The Menace of Microsoft

 

In the past few weeks MS has made me go through 13 upgrades as noted above. This does not include other stuff. Each upgrade takes 5-6 hours of computer time between downloading, installing and then getting all the other files to work so I can do some productive work. That is a total of almost 80 hours! Now there are a total of 8 systems so we have 640 hours!

All I want is a word processor, spread sheet, web browser and email! What a wast of humanity!

The Unreasonable Mind

 

I heard the NJ Gov, the Carpetbagger from Boston, state that New Jersey will be fossil fuel free by 2050. Namely no gas for cars, homes, mowers, etc. That means the gas heating system for your home must be removed and replaced with electric. Electricity will be the only permitted power source. No wood fire places, no gas lawn mowers, no gas cars.

Now there is the law of unintended consequences. Look at the current issue with the Murphy bags. These are the bags we all carry around in cars for shopping for anything that exceeds two items, one in each hand. No Murphy bag, no shopping. So what happened, home deliveries could not use plastic or even paper, but homes now have hundreds of Murphy bags. This is the unintended consequences, which of course are denied by the offending NJ politicians.

Now we move to electricity. In NJ the power fails every two months. Some times for hours sometimes for days even weeks. You see they electricity is coming to us from poles, wooden poled wrapped in tree branches. Heavy wind, broken branch, no power. I moved one of my companies from New Jersey to the Czech Republic, better reliable electricity. Yet now we all have back up generators, gas powered. But  the Carpetbagger and his allies will eliminate them. How many people will die as a result? They care not!

If this were to happen, we would have a single point of failure energy source, and if one drives along the local roads we see massive unsecured power lines. Imagine what a threat to them would look like. This is what happens when we get Carpetbaggers who are quasi religious zealots. It will cost more than $75,000 per home in this weeks dollars to make these changes. That is trillions just for these people, people already at the breaking point.

Will reason ever prevail again?

Manners?

 The NY Times has an interesting piece on how to address people. The specific case is in addressing physicians or other professionals. They note:

Dr. Yul Yang, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., addresses all of his patients with an honorific — Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. — even if they ask him to use their first names. It is a sign of respect and a way of distinguishing his professional role as a doctor from a more personal role as a friend or confidant. But many patients do not reciprocate, calling him Yul instead of Dr. Yang. He finds that “kind of awkward,” he said, though he lets it pass. But Dr. Yang and his colleagues began to wonder: How often do patients call doctors by their first names? It wasn’t easy to answer this question, but Dr. Yang and his co-authors found a way — by studying tens of thousands of emails that patients sent to doctors at his institution. The results, published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open, appeared to illustrate a few themes about which doctors find themselves on a first-name basis with the people they care for.

The JAMA article states:

Whether being informally addressed by other medical professionals or patients, untitling (not using a person’s proper title) may have a negative impact on physicians, demonstrate lack of respect, and can lead to reduction in formality of the physician-patient relationship or workplace. Institutional leadership and individual efforts should focus on a supportive culture, with particular attention spent to address potential unconscious biases as revealed here. Such efforts could include formal guidelines, practice changes, direct patient education, and further research to explore other areas of unconscious bias.

 Now there is more here than meets the eye. First in my old 5th edition of Harrisons, the budding physician was told to address patients as Mr or Mrs or Miss, whatever was appropriate. First names were never to be used. The physician was always Doctor.

But in today's world the staff always calls out one's given name, that is your first name. But "given name" has some rather negative connotations as well. If one recalls, the Slave Master gave names to their slaves, the slaves never has a family name since they were property and treated as such. At best they were called Joseph or Sara or whatever the Slave Master so decided. The Plantation owner was Mister or Master never did one use their given name, that would destroy the bondage relationship.

Now ironically my given name is that of a Roman African slave, Tenentius Publius Afer, the greatest comedy writer in Rome. Strange that Terence wrote comedy, for in it he told of the Roman foibles in humor, sort of like the Norman Lear of 100 BC. 

I still use honorifics unless and until I have developed a personal relationship agreed to by both parties. Furthermore when in a medical environment I remain with Dr or whatever the appropriate title is.

Perhaps a return to formality will enhance relationships. Just a thought. By the way, please do not call me Terrence! My mother used that when I was allegedly in some trouble and I have a severe limbic valence response.

I'm Back!

 

The COVID variants BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 seem to be exploding. They are BA.5 variants and one suspects they will result in a winter explosion. 

