Day two. I received my first dose of the Pfizer COVID vaccine on Saturday morning. I had a bit of a headache that afternoon but otherwise, no side effects. The next day, Sunday, day two, I woke up with some aches and pains, but at my age, it’s hard to tell if those were new or normal. I forget. Others complain about a lot of pain in the arm where they got the shot, but not so much for me, at least nothing that a few painkillers couldn’t handle.
Having gotten an mRNA vaccine, my body is now reacting to…
Way up at the edge of the Arctic Circle, a dot in the middle of nowhere, is the Nordisk Vulkanologisk Institut (NordVulk), one of the world’s most prestigious institutes of volcanology and related earth sciences. Oddly, this past March, just 50 kilometers away, a mountain named Fagradalsfjall erupted with spectacular lava flows that are still continuing today. Did the NordVulk Institute cause this eruption? No, of course not. In fact, it is exactly the other way around — the restless volcanoes of the neighborhood region caused the institute.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology exists in Central China’s Hubei province (think…
There’s been a lot of talk this past year about “Freedom!” …Freedom and “Tyranny!” …Tyranny and “My Rights!” How cheap we are, throwing those words around as if we own them. As if we even know what they mean.
Imagine, for just one moment, the most frightening experience in your life. We’re usually pretty good at remembering such things because they get burned into our brains. Now, imagine there is some kid — in the prime of their youth, their whole life ahead of them, never even been in love — being plucked from everything they know and thrown into…
There’s a cool thing in statistics called the “normal distribution”. Basically, nothing really happens in the same way and all at once, but if you plot the details, they always tend to fall along a nice and neat bell-shaped curve. For instance, this is the “bell curve” that teachers use in school when a few kids do really well (graded A), and then a few more do pretty good (B), but most kids do okay (C, the hump in the middle), while a corresponding few do not so well (D), and fewer still don’t do good at all (F).
One of the most inexplicable phenomena of this pandemic is a supposed “survival rate” of something like “99.9%” or whatever high number the arguer pulls out of a hat. The gist of this logic is we should not care that much about the people who succumb to COVID because so many people apparently don’t.
However, what makes this phenomenon even more inexplicable is how often these very same arguers will flip on this logic when it is convenient for them to care about someone other than COVID victims. For instance, the Q-fueled conspiracy, “Save the Children”.
About 460,000 children are…
Yesterday I sat on hold for an hour and twenty minutes, and then the automated system hung up on me. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Isn’t it weird that you know exactly what I’m talking about? You’ve been there too, haven’t you? Haven’t we all?
We expect things to be screwed up because they usually are. Last week, a package I was waiting for mysteriously disappeared en route, and another package I had already gotten arrived again. A thing we bought at the store was missing an essential part. Last year’s Christmas lights don’t work because of one…
Way back when COVID-19 wasn’t even designated a pandemic yet, someone had the idea that the government should send a free box of face masks to every household in America. Few people were in the room at the time, so it’s anyone’s guess why that didn’t happen, but that alone might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The world could be a very different place right now: COVID could be under control, Mr. Trump would have been re-elected handily, and we would be talking about other things. But, unfortunately, it is what it is.
The reason is economics —…
“All models are wrong. But some are useful.” This is a saying by the famed statistician, George Edward Pelham Box, also known as “one of the great statistical minds of the 20th century”. His saying is a principle in the field.
But how can this be? How can the modelers themselves know that the models they make are wrong and yet still tout them as true? Well, because models are supposed to be wrong. At least, in the case of the Coronavirus pandemic, that is the hope…
Let’s put it this way: Suppose you go to the doctor and you…
In certain respects, it could be considered a hoax to invent old campaign buttons that never existed and then share them to social media. According to the Wikipedia entry for “hoax” (which is quite good, btw), “A hoax is often intended as a practical joke or to cause embarrassment, or to provoke social or political change by raising people’s awareness of something.”
But the original image was a political cartoon, which should absolve it of being a hoax, and rather put it squarely in the realm of satire (ala The Onion or Borowitz Report). As a cartoon, these buttons should…
Studies about “nature vs nurture” have more-or-less determined that there are some things we are born with and other things we learn. Obviously, things like being right- or left-handed are pretty-much beyond our control — we are born that way. But other behaviors, like if we are mostly happy or mostly sad, well, how we are brought-up can make a difference. Or so we think.
Studying twins who are separated at birth is particularly fascinating because genetically they are the same — this is the “nature” part. So then any differences observed between the twins can probably be attributed to…
Peter Sylwester
Sent from a future where everyone thinks as slowly as me.
