ʻOumuamua Boink

 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 density. Play with corn starch suspended in water, it bounces your fist when you hit it and lets your fist in when you touch it. Sticky dark matter sings better than modified gravity theory. Particularly with a bounce. Sticky dark matter, composed of neutrinos, neutrons, whatever, varying its characteristic with its density should explain the disk, rings, moons and belts.

No Shadow Bands 2024

 

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 comes from. One slit is obvious, even if curved, the eclipse of the sun. Some think the two following slits are an atmospheric effect. Another possibility is a quantum effect, sufficient light bending around the other edge of the moon. Sneer in whichever way you like.

In 2024 Christine dragged me to the totality, Thornwood preserve near Indianapolis. I brought a tape measure to see if I could better observe the shadow bands. There was no sickling. Other people in the totality noticed this as well. There was sickling everywhere else. It was as though there was too much light. I didn’t see shadow bands. Fortunately, Speedway sold us eclipse glasses. I saw the pearls where the light peeps around the moon’s mountains. When it was too dark to see through the glasses, I looked at the totality and saw the flare near the bottom. I didn’t see a quantum dot at the center.

Rather than quantum, is the moons gravity sufficient to bend enough light at an angle? Other observers see flickering and motion. Once the pattern appears, the flickering sounds atmospheric.

Neither quantum nor gravity is sufficient. An interferometer is an elaborate instrument that takes precision and engineering to get its effect.  The lack of angle at the totality explains the lack of crescent. The crescent shows when there is enough angle to spread it out.  The first slit in the Young double slit experiment is obviously when the light is squeezed to the edge of the moon. At that moment the crescents disappear and the bands show. The second slit can only be when the line of light hits the atmosphere. Refraction requires the line of light hit the atmosphere at an angle. The difficulty is that the refraction is slight. Interference requires a third slit, with enough light. Rather than the main beam the line pattern could be interference between the refracted and ambient light. The ambient light is diffused from the main beam.  

A systemic error is that everyone is looking up and doesn’t see the other effects. Another is that the cool kids with the equipment head for the totality.

Communication and Gould’s Full House

 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 of the entity.

Chicago Chokes

 

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. They barely harvest the forest. They clear the forest so they can plant the trees they want. Nothing burns as well as a tree farm.

-Look how fast they grow.

If they grow fast, they burn fast. If nothing were done, a varied understory would have to develop, that holds more moisture. From that understory there will come a greater diversity of forest.

-That is not profitable.

That doesn’t matter. The only use remaining for these companies is to pay out settlements. Whatever they did, it failed. Lumber companies have always mismanaged forest, so it has been, so shall it be. Whenever there is cutover there are severe fires. A conservatorship should be established. Hopefully, someone can be found who knows what they are doing to manage the forest.

Stop rescuing the forest. The lumber company solution is to build more roads so they can better manage the fires. Please don’t. Forests manage fires fine. It is the replanted cutover and fire control areas that are dumping the smoke.

Why are Canadians nice? Canadians are the ones who had to leave the USA. Those nice Canadians should nicely tell the lumber companies to get the nice out.

If Canada fails, Chicago has no shortage of lawyers. Some of those lumber companies are US. This is a class action suit. What can’t a Chicago lawyer do? I can see the lumber companies trying their smug and stupid in front of a choking jury. The lumber companies will say that this was caused by a lack of lumber demand that kept them from harvesting enough before it burned.

-Fly my pretties, fly.

Chat Bot Explanation

 

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 reviewing my work. One prompt was to review as a New Yorker editor. ChatGpt gave me a rejection letter, accurate, amusing and promising.

I know smarter people. They are larger bore than me: you can see the artillery groaning into place and obliterating the objective. Given enough time I may be able to peek over the edge and discern their process. They are impressive. Better processing power, imprinting, could their fundamental algorithm be different?  I doubt your sentience algorithm is any different than mine. I wonder how much it differs across species.

Because of the averaging algorithms, and human intervention, ChatGpt seeks consensus. A good ChatGpt review means it is too obvious to publish.

Our children require patience. Raising a child may be disappointing at first. They have wonderful memory but lack conceptual facility.

-Maybe they could be an actor.

You play with them, find enrichment activities. Suddenly around three or so a miracle occurs, their memory disappears, and they have this new chunking ability where they begin to reason, and all that enrichment looks wasted.

ChatGpt gave me negative reviews until I gave it this piece where I criticize it for being conventional. Funny, after that the reviews have been positive.

