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Fri Aug 6 06:00:01 EDT 2021
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Slept from ten-thirty to six-thirty.
Woke briefly around two-thirty.
Partly cloudy then becoming mostly cloudy early in the afternoon then becoming partly cloudy.
A 30 percent chance of showers in the afternoon.
Highs in the mid 80s.
South winds up to 15 mph shifting to the southwest in the afternoon.
Forty-minute walk in the morning.
Mostly sunny and not hot yet.
Saw a rabbit, a cardinal, crows, a mourning dove, a bee, and a goldfinch.
Work
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- check vs-nvr shipment
Done.
- change STA date for Becky
Done.
- fix Entrata bathroom value for Sarah at GB
Done.
- Is Kari still re-adding buildings to unit names?
Done. (She's done.)
Home
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- complete Somerset documents
Done, except for DTE and Consumers Energy confirmation numbers. And renter's insurance.
- pick up groceries 1–2 PM
Done.
Started reading Annalee Newitz's Autonomous last night.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/libraries-digital-publishing-ebooks/
(Not that I love DRM.)
> National Emergency Library, a temporary program of the Internet Archive’s Open Library intended to make books available to the millions of students in quarantine during the pandemic. Even though the Internet Archive closed the National Emergency Library in response to the lawsuit, the publishers refused to stand down; what their lawsuit really seeks is the closing of the whole Open Library, and the destruction of its contents. (The suit is ongoing and is expected to resume later this year.) A close reading of the lawsuit indicates that what these publishers are looking to achieve is an end to the private ownership of books—not only for the Internet Archive but for everyone.
https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1422595200615133189
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD
> First, we need to make sure everyone is on the same page about what the average “reproductive number” is.
> This term means the average number of new cases that will be infected by a single infectious individual.
> When we’re talking about a population that is all susceptible, we use R0 (pronounced R-naught, like we’re fancy & British) or the basic reproductive number.
> When we’re talking about a pop with mixed susceptibility & immunity, we use R or Re for effective reproduction number.
> Regardless of whether we’re talking about R0 or Re, if this number is bigger than 1 any infections will lead to an outbreak that grows & grows until we stop it or it runs out of people to infect.
>
> The next epidemiology lesson you need is that whenever we want to make a decision we need a “base case”: we can’t decide what to do unless we know what would happen under our typical default action!
> In the case of COVID there are two base cases we might want to consider.
>
> First, how well did COVID originally spread before all the variants & before vaccines?
> This base case #1 will give us intuition about the pandemic because it represents most of what happened LAST year.
> The R0 for the non-variant COVID was estimated at around 2-3.
> All the lockdowns, masking, and similar public health precautions we did over the past year lowered Re to close to 1 **while those things were happening** & in some cases even below 1.
> A huge win! Until we stopped doing themWoman facepalming
>
> What did vaccines do to Re? Let’s calculate it!
> We can get a rough calculation of Re with the following formula:
> Re = R0*(1-X*Ve)
> where X is the proportion of people vaccinated and Ve is the vaccine efficacy.
> (Another way to write this is: Re=R0*S where S is the proportion of people who are susceptible).
>
> Because it’s a nice easy number, let’s assume all the vaccines have the same efficacy as Pfizer/BioNtech (ie 95%).
> For the original non-variant COVID, we find that the impact of the vaccine *if 100% of people got vaccinated* would be:
> Re=3*(1-1*.95)=0.15 <<< 1!
>
> Now, we obviously are not at 100% vaccinated. So, what about if we take the current % of fully vaccinated people in the US?
> As of Aug 2, that was 49.9%, so let’s say 50% for simplicity.
> Re=3*(1-0.5*0.95) = 1.575
> That’s still bigger than 1 so we still need other precautions.
>
> Plus, non-variant COVID isn’t the only COVID circulating.
> So, for our second base case, let’s look at the Delta variant.
> The CDC says it’s R0 may be 6-9. Let’s choose 8.
> Recent observational data suggests Pfizer vaccine efficacy is a bit lower against Delta, let’s say 85%.
> What do these numbers give us for the Re of Delta in the US as of Aug 2?
> Re=8(1-.5*.85) = 4.6 >>>>>>1!
> That’s definitely lower than 8 but wow that’s high. Higher even than the R0 of non-variant COVID back at the start of the pandemic!
>
> Now let’s think about some interventions we could do.
> A) What if we increase vaccination rates to 75%? That’s a big lift but not impossible.
> B) What if we gave *all vaccinated people* a booster? Let’s assume the booster restores the original 95% efficacy.
>
> For base case #1 (non-variant covid),
> Option A gives us:
> Re=3(1-.75*.95)=0.86 <1!!
> That’s less than 1 & means we COULD rely on vaccination alone! What a win!
> (Option B doesn’t change our base case because the non-variant VE was always 95%.)
>
> What about Delta?
> Option A (more people vaccinated) gives us:
> Re=8(1-.75*.85)=2.9
> Wow! That’s still bigger than 1, so we still need masks & other precautions, but MUCH much better than 8!!
>
> Option B (boosters) gives us:
> Re=8(1-.5*.95)=4.2
> <sad trombone> wow, underwhelming!
> Giving EVERY vax person a booster that gets vaccine efficacy up to 95% (a fantastically high number) will only reduce Delta’s Re from 4.6 to 4.2!
>
> From these calculations it seems pretty clear that vaccinating 75% of people (ie half as many again as we’ve done so far) is better than getting boosters to the original 50% of people who have been fully vaccinated.
> But NO MATTER which we choose we still need other precautions!
