TJ Radcliffe
- Substack
- https://worldofwonders.substack.com/
- Books
- https://siduri.net/
Semi-retired cantankerous physicist/engineer/writer/executive/dev living in the Gulf Islands, interested in poetry, quantum metaphysics, numerical methods, etc
Five days post-negative and still exhausted. Started a pro-biotic yesterday and today have some real energy. Coincidence? In an n=1 observational correlation? Yeah, almost certainly. Don't be stupid.
Flu has R0 ~ 1.5. Colds are 2-3.
Omicron has R0 > 10.
It follows from this that if you have symptoms, you have covid, not cold or flu. Even if you test negative.
I'm seeing a lot of "Oh it's just a cold", which is Flat Earth level implausible: there will be hundreds of covid cases for every cold or flu--we practically killed flu last year with masking--and if you've taken any precautions at all, the odds are overwhelming you have covid, not cold or flu.
Ever wonder what would happen if Dr Seuss got transported back to the 14th century and wrote a story about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Ham? Personally I imagine it was something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Sir-Gawain-Green-Knight-Ham-ebook/dp/B08234FKSM/
#cosowriters #writers #books #poetry #anapest #cosobooks #cosobookclub
Popular understanding of the Turing Test is wrong: it's not a machine simply attempting to imitate a human. It's a differential test with a man, a woman, and a questioner who tries to tell which is which. Man aims to fool the questioner, woman to help them. Test was to replace man with a machine and see if it could fool questioner about sex as often as the human. It's not clear original version has any validity. But simplified version loses crucial differential component. https://watermark.silverchair.com/lix-236-433.pdf
Interesting look at epistemic failure in the case of cholera in New York state in the 1830's: evidence pointed toward contagion, but there were inconsistencies, as there always are. Those inconsistencies were resolved in favour of the prevailing model of moral degeneracy as primary cause. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jphp.2011.20
Straight Christian White Woman ...
Brave woman! Now we need all Dems to approach all issues like she is.
I think "mystery hepatitis after COVID-19" is an entity already described and characterized by Indian investigators (observed in May 2021, preprint posted October 2021). As has so often been the case during the pandemic, Western countries ignore or dismiss evidence from LMIC. The preprint is here.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260716v6.full.pdf
I generally trust individuals to make good choices. I know they don't, because people are idiots.
But I want the idiot with the most information and interest making the hard choices.
This pretty much sums up my political philosophy.
Some happy pandemic news; global counted cases continue to decline; now less than 500,000 a day (from a peak of around 4 million a day in December). Global R < 1.
Every child should be a wanted child.
Oops, wrong link, but that article is good too.
Dr Hirji is a real hero imo. Very brave to swim against the tide to protect his community.
Here’s the article about our presser
"The combination of this 4D approach and follower growth on Twitter should alarm communication scholars, as the further blurring of the borders between professional fact-checking and conspiratorial thinking (Linvill et al., 2019) may have strategic benefits for malicious actors."
It's a great paper to read if you want to make sense of what's happening on social media platforms:
The issue is that the attacks on @dgurdasani and other epidemiologists like @dfisman aren't even about you.
They are performative attacks for the audience, and they are wholly to get you to shut up.
A number of us have been tracking a large network of misinformation accounts leading this behaviour. These accounts are only a fraction of the accounts engaging in online disinformation and abuse - my estimate is they are usually about 20-30% of the attackers.
"The concept of reflexive control was first developed at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s (Levefr & Smolyan, 1968) as 'a process by which one enemy transmits the reasons or bases for making decisions to another' (Thomas, 2004, p. 238)."
"According to Russian generals, American use of information weapons did more damage to the Soviet Union’s defeat that any other weapon (Prokhozhev & Turko, 1996, as cited in Thomas, 2004)."
Please use caution when bringing Twitter nonsense here: QTing stuff to dunk on it ended up being one of the most problematic, toxic elements there. It kept putting people in front of me I'd decided to ignore.
I'll beg if I have to: please, please, please stop fixating on what you want to oppose, and live into what you want to give your energy to, and what you want to celebrate.
I've found that being in a "for" community is much more productive than being in an "against" community.
For Counter Social newbies (like me), here's a handy user guide that was shared with me by @realDDGlover (Thank you again!). https://counter.social/userguide.pdf #FismanSentMe
Semi-retired cantankerous physicist/engineer/writer/executive/dev living in the Gulf Islands, interested in poetry, quantum metaphysics, numerical methods, Bayesian epistemology, politics, non-revolutionary transition to self-organized scalable society, and stuff.
TJ Radcliffe
- Substack
- https://worldofwonders.substack.com/
- Books
- https://siduri.net/
Semi-retired cantankerous physicist/engineer/writer/executive/dev living in the Gulf Islands, interested in poetry, quantum metaphysics, numerical methods, etc