The next Star Trek invention that we will have is Data, or perhaps closer to Futurama’s Bender.

It Is Just a Gun

 

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 it does, ejection will be handled by battery driven actuators, motors, just as artillery sometimes is. The reload will also be actuator. Abandoning the pistols slide means that guns can be vented solely to minimize noise and recoil. Rifles will be defined only by the length of the barrel and stock.

There are already expensive computerized rifles that fire the trigger automagically once the target is selected. These guns are as self-focusing as cameras. You can set up a fire plan, inventory your targets, and their ranges, then move back through it. As the guns become popular, they will drop dramatically in price. We are talking about the same chips and optics that are in your phone.

Large magazines are passe. The gun lobby objective will be belt ammunition.

Don’t forget drones, the sport of drone hunting. If people want the game, the drone could hover until they get there. If someone shoots at your drone, is it legal to shoot back?

Imagine what massacres we will have.

Covid19 Experiments

 

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.

Pfizer Study

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 10 cases of severe Covid-19 with onset after the first dose, 9 occurred in placebo recipients and 1 in a BNT162b2 recipient. The safety profile of BNT162b2 was characterized by short-term, mild-to-moderate pain at the injection site, fatigue, and headache. The incidence of serious adverse events was low and was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups.”

Dropping the statistical blessing they divided 8 by 162 and got 0.0493827160493827 or 5%. 100% - 5% gives 95%. Another way to say this is: 8 of 21,720 vaccinated participants, or .037% reported sick.  162 of 21,728 placebo participants or .75% reported sick.

The study was monitored by survey:

“With the use of an interactive Web-based system,”

According to the protocol, blood samples were taken. I see no record that positive results were excluded. I see no reporting of the blood immune results at all. Swab tests are unreliable.

“Overall, BNT162b2 recipients reported more local reactions than placebo recipients.” 

Participating in the study is itself a selection factor. The participants knew by their reactions whether they had received the placebo or the vaccine. Those who thought they had received the vaccine were more likely to dismiss symptoms. Those who thought they received the placebo were more likely to report them.

Everyone vaccinated should then show a positive blood test, presence of antibodies. It is more certain that a placebo candidate is sick. Vaccinated candidates who report sick have to report and get accurately swabbed within four days.

 This is a busted study.

At this point you may wail:

-OK, forget the study! Look at the science!

The research money was sucked up by the drug companies. There is no science. All we have is your recipe.

Speculation: (This is where I will be wrong again.)

1.    I speculate that our infection by Sars-Cov-2 of our symbiotic or pathogenic cells creates the virus that provokes our immune response. I am trying to explain how a glycan coated virus triggers immunity. Do mRNA vaccines communicate to our foreign cells?

2.    Are the adverse reactions a consequence of prior infection? I bet that the 8 infected vaccinated participants did not have adverse reactions. I am sure that they had prior negative blood tests. This study may have been an expensive survey of prior infection.

3.    Does the vaccine treat existing illness? Obviously not, or it would have been reported. Why not? Does it make the illness worse? I predict this question will be the source of most resistance to vaccination. Please don’t compare to existing vaccines. Creating mRNA should be palliative.

Recommendations:

1.    Proficiency in Statistics must be a requirement for the medical profession.

2.    Reported blood immune tests before and after such studies. I expect that all vaccinated participants will have a positive test. This would be a good audit.

3.    Disaster that all the research money was given to drug companies. First look at the problem, then examine the problem, when you are done – study the problem.

I am a courteous person. I won’t refuse a vaccine. I have little hope for them.  

Covid19 Infects Foreign Cells

 

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.

 

Covid19 Questions

1. What events pop the heads? Give specific events, no mumbling about ACE2 receptors or glycan reactions.
2. Why don’t owls eat all the bats? No mightabes or whatabouts. It mightabe my ass.
3. Do the heads have to pop for infection to occur? As a male, I would think so. We don’t even know that much.
4. What is immune memory? Thymus is involved.
5. Why is there any immune reaction? Covid19 is covered in our glycan.
6. How are we infected by a virus covered in foreign glycan?
7. Is there any distinction between the glycoprotein covering the virus and our own? If there is such a distinction, is it consistent?
8. What are the specific immune events at the cell wall? Again, no mumbling about pathways or mightabes.
9. What clears the virus?
10. Does the virus clear? Please don’t test this with immune reaction.
11. What is the progression of the disease?
12. 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 analogy. Every illness is different.