>
> If you run the numbers, you’ll find that getting vaccines to unvaccinated people is pretty much ALWAYS a better move than giving boosters to the already vaccinated. At least until we’ve gotten almost everyone vaccinated.
>
> We can also see that if Delta is really this bad, we’ll need masks & other precautions for a long time to come.
> That’s a real bummer & what’s worse, we could have avoided this by doing a better job controlling infections last year.
>
> Another common question: what is the end-game?
> If Delta (or a worse variant) persists, we probably can’t hope to get rid of the *virus* entirely. But the vaccines do a great job at getting rid of the *disease*. The end game is vaccinate vaccinate vaccinate.
https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/usa/new-york-w-s-burroughs/
> His parents sent him to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school described as a place "where the spindly sons of the rich could be transformed into manly specimens." In Burroughs' case it did not work out as intended.
> Burroughs was supported by a monthly allowance from his parents until he was at least in his 40s, and they were very comfortably well-off. However, they weren't as vastly wealthy as the label "heirs to the Burroughs fortune" makes them sound. His parents sold the rights to his grandfather's inventions, and sold all their stock in the Burroughs Corporation for $200,000 shortly before the 1929 stock market crash.
> Burroughs attended Harvard University from 1932 through 1936, earning a degree in English. He worked during the summers as a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he was tasked with unpleasant assignments like the accidental deaths of children. He was writing about gruesome topics and building a disdain for authority, trends that continued through his life. During the Harvard school years he frequently traveled from Cambridge, Massachusetts to visit New York City.
> After graduation from Harvard in June 1936 he made an extended trip to Europe, hanging out in the steam baths of Vienna and Budapest. He enrolled in medical school in Vienna, which lasted six months during which he was treated for syphilis he had picked up at a brothel in Cambridge and then had an emergency appendectomy.
> Returning to Dubrovnik for recuperation, he again met Ilza Klapper, a Jewish woman trying to extend her visa to remain in Yugoslavia and flee Nazi oppression. Burroughs married her in July 1937, vastly helping her visa situation, by taking her to Athens where the American consulate set up the paperwork and found a Greek Orthodox priest willing to marry them. He soon returned to Vienna. She eventually made her way to the U.S. — while she and Burroughs were divorced, they remained good friends.
> Burroughs soon returned to the U.S. and enrolled in graduate school at Harvard. He took courses in the Navajo language and Mayan archaeology.
> World War II had been underway since September 1939 and U.S. involvement was looming. He tried to enlist in the navy but failed the physical due to bad eyesight and flat feet. He then tried the American Field Service, which had operated ambulances during World War I and would again in the coming war. But he was turned down for ambulance service when his interviewer, also a Harvard man, decided that Burroughs hadn't belonged to the right clubs or lived in the right fraternity while at Harvard.
> He had an introduction to Colonel William Donovan, who would form and lead the O.S.S. However, Donovan's director of research and analysis had known and disliked Burroughs at Harvard, and rejected him.
> Burroughs came to be friends with a man who lived in Kammerer's building and worked at The New Yorker. Not homosexual himself, he was intrigued by these two men with somewhat rustic accents but very literate backgrounds. He introduced Burroughs to a New Yorker co-worker, Truman Capote, who Burroughs dismissed as not being the promised "beautiful boy" at all but a prematurely aged albino with a squeaky voice.
> The socialist activist Leland Stanford Chumley opened a pub known simply as Chumley's in 1922 at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village in 1922. Prohibition had started in 1920, the pub was a speakeasy established in a former blacksmith's shop. Many authors, poets, journalists, and other writers spent time at Chumley's.
> The legend is that the term "86" meaning "to eject" originated here, although there are two versions of the legend. One is that unruly patrons would be ejected through the door at 86 Bedford Street. The other is that during Prohibition the police would helpfully call ahead with a warning to send the patrons out the #86 Bedford Street door, as the police would soon arrive for a raid at the Pamela Court doorway on the opposite side of the building.
> Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses who had not reported a homicide. [i.e., Carr killing Kammerer.] Burroughs' father immediately posted the $2,500 bail, while Kerouac's father refused to pay and let Jack stay at the Bronx jail. Edie Parker's parents agreed to post Jack's bail if he promised to marry their daughter. He did, the marriage was annulled two years later.
> A plea bargain got Carr a conviction for first-degree manslaughter, and he was sentenced to an undefined term of up to twenty years to be served at the Elmira Reformatory (instead of Sing-Sing prison, given his age and the details of the plea bargain). He was released after two years.
> Carr was hired by United Press (later UPI) upon his release in 1946 as a copy boy. He stayed with UP/UPI for his entire career, progressing to head the general news desk until his retirement in 1993.
> The merchant shipping escapade and the murder were described in "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks", a mostly factual joint memoir written by Kerouac and Burroughs. They wrote alternating chapters under the pen names of William Lee (Burroughs) and John Kerouac. Burroughs' character in the book is "Will Dennison", and Kerouac's is "Mike Ryko".
> Within a few weeks Joan's husband returned from where his unit had reached in Germany, and went to his wife's apartment to find a pile of people strung out on Benzedrine lying on her large double bed. He was disgusted and asked "This is what I fought for?" She responded dismissively, and he left and filed for divorce.
Read a bit of Burrough's The Adding Machine.
> As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native body and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.
Servings: grains 3/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 2/2, meat 0/3, nuts 1/0.5
Brunch: banana, bean and tomato wrap, coffee
Afternoon snack: potato chips
Dinner: cucumber sandwich
-36
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