It was free last year, but you had to show up for a Boston January. This year we’re doing it all via Zoom (so anyone in China can watch!) and the price remains consistent with the value: our $0 ground school, otherwise known as MIT Course 16.687. If you’ve been needing a nudge to get a Private pilot certificate, this could be it. The course is also useful for drone enthusiasts.
Please follow the above link and register if you’re interested. Tina (MIT Aero/Astro PhD) and I will host a Zoom meeting every morning at 11 am, do a bit of live lecturing, and then spin folks off to watch the videos that we recorded in 2019. We’ll be available for questions as the day wears on.
All of the course materials are available online for free, either from our site or the FAA. I can sign you off to take the official FAA knowledge test at the end of the class (or a local instructor at your nearby flight school can).
Hope to see everyone in January as at least a grid element on my 32″ monitor!
A variety of friends on Facebook (mostly identifying as “women” and in their 50s) have been posting their concern regarding the wicked Swedes running out of ICU capacity, implicitly due to their failure to don the Church of Shutdown’s hijab and continuing to run (unmasked!) schools for everyone under 16.
(For the first time in the year since Covid-19 reached the U.S./Europe, the Swedes have some real restrictions, e.g., movie theaters and similar large “public” gatherings are shut down; our Swedish helicopter instructors says that his mom’s hair salon has been open continuously, however, and remains open. His parents still don’t own a mask. They would be discouraged from hosting a party for 30 people at their house, but it would not be illegal for them to do so. Unlike in Maskachusetts, Swedes need not tell the government when they’ve traveled or to where nor do they need to submit medical records to government authorities “on request”.)
In the best American fashion, this article presents all of the information out of context. How many ICU beds are there in Sweden? How does that compare to what we have here in the U.S.? How does the number of Covid-19 patients in the ICU compare to what Sweden had back in the spring of 2020?
How does 259 ICU patients with Covid-19 in wicked Sweden compare to the situation in place that is a model of shutdown (9 months) and masks (7-8 months)? Maskachusetts currently has 309 Covid-19 patients in the ICU (state dashboard) or 1.7X the rate when adjusted for population.
Second, it looks as though Swedes don’t have that many hospital beds that they designated as “ICU”. Reuters, under a headline that directly contradicts the above (“ICU bends not full”):
Sweden still has 148 unoccupied beds in intensive care wards nationwide, corresponding to 22% free capacity, said Irene Nilsson-Carlsson, senior public health adviser at the National Health Board.
In other words, the entire country of more than 10 million people has about 675 hospital beds designated as “ICU”.
How does this compare to the U.S.? Here in Maskachusetts, population 7 million, we have 1,500 “ICU” beds in ordinary times and that is boosted to 2,700 for a “surge” (boston.com). Sweden would need 4,000 ICU beds to have the same number per person as Massachusetts.
How about the rest of the U.S.? It looks as though 70,000 adult ICU beds is the baseline (aha.org). That’s 212 beds per million residents of the U.S. Sweden has 66 ICU beds per million residents.
So… even without coronavirus, if the Swedes organized medicine the way that we do, 100 percent full ICU in Sweden would correspond to 31 percent full in the U.S.
For True Believers in the Church of Shutdown, what Sweden is doing is merely a variant form of their own religion, just as Hinduism was for the Portuguese who spent an entire summer on the west coast of India in the late 15th century. So strong was their belief in Christianity that they believed Hindu temples to be churches (and Ganesha was Jesus with a big Jewish nose?). They attended Hindu religious rituals and believed that they were observing Christian practices.
From the world’s leading expert on how information presentation affects decision making, a new book: Seeing with Fresh Eyes.
A new book on information design is either extremely timely, if you believe that humans are making data-driven decisions regarding coronaplague, or mostly for post-vaccine reading, if you believe that humans are using “science” and data to confirm already-held beliefs regarding what should be done.