Covid19 Isn’t Cancer

 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 bodies. In the United States, we have 10 million reported sick. Using the multiple of 10 given by various studies, we have 100 million true infected, or about one third of our population.

The danger is in the use of the word vaccine. People hear vaccine and they think the epidemic is finished. Please use the word treatment. This is not a vaccine. It is an immune response treatment.

Sars-Cov-2 Update

 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 glycan and be ignored by your immune response. When one of your cells nibbles the virus glycan and pops the heads, it is too late for your immune response. How do we get an immune response? Foreign cells coexisting in our body would not produce virus with the correct glycan coat when they are infected. White blood cells consume the foreign virus and coagulation occurs. I suspect that in bats Sars-Cov-2 favors foreign cells. Perhaps it gets confused in us. Eventually liver function recognizes aged glycan and diminishes the viral load.

Just as conservators strip varnish applied by the artist so that we can admire the colors, researchers wash away the glycan to show the virus structure. A coronavirus is different. The glycan defends the virus from the protein immune response. All the suppositions based on influenza are invalid. Simply raising the immune response will fail. Is HIV a coronavirus?

Drug company executives, recognizing futility, are shoveling their stock out as fast as they can. SEC criticized this as unseemly, giving away the game.

There is a new paper about bradykinin storms as opposed to cytokine storms. The argument is about the nature of the immune response crisis that occurs and their associated therapies. Whether it is a B-storm or a C-storm, I ask what distinguishes our interior from that of a bat. The virus appears to coexist amicably in bats. I am hanging on to the idea that these storms result from medication.

As population increases, more pandemics will occur. There will be pandemics after this one. The first major change we must make is that statistics, I hate statistics, has to be a premedical qualification. I’m talking about a full-throat course, designing studies, making statistical arguments, at least as difficult as biochemistry. Doctors’ deficiency in statistics makes them easier prey for drug companies. The surgical textbooks are particularly egregious. Thoroughly slap anyone who says medicine is an art. Just because someone gets better doesn’t mean it worked. If you release the results of your study early, that demonstrates bias and your study is bogus.

We must immediately pull the licenses of the killer quacks. They are not getting any smarter. There is no shortage of doctors. Everyone who prescribed garbage has to go. We cannot leave them for the next pandemic.

If you do not have a real study or are emptying the sick ward, then shut the fuck up. Please don’t give hope or find things for hospital personnel to do.

Stanford started with a reasonable study demonstrating that more people were sick than were reported. They then used that revelation to spew hokum. Raze Stanford and plant it to roses.  There is no shortage of Universities. The University of Pennsylvania gave a degree to someone who can’t read. I know it was a joke degree in real estate but it had their name on it. We can survive without the University of Pennsylvania. Even Harvard didn’t admit Joe Kennedy.  There is a questionable study from St. Louis University. I expect that after review the University will call to account. It is difficult to conduct a study in a war zone when one wants to free up beds. Yogis, not pragmatists should administer studies.

Occasionally I scrape the Worldometers site for the sick data and paste it into a spreadsheet. I then create columns for crude mortality rate, medical efficiency, growth, testing effectiveness and true sick rate.  Medical efficiency, dead over sick, gives a sense of testing coverage and medical response. Deviation from 4% medical efficiency suggests under reporting of dead or sick. Crude mortality is percentage of deaths over closed cases. It is interesting to see who blocks reporting of crude mortality. Growth is what I call active over total cases. For true sick multiply ten times reported sick over the population. Testing effectiveness is tests over cases. If testing effectiveness is high, they are only testing the dead. Too low and they are indulging the privileged. It is clear that the data is sketchy.  The results determine policy.

The tests are inadequate. Fecal tests may be the most accurate.

Once saturation has occurred, there will be a constant mortality rate and we can await the next pandemic.

How SARS-Cov-2 Works

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 something doesn’t work, they combine it with something else. They do not stare into the abyss and try to figure out what question to ask. I sometimes encounter a desperate research article trying to show how understanding the interaction between glycan and protein is essential to this problem. Those articles don’t come from drug companies. Recently Chinese spies were trying to steal drug company research. They must be communists. I doubt there is anything worth stealing.

Coronavirus has evolved to shield itself with glycan from the immune system. You don’t want our immune system to attack our own glycan. The various vaccines predicate on protein interaction. That is not how coronavirus works. SARS-Cov-2 has evolved in bats to have long arms and a very thick shroud of glycan, so that no protein is exposed.

