Bite Point

Disinformation

As the Covid-19 pandemic enters its third year, and as our culture sustains damage from the illness and death caused by the Covid-19 virus, from supply chain disruptions, from widespread chronic anxiety, from disruptive political forces and from a myriad of other causes, one harmful force stands out to me above all others:

Disinformation.

When I grew up, there were relatively few sources of public information, and they all were controlled by powerful gatekeepers. If one wanted to publish a letter to the editor, or a novel, or air a commercial, or get an original piece of music on the air—one had to ask a gatekeeper for permission first. And denials were far more common than permission.

This system had serious flaws, obviously. A great deal of human expression was held back or suppressed.

When the Internet—the greatest connection machine we’ve ever known—came along, a revolution in information flow occurred. This was the first communications medium in human history in which everyone who has a receiver—has a transmitter too. Now, we don't have to ask a gatekeeper in order to say something in public. We can write a blog post, share our music with the world, self-publish a novel or start a podcast, and we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so.

A decade ago, I was extremely optimistic about this. So much so that the ending of my first (self-published) novel, The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks, points to this great freedom as the beginning of a glorious historical period in the life of humanity.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the dark side of human nature. Every tool we create, it seems, can be used for good or evil. And so now, disinformation, fearmongering and angermongering are a significant part of what is damaging our culture and disrupting our lives. There are people who spread disinformation because they can, and presumably because to do so is breathtakingly profitable.

Nowadays, I kind of miss Walter Cronkite.

Naturally, I’m not brimming with a solution to the vexing and harmful problem of disinformation. To paraphrase the iconic line by Dr. Leonard McCoy, “I’m a dentist, not a …” Well, who would it take to solve this, anyway? I’m not even sure. But I do want to share with you all a key insight that we need if we are going to, together, work our way out of this awful and dangerous mess.

Mary Parker Follett was an American social worker, management consultant, philosopher and pioneer in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. She has been called the “Mother of Modern Management.” Ms. Follett passed away in 1933, so she performed her remarkable work a very long time ago. I have a great penchant for outliers, and for a woman in the 1910s and 1920s to be listened to, and respected, and her ideas acted upon by the male-dominated world of American business of her time was beyond remarkable. I’ve read her work and I can see why. Her unique brilliance was that she focused on the human element of business, and she regarded human beings as the most important component of any business enterprise.

Ms. Follett once told a little parable that is so relevant just now. I’ll present her parable here, in hopes that you gain insight and agency from her words.

“We need experts, we need accurate information, but the object is not to do away with difference but to do away with muddle. When for lack of facts you and I are responding to a different situation—you to the situation as you imagine it, I to the situation as I imagine, it—we cannot of course come to agreement. What accurate information does is to clear the ground for genuine difference and therefore make possible, I do not say make sure, agreement. The object of accurate information is not to overcome difference but to give legitimate play to difference.

“If I think I am looking at a black snake and you think it is a fallen branch, our talk will be merely chaotic. But after we have decided that it is a snake, we do not then automatically agree what to do with it. You and I may respond quite differently to ‘black snake’: shall we run away, or kill it, or take it home and make a pet of it to kill the mice? There is now some basis for significant difference.

“Difference based on inaccuracy is meaningless. We have not done away with difference, but we have provided the possibility for fruitful difference.”

Difference based on inaccuracy is meaningless. Indeed! Going forward, we all need to work together in order to re-establish a common cultural agreement on what Truth is. And we certainly need to be on guard against those who attempt to manipulate us with disinformation. Being on guard is critically important to protecting yourself and your family.

Stay safe and do good,

Rick Wilson DMD

Covid-19 Worldwide Numbers, Mass and Volume

I've wondered for a long time how many copies of the Covid-19 RNA there are in the world at any given time. Now, we have some good estimates.

Each infected person carries 10⁹ to 10¹¹ Covid-19 virions at peak of infection.

Assuming during most of the course of the pandemic there has been a total of 1–10 million infected people close to peak infection globally at any given time, including those undetected, we arrive at a total of 10¹⁷ to 10¹⁹ viral particles in the world at any given time.

Let's split the difference at 10¹⁸.That's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 if we write it out longhand. One quintillion, if we use the accepted math word. To give some idea of how large a number a quintillion is: It's about fifteen quintillion miles from our galaxy, the Milky Way, to the Andromeda Galaxy.

