Dreams
Occasionally I write about some dreams. I think I've been fascinated by them, at least from the time McCartney mentioned that he woke up one morning with the melody of "Yesterday" in his head. I'm a creative writer and wish I could report similar inspiration; I have yet to write/publish my first book of short stories, although some have begun out of dreams. My late friend Bruce used to wonder how that creativity even works; as an accountant, he was very logical, detailed, and intelligent. If he had an issue in his academic career, it was probably at the research end, which is a creative endeavor. To me, it was a natural gift; I remember when I started my doctoral program, the idea of a dissertation, the generation of original knowledge, was very intimidating. It's hard to describe; I'm personally not very mechanically inclined, but I suspect if I wanted to design a newer, better watch, I would probably start by taking a watch apart and putting it back again. After a while, I might start wondering why use this material rather than that, is there a faster, more efficient, effective way to achieve said functionality or to improve functionality, why don't more people wear watches, why are repairs so expensive and why do you need to find a specialist vs DIY?I would like to say I was inspired by great researchers or mentors while at UH, but that's not the case; none of my professors involved me in his or her research projects, not for lack of trying; I would have done it for free or a minimal stipend. Well, Maryam Alavi asked me to proofread her CACM article, which was very cool, but she sent back her proofs (without notice) before I got back with my corrections, and to this day I cringe at the mistakes in print. (Not critical to the paper itself: it was stuff like misnumbered references.) Scamell (my chair) was more like a great football coach. I became obsessed with scaling methodology, and he was not a psychometrist, but I had developed a concept I called metric triads, and he was like, "This is the coolest thing I've ever seen." Once I had gained experience in doing research, it wasn't like I ran into a dry spell of what to do next. I think it was similar to a Lennon/McCartney writing session; I remember Paul said they pretty much hammered out a song in say 3-hour long sessions. I particularly liked how he talked about wanting to throw out one line in "Hey, Jude" and Lennon said, "No, dude! That's the best line in the song."
I do regret never having a research partner (vs. writing partner), not for lack of trying. I think the senior faculty I dealt with were jealous and/or weren't interested, wanted complete control, etc. I'm a polymath (I could have easily become a scientist, engineer, physician, clergyman, etc.) and have been an interdisciplinary researcher from the start. I think if I could get any academic to talk about his research for a few hours, I could come up with a mutually interesting topic (if not several). I remember in one case I was trying to tweak the name of a colleague's project ("end user computing" was a hot topic, but I really thought that the project wasn't EUC; she got highly defensive and basically told her doctoral student not to talk to me; dude, it wasn't me stopping you--you still have to go before peer reviewers.) There is no question that I could have easily quadrupled my scholastic output if I had taught at better schools, with more active researchers, and didn't have to fight absurd academic politics. My last 2-3 years I was having to spend 10-15 hours a week trying to find my next academic job (and it didn't work my last year). Tom Woods points out libertarian icon Walter Block has published over 600 papers during his career and I've read several, but not most: very high quality. I can't tell if they were discrete or like, say, you deliver a paper at a conference and republish it in a journal. And you don't know who did what in a joint paper (well, if you're aware of Block's solo work, you can probably judge his influence in a joint paper). But it is impressive; I mean, George Will writes maybe 100 columns a year, but publishing, say, 10 academic papers a year is impressive, even if you would publish them yourself. My articles took literally dozens of hours to write, juggling up to 400 or more references. And several papers I wrote reported empirical research; there're a lot of steps involved, getting approvals (e.g., committees for the protection of human subjects, even for a voluntary questionnaire), study participants, data collection, and analysis. A lot of the stuff Block has written is more conceptual pieces; nothing wrong with that: I've done those, too. And he may have done a lot of empirical pieces, too: I haven't seen his vita. I'm still impressed by the quality of his work.
So this dream I had the other night was once again as a university student (and I haven't taken a class in several years). Often it's a nightmare scenario where I go into a final exam, completely unprepared. In this case, I write this exam and feel well about what I did. I get the exam back and don't see a grade. I look at the exam, and it looks like someone was using it for scratch paper with chemistry formulas all over it. What the hell? Finally we get to the long essay section where I was proud of my answer. To my shock, it's completely written over in red ink, with the corrected solution longer than my own answer. Now this has never happened in real life. In high school I was known to bicker over the 2 or 3 points taken off on a math test. But learning that I completely missed the point of a major exam question was a shot to my ego.
Hallmark Christmas in July Continues
These are all repeats and not many of my favorites, but just a couple of details I wasn't aware of in earlier segments. First, I thought Hallmark Movies and Mysteries wrapped up 2 weeks this past weekend, but I continue to see holiday content between say 3-11 PM EDT. Second, on Hallmark it seems wall-to-wall movies except for its daily talk show 10 AM - noon EDT.A side note: Peacock.tv, a Comcast streaming service, has a largely free (ad-supported) service for Comcast network current/past content (including NBC, USA, MSNBC, etc.) They also have optional premium-fee services, say for supplemental and/or ad-free service. If you are currently a Comcast customer, you may qualify for complimentary premium service.