As with previous books by Professor Tufte, the teachings are via positive and negative examples. The reader can dip into the book at any point and if you don’t get something that you can use from one example, you might from the next.
Pages 48-53 provide interesting demonstrations of the dramatic impact of breaking up a continuous paragraph with newlines.
Page 66 looks at a word tree from a book by Galileo and also “stacklists”, a way of formatting words that would be tough to replicate in HTML and certainly isn’t supported by WYSIWYG editors.
A healthy (so to speak) fraction of the book deals with data in medical contexts. Sample:
Screening tests produce many false alarms, terrifying millions of healthy people. False alarms cascade into more tests. Mass screenings are now regarded as dubious–because of false alarms, harms, and failure to reduce all-cause mortality. … Since survival time = time from diagnosis to death, early diagnosis can create statistical illusions of improved survival times. And false alarms, if their falsity is not detected, lead to treatments of patients for a disease they don’t have.
(The latter point is the true magic of screening tests. The annual mammogram that Americans eagerly adopted circa 1990 resulted in improved five-year survival statistics… because people who didn’t have breast cancer and who nonetheless received treatment for breast cancer were unlikely to be dead from breast cancer five years later.)
On page 94, Professor Tufte provides what I think is the best example of survivorship bias: “Most medieval castles were made of wood. We think most were made of stone because of survivor bias.”
Page 108 provides “a short list of medical reversals,” many of which were due to misinterpretation of data.
Faith that government experts and regulators will save us from coronavirus? Page 112:
Every single oxycodone pill was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and was made by licensed drug companies, prescribed by licensed doctors, sold by licensed pharmacists. All 72,000,000,000 pills (500 pills/U.S. household) were tracked to the exact place/time/amount of sale by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
The above paragraph subtly shows a Tufte principle by placing the 72 billion pills in context with “500 pills/U.S. household.”
Readers know how passionate and frustrated I am about dishwashers. Page 18 singles out a particularly bizarre Bosch owner’s manual page. A similar one from our latest Bosch:
Who back in Germany thought that there was someone in the U.S. who was going to follow this plan? (Or that this was an effective way to communicate it?)
Computer programmers will appreciate page 14, pointing out the importance of spacing and formatting for source code.
Some of the last pages relate what Tufte has learned from teaching 930 one-day courses to 320,000 students and are worth reading for anyone who wants to give effective presentations. (The one-day course is now offered in an online video version that includes a complete set of the hardcopy books.)
The organization and formatting makes this more challenging than some of Professor Tufte’s earlier works, but it should reward study. A great Christmas gift for anyone who has the preceding four books!
Related (read these first if you’re new to Tufte):
From a recent Costco excursion, a 29-hour 28-CD audiobook by Barack Obama:
It is impossible to imagine a better Christmas gift for your friends, who can wrap themselves in 29 hours of bliss and comfort every time something upsetting is said by Donald Trump or those Republicans who remain unkilled by COVID-19.
(What if you have neglected to defriend all Republicans? This is an even better gift for a Deplorable because Deplorables need to hear these healing messages more than the righteous.)
Separately, in terms of page count, this is the same length as Homer’s Iliad and Odysseycombined. Homer’s epics were almost the sole basis for education for centuries. Perhaps we could design a public school curriculum where A Promised Land was the only book studied from K through 12?
An Amazon review:
Obama’s autobiography is very wordy, slow and much of it boring. And I like the guy and loved his first book. There is no real news in this autobiography which is mostly about politics and how moderate he was as president. Too long, too. Too much about his time in the Illinois legislature and the U.S Senate. The book should have been edited down. Volume One is 752 pages and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Volume Two likely will be equally long.
Hallelujah! There will be four Iliads worth of content soon enough.
