Shaky Danny

  There has been fuss about this interstellar object passing through our solar system. We know it is interstellar because it dropped from above the solar disk. Everything in our solar system is near the disk. This dropped from above then changed direction at the disk near the sun and went skittering off along the path of the disk. Why did it change direction? The two reasonable explanations are outgassing from the object and solar wind. The sun produces heat and radiation so one of those must have moved the object. But the object doesn’t change direction until it reaches the solar disk. Why wouldn’t heat or radiation move the object earlier? The explanations given are unsatisfying. Aliens are suggested. It looks like it bounced. It bounced near the sun on the disk. Why did it bounce on the disk? It looks like it hit something and changed direction. What could it have hit? The man on the stair. Something that isn’t there. Sounds like dark matter to me. Dark matter varies in de...

  In 2017 Christine dragged me on the Katy Trail near St. Louis to see the eclipse. We were not in the totality. The first effect I noticed was the sickling. People were making pinhole viewers with blades of grass or a circle with thumb and forefinger. Sickling, the crescent moon shadow, was everywhere. The next was shadow bands. The sickling turned off and shadow bands, alternations of light and dark, appeared on the ground. They were straight and went on forever. Towards maximum darkness, and stillness, the shadow bands clicked off and then reappeared on the other side of the eclipse. Then the bands turned off and sickling reappeared. The shadow bands did not move. I don’t know if their position was the same on both sides of the eclipse. I had not heard of shadow bands before. Shadow bands are an interference pattern. An interference pattern occurs when a light is split, and then subsequent two slits create a wave interference pattern. The question is where the interference com...

  Life doesn’t play fair. We cheat. From virus to Dolphin, we slip the wink, nod, hidden card. All entities communicate, sometimes to our advantage. Roots respond to fungal signals. Flowers attract insects. Birds shriek at hawks. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House , has evolution as a disordered wandering in a local domain from a variational minimum. He is contradicting the belief that humans are a culmination of effort. We are merely a twig on the great evolutionary bush.  Except when the wandering is selected. Communication across and within species is such a selection. The principle of intelligence, the consequence of its various possible algorithms, develops from communication. Unlikely there is one common algorithm for intelligence. More reasonable there is a principle among the algorithms. Given communication as the source of advantage, intellect is inevitable. Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. The principle of intelligence will be the same, regardless ...

  Christine asked: -Why is Canada burning? Without hesitation I responded: -Lumber companies planted the wrong trees and it got warm. Seems glib, but in this case my cynicism was correct. If you go out on Google Earth, it is clear that the arboreal, original Canadian forest did not burn. Lumber companies proffer all sorts of rationalizations. Whatever they say, it didn’t work. If they take refuge in regulation, consider the Exxon Valdez. Exxon Mobil went into court and said that Alaska did not require double wall tankers. Everyone laughed because the reason for that was because Exxon had lobbied against it. Covering North America in soot is a lot worse than dumping oil on beaches. Lumber companies have no refuge. This is their game. They ran it. Lumber companies don’t own all the land, but they did the cutting. They didn’t know it was getting warmer? The cutover areas flamed. Arboreal sometimes burns, not like this. Please prevent these boobies from planting trees. Th...

  We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work. Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot. I task ChatGpt with revie...

  I recently learned about pistol compensators. These are vents you can install on your pistol to lessen recoil. Since the recoil is what drives the reload, you have to be careful the compensator doesn’t jam the gun. This is a variant of the gas operated action on assault rifles that allows them to be the small plastic toy looking guns that are so popular. Shooting guns used to be more difficult. You can find YouTube videos of people shooting old rifles that hit them in the face because they are not used to the recoil. There are also laser pointers you can attach to the gun. Fire a round into the target at the range you expect to use. Fix the laser dot on the bullet impact. From then on, within range, your shots should hit the dot. Eventually we will have the Tom Swift electronic rifle. The gun won’t need a hammer anymore because it will fire with a spark. This will allow the cartridge to be held still and contained with no blow back. The cartridge may not have a case. Even if ...

  I just bought some Binax Now tests. The first test I followed the instructions and got a negative result. This is reassuring. I got my last Moderna shot in April. The next test I took a rectal swab instead of nasal. Chinese think this is more accurate. It is also in line with my speculation about bile. This was ever so slightly positive. A clear test is obvious. If it is not clear, it is positive. I have thought that I had Covid19 in the fall of last year. Avoid flatulence. I then blasted a nasal swab in front of a speaker to vibrate it. I had speculated that vibration pops the heads. This was negative. Protein tests, such as this, seem more useful than immune tests, particularly once we have been vaccinated.

Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine has come out in the New England Journal of Medicine. I was wrong again. I thought the 95% was a consequence of confusion between oncology and epidemiology. The study was conducted by Pfizer. I had thought it was fortuitous that an mRNA vaccine that avoids the issue of white blood cell response was easier to develop. The study:  “ RESULTS A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo. There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo; BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6). Similar vaccine efficacy (generally 90 to 100%) was observed across subgroups defined by age, sex, race, ethnicity, baseline body-mass index, and the presence of coexisting conditions. Among...

  Foreign cells have the ability to resist our immune system. When Sars-Cov2 infects a foreign cell, it will be coated in that cell’s glycan. Depending on the cell that is infected the new virus will either awaken our immune response or avoid it. In those cases where the glycan is part of the foreign cells immune defense, the new virus will also have that capability. This speculation is to explain why some people are more infectious. When Sars-Cov2 infects strep for instance, those virus particles may be transmitted more easily.  

What events pop the heads? Give specific events, no mumbling about ACE2 receptors or glycan reactions. Why don’t owls eat all the bats? No mightabes or whatabouts. It mightabe my ass. Do the heads have to pop for infection to occur? As a male, I would think so. We don’t even know that much. What is immune memory? Thymus is involved. Why is there any immune reaction? Covid19 is covered in our glycan. How are we infected by a virus covered in foreign glycan? Is there any distinction between the glycoprotein covering the virus and our own? If there is such a distinction, is it consistent? What are the specific immune events at the cell wall? Again, no mumbling about pathways or mightabes. What clears the virus? Does the virus clear? Please don’t test this with immune reaction. What is the progression of the disease? Is HIV a coronavirus? Get your flu shot. Get a Covid19 vaccine when it comes. Stay away from people. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t argue by metaphor or analog...

  Crossing disciplines can be a source for inspiration and embarrassment. BioNTech recently made an announcement of 90% effectiveness. I suspect that the oncologists meant 90% in the body and the virologists heard 90% in the population. BioNTech, as everyone else, is targeting the heads that pop up on the virus when it is about to infect. They have recognized that the white blood cell response is inadequate and they are conflicting with the virus at the cell wall. The company’s specialty is provoking this cellular response without the mediation of white blood cells. This makes perfect sense with tumors.  The white blood cells keep immune memory.  Covid19 virus coats in our glycan and thereby avoids white blood cell response. The BioNTech candidate avoids this issue but it can’t confer lasting immunity. If we surround an Ebola spot outbreak with this type of intervention, it should be effective. That doesn’t mean that the population can go back to passing around dead b...

  Pandemic means that we don’t know anything. If we knew how to cope, it wouldn’t be a pandemic. The drug companies got all the research money. The few researchers who remain have cobbled together a few studies. One of the studies is a computer model showing how the heads pop up on the virus when the glycan stimulus occurs. We don’t know what events raise the heads. Given that the virus leaves the bat on two ends, I suggest that two of the events are loud noise and bile. Infection must occur when the virus is inside us. Another event must be a cell nibbling on the virus glycan. It seems reasonable that the heads have to rise for the virus to infect. When you encounter a foreign virus where the heads haven’t popped, your white blood cells should recognize foreign glycan and consume the virus. Once the heads have popped it should be possible for the virus to encounter one of your other cells before your white blood cell and infect it. The virus produced by your cell would have your...

Building out my five earlier posts, one mistake is framing as influenza. SARS-Cov-2 is a coronavirus. Those little arms aren’t sexual selection. They aren’t cute. They hold onto glycan. My frame bases on two facts, glycan and bats. If you are into rage, rage pleases some people, consider all the researchers staring into the abyss, making their tiny incremental gains in knowledge and technique. They were reserving their lab equipment, writing their grant proposals, studying HIV, Ebola, H1N1, etc. The discovery they were converging on was the relation between glycan and protein along the cell wall. This molecular process is complex and difficult to discern. Glycan is just as complex as protein. The research is cancelled. Government gave the money for all those projects to drug companies. Drug companies are drug companies. They are perfecting their manufacturing process to be ready for the vaccine. They are doing clinical trials for various expensive cocktails of treatments. If someth...

If this crowd had been in charge during Ebola, we would all be dead. If it were Clinton elected, she would be tearfully tragically sorry for the hundreds of dead in New York. If, by some miracle, the Golden Child had a third term, they would fiercely pillory him for the billions he had wasted in China. If the Federal government had existed during the bubonic plague, they would hand out rats. I doubt you develop immunity to Covid19 in the normal sense. This doesn’t demand that it persist forever. If you are not reinfected it may be that over some time your liver will recognize large, elderly glycan balls and dispose of them all. Perhaps Covid19 is advantageous in bats. It avoids immune response and may target foreign invaders. This is not ridiculous there are anticancer viral therapies. Bats don’t get cancer. This coronavirus may coevolve with future human generations. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to get it.   In a few years, after the 100 million have died in the world, w...

