Post #6147 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest stats from WaPo:just under 25k

The latest from CDC:

Cases have dropped to an average of under 25K, the lowest we've seen in several weeks Probably the biggest news over the past week is a Congressional vote to declassify so-called evidence supporting the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis. I think the lab leak hypothesis is not well-supported, and this is more about China Derangement Syndrome. Science is all about transparency and data, and so I don't object to declassification which can expose and debimk incompetent government analysis; the natural zoonotic interspecies-jump.

One of the most recent, possibly ominous news stories is NYC rats found to have COVID-19. 

I covered the announcement in an earlier journal post that Johns Hopkins case tracking project was winding down; I think it's happening this weekend. 

We continue to see prosecution of COVID relief fraud cases.

Celebrities continue to report COVID-19 cases, most recently CA Governor Newsom.

I'm willing to be anti-vaxxers feel vindicated by this talking point:

Immunity acquired from a Covid infection provides strong, lasting protection against the most severe outcomes of the illness, according to research published Thursday in The Lancet — protection, experts say, that’s on par with what’s provided through two doses of an mRNA vaccine.

Infection-acquired immunity cut the risk of hospitalization and death from a Covid reinfection by 88% for at least 10 months, the study found

We continue to see lifting of vaccine requirements in hiring, public universities, etc.

Other Notes

In blog readership, there has been a fairly strong close to the week; it hasn't shown up individual posts (and in fact I haven't posted an essay in a while), but one hint: there's a lopsided cluster from Hong Kong; I'm not sure why. I know some years back I was getting an unusual cluster from Russia and another time I was getting a cluster from Western Europe. In Twitter week, I dropped below 1K daily earlier in the week but have rebounded somewhat. I don't have an explanation why some tweets take off like one of mine on Kaepernick yesterday. The trend really started because he had thrown his white adoptive parents under the bus as racist and it was trending. I've written other Kaepernick tweets before and since which earned scant impressions. 

I have two posts that I'm working on but haven't published yet, one inspired by the announcement of Jimmy Carter going into hospice care and another on migrating my email client (Thunderbird) to my new workhorse computer, which I'll be publishing in my SoftDoc blog on practical computing. I'll sometimes get sidetracked while writing a post. For example, I used to archive my Thunderbird messages in Asksam, a freeform database product I first licensed while I was an assistant professor at UWM in the late 80's. I think the last version (7) was released in 2008, and at some point, probably around 2013 when I first noticed, the company's URLs were working. I know around 2016 I exported some files to text when I had problems installing in new workhorse replacements. I had my old license number but it wasn't getting accepted; I wasn't sure if it was registering the software at an obsolete server setting, if the license number I had was for an earlier version or whatever.  My version of Asksam 7 abends right in the middle of installation for some obscure reason on my newer PC. I ended up starting to archive my emails in MailStore Home shortly after having Asksam problems. So, long story short, I couldn't remember trying to install on my older workhorse and tried: to my surprise, the install worked, and it accepted my license number. I worked on exporting other Asksam files I hadn't converted. So,the post got sidetracked. Maybe I'll finish over a 3-day weekend.

Well, to the curious, the above keyboard is a soft font version of an APL keyboard. APL stands for "A Programming Language", developed by Kenneth Iverson of IBM in the 1960's. It's an interpretive (vs. compiled), cryptic, powerful language, heavily based on mathematical constructs like vectors and matrices. You can write very concise programs that would take dozens or hundreds of lines in another language. A lot of applied statisticians like insurance actuaries quickly migrated to it. I got my start at a large insurance company's property casualty new end-user tech support unit. There were organizational blunders and office politics I did not expect at a reputable employer, which I won't get into here. I was hired as a trainee based on my 2 math degrees, but there was no supervisor at the time; I was assigned to a former actuarial analyst (who failed to reach the highest certification level), but he was pissed at the company for passing him over for the tech supervisor position. (They hired someone from Blue Cross, but he eventually decided not to take the offer.) So basically, I taught myself, well enough to attract an offer 50% higher in Houston at the leading APL timesharing vendor.

I started my MBA at UH part-time for career reasons, and my first guest lecture in a graduate school class was a demonstration of APL in John Ricketts' DSS class. (Dr. Ricketts would later serve on my dissertation committee). Many decision support systems were prototyped using APL

I occasionally used APL as an MIS professor. For example, I built a utility to scramble multiple choice question options and the question sequence to guard against student cheating by generating alternative test versions.

I last professionally programmed in APL at an IBM subsidiary as a contractor in the Dallas metroplex after my academic career ended in a recession. 

So, it's been several years and I recently found a freeware version on the Internet and have installed it. I thought it would be fun to brush up on my skills