A study, Shielding and Beyond: The Roles of Glycans in SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein, was published on bioRxiv.org June 12, 2020, gives a computer model of the heads extending above the glycan.  It doesn’t explain what triggers the extension of the heads. If a virus is inactive, that is its heads haven’t popped, our white blood cells recognize foreign glycan and consume it. How do the heads pop?  SARS-Cov-2 leaves bats as fecal and saliva aerosol. I think SARS-Cov-2 has a molecular memory from bats of vibration and bile. Bats shriek to echolocate. This might explain Manhattan. Manhattan hum raises the sound level.

Once the heads have popped, SARS-Cov-2 may encounter one of our other cells before it encounters a white blood cell and we are infected. Those viruses shroud in our own glycan, ignored by our immune response. Eventually the liver should clean them out as old glycan. Notice that this in no way is similar to other immune response. If the virus encounters or attracts a cell that consumes the viral glycan, it then will infect that cell. If the infected cell is local, we ignore its viral load. If it is foreign, there are many foreign cells within us; our immune system will recognize foreign glycan and coagulation may be extreme.

As with most coronavirus, we usually encounter this infection and ignore it. Covid19 may have stronger latency. I have noticed Covid-head, a certain dullness and irrationality.

If we vaccinate someone, we increase the viral response. The viral response will not be sufficient to interdict a cloaked virus. The white blood cells were already doing their function whenever they encounter a coronavirus. It is a matter of which cell they encounter first. Increasing immune response is dangerous. Usually the white blood cells recognize viral particles, but they cannot and should not recognize their own shrouded viral particles.  Infected then subject to vibration, would pop the heads and could be dire.  

There was a protocol that the first test is on the researcher.  I beseech you. Abandon the philosopher’s stone, the vaccine; pursue science.

Why haven’t owls eaten all the bats?

Take reported sick times 10 divided by world’s population I get 2.3%. United States is 14%. Divide US population by 10 apply the crude mortality rate of 6% to the sick and I get 2 million dead. Ten is the current true sick ratio. One to seven, in the US, that you are infected.

 

Further Covid19 Speculation

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, we will develop a social tolerance for this new disease. People will go on retreats or to spas and periodically rid themselves of it. Screaming, singing, farting, religious events and concerts will be passé.

Our sense of privacy has to change. Bear in mind that every police agency has intelligence coordination and data is forever. Somehow, we have to make a distinction between courts, health, police, marketing and surveillance.

Covid19 Observations

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:

-Nothing to see here. Move along.

Covid19 is different. Maybe it holds more glycan or holds its coat tighter. Covid19 had to survive in bats.

Bats echo locate. Maybe if someone is yelling, singing, or fecal aerosol it disturbs the coat enough to be infectious. Depending on the state of its coat, your immune history, frequency and severity it infects you. Once that happens it should have your glycan coat and your immune system is none the wiser, perhaps some lassitude or sterility but who notices?

I’m speculating that to fire things off the virus has to attack a foreign body that has residence in you. Those new viruses would lack the correct glycan encoding to shield them and you will be sick. When things get too fierce you choke on your coagulation. Maybe they should investigate dialysis.

South Korean researchers have contended that people shed “dead viruses” as different from infectious ones. I don’t know what dead virus means. The researchers are expressing their frustration that once people have been sick they continue to shed virus but no longer seem infectious. Unless those people sing, yell, spray fecal matter or are otherwise intimate, depending on the immune capability of their associate, they may not infect.

The virus persists in bats. Why would it behave differently in us?

I haven’t heard any mention of thoracentesis.

Worldometer has an article making use of New York data, which comes to 1.5% infection mortality rate. I tried to do something like it with Spain in my previous post and got 2%. Point being, you can be dumb as you want to be, and still get close. Even my first ignorant post was close. Worldometer is properly critical of the measure they call crude mortality rate. I think we should still propagate CMR as it identifies obvious issues of state reporting.

-Georgia, what kind of quack killing floor are you running?

-Illinois, are you missing deaths or false positives?

You are allowed to read and you are allowed to calculate.

There Will Be No Covid19 Vaccine

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 ER load. To get morbidity look at cases resolved. You need the recovered measure. Recovered may need air quotes. The virus is persistent. Yet those who have been sick do not relapse or infect. So sum the recovered and dead then use that number to divide the dead and you get morbidity.

