Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I heer ya.

 

Which is my point. Get it to protect YOU (not from getting it, but to possibly mitigate illness), but stop the facade about doing it for others. Which is what any vaccine mandate is about.

For all his stupidity, a vaccine won't stop, say, Djokovic from getting it, or spreading it. So why mandate it for him to enter the country?

 

Meh ... it was OK. Some of the extrapolations are pretty out there (e.g., the dinosaurs develop a preference for certain crops in a bajillionth of a second, evolutionarily-speaking), but there's a lot of truth underpinning the premise (which is, basically, "You don't know shit about where this could be heading!").

The book you have, is it the Gleick one? It has been many a year since I read that. That body of work was all the rage in the organizational disciplines when I was a doctoral student*, but then everybody realized that putting it to use is, to put it mildly, hard.

It was also around then that the cognitive biases stuff (Tversky and Kahneman, etc.) was going gangbusters, and several of us suffered through a semester-long seminar offered by a guy who was just smitten by both that and chaos/complexity theory. To cope a classmate and I came up with a song, to the tune of John Hiatt's "Shredding the Document," we called "It's Chaos and Cognitive." (I can only remember our "title" ... that was 25-ish years ago.)

*Years earlier I'd bumped up against some of it when my wife-to-be was a grad student in architecture. Some of her more avant garde professors had gone nuts over fractal-this! and fractal-that! Not knowing diddly about it, I'd try to get her (and her classmates) to explain it, but they never made any sense. Turns out they (professors included) knew barely more than diddly about it.

 

Because it’s the best we have. And it will get better. And just because he can get it and spread it doesn’t mean we want him to die.

 

You're the expert ... even in its current form, the vaccine reduces the chances he'll spread it, right?

 

I'm sure it's fine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95565-8

 

Yes, but that wanes pretty quickly.

I think the numbers are something like the vaccine being ~60 percent effective against infection at first, but falling to less than 20 percent within two months or so.

 

Quant-

Gleick it was.
This specific edition, which was late 1990s when offbeat intellectualism had a certain value.
I was surprised by how often I saw this book whenever I'd be in people's personal libraries over the years. It probably made Gleick's career?

I spoke with statisticians for personal projects from time to time and would try to squeeze in a question about chaos theory, of these much smarter people.
The consensus was that it was corn syrup for nerds, fun to play around with but in the end nothing you could prove, which I suppose is what maths are.

 

Hey, we just had a polio case in America!

 

It's coming

 

Thank an anti-vaxxer near you.