Microsoft is at it again!

 Well yesterday was the second Tuesday and Microsoft update day. So I come down early on Wednesday to see if it rebooted, but no, it totally crashed, wiped out everything. I am now 30+ hours trying to recover. If all else fails I have seven back ups, the most reliable is my Lab XP machine, still going strong!

What was old is new again!

 The anarchists were rampant in early 20th century. Think of Goldman and Kropotkin and Sacco and Vanzetti, the assassination of McKinley etc. The current ones calling themselves socialists are really anarchists. We can learn from their past actions and try to keep a step ahead. History has a strange way of repeating, like plagues.

Spot On!

 The NY Times has a compelling article on clinical trials. They are costly, slow, bureaucratic. But the most recent twist is that with "personal medicine" they no longer work.

Here  is the issues. Classic clinical trials assumed the same therapeutic was give or not to a group of patients. The evaluation was then with or without and did it work and was it better than the previous treatment. Simple, yes?

But as the article noted:

A few converging forces make this bottleneck more consequential than ever. The first force is scientific progress itself. Science is creating treatments that the regulatory system was not designed to handle. The most striking case is that of personalized medicine: Thanks to technological advances in recent decades, we can now sequence a patient’s tumor to find out its specific vulnerabilities, and increasingly we can tailor therapies to the needs of specific individuals.

The problem is that the therapeutic is fundamentally different for each patient since we are examining the genes in the tumor cells. There are two basic approaches. One is the recent one treating melanoma as we have discussed previously using the immune system. The other is a antibody drug conjugate approach as we proposed for prostate cancer. Each therapeutic is different and designed specifically for the patients malignancy, cell by cell. Apparently one has gotten through the quagmire of FDA approval. Will others?

The article is broad and compelling, The US is often the slowest to get through as well as the costliness. Hopefully there will be a focus on improving personalized treatments. But the politics of the FDA and HHS may be the worst problem in the process and many lives may be lost as a consequence. 

Was the Medieval Period That Bad?

 In a recent post by Victor Davis Hanson, the author notes:

 Remember, the medieval period was roughly that area in time after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, roughly AD 500 to around AD 1300 to 1400, the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. In medievalism, we often talk about primitivism after the destruction of the classical world during the Dark Ages, the early medieval period, and it’s characterized by epidemics, bubonic plague, typhus, typhoid, smallpox, terrible sanitation in urban centers. They had forgotten the Roman use of sewage and aqueducts. There were open borders. National states popped up that couldn’t defend themselves, so you saw castles and walls pop up all over the European countryside in a way you had not during the Roman period. In cities, they were walled, towns even, and the gates closed at dusk to prevent gratuitous crime. But at the same time that this was happening, you had some of the greatest works of literature in the Western world. You had Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Dante’s “Inferno,” St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologica.” And if you look at the architectural expertise and scientific knowledge of architecture, it was progressing at a geometric rate when you look at the huge cathedrals at Seville or Cologne. ...

Now let’s switch to the modern period. All of us now can call anywhere in the world in seconds on our iPhones. Anything you want to know, past, present, future, you can just get on a cheap computer and ask an artificial intelligence program from the many free platforms. You can watch movies, you can watch entertainment on satellites. Anything you want is at your fingertips. The nation itself is exploring space. We’re getting close to conquering cancer. I can attest to that. Computers allow you to write without even speaking. You can, unfortunately, compose a whole term paper or a book with AI. You can make a movie with AI. Yet at the same time that’s happening, look at what’s going on in Berkeley here in California or Los Angeles. We’re seeing outbreaks of medieval diseases that we thought had been conquered years ago, given our sophisticated knowledge of sewage and water treatment. We had a typhus breakout in Los Angeles. We had leptospirosis, a rat disease, in Berkeley. 

Now to correct Hanson I note:

1. The Dark Ages most likely were from the fall of Rome, say 400 AD to 1000 AD, The key players were the Merovingians from the east. However the Irish had universities, were fluent in Latin and Greek. The Muslims had from mid 600s occupies the Near East as well as all of North Africa. Such places as Alexandria were willing to accept Muslim rule because it was a better Tax situation than the Byzantine rulers! Think New Amsterdam and the English, lower taxed became New York, and the USA was the result of tea tax of the Brits. See a thread there?