Maskachusetts is the 3rd most restricted state in the U.S. (WalletHub ranking). Florida is ranked #11 for freedom. Yet the latest map from covidexitstrategy.org, which our state officials use to decide cleanliness/godliness for travel order purposes, shows that no-mask-order Florida has 427 new cases of COVID-19 per million residents while fully-masked-since-May Massachusetts has 704 new cases per million (slightly lower positivity rate, but that could simply be due to the fact that universities here are constantly testing the rich white locked-in students and thus pumping up the denominator).
If the God of Shutdown is a just god, and the people of Florida have been flouting the church dogma of shutdown+masks, aren’t we forced to conclude that the God of Shutdown has a special love for Floridians?
Related:
On the third hand, “No Excess Deaths In Massachusetts Over the Past Six Months” (from our state’s boards of health): This means that for any one currently living in Massachusetts that the probability of dying from any cause has been equal to or lower than during the previous seven years. Does this sound like a strange statistic given all that you have heard about the increased death rates due to COVID-19 during the past six months? Given this fact, why are so many individuals more afraid of dying from COVID-19 than any other cause? The answer is that numbers reported without proper adjustments, missing critical denominators or taken out of context altogether lend themselves to false interpretation. [This page has some stats and you can adjust to see different states; Florida has roughly the number of expected deaths from all causes currently.]
A variety of Facebook friends today posted their respect for Chuck Yeager, who died yesterday at age 97. Some had been in meetings with General Yeager when he was serving in various high management roles and talked about the pointed intelligent questions that he asked.
What about on days when a hero such as Yeager did not die? The same folks post approvingly of rules to forbid the assignment of high management roles to Americans such as Yeager who identify as straight white males. For example, “Nasdaq to Corporate America: Make your boards more diverse or get out” (CNN):
Nasdaq is proposing a rule that would require at least some measure of diversity on the boards of directors of companies listed on the exchange.
The rule, which needs the approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission to take effect, would require companies to have at least two diverse directors, including one woman and one member of an “underrepresented” minority group, including Black people, Latinos or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Smaller companies and foreign companies on the exchange could comply with two woman directors.
(separately, how do the money nerds at Nasdaq evaluate whether someone is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community”? Will it be like the gay evaluation scenes in the Kevin Kline movie In & Out, e.g., a quiz on the titles of Barbra Streisand‘s recorded oeuvre? Does a person meet the B victimhood designation within LGBTQIA+ if he/she/ze/they merely finds people in multiple gender ID categories attractive, but doesn’t act on this attraction by having sex with those people? Similarly, what constitutes “Black people” as far as a Wall Streeter is concerned? Will Nasdaq start looking at Quadroons and Hexadecaroons and decided how many of them are required to add up to the business wisdom of a single “Black” individual?)
(Also, what about Elliot Page? We are informed that a man who was born with XX chromosomes is no different than a man who was born with XY chromosomes. Mr. Page identifies as a man currently. Mr. Page may also identify as white. If are going to give maximum respect to transgenderism, shouldn’t Elliot Page therefore be excluded from boards due to being a white male?)
From the National Air and Space Museum, an X-15 points at Yeager’s old X-1:
(Both the downtown D.C. Museum and the Dulles Airport annex that celebrate Americans willing to risk their lives in the air are currently closed due to coronavirus fears.)
Playing to Win, a short Michael Lewis book that is free to listen to for Audible subscribers, is a fascinating look into a strange corner of the U.S. economy: the $70 billion/year travel sports industry.
The primary motivation for kids’ travel sports is the parental desire for their children to get into elite colleges, which may reserve 25-33 percent of their spots for recruited athletes. (I.e., white privilege permeates America, but it is available only to whites with degrees from elite universities). The statistics that we see for selective university admissions lump together athletes and non-athletes. The chance of a white or Asian child getting into without an athletic coach’s recommendation is actually worse than the statistics suggest.