The Wuhan bat lady recently got out of jail. Her first speech was to the effect: -You ain’t seen nothing yet. See why they jailed her. Her group’s first new paper nailed it down that Sars-Cov-2 comes from bats. They needed to put that marker down. Extrapolating from that information, bats are healthy. They have a protein rich diet. Bats have plenty of vitamin D. They are active. There are no fat bats. Covid19 is all up in bats. Just because something is logical, does not make it so. In desperation, I smoked a cigar in the park. I was uncomfortable after that. The catch in my throat declined, but now it’s back. Is there any correlation to tonsillectomy? Coronavirus arms hang onto their glycan coat. Glycan is encoded. Your body can detect foreign glycan. So when a coronavirus from someone else gets in you, your body says: -Not my glycan. The white blood cell or whatever chomps it down. Your immune system isn’t notified. It’s just another foreign invader: -No...

The virus spikes hold on to glycan. Glycan, sugar molecules, cover everything. Glycan is how all cells interact. Sars-Cov-2 has evolved in bats to conceal itself with glycan from your body. Search on glycan coat Sars-Cov-2 and you will find all these research articles, trying not to be snarky, not wanting to bust rice bowls, explaining the difficulty. You would think they would be more explicit in these circumstances. Why are we getting immune reaction? How about the virus infecting foreign bodies, those viruses lack the correct coat and activate immune response? We don’t know that immune response means immunity. We finally have some data as to morbidity. We don’t have exposure or infection but of cases resolved 20% die. A million sick means 200,000 will die. Easy bar bet, if the bars were open. 80% remission is still opportunity for delusion and quackery. Everyone divides dead by sick. I have taken this measure as medical effectiveness. It gives a sense of testing and E...

Distance is it. Distance is all we have. The more we play with it, the longer it takes. Too long and the virus twitches. I hate to say mutate, sounds like a comic book. The meaningful virus change is to attack a different population segment. This sounds likely, I don’t know when, but that is how nature works. Even without Covid19 changing, once the herd is sickened, opportunistic infections increase. There will be no vaccine. The glib, confident, hardworking, energetic, smart people who get the money are not the ones who make discoveries. The Ebola people, with the hot hand since they actually created a successful vaccine, took decades, got their funding cut. The one lab in the world that knows anything, in Wuhan, got their funding cut and their principles are in jail. The HIV people who have been staring into the abyss and making their incremental discoveries got their funding cut. They are trying to find the coconut chocolate in the sampler. A good analogy because the virus...

I am not an authority.   Anyone who does speak with authority on this subject is lying. It is too new. The federal government just released a projection of 200,000 deaths. This is close to my own calculation. Given the federal governments history of guidance and information, perhaps I’m wrong. I’m getting the same order of magnitude without an engineering degree. The federal government did not show its work. Presumptuous to call this a model, start with a 330,000,000 population in the United States. How many people will be exposed?   I am impressed with social distancing. Even if only half the states are sheltering in place, those states seem sincere. In Illinois, Pritzker has been good. It is difficult to make decisions with insufficient information. I doubt I would have his courage. Let’s say half the population becomes exposed.   This gives 165 million. Of those exposed how many become infected?   I’m hesitant to discuss the virus structure. My impre...

A deficiency of blogging is that subsequent posts supersede the originals. I use this blog as a Pensieve so I don’t modify posts. Instead I have adopted the convention of revisited in the title. The prosaic explanation of dark matter is that it is composed of Neutrinos. I am a fan of the prosaic. Whatever it is there has to be a lot of it. It has to have mass. I believe it has to propagate light. Does it have the sole property of propagation? Does it propagate in cooperation with other materials?   Does it only show this ability in vacuum? Since light bends in gravity I am unable to think of a distinction between inert photons, static neutrinos and current theories. Can we create, however faint, the laser affect within vacuum? If the ether material lases it should maximize at specific frequencies, identifying the particles. Christine suggested dissipated gravity waves as an explanation of the chatter.

Ether has long been used for explaining the propagation of light. Aristotle discussed Ether. Given electromagnetic waves, the implication that light has to propagate through something seemed reasonable.   Ether went the way of phlogiston and caloric when Michelson and Morley split a light beam, then bounced the two perpendicular rays back to each other and found no difference in diffraction. If it can’t be measured then forget about it. The Dark Matter theory accounts for the difference between observed mass and the behavior of galaxies by positing an entity that exists in a vacuum yet has mass. Dark Matter seems a misnomer as it allows for the transmission of light. Exists in a vacuum, has mass and propagates light, sounds like Ether to me. Abandoning Ether leads to the wave particle duality and quantum theories.   Why is it that a child without any apparent ability of concentration or interest can intently spend their entire playground time pouring sand through a s...