Shaky Danny

  It is a cruel twist of technology that librarians have become one of the most computerized professions.   Whether transporting their bibliographic files across platforms or navigating all the varieties of text processing and information retrieval the technical expertise expected of them seems totally disjointed from the personalities that this profession should attract. Like Amazon, librarians rarely touch books. What librarians want to do, and are rewarded for, is party: events and fund raisers.   The only people in the stacks anymore are kids playing and making out.   Similarly, authors are now plunging the depths of HTML to properly format their works.   Books have become video graphic experiences.   I fully expect hypertext markup language to be taught in Humanities. Professors make use of services to check for plagiarism, grammar and composition. Except perhaps for Prince, who cut all his own tracks, most people work with others. Authors have const...

  I have just finished The Counter-Revolution Of 1776 , New York University Press, 2014. It is a fire hose of facts. Horne, as most of us, could use an editor. There is occasional awkwardness and redundancy. But the facts. Nearly a quarter of the book is notes. I have seen some criticism to the effect that there was an abolitionist in Massachusetts or some such. There are dismissals of slave owners reports as hysteria, which Horne acknowledges by the way.   Just put your head in this fire hose of facts. In the US of Usn’s we are taught history starting from our “revolution”. Nothing comes from nowhere. In England they at least know there was the Seven Years War.   The Seven Years war was nine years. The English don’t want to acknowledge that it was the colonial tail wagging the empire dog. I had attributed English opposition to slavery to their experience with Barbary pirates. Horne mentions this on page 39 as part of a larger argument and it doesn’t merit an index en...

  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.

There is a new word, apophenia, created by Klaus Conrad to describe false correlations. I propose a duality with gestalt. This isn’t fair to gestalt. Gestalt is intended to break you out of your current patterns and recognize more useful ones. Sometimes we recognize incorrectly. Let us apply this duality to the USA invasion of Grenada in 1983. When Thatcher remonstrated with Reagan over this breach of international law and convention, Reagan responded that he wanted some nutmeg for his eggnog. This was just after England had defended the Falklands. While this remark is appropriate within the history of the spice trade, in 1988 Grenada exported 2,230 tons of nutmeg and 256 tons of mace for a total export value of $15,761,107. This was a good year.   Let us find the street value. 2,486 tons is 87,691,069 ounces. I have a price of 6 ounces is $10 listed on the internet currently. Divided by 6 is 14,615,178. Times $10 gives a markup of more than 10 times the export value. Somewhere...

  I spent a year in Dallas one week. Southern Methodist University had volunteered as the crash test dummy for the beta release of our library software. Wandering down the hall, I noticed a PC. I got on and brought up our company’s web site. It was 1995. When I attempted to reach our mainframe, a firewall stopped me. I knew it was possible to reach it from the internet so I called up our hex support and told them: -The only people you are blocking are customers and employees. Support graciously allowed me in. Normally we come back from these jaunts with scraps of paper trying to remember what we did. This time I put my changes in our source base and had it reinstalled. Monday morning, I hit the office clean. Then I made it a habit to check SMU for their dumps each day and brought them across the web. The same situation is happening for privacy. Let us review phone surveillance. In the American Civil War, soldiers realized that rather than knocking over telegraph lines it was ...

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.