A quintillion is a stupid-big number, for sure.

Each Covid-19 virion has a mass of ≈1 femtogram. Therefore even when the human body carries 10⁹ to 10¹¹ viral particles, these have a mass of only about 1–100 μg. When we consider the total number of infected people at any given time, the total mass of Covid-19 virions residing in humanity at that given time is on the order of 0.1–10 kg.

As for volume? All the Covid-19 virions in the world would likely fit inside a can of soda.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7685332/

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-global-weight-sars-cov-viruses-kilograms.html

https://theconversation.com/all-the-coronavirus-in-the-world-could-fit-inside-a-coke-can-with-plenty-of-room-to-spare-154226

Leverage Perspective

The total weights of the atomic bombs employed in WWII were 64kg uranium + 6kg plutonium = 70kg, which killed 226,000 human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (This figure does not include long-term early deaths from radiation poisoning, which are much more difficult to calculate.)

The total estimated weight of all the Covid-19 virions in the world at any given time is 0.1kg-10kg. Let us use the high end estimate. We know that 10kg of Covid-19 virions has, so far, killed some 4,500,000 human beings worldwide.

This gives us a leverage perspective:

Each kilogram of Covid-199 virus kills 450,000 people at current conditions.
Each kilogram of fissile material killed 3,229 people, in the only example we know ... to date.

Covid-19 is thus approximately 140 times more effective, per weight of material, at killing human beings than are atomic bombs.

SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines, Explained

 

We are coming up against a time when a vaccine against Covid-19, also called SARS-CoV-2, may become available.

Viruses mutate very rapidly, changing their surface proteins and such. The virus variants that are best at evading the human immune system are the ones that prosper, which makes our challenges in fighting them very difficult. Yet, effective vaccines againsts the Covid-19 virus are now being developed. It may be that, like influenza vaccines, new Covid-19 vaccines will need to be administered each year, in order to keep up our collective immunity.

There's one thing I am certain of regarding a Covid-19 vaccine in modern America, however, and that is that in all respects, it will be a politically and culturally charged issue.

Thus, I wish to explain the four types of anti-viral vaccines, so that you are all prepared for the time when we will face the personal and societal decision on being inoculated.

Similar-Species Vaccines are not common today, but were very important historically. The world-changing smallpox vaccine used cowpox, a poxvirus that was similar enough to smallpox to protect us against it, but not cause disease in humans. The Covid-19 vaccines currently being developed are not of this type.

The next category is Live-Attenuated (weakened) Vaccines. Attenuated vaccines can be made in several different ways, but they all involve passing a virus through a non-human host in the lab. Sometimes, for up to 200 cycles. The goal is to produce a version of the virus that can still be recognized by the human immune system, but cannot replicate (make copies of itself) well inside our bodies. Examples of attenuated vaccines include MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella), Chickenpox, Influenza, and Rotavirus.

There is one concern with attenuated viruses: that they may, through random mutations, regain the ability to replicate within the human body and cause illness again. The most significant example of this in the U.S. was the oral polio vaccine, which was an attenuated virus. In extremely rare cases, it mutated fast enough to cause polio again, so we switched the polio vaccine to the next category of vaccine types in order to 100% avoid this complication.

The next category is Inactivated Vaccines, which are produced by "killing" the pathogen with chemicals, heat and/or radiation.

(Sometimes, to be as certain as possible of total kill, researchers even expose the virus in question to repeated recordings of the rants of modern American Members of Congress and other politicians ...)

Note, I placed the word "killing" in quotations marks above. This is because a virus, in a philosophical sense, isn't really alive at all, at least in some ways of looking at it. Viruses are inert outside of their host, and don't really "do" anything at all until they make their way in and start causing trouble. It's a very weird concept to grapple with.

Any event. I imagine the technical trick with making inactivated vaccines is to wreck the virus DNA or RNA, so that it can't do anything to harm us, and yet leave the outer protein coat relatively intact. In this way, our immune system can still recognize the protein shapes it has to in order to fight the virus. It's a clever balance!

The fourth category of vaccines against viruses is the newest one, in use since the 1980s, and it's really clever: Subunit Vaccines.

