Why do Covidians gather en masse?

by philg

Our kids watched part of a Miami Heat v Celtics basketball game. 20,000 people gathered indoors, more or less on top of each other, in a sold-out TD Garden (in Boston’s North End). Hardly any fan had a mask on.

From 2020 through mid-2022, preventing deaths tagged to COVID-19 was important enough to Bostonians that they equired 5-year-olds to get injected with an experimental vaccine before going into public places, closed businesses (except “essential” marijuana stores), and required everyone (but especially children down to age 2) to wear masks.

It is the official position of Science that COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection by SARS-CoV-2 nor transmission of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. (There are also plenty of other lethal respiratory viruses that can spread when 20,000 people gather indoors.) Why were the Covidians of Boston willing to cram into this arena rather than #StayingHomeSavingLives and watching the game on TV?

The risk of a deadly mutation is increased every time that humans gather en masse. “No, the COVID-19 Pandemic Isn’t Over” (Cleveland Clinic, May 2023):

Simply put: If the virus is circulating, it’s also mutating. As we learned during the delta variant surge, some of those mutations can have devastating consequences.

Same idea in less clinical language:

I remain baffled by folks who say that they haven’t changed any of their Covidian opinions yet they’re doing everything possible to help SARS-CoV-2 spread and mutate. Can someone please explain this?

The Covidians who are still masking and/or staying in their bunkers strike me as more logically consistent. Here is a sampling:

I’m also not surprised when Floridians gather en masse. In 2020 they said that they were still going to attend school, work, and social events despite SARS-CoV-2 so it makes sense for them to be living in the same way now. But why did the Covidians change? It can’t be vaccinations. Nearly 200,000 Americans died with a COVID-19 in 2022, quite a few of them in a state of grace (after having received the Sacrament of Fauci).

(Separately, we were sad that Miami came in 2nd in the NBA Finals, but #2 isn’t terrible!)

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Diversity is our strength, NASA edition

by philg

Many moons ago, so to speak, I was a Fortran programmer on the Pioneer Venus project. Here’s a recent tweet from my former employer:

There’s “space for everyone” and “different perspectives” are valuable. But on the other hand, there is no space for perspectives from taxpayers who fund the agency.

Also, why is it just “LGBTQI+”? Why not 2SLGBTQQIA+?

Finally, if the future of the galaxy is female, according to Science and the baseball cap below, why does NASA hire anyone who identifies as of the 73 other genders recognized by Science? Why is “diversity” better than betting on the winning gender?

Related:

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Test deep submersible designs for 2-3X the number of dives that will carry humans?

by philg

Department of Fighting the Last War… let’s talk about ideas that could have prevented the Titan tragedy.

The potential for failure of a pressure vessel is something that aviation has been dealing with since at least the 1930s (Boeing 307). The cycles of pressurization and depressurization are known to cause metal fatigue and, sometimes, lead to catastrophic failure. Certification authorities, such as the FAA, require structural analysis to certify a cycles or hours limit and this may be extended once there is more experience with the airframe. Running the cycles up to 90,000 (many short hops) contributed to the failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a Boeing 737.

The reasonable standard of safety for deep-sea exploration and tourism is lower than for commercial airline travel. However, what about a rule that you have to build at least two of each design and use one as a sanity check on the pressure vessel design and ability to tolerate cycling fatigue? Don’t send humans on a 50th dive in a machine unless its sister ship has done at least 100 or 150 robot-only dives to the same depth. (If additional protection from fatigue-related failures is desired, increase the number of sister ships and the multiplier for how many dives they must survive compared to the human-occupied dives.)

Note that this procedure wouldn’t guarantee safety. Portions of the de Havilland Comet were subjected to 16,000 simulated cycles and the finished design nonetheless suffered a catastrophic failure with passengers on board (though the airplane that failed had some construction method differences from the prototype that was tested). But it is better than finding out the cycle limit with humans on board. And every machine that goes to the ocean floor will have a cycle limit.

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Amazon Prime: one-week delivery to small towns

by philg

During our three-week sojourn in the American desert we discovered a few nice-to-have items from Amazon. These were available for overnight delivery to our house in Palm Beach County. Changing the delivery zip code to a small town in Utah, however, resulted in an update: one week (e.g., to Moab, Utah, full-time population of 5,000). Maybe it was just a question of price? There was no faster option offered at any price.