As Nature notes:

In a September preprint, Cao and his colleagues evaluated the capacity of the new crop of variants to evade neutralizing antibodies from vaccination and previous infection with other variants. They found that BQ.1.1 (a member of the BQ.1 family with one extra spike change) and BA.2.75.2 were the most immune evasive, even able to dodge most neutralizing antibodies elicited by infection with BA.5. Two antibody drugs were still effective against BA.2 and BA.5, but they are likely to lose much of their potency against many of the emerging Omicron subvariants, the study suggests. Another team, including Peacock, came to similar conclusions about BA.2.75.2. “The degree of immune escape and evasion is amazing right now, crazy,” says Cao. On the basis of initial estimates, Wenseleers thinks that autumn–winter waves will be similar in size to BA.5 surges, at least as far as infection numbers go. What’s harder to predict is the effect on hospitalizations. The build-up of population immunity from vaccination and previous infection is likely to keep admissions lower than during past COVID-19 waves, say researchers, but how low is unclear. “While a completely different game than it would have been in 2020 or 2021, a surge still would probably be associated with an increase in deaths and an increase in hospitalizations,” says Lessler. But even a relatively muted COVID-19 wave could put strain on hospitals, which are facing backlogs and other conditions that put a heavy burden on health systems in the winter. Influenza, which has barely registered over the past two winters, is likely to come back with a vengeance in the Northern Hemisphere this season, stoking fears of a ‘twindemic’ of influenza and COVID-19. “In a bad flu year, hospital systems get pretty stressed,” says Lessler.

 So what does this mean? Not really clear but keep those masks handy and get a bivalent shot. This is not/never going away. And with BU generating more deadly ones, who knows.

Why Worry About China

 Apparently Boston University developed a COVID strain with 80% lethality. As The Daily Mail notes:

Boston University scientists were today condemned for 'playing with fire' after it emerged they had created a lethal new Covid strain in a laboratory. DailyMail.com revealed the team had made a hybrid virus — combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain — that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study. The revelation exposes how dangerous virus manipulation research continues to go on even in the US, despite fears similar practices may have started the pandemic. Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: 'This should be totally forbidden, it's playing with fire.' Gain of function research - when viruses are purposefully manipulated to be more infectious or deadly - is thought to be at the center of Covid's origin. A Chinese laboratory located just miles from the first cluster of cases carried out similar research on bat coronaviruses. But the practice has been largely restricted in the US since 2017.  Dr Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, told DailyMail.com that: 'The research is a clear example of gain of function research. He added: 'If we are to avoid a next lab-generated pandemic, it is imperative that oversight of enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research be strengthened.'

This is an insane act. Labs at places like BU are NOT secure Level IV facilities. One could just get a cleaning person have access and we are off and running. Did Fauci and his team fund this monstrosity? 

Needless to say in my opinion someone should do something to stop these people. 

If one reads the paper it states the funding as follows:

This work was supported by Boston University startup funds (to MS and FD), National Institutes of Health, NIAID grants R01 AI159945 (to SB and MS) and R37 AI087846 (to MUG), NIH SIG grants S10-OD026983 and SS10-OD030269 (to NAC), Peter Paul Career Development Award (to FD), and BMBF SenseCoV2 01KI20172A (AE) and DFG Fokus COVID-19, EN 423/7-1 (AE). 

 which is Fauci's funding site and the abstract states:

 We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor- binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality  rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral  pathogenicity reside outside of S.

Now if that is not "gain of function" I really may not understand the term.  Also work like this must be done in a Level-4 bio facility and to my knowledge only Broad has something close to that capacity. It is a highly secure and monitored facility and there are limited numbers in the US. So where was this work done?

This sounds like a disaster ready to happen!

The OC Debate Continues

 A writer in the NY Times notes:

Unfortunately, if not surprisingly, abundant evidence shows that universities are more responsive to requests from their highest-paying customers. With tuitions rising ever higher and government subsidies only a fraction of what they once were, universities are dependent on money from affluent families. That model pushes schools to cater to the demands of privileged students and their families, even though doing so increases inequalities between those students and the less privileged peers whose tuitions the wealthy families essentially subsidize. And the more that schools cater to privileged families, the more entitled those families may feel to make demands. Fixing these kinds of inequities would take a massive shift in the way the country supports families and funds both public K-12 schools and higher education. Even in the absence of that kind of shift, though, universities can do more to help students succeed in their classes, regardless of the level of privilege they bring with them or the types of majors they pursue. That means investing more in faculty hiring, to allow for smaller class sizes, and in academic advisers and other student support staff members, who are often deeply underpaid. It also means ensuring that students aren’t facing pressure to try to overload on courses in order to graduate early and save on tuition, room and board. That they don’t have to worry about having enough food to eat or a place to live or access to health care (including mental health care) or reliable technology. That they don’t have to juggle class work with working long hours for pay. And that they don’t have to circulate formal petitions to get the