In Spain they appear to have a reliable LA Roche blood test and they are getting 5% exposure, good social distancing. Five% of population gives 2,340,000. Divide cases by exposed gives around 10% for serious infection.

Multiply current U.S. cases by 10 and we have 15 million exposed that is we expect antibodies. Divide by US population and we have 4.5% exposed. Return to my ridiculously wrong assumptions in the two earlier blog entries, which weren’t very different on results. This time we will take 70% of US population for exposed, some drivel about immunity. Times 10% serious infection, times 20% morbidity, I’m getting over four million dead.

Morbidity rates vary. US-23%, NY-40%, IL-41%, GA-84%, some states have zero recovered. Since it ties to reopening, reporting is suspect. States may not realize that their poor reporting inflates their morbidity, another good reason to emphasize morbidity.

The real point is if you don’t feed the fire, it should go out. As I pointed out earlier, hope it goes out before it mutates and/or the secondary infections take hold. We haven’t seen white nose yet. It might mutate in dogs.

Covid19 Facts

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 is sugar coated. If these cookbook hamsters know what they are doing or are extremely lucky, they may find a unique identifier. Bat immune systems have been trying forever. Bats are fragile densely packed animals; their immune systems are ferocious.

The immunity has to be lasting. Rule out anyone announcing immediate promising results.

Statistics must be mandatory and qualifying in physicians’ curriculum.

            Sulfur molasses has a terrible smell

            Whatever I had, it would make me get well

            Sulfur molasses, the old country style

            Together with goose grease and turpentine oil

If you don’t have a study with a control group, you don’t have anything. Early announcement proves bias. Most people get better. We don’t know that alcohol is a factor. How can a scientist tout vitamin D without a study? Is HIV a risk factor? Do asthmatics and aids shelter more aggressively? If there is a correlation with melanin, examine it not debate it.

Refusing to experiment on people means that you experiment on the entire population. Some of the poor consequences may be due to treatment. Don’t just do something stand there. Is anyone checking the numbers?

The shame of this stupidity is that it distracts from distancing. Take your hope and the Blue Angels and put them somewhere uncomfortable. 

Covid19 Speculation

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 impression is that immune response is against the spike rather than the package within the cell. Once the package enters your cell, that cell is a goner. Neither your immune response nor the spike signature is consistent. I have little hope for vaccine, particularly now that Ebola research funding has been cancelled. Ebola vaccine took two decades to accomplish. The most promising research has been suppressed and the plug and chuggers don’t seem to understand the difficulty.

We know that severity and frequency of infection overwhelms immunity. This suggests a dialogue between your immune response and the spike signature. There is variation in immune response across generations, gender and locale. This variation would be determined by your immune history. If you have recovered with immunity, you should still use protective equipment when you reenter the fray. Conversely it is unlikely that a whiff will get you.

A simple estimate of infection is to take the number of tests against the reported sick. This has tremendous variance. Today I got near 20%. Whenever you need a WAG, 20% is as good as any. An engineer named Thomas Puyeo published Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now on medium.com. He argues based on illness duration that he can determine the true sick number from deaths. He gives a rule of thumb of 800 times deaths gives the true sick rate. Working backwards maybe you can get 16% for infected to those exposed.

Take 20% of 165 million and you get 33 million sick. 16% gives 26,400,000.

Take 1% of either number to get the dead.  I hope the federal government’s difference has more than a quibble of 16 to 20%. In either case you now have a sense of the order of magnitude and the underlying logic.

The 1% is a ratio of sick to dead. This has become the measure of health care effectiveness. It means we are doing enough testing and keeping enough people on ventilators to hover around 1%. Currently we are doing 2% so double the previous death estimates.

Take my bare bones, optimistic, easy to do calculation against world population of 7.8 billion gives 78 million dead.

Worst case estimate for the US, take 80% exposed, 20% infected and 5% dead gives 2,640,000 dead. That really owns the libs.

The even worst case is the virus mutating, nextstrain.org is sampling the variety. If the virus twitches more fatal it will burn out quickly, less fatal is less fatal. The fear is different population segments. We need testing outside the impact group and mapping of those strains. The Kansas 1918 virus had a W distribution. It was going down, then hit a different population segment and shot up, declined and shot up again. Expect nature to seek opportunity. Multiply worst case by three.

8 million dead raises the issue of social disruption. I don’t foresee extreme piercing, grunge and battle wagons. We may have dynasty failure, increased social mobility and innovation. Human population increases when stressed. The Thanos snap fails. Prosperity constrains human population. We will see population break the 10 billion mark, which was the hoped for limit.