COVID-19 Shutdown Diary
Well, in terms of my current work assignment, it seems the latest spike of COVID-19 cases actually set us slightly back just as it looked like we were going to progress to the next phase of recovery. More worrisome is travel among states, especially to and from those which have been spiking. To give a simple example, a lot of WWE talent had been working travel to and from taping facilities in Florida through Philadelphia and then travel by car, etc. to northeast States. It looks as Pennsylvania's governor has ended that workaround. (I assume the wrestlers need to stay in Florida over the short term, and of course Florida is in the midst of a spike of its own.) For me, the last few years I've made holiday visits to Texas, and that might not be doable, at least under current circumstances.I haven't tried to dine out over the tenure of the crisis, but it doesn't look like much has changed locally since my last scan via Google. I would say only about 20-25% or so of restaurants are showing a dine-in option, almost no fast food. I really haven't seen many shortages recently at the grocery stores.
I've been running fewer COVID-19 clips in my daily blog posts. Ron Paul has been running a number of strident clips (against public policy); I tend to agree, because I think public policy tends to be a blunt instrument, not unlike a therapy that kills healthy cells along with diseased ones. Businesses have a vested interest to provide a safe place to work and shop in. They should have enough flexibility to adapt to the situation short of shutdowns. So I continue to include some of the Ron Paul clips, but not to the point that I'm pretending the recent surge is not real and worrisome. Yes, the fatality rate is less than originally promoted, but make no mistake: even if you survive, the virus can damage you seriously as I may discuss below.
I have a new website I'm tracking (I think I saw it referenced ina Quora forum): https://covidtracking.com/. And here is a chart I'm regularly reviewing:
The point I'm making, of course, is that increasing positive counts is not simply an artifact of increased testing, which Trump wrongly asserted. As the virus infection rate falls in the local area, we should see the rates of positive findings dropping as well. Now, granted, we should have seen fewer positives as we expanded testing to more asymptomatic individuals, although a significant, worrisome number of positives are from that segment.
Other charts of interest:
So, for example, we've seen doubles of testing rates in AZ and TX, not to mention rising hospitalizations. Those are symptoms of a real surge, not an artifact of increased testing.
Now I'm not going to spend time discussing every COVID-19 article I've read, but I want to point out some items I've found of interest. [As a side note to PC users, I've been a user of Evernote and more recently a related freeware product Joplin, so basically I can go to a webpage and save a complete or simplified copy into categorized notebooks, like one I have for COVID-19. There are also browser extensions like "Reading mode" which will declutter a webpage, which you can then, e.g., save into a pdf file.]
In this article, we have a discussion getting an infection is more than just an incidental microbe getting through our homemade face mask. It probably has more to do with the magnitude and duration of exposure. (It's not clear what the magic number is of microbes; it may be impacted by individual factors like the nature and extent of related microbe antibodies, etc.) And obviously you have things like air conditioning/filter or circulation out of doors, the type of exhalations from the infected individual, with higher counts of microbes associated with more active breathing patterns, e.g., yelling, coughing, singing, sneezes, etc. What this seems to suggest is that incidental contact from an asymptomatic someone you meet in passing at the polling place or grocery store shouldn't be all it takes to contract the disease, but obviously multiple people shedding in the same area prolongs your exposure and heightens your risk.
I really love this piece on COVID-19 vaccine development, because it does an interesting taxonomy on different approaches to vaccines, identifies key players, and provides some statuses on efforts, discusses limitations of vaccines, etc.
This post suggests COVID-19's real insidious nature may be as a blood vessel disease.
Nothing here is really new, but it focuses on the airborne transmission hypothesis and why masks and testing are necessary to contain the disease.
Finally I want to counterbalance against right-wing talking points that the real issue is (short-term) fatality rates and dismisses the disease as little more than a garden variety seasonal flu. I want to quote a Quora blogger Mitchell Tsai, a retired Harvard virus researcher. (Let me note I don't share his views on other topics, like "overpopulation".) He recommends the tweet embedded at the end of this post, and I agree it's probably the best clip of what I've seen on the novel coronavirus and I recommend it.
But I want to the dismissive talking point by right-wing critics that only 1% dies and the rest are fine. On the latter point, I want to quote Tsai:
What about the people who survive?
For every one person who dies:
19 more require hospitalization.
18 of those will have permanent heart damage for the rest of their lives.
10 will have permanent lung damage.
3 will have strokes.
2 will have neurological damage that leads to chronic weakness and loss of coordination.
2 will have neurological damage that leads to loss of cognitive function.
So now all of a sudden, that “but it’s only 1% fatal!” becomes:
3,282,000 people dead.
62,358,000 hospitalized.
59,076,000 people with permanent heart damage.
32,820,000 people with permanent lung damage.
9,846,000 people with strokes.
6,564,000 people with muscle weakness.
6,564,000 people with loss of cognitive function.
For God's sake and for your family, protect yourself! Wear your damn masks, and wash your hands. Don't do it because the government tells you to; do it as an act of love for you and your family and friends.
This is what having the novel coronavirus looks like pic.twitter.com/mu7Sj1pq28— Tech Insider (@techinsider) March 22, 2020