In its early 2-day-always-anywhere incarnation, Amazon Prime was a great leveler and put people in small towns on an equal footing, as far as convenience went, with people in big cities.

Maybe this is why Amazon went into the business of streaming interminable TV shows? People in out-of-the-way parts of the U.S. can binge-watch while they wait for their Bluetooth headphones?

Perhaps this will save bricks-and-mortar retail? Moab has a local bookstore that has survived nearly 30 years of competition from Amazon:

(Note the success of Rainbow-first Retail (examples from Bozeman, Montana) here, with the sacred symbol of the official state religion directly over the “Children’s Books” sign.)

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The economics of hydropower

by philg

We recently visited the Glen Canyon Dam, which destroyed Glen Canyon and replaced it with a reservoir to hold surplus water in a river that doesn’t have any surpluses (calculations were made in the early 20th century, a period of remarkable wetness when compared to the previous 800 years). From the Carl Hayden Visitor Center:

(Is the visitor center named after a senior engineer who made the dam possible? One or more of the 18 workers who died so that the dam could live? No. It is named for a U.S. Senator who funneled tax dollars into this project.)

The dam powers 400,000 households, which means that the trashing of what would have easily qualified as a National Park does not generate enough power for the houses that are occupied by a single year of immigration into the U.S. What did this cost?

$2.17 billion in pre-Biden (2015) money. The BLS says that this is roughly $2.82 billion in Bidies. If we can arrange for God to give us a new raging river ever 3-6 months suitable for damming, in other words, we can provide clean hydropower to the new American households formed by migrants at a capital cost of $7,000 each.

On the third hand, maybe it would cost us a lot more today to build a monster dam. At the Navajo Bridge, just downstream of the dam, the government notes that modern construction techniques are similar to what we used in 1929, but bureaucracy and regulation are dramatically more challenging:

How much inflation has there been in concrete-rich power-generating facilities? We can look at nuclear plant construction. This 2019 paper says that the cost has gone up about 10X, in constant dollars, compared to the 1970s (takes us twice as long as costs 5X as much per day). If we had help from God (new river ever 6 months), in other words, it would cost $70,000 per new household (see How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?) to provision the power generation infrastructure.

(Comparison: progressive technocrats in California have spent $9.8 billion so far on their high-speed rail dream… without laying even one mile of track (CNBC).)

What would Glen Canyon look like if this massive silt-collecting dam hadn’t been built? Here’s the Horseshoe Bend, just downstream, photographed at 0.5X on the iPhone 14:

What does the dam look like?

A concrete salesman’s dream! Note that last bucket of concrete was poured in September 1963, the same year in which your beloved (I hope) blog host was born. The project was supposed to take 6.5 years, including all of the prep work and the bridge, but was finished after 6 years for substantially less than forecast (by Kiewit, whose Boston Harbor project was rendered lethal by government bureaucrats as described in Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea).

Related:

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Avenir: a 4,000-house development in Florida proves that New Urbanism does not maximize profits

by philg

As the U.S. population grows (Pew forecast), let’s consider what kind of residential environment will be enjoyed by the country of 450+ million…

We live in Abacoa, a New Urbanism community developed 25 years ago by the MacArthur Foundation, which didn’t need to make the last nickel off the project. Our development is organized into neighborhoods, each with 130-300 households, a small enough group that people can reasonably get to know each other (see Dunbar’s number). Each neighborhood has its own common facilities, such as a clubhouse/gym, a pool, a playground, and a green field. Neither the neighborhoods nor the development are gated, so everything is integrated and you can walk around without looking at high walls. There is a walkable town center, which is pleasant but denies retailers access to the traffic from a major road. We’re home to a university, a neuroscience lab from Germany, and a biology research lab. For aesthetics, the houses usually have their garages in the back and cars go in and out via alleys. Abacoa has been successful and, we’re told (at least by realtors!), that people pay a premium to live here. Even people who don’t live in this part of town say “I love Abacoa”.

If this style of development makes humans happy and motivates humans to pay a premium, you’d think that it would be commercially successful and copies would be sprouting everywhere. That does not seem to be true, however. Across the main road from Abacoa is a newer community: Alton. Their “town center” is a strip mall on a 50-mph 6-lane road. Their clubhouse/gym/pool is a massive magnificent facility serving the entire development (vastly larger than Dunbar’s number). The houses themselves are crammed together more closely than in Abacoa and often “meet the street” with a garage door.