What if we could take just parts of the protein shell, that our immune system can recognize, and not have any viral DNA or RNA at all? Without its DNA or RNA, a virus isn't a virus. Its genetic code is what enables it to harm us by telling the cells it enters to do something that the virus "wants" instead of going about their normal business. Robbed of its genetic material, such a mere shell of a virus makes the iconic country singer who's lost his gal, tore his best jeans and crashed his pickup truck look like the luckiest guy in the world.

To make a subunit vaccine, just one viral gene coding for one vaccine protein is inserted into producer cells in culture; often, yeast. The yeast (bless the little beasties, who also make us bread and beer) pump out this one protein, a vaccine is made with it, and even though our immune system doesn't get to "see" the whole virus, often times, one piece of it is enough to stimulate an effective immune reaction. Those red spikes on Covid-19 look like mighty fine targets, don't they?

The Hepatitis B and HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccines are examples of subunit vaccines.

What does this all mean for us as we go forward? The Covid-19 vaccines that reach commercial development are not going to be similar-species vaccines, so we can forgo that category.

For me, if a Covid-19 vaccine is a subunit vaccine or an inactivated vaccine, I have no worries at all about receiving it. Sign me up to go first, give me twenty boosters, I'm not worried about a thing.

If the vaccine is an attenuated one, I'll still get it, but even as a health care worker, I'm inclined to hold back for just a little while, to ensure that no Covid-19 infections result from it. Especially considering that this whole enterprise is a rush job. Probably just a month or so would be enough to make the call.

In my view, though, the rigid anti-vaxxer stance is foolish, misinformed and just a staggering example of human confirmation bias, in which no amount of real-world facts can change emotionally charged beliefs.

We get to have our own opinions, yes. But we don't get to have our own facts.

I sincerely hope that this post helps you all understand anti-viral vaccines better than you did before, and gives you the confidence to receive them, should Covid-19 vaccines become available.

Oh, and this year of all years, please get your flu vaccines.

And floss.

COVID-19 May Very Well Be With Us Permanently

"There is always potential for a conflict of interest between microbe and host because the genetic makeup of the microbe differs from that of the host. Natural selection will favor microbes that act in their own genetic interest as circumstances permit." --evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald, PhD.

As circumstances permit.

Right now in America, circumstances permit the COVID-19 virus to act very aggressively in its own interest. New infections are increasing at a rate where even the logarithmic graph is scarily steep. As I write, nearly 150,000 have died of this disease and soon four million will have been infected, with disturbingly variable effects on their bodies. COVID-19 is a calamity on the scale of a world war, and we haven't even sent our children back to school in the fall yet.

What can we do?

Dr. Ewald has explored in depth the relationship between the characteristics of pathogens and their virulence. He's also researched how host behavior modifies pathogens--something that happens with surprising speed, due to the rapid generation times and high mutation rates of bacteria and viruses.

This interview is an excellent introduction to this way of thinking about human disease:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/text_pop/l_016_06.html

Here's the heart of it, in an answer Dr. Ewald gives towards the end:

"We can summarize this information in a nutshell by focusing on how dependent disease organisms are on the mobility of the host for transmission. If a disease organism is very dependent on healthy hosts moving around [and] contacting susceptible hosts, then we expect natural selection to favor extreme mildness in those disease organisms. If, however, the disease organism is not dependent on host mobility -- for example, if the disease organism is transmitted by mosquito, or contaminated water, or because it's durable in the external environment -- then we expect that natural selection will favor high levels of harmfulness in those disease organisms."

This is, in fact, what we find in the study of infectious diseases. And mosquitos, ticks, contaminated water or food--these are called vectors. External factors that spread disease.

What, then, about America's severe difficulties with the COVID-19 pandemic?

My current thinking is, that careless and maskless people are acting as human or cultural vectors, just as a mosquito acts as an insect vector in malaria, or as water acts as an environmental vector in cholera. And these countless human cultural vectors in America are not only causing more new infections. It's worse than that.

Human cultural vectors are also actually selecting for more virulent, dangerous, damaging strains of the COVID-19 virus. This is because the virus can "afford" to immobilize, severely harm and even kill its human hosts under these conditions of reckless human behavior. Even when COVID immobilizes and kills, it still spreads widely during the incubation period, before the patient becomes ill enough to be immobilized.