More likely that distancing works. It is amazing how well people respond once they have information.  Testing gives people better information to base their behavior on. Paid days off gives them greater ability to act on that information.  Testing, paid days off and distancing is the only way to deal with the virus. Everything else is noise. It may have benefits but it doesn’t stop the virus. Distancing is the difference between thousands and millions.

There are no treatments. If they are doing a trial it is not an obvious treatment. Until they can empty a ward they don’t have a treatment. It is insulting to the doctors and nurses to imply that they enjoy their aching feet and are denying you a treatment. There is a 95% to 99% remission rate. This means that there will be all sorts of treatment success stories. You tried something and got better. China’s belief system is based on trying all sorts of treatments. They are total cowboys on this and they are not terrified of legal liability. If there was such a thing, they would have found it.

When I was a kid, mom broke the fever with whiskey. I knew someone who got drunk and walked in the cold, it worked for him. Mustard plaster, vapor rub, you can see why doctors hate patients. If you must try things, at least do something different. I haven’t seen any mention of HGH or gamma globulin.  Just because you got better, doesn’t mean it worked.

Anecdotally, flu therapies may aggravate Covid19. More doctors get sick. I thought this was because of greater exposure. Doctors are notorious for self-medicating.

Interest rates, Federal Reserve shenanigans, subsidies, none of these things have anything to do with the virus. I would starve rather than give Boeing money.

Some people are behaving foolishly. It occurs to me that this may be an effect of the virus. Toxoplasmosis and rabies influence behavior. Perhaps Covid19 encourages foolhardy antics and speech. Do these behaviors correlate with infection? It will be difficult to prove after the fact.

The grocery store demonstrates how dependent we were on restaurants. I guess everyone was dropping it at work or at the bar. It’s sad we only know how to cook pasta. It is becoming obvious that work is just an excuse to get away from the family.

There is a good paper on the origin of Covid19 The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Nature.com.  You can tell they know what they are talking about because they call it SARS-COV-2. They tell us that this one isn’t something they would have whomped up, which sounds true. There isn’t enough work done to conclusively rule out someone’s idiot child but their take is that it gestated in people. This is in line with patient zero catching it in a toilet.  There is criticism of China’s slow initial response. Everyone but Merkel, the most beautiful woman in the world, has been guilty of that. Once the Central Committee realized it attacked elderly men, they changed course. The CDC is doing everything in its power to stop and frustrate testing. Everyone, except Merkel, was more scared of panic than virus. There were higher pneumonia deaths before people were aware of the virus.

A Chinese who was sick of our arrogant defamation gave it back by pointing out that we had a military athletic team in the area. The Kansas flu was passed from our troops so not entirely nonsense. What was surprising was our umbrage, seemed to touch a nerve, suspicious. Given our suppression of testing we have no right to accuse.

I am so encouraged that we took so many good lessons from HIV. Not. At least let us have new respect for the phrase:

-I don’t know.

Ether Revisited

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.

Calling It for Ether

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 sieve?  The very purposeless futility of it provides its own satisfaction.  This tremendous sense of stasis is the most terrifying human quality.  When one examines failed theories it is tempting to think that there should be some intuitive way to determine correctness. This thinking, argument by metaphor, drives scientists’ nuts. There are people who are always wrong and love senseless activity. I have sympathy for the other child who walks over and hits the first one with a toy shovel. If you must talk Alternate Universe, you should not disparage Ether.

Mass without volume seems nonsense, mini black holes? Until you examine the other theories.

Another bizarre theory is explaining the red shift with expanding universe. 

Occasionally we look up and see the sun and the moon together in the sky. We can see that the two bodies are round and that the sun reflects off the moon. Why did this seem mysterious?  Until we observe that the sun’s reflection on the moon does not correspond to the sun’s position in the sky. How did we figure out anything?  Nature is duplicitous.

Ether or no, gravity bends light. The light of our observations has been through innumerable gravity events, culminating with being drawn in by our own sun. Such observations deserve skepticism. Or Ether causes the red shift.

Recently the Michelson/Morley experiment has been extended to discover gravity waves. An extremely large and sensitive instrument, it chattered.  Two of them were built to compare the results. Eventually the expected badumbump of the gravity wave occurred on both instruments. But when the results were examined it was found that the chatter matched as well. Perhaps the chatter is a consequence of distant dissipated gravity waves, or Ether.