Chuckles of the Day

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Aging

Two elderly women were eating at a restaurant one morning.

Ethel noticed something funny about Mabel’s ear and she said, “Mabel, did you know you’ve got a suppository in your left ear?”

Mabel answered, “I have? A suppository?” She pulled it out and stared at it.

Then she said, “Ethel, I’m glad you saw this thing. Now I think I know where my hearing aid is.”

* * * * * * *

An elderly Floridian called 911 on her cell phone to report that her car has been broken into. She is hysterical as she explains her situation to the dispatcher. “They’ve stolen the stereo, the steering wheel, the brake pedal and even the accelerator!” she cried.

The dispatcher said, “Stay calm. An officer is on the way.”

A few minutes later, the officer radios in. “Disregard.” He says, “She got in the back-seat by mistake.”

* * * * * * *

Two elderly ladies had been friends for many decades. Over the years they had shared all kinds of activities and adventures. Lately, their activities had been limited to meeting a few times a week to play cards.

One day they were playing cards when one looked at the other and said, “now don’t get mad at me…..I know we’ve been friends for a long time but I just can’t think of your name! I’ve thought and thought but I can’t remember it. Please tell me what your name is.”

Her friend stared at her. For at least three minutes she just stared. Finally she said, “How soon do you need to know?”

* * * * * * *

“OLD” IS WHEN . . . . . . .

• You don’t care where your spouse goes, just as long as you don’t have to go along.
• You are cautioned to slow down by the doctor instead of by the police.
• “Getting a little action” means you don’t need to take any fiber today.
• “Getting lucky” means you find your car in the parking lot.
• An “all-nighter” means not getting up to pee.

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Toasted English Muffins with Honey-glazed Bacon and Eggs

Ingredients

2 English muffins
6 rindless unsmoked bacon slices
1 tbsp honey
3 oz canned corn kernels, drained
2 small tomatoes, diced
1 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper
4 eggs
butter

Method

1. Preheat the broiler on a medium—high setting. Slice the muffins horizontally in half, then lay them cut sides up on a piece of cooking foil on the rack in the broiler pan. Toast until lightly browned, then turn and cook on the other side. Reserve and keep warm.
2. Preheat the oven to 275°F/140°C.
3. Heat a nonstick skillet over medium heat. Lay the bacon slices in the skillet and cook until lightly browned, then turn and cook the other side.
4. Warm the honey slightly and brush each bacon slice lightly with it. Cook the bacon for an additional 1 minute or until it takes on a slight glaze. Remove from the pan and keep warm in the preheated oven.
5. Mix the corn, diced tomatoes, and chopped parsley together in a bowl and season to taste with salt and pepper. Fry, poach, or scramble the eggs, as you prefer.
6. Serve the honey-glazed bacon and eggs on the toasted muffins, on warmed plates. Top each with a spoonful of the corn and tomato mixture.

Makes 2 servings.

Source: Toast It!

In Pictures: Breakfast Toasts Made by Home-cooks

Thousands of Dutch COVID-19 Patients Have Permanent Lung Damage

Janene Pieters wrote . . . . . . . . .

Thousands of Netherlands residents who recovered from Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, may be left with permanent damage to their lungs, resulting in decreased capacity and more difficulty absorbing oxygen, Leon van den Toorn, pulmonologist chairman of the Dutch association of physicians for pulmonary disease and tuberculosis NVALT, said to newspaper AD.

Many people underestimate the consequences of the coronavirus Van den Toorn said to the newspaper. The virus and the body’s response to it can cause permanent damage to the lungs, he said. “In severe cases, a kind of scar formation occurs, we call this lung fibrosis. The lungs shrink and the lung tissue becomes stiffer, making it harder to get enough oxygen.”

Van den Toorn expects that “there may be thousands of people in the Netherlands who suffered permanent injury to the lungs from corona”. Of the 1,200 Covid-19 patients who so far recovered after admission to intensive care, “almost 100 percent went home with residual damage”, he said to AD. And about half of the 6 thousand people who were hospitalized, but did not need intensive care, will have symptoms for years to come.

So far 45,500 people in the Netherlands tested positive for the coronavirus. Many did not get sick enough to need hospital care. In this group, Van den Toorn expects that permanent problems will be less serious, but still possible.

According to Van den Toorn, recovered coronavirus patients who continue to suffer from shortness of breath after a few weeks, or who have a severely reduced exercise capacity, should go see a lung doctor. “There may be a low oxygen level in the blood, which is harmful to the body.”

Van de Toorn said the NVALT wants to avoid making the same mistakes with coronavirus that were made with Q fever, an infectious disease that broke out in 2007 and lasted until 2011. Hundreds of people still suffer from serious health problems as a result of Q fever. Prime Minister mark Rutte apologized to them on behalf of the Dutch government in 2017.

“People with a history of corona infection should be monitored closely to see if recovery is complete,” Van de Toorn warned. The Dutch Lung Fund is setting up a platform to do just that.

Source: NLTimes

New Model Predicts the Peaks of the COVID-19 Pandemic

As of late May, COVID-19 has killed more than 325,000 people around the world. Even though the worst seems to be over for countries like China and South Korea, public health experts warn that cases and fatalities will continue to surge in many parts of the world. Understanding how the disease evolves can help these countries prepare for an expected uptick in cases.

This week in the journal Frontiers, researchers describe a single function that accurately describes all existing available data on active cases and deaths–and predicts forthcoming peaks. The tool uses q-statistics, a set of functions and probability distributions developed by Constantino Tsallis, a physicist and member of the Santa Fe Institute’s external faculty. Tsallis worked on the new model together with Ugur Tirnakli, a physicist at Ege University, in Turkey.

“The formula works in all the countries in which we have tested,” says Tsallis.

Neither physicist ever set out to model a global pandemic. But Tsallis says that when he saw the shape of published graphs representing China’s daily active cases, he recognized shapes he’d seen before–namely, in graphs he’d helped produce almost two decades ago to describe the behavior of the stock market.

“The shape was exactly the same,” he says. For the financial data, the function described probabilities of stock exchanges; for COVID-19, it described daily the number of active cases–and fatalities–as a function of time.

Modeling financial data and tracking a global pandemic may seem unrelated, but Tsallis says they have one important thing in common. “They’re both complex systems,” he says, “and in complex systems, this happens all the time.” Disparate systems from a variety of fields–biology, network theory, computer science, mathematics–often reveal patterns that follow the same basic shapes and evolution.

The financial graph appeared in a 2004 volume co-edited by Tsallis and the late Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann. Tsallis developed q-statitics, also known as “Tsallis statistics,” in the late 1980s as a generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics to complex systems.

In the new paper, Tsallis and Tirnakli used data from China, where the active case rate is thought to have peaked, to set the main parameters for the formula. Then, they applied it to other countries including France, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, and found that it matched the evolution of the active cases and fatality rates over time.

The model, says Tsallis, could be used to create useful tools like an app that updates in real-time with new available data, and can adjust its predictions accordingly. In addition, he thinks that it could be fine-tuned to fit future outbreaks as well.

“The functional form seems to be universal,” he says, “Not just for this virus, but for the next one that might appear as well.”

Source: EurekAlert!

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