With specific regard to schools of all types, if, this fall, students are placed indoors in close proximity with no changes in protocols from how life was before the pandemic, the COVID-19 virus will likely exploit this sudden change in its target hosts' behavior. Currently, it's rare that COVID-19 causes severe harm or death in young hosts. But if effortless viral transmission routes are set up amongst millions of young people in school settings, there's a possibility that random mutations that really harm the young will out-compete the present forms of the virus' RNA in those populations. COVID-19 may depend upon human mobility to spread--but its incubation period is long enough that it can infect others for days before host immobilization due to illness occurs. And there's that pesky variability as well--asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic carriers who remain mobile can infect even more of their peers than those who are taken severely ill.

Is there a way out of all this?

It is likely (almost certain) that if we make it more difficult, through our human behaviors, for the COVID virus to spread, then those milder mutations that do not severely harm and immobilize their human host will out-compete those mutations that debilitate and kill. Because the virus cannot, under those more challenging conditions (from its point of view), “afford” to kill its host.

We would then tame the COVID-19 virus. Dr. Ewald often uses the phrase "domesticate the virus."

The well-known human behaviors that can tame COVID-19 include wearing masks, washing hands frequently and before touching one's face, "respiratory etiquette," social distancing, and surface disinfection. Less talked about but vitally important human behaviors involve proper airflow management in buildings, changing HVAC systems into active virus-killing machines, radical improvements in food handling, managing aerosols created by everything from dental treatment to sneezes to flushing toilets, and probably hundreds more strategies that our culture hasn't even begun to think about or implement yet.

With our backs to the wall now, I'm starting to believe that taming COVID-19 through intelligent and effective human behavior is our only option. A vaccine against any coronavirus species just doesn't seem likely due to the mutation rate and the decrease in levels of antibodies to them over time. Herd immunity is a fantasy—in naturally acquired COVID-19 infections, antibodies and B-cell mediated immunity appear to fade in months, just as they do with all other coronavirus species. Treatments will improve, but one does not "cure" an endemic virus that numbers in the trillions (quadrillions?) planetwide and keeps changing its RNA coding with every passing hour.

COVID-19 appears likely to be a part of our environment permanently, going forward.

And I believe our only viable strategy to defeat COVID-19 is to domesticate it, through intelligent and effective human behavior.

Juneteenth Thoughts

Juneteenth thoughts.

Intolerance is not only mean-spirited. It’s illogical.

Human beings sort wrong.

Meaning:

We label, classify and sort people and things as a vital survival strategy. It’s part of our nature. Classifying and sorting is part of what brought us here.

And yet.

To sort by race, religion, culture, creed, appearance or any other such thing has no use whatsoever. It’s all damn foolishness. No point, no moving forward, no use.

It *may* make sense to sort by ethics. By how does this person treat me. By have they chosen a passion in life that moves the culture forward. By are they totally dedicated to their chosen mission.

By are they kind, and thoughtful, and empathetic.

Most human beings sort wrong, and it’s idiotic, and that’s the damn trouble.

The Covidian Calendar

The International Association for the Advancement of Time will be rolling out a new calendar shortly. Guessing the Gregorian has had its day.
The new months are:

January
February
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary
Coviduary

Using the Number e to predict COVID19 Progression

The number e is one of the most powerful, profound, mysterious, mystical things I've ever encountered. I mean in all of life. Let's use its power to explore the growth rate of the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S.

From my very favorite explanation of e:
https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to-exponential-functions-e/

"e is the base rate of growth shared by all continually growing processes. e lets you take a simple growth rate (where all change happens at the end of the year) and find the impact of compound, continuous growth, where every nanosecond (or faster) you are growing just a little bit."

"e shows up whenever systems grow exponentially and continuously: population, radioactive decay, interest calculations, and more. Even jagged systems that don’t grow smoothly can be approximated by e."

Let's get right to COVID-19 now. For those with interest in math, explore that chap's  delightful and intuitive exploration of e and its magical properties.

Starting on March 18th, I've taken the total number of cases of COVID-19 infection in the U.S. and divided by the previous day's total. Here are the results:
1.46    March 18th
1.50
1.40
1.25    
1.39
1.30
1.25    
1.24
1.23
1.21
1.18
1.15
1.13, on March 30th
1.14, on March 31st

Now let's convert those numbers to percentage growth:
46 % (on March 18)
50 %
40 %
25 %
39 %
30 %
25 %
24%
23 %
21 %
18 %
15 %
13 % (on March 30)
14 % (on March 31)

Now, e merges rate and time. That's one of its amazing powers.
The exponent to which we raise e signifies the rate of change and then the time passed.