What does it cost? Lewis describes the typical athlete starting at age 11 or 12 and the parents spend $20,000 to $30,000 per year (plus a huge amount of time driving, flying, and spectating). In other words, at least $150,000 of which a small percentage might be recouped via an athletic scholarship. These costs mean that only one sport remains open to the half of Americans whose families are below the median income: football. This is because football is the only sport in which the good teams remain associated with public high schools. Travel sports is how upper-middle-class and rich whites/Asians compensate in a world where college admissions starts with a sort-by-skin-color and victimhood status.
Can individuals tap into this river of cash? Oh yes! The best is volleyball. Lewis describes a volleyball coach who organized a weekend tournament and made $1 million renting a convention center and filling it with nets. Sports for “girls” (however that term might be defined) are better than sports for athletes who identify as “boys” because the parents of the “girls” are less likely to allow the “girls” to travel unsupervised. At least one parent comes along with the athlete and books an additional hotel room then buys a ticket to the event. From the leagueapps.com web site, a presumably typical document requiring participants to book their hotels through the event organizer:
(LeagueApps says that they have processed more than $1 billion in payments.)
Lewis’s own daughter gets into the liberal arts college of her choice after a softball coach watches her play. What is a stressful admissions process for her classmates is a brief conversation with the coach in the spring of her junior year of high school.
As Toucan Sam likes to remind us, Barack Obama said “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” but our new insurance company apparently did not get the Presidential memo.
It is thus time for me to shop for a new physician. The new insurer assigned me to a doctor, but after a couple of hours on hold with the big clinic where he works, I learned that (a) he isn’t accepting new patients, and (b) he is mostly retired.
One Medical has a couple of offices here in Boston and claims to be patient-centric rather than insurance-company-centric. Does anyone have experience with this concierge-lite primary care system? (it is $200/year, which is a lot better than waiting on hold for hours!)
Update… part of the sign-up form:
(I decided to sign up based on positive reviews from people here and also a friend who drives 30 minutes from the Boston suburbs to continue his treatment at One Medical. As readers can no doubt imagine, it was tough for me to resist entering a long essay into the Gender Information box. And, then, of course, I had to de-subscribe from One Medical after it turned out that they accept Tufts insurance, yes, but not the particular flavor of Tufts “Platinum” that we have.)
Today is National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, marking 79 years since we entered World War II in order to fight Totalitarianism.
Here in Massachusetts, as part of our governor’s more-than-50 orders, we are required to tell the government, via a web form, about any travels that we might have undertaken. And “Quarantine for 14 days or produce a negative COVID-19 test result that has been administered up to 72-hours prior to your arrival in Massachusetts.”
72-hour Testing Rule: The individual can produce, upon request, proof of a negative test result for COVID-19 from a test administered on a sample taken no longer than 72 hours before your arrival in Massachusetts.
So we’ve spent hundreds of $billions (software, time spent with forms) for our medical records to be protected by HIPAA (federal law), but the state can demand a portion of our record via a “request” (fine of $7,000 if one fails to comply with the “request”; see the governor’s 45th order).
Plainly the Shutdown Karens can say that this is quite reasonable. The governor has declared an emergency so the state government should have access to whatever is necessary to deal more effectively with that emergency (never mind that test and trace immediately fell apart, so this information is useless, or that the typical person is not contagious by the time a test has been scheduled and result received (NYT)). But, on the other hand, a governor can declare additional “emergencies” any time that he/she/ze/they wants to. Obesity kills far more Americans than COVID-19. Couldn’t a governor declare an obesity crisis and demand that people submit medical records related to obesity and diabetes? We’re already in an opioid crisis, right? Why shouldn’t the state have the right to “request” your prescription records to make sure that you haven’t been getting too many OxyContin pills? (and fine you $7,000 if you fail to comply with the request)
Very loosely related, a conversation with a 5-year-old after putting a e-collar on our golden retriever to prevent her from scratching at a scab:
Me: Mindy doesn’t like wearing this collar.
Child: Why not?
Me: Even a dog can tell when her liberty is taken away.