2. The Middle Ages is a creation of the Renaissance.  It was a very idiosyncratic period. The Italian city states were the creation of individual rule and the rejection of royalty inherited. Marcellus of Padua and William of Ockham in about 1340 created individualism, namely the rights of individuals and equality of them.

3. The plague of 1348 was better handled than COVID. The mortality rate was near 50% whereas COVID was less than 0.7%. Yet COVID lasted longer tan the plague of 1348! We had a Fauci, they did not! Think Jesuits versus Franciscans (inside joke).

 4. Now Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer are benchmarks. Aquinas was in Latin, Dante in Italian, and Chaucer. Aquinas focused on God, Dante on bad rulers, and Chaucer on common folk. This is 1250 to 1400!  The world had changed. If one looks at these three one see a dramatic progression. It is a movement in society. Needless to say, a mere 40 years later (1440) with the printing press, all changes. People could not get access to Aristotle, Chaucer, Plato, Dante et al. 

5. As for brutality, it was less roaming gangs, although the French had the jacquerie which was a mob of oppressed commoners, the real butchers of humanity were the English, the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He butchered men, women and children, and did so with the approval of Avignon! The butchering was done not the immigrants but the enshrined!

I think Hanson is a smart and prolific fellow, but to understand the Dark and Middle Ages one must spend time understanding the people and events, I have written on bother periods and suggest perhaps a look at the 14th century, despite the plague, it was prolific and led to the Renaissance. 

Oh yes, and the Roman water system. They relied heavily on lead pipes and thus the consequences from massive lead poisoning. I have noted that earlier.

Is This what we pay billions for?

 

NASA seems to have been converted into a clown college. It feels that the above have become a necessary part of displaying the results of their missions. As one who worked on Apollo in the 60s, the team involved were all professionals. Pity for the change.

Bayeux and the Brits

 There was an interesting view of the Tapestry in the Guardian by a Brit. He notes:

 In both the borders and central strip, the Bayeux tapestry always set its action in a wider world, and even, when it shows the comet, a larger cosmos. As the armoured elite go to war, peasants plough and sow the fields. They are portrayed in distracting, vibrant detail and this workaday scene as the battle approaches is pointed and poignant: whoever wins, whoever rules England, country people will still work the soil. That same sudden cutaway from the rulers’ perspective happens when a woman and her child watch the Normans set their house on fire. But what you can see here, close to the stitches in such good light, is that one of the men torching the house also seems sad and conflicted. It’s that honesty that makes this not just a fascinating medieval relic but a universal depiction of the madness that is war. If the violence is stunningly real, so are its consequences. The dead bodies pile up in mounds as Saxon after Saxon falls. King Harold didn’t really get killed by an arrow in his eye we are told, but seeing the tapestry so close, it sure looks like it. Anyway, his royal body just joins the rest. In the final scenes, the peasants, the churls, get their revenge. Little shabby figures pull the mailed hauberks off dead knights, leaving them naked. It’s a final flourish of the precocious artistic brilliance of these 11th-century artists and craftspeople. Naked bodies emerge from their armour, pale and oddly beautiful – the complete ones, at least – as these medieval geniuses show they can depict, through embroidery, incredibly gentle, intimate nudes whose dead flesh fills the battlefield with pathos. It ends there. But, although there’s a lost later section, this anticlimax looks perfect to me. By then, I had been drained by this epic in all its tragedy and comedy. Bodies and body parts. That’s where the war talk was headed all along.

 The writer fails to comment on the Latin prose. I recall when I saw it in France that it was quite readable, aqnd despite the art work the commentary was over powering. 

Now English brutality has no beginning or end. Consider the brutal and barbaric acts of the Black Prince, son of Edward III. He and his men butchered thousands of French women and Children until a good case of poor pork took him away!

The Irish and Indianans recall the more recent English butchery of the past century. 

Frankly this is a rather sophomoric writing failing in its historical context as well as the ignorance of the simple 11th century Latin text.