We humans tend to think in terms of how we measure time. Hours, days, weeks, months, years. Let's see what the spread of COVID-19 would look like if we forecast several of those growth rates over one month--30 days of epidemic progression at the daily growth percentage that occurred on any of those days.

The formula is this: e^{x
x will be, in each case, the percent growth for the day times 30 days. We will start with one patient.
Thus, in these projections, we will see how many patients would be infected with COVID-19 one month after just one patient started off infected, at the growth rate for that day. Rounded to nearest whole number.}

^{13% growth}    e^{.13 x 30    49-fold number of cases at 30 days.}

^{18% growth}     e^{.18 x 30    221-fold number of cases at 30 days.}

^{25% growth}   e^{.25 x 30    1,808-fold number of cases at 30 days.}

^{40% growth}   e^{.40 x 30    162,755-fold number of cases at 30 days.}

^{If we were fortunate enough to slow this pandemic to 2% growth per day this month:}

^{2% growth}   e^{.02 x 30    1.8-fold number of cases at 30 days. How different than the others!}

^{We see how wildly different the month-end projections are given the different growth rates. Early in an epidemic, the growth rate is generally faster than later because at the beginning, the virus spreads far more rapidly than it could later. Put simply, that's because the virus is in a "target-rich environment." Nearly everyone is un-infected at the start and no one yet knows the dangers, or has changed their behaviors from normal.}

^{Now let's use e to come up with a useful projection. We start with today's known U.S. COVID-19 infections. (Many more of us likely have asymptomatic cases).}

^{On March 31, as I write this, there are 180,000+ known COVID-19 cases in the U.S.}

^{Starting with that, at the recent daily growth rate of 2%, by April 30 we end up with:
327,981 cases.}

^{At a 4% daily growth rate, by April 30 we end up with:
597,621 cases.}

^{At a 13% daily growth rate we recently experienced, by April 30 we end up with:
8,820,000 cases.}

^{At a 25% daily growth rate we recently experienced, by April 30 we end up with:
325,440,000 cases. Nearly all Americans.}

^{In real life, exponential virus infection curves steepen and they flatten. They usually flatten as the epidemic progresses because the number of un-infected "targets" decreases. Host behavior may change as well.}

^{Still. We now see, through the splendid magic and power of e, the importance of hand washing and social distancing. 327,981 cases by April 30 versus 325,440,000 cases by April 30. That's a 1,000-fold difference.}

Using the Natural Logarithm to Forecast COVID19 Progression

In our last post, we explored how to predict the COVID-19 epidemic progression with the irrational, transcendental and may I say supernatural number e.

e is the base rate of growth shared by all continuously growing processes. e merges growth rate and time. If we know the growth rate of a process and we wish to know how it will grow in a certain specific period of time, e computes the answer.

What if we want to know the time? What if we have a certain amount in growth in mind, and we want to know how long it will take to reach that growth?

Ah, the answer is as beautiful as e itself. e has an opposite, a mirror. This is the natural logarithm, ln.

In other words,
e^x lets us plug in time and get growth.
ln(x) lets us plug in growth and get the time it would take.

Let us move right into COVID-19 epidemic forecasting examples. As we saw in my last post, over the course of March 2020, the epidemic grew at different rates in the U.S., depending on the day. I will present these rates to you and ask the two questions:

(1) How long would it take, at the given rate, for the number of infected patients to double?
(2) How long would it take, at the given rate, for the number of infected patients to increase ten times?

We will answer these two questions for each rate with the natural log.

Here are the epidemic growth rates we've noted in March, minus the early outliers, and the time calculations.
On March 31 there were 180,000 U.S. COVID-19 cases. For each rate, we will ask, how long will it take to reach 360,000 cases, and how long will it take to reach 1,800,000 cases, assuming that growth rate continued?