Some of the same builders involved in Abacoa have turned their attention to some former swampland that will soon support 4,000 houses: Avenir. It seems safe to assume that the developers want to maximize their profits. What’s profitable? A rejection of much of New Urbanism and what makes Abacoa Great:

  • each neighborhood is gated (many walls!)
  • there is a massive central gym/pool to serve a huge number of households
  • the town center is a strip mall on a busy road
  • driveways and garages are in front of the houses (saves the cost of building alleys)
  • no townhouses and apartments, just single-family homes

I visited on April 7. It’s across the street from and actually farther from “civilization” than the Grassy Waters Preserve:

Here are some houses built by Pulte Homes that meet the street with a driveway/garage:

I will give Pulte Homes credit for a nice outdoor kitchen. I want this one:

While I can see that the massive central gym and pool would appeal to people coming to look at buying a house (only after they move in will they realize that it would have been nicer to have smaller neighborhood-based amenities), I don’t understand why the other things that make New Urbanism communities so pleasant and desirable aren’t profitable. I thought that we had learned our lesson about the dangers of conventional 1970s suburban development leading to loneliness and insanity.

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How innovative is the OceanGate submersible that is in trouble?

by philg

Sad to think about the folks inside the OceanGate Titan right now. Usually the flip side of innovation is danger, as demonstrated by Deepwater Horizon (see Ten years since Deepwater Horizon set a depth record).

How innovative is the Titan? Here are the most critical specs:

Let’s compare to Alvin, built by a cereal company in 1964.

Alvin has the same payload as Titan, but weighs 38,000 lbs (65 percent more) and has dramatically less interior volume. A perhaps more significant difference is that Alvin has small windows. From a 2013 article:

When we set sail later this year, Alvin will have five windows: three up toward the front that are 7 inches across on the inside (17 inches across outside), and two smaller ones off to either side that are 5 inches in diameter on the inside (12 inches across outside). These are considerably larger than the windows we had before.

Titan reportedly has a 21-inch diameter viewport. Let’s hope that wasn’t the failure point. The other big difference is that Titan hull is “Carbon Fiber and Titanium” (above web site) while Alvin’s personnel sphere was entirely titanium (and could detach from the rest of the machine in an emergency, then rocket to the surface).

Here’s hoping that everyone comes out of this alive, though that seems unrealistic.

Related:

  • Remembering William Lewis Herndon, captain of the gold-laden SS Central America (the treasure hunters decided not to attempt sending humans down into 8,000′ of water, but to do it all with remotely operated equipment)
  • “DEEPSEA TITANIUM PRESSURE HULLS” (U-Boat Worx): In our deepest-diving submersibles, we use titanium alloys to achieve optimum size, weight and performance characteristics. Titanium has several distinct advantages – it is stronger than regular steel thereby enabling us to keep the weight of deep-diving models as low as possible. Other advantages include that it requires no maintenance, has an extended lifecycle, and has incomparable anti-corrosive properties.
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Fed blames coronapanic for inflation

by philg

“Fed Chair Sees ‘Long Way to Go’ on Inflation Fight” (NYT):

“Inflation has moderated somewhat since the middle of last year,” Mr. Powell said. “Nonetheless, inflation pressures continue to run high, and the process of getting inflation back down to 2 percent has a long way to go.”

“Inflation has consistently surprised us, and essentially all other forecasters, by being more persistent than expected,” Mr. Powell said. “And I think we’ve come to expect that — expect it to be more persistent.”

He added that there’s a “common factor” that has driven price increases higher. “It’s the pandemic, and it’s everything about the pandemic: The closing of the economy, the reopening of the economy, the fiscal support, the monetary support. All the things that happened went into high inflation.”

Of course, it is the virus that is to blame, not the human response (panic everywhere other than in Sweden) to the virus! But if the wild government spending on coronapanic is now the official cause of inflation, how can the Fed stop inflation? Congress continues to spend wildly with annual budget deficits that were, prior to 2008, seen mostly during wars. From the CBO:

Separately, here’s my latest inflation achievement… paying $30 for Pad Thai (Jackson, Wyoming):

That was one week after getting a haircut in a barber shop… for $55 plus tip (Big Sky, Montana).