2% Growth Rate per Day

2x, to 360,000 cases:
ln(2) = 0.69 ...
0.69/.02 = 34 days
10x, to 1,800,000 cases:
ln(10) = 2.30 ...
2.30/.02 = 115 days

4% Growth Rate per Day

2x, to 360,000 cases:
ln(2) = 0.69 ...
0.69/.04 = 17 days
10x, to 1,800,000 cases:
ln(10) = 2.30 ...
2.30/.04 = 57 days

8% Growth Rate per Day

2x, to 360,000 cases:
ln(2) = 0.69 ...
0.69/.08 = 9 days
10x, to 1,800,000 cases:
ln(10) = 2.30 ...
2.30/.08 = 29 days

20% Growth Rate per Day

2x, to 360,000 cases:
ln(2) = 0.69 ...
0.69/.20 = 3.5 days
10x, to 1,800,000 cases:
ln(10) = 2.30 ...
2.30/.20 = 11.5 days

22% Growth Rate per Day

2x, to 360,000 cases:
ln(2) = 0.69 ...
0.69/.22 = 3 days
10x, to 1,800,000 cases:
ln(10) = 2.30 ...
2.30/.22 = 10 days

And so. We end up with case-doubling times that range from 17 days down all the way to just 3 days, depending upon human behavior.
And we end up with ten-fold case increase times that range from 57 days down all the way to just 10 days, depending upon human behavior.

I find it chilling that the March 30--March 31 interval returned us to a 22% growth rate of new COVID-19 infections. We need to (if we even can) return that to 2% and less, as these ln forecasts show.

Wash Hands, Social Distancing. They matter even more than you think.

 

Californium

Warning: anything and everything made up of any combination of the any of the following elements is known to the State of California to cause cancer:

H - Hydrogen
He - Helium
Li - Lithium
Be - Beryllium
B - Boron
C - Carbon
N - Nitrogen
O - Oxygen
F - Fluorine
Ne - Neon
Na - Sodium
Mg - Magnesium
Al - Aluminum, Aluminium
Si - Silicon
P - Phosphorus
S - Sulfur
Cl - Chlorine
Ar - Argon
K - Potassium
Ca - Calcium
Sc - Scandium
Ti - Titanium
V - Vanadium
Cr - Chromium
Mn - Manganese
Fe - Iron
Co - Cobalt
Ni - Nickel
Cu - Copper
Zn - Zinc
Ga - Gallium
Ge - Germanium
As - Arsenic
Se - Selenium
Br - Bromine
Kr - Krypton
Rb - Rubidium
Sr - Strontium
Y - Yttrium
Zr - Zirconium
Nb - Niobium
Mo - Molybdenum
Tc - Technetium
Ru - Ruthenium
Rh - Rhodium
Pd - Palladium
Ag - Silver
Cd - Cadmium
In - Indium
Sn - Tin
Sb - Antimony
Te - Tellurium
I - Iodine
Xe - Xenon
Cs - Cesium
Ba - Barium
La - Lanthanum
Ce - Cerium
Pr - Praseodymium
Nd - Neodymium
Pm - Promethium
Sm - Samarium
Eu - Europium
Gd - Gadolinium
Tb - Terbium
Dy - Dysprosium
Ho - Holmium
Er - Erbium
Tm - Thulium
Yb - Ytterbium
Lu - Lutetium
Hf - Hafnium
Ta - Tantalum
W - Tungsten
Re - Rhenium
Os - Osmium
Ir - Iridium
Pt - Platinum
Au - Gold
Hg - Mercury
Tl - Thallium
Pb - Lead
Bi - Bismuth
Po - Polonium
At - Astatine
Rn - Radon
Fr - Francium
Ra - Radium
Ac - Actinium
Th - Thorium
Pa - Protactinium
U - Uranium
Np - Neptunium
Pu - Plutonium
Am - Americium
Cm - Curium
Bk - Berkelium
Cf - Californium
Es - Einsteinium
Fm - Fermium
Md - Mendelevium
No - Nobelium
Lr - Lawrencium
Rf - Rutherfordium
Db - Dubnium
Sg - Seaborgium
Bh - Bohrium
Hs - Hassium
Mt - Meitnerium
Ds - Darmstadtium
Rg - Roentgenium
Cn - Copernicium
Nh - Nihonium
Fl - Flerovium
Mc - Moscovium
Lv - Livermorium
Ts - Tennessine
Og - Oganesson

What’s that?
Oh, yes.
Even Californium.