Related:

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Update War of the Worlds for coronapanic

by philg

I subjected 7- and 9-year-old boys to H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds as an audio book recently. It wasn’t as big a hit as I expected. I enjoyed it, though! I didn’t realize how topical the 1895 book was.

*** spoiler alert ***

I wonder if it is time to update this book for a modern audience. Wells’s prediction of industrial robots needs no tweaking, but he has the Martians being killed by an unknown bacterial enemy. In an updated version, the Martians will reject a bivalent vaccine offered by Pfizer and the director of the CDC. Due to this rejection, which happened because Martians had tuned into Fox News from afar, SARS-CoV-2 kills them all.

The book has a powerful description of humans panicking in the face of a threat and a prescient description of how Californians and New Yorkers might react to Martians wanting to cage and breed them so that they could harvest human blood.

All these—the sort of people that lived in these houses, and all those damn little clerks that used to live down that way—they’d be no good. They haven’t any spirit in them—no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other—Lord! What is he but funk and precautions? They just used to skedaddle off to work—I’ve seen hundreds of ’em, bit of breakfast in hand, running wild and shining to catch their little season-ticket train, for fear they’d get dismissed if they didn’t; working at businesses they were afraid to take the trouble to understand; skedaddling back for fear they wouldn’t be in time for dinner; keeping indoors after dinner for fear of the back streets, and sleeping with the wives they married, not because they wanted them, but because they had a bit of money that would make for safety in their one little miserable skedaddle through the world. Lives insured and a bit invested for fear of accidents. And on Sundays—fear of the hereafter. As if hell was built for rabbits! Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they’ll come and be caught cheerful. They’ll be quite glad after a bit. They’ll wonder what people did before there were Martians to take care of them.

In the updated version, this will be developed further. Wells’s character envisioned a human resistance living on in the sewers. In the update, the resistance will be in Sweden and Florida because Martians can’t tolerate Surströmming and are afraid of alligators. SARS-CoV-2 will take a year to kill the aliens, which will give governors in California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, etc. time to work with federal officials and the Martians to set up the human farms for their respective meek and compliant populations.

Dr. Fauci will leave his portrait-filled study and return to work organizing the development of ventilators powerful enough to treat Martians suffering from COVID-19. The Fauci Protocol will be to put a Martian on vent after 10 “ullas”.

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Science requires that teenagers receive gender-affirming care…

by philg

“First in the nation gender-affirming care ban struck down in Arkansas” (from state-sponsored NPR):

The ruling by U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr. on Tuesday says the state of Arkansas violated several sections of the U.S. Constitution when it banned all gender-affirming treatments for people under 18. The 80-page ruling says depriving trans minors of treatments like hormone therapy would cause them irreparable harm, and that delaying care until adulthood would force teens to go through changes inconsistent with their gender identity.

“Rather than protecting children or safeguarding medical ethics, the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients and that, by prohibiting it, the State undermined the interests it claims to be advancing,” the ruling reads. “The testimony of well-credentialed experts, doctors who provide gender-affirming medical care in Arkansas, and families that rely on that care directly refutes any claim by the State that the Act advances an interest in protecting children.”

This is not a political decision. Science requires that teenagers get injected with hormones and have various body parts cut off surgically. It is settled Science that youngsters who receive gender affirming care have improved mental health and well-being.

On the other hand… What did Science tell the folks who run the widely admired technocratically managed universal government-run health care system over in the United Kingdom? “England’s health service won’t give puberty blockers to children at gender clinics” (New York Post, June 11, 2023):

The NHS said the new rules were “an interim policy” that would undergo further review, including the outcome of a research study on the impact puberty-suppressing hormones have on gender dysphoria in children and young people. Findings published last year from a review of children’s gender services led by a pediatrician, Dr. Hilary Cass, said there were “gaps in the evidence base” about the blockers.

The “gaps in the evidence” identified in the U.K. simply do not exist for judges in the U.S.

Separately, what if you’re visiting a teenage recipient of gender-affirming care in a hospital in Arkansas and want to look fashionable? Levi’s has you covered for about $1,000 (photos from yesterday):

Bigger budget? Photos from a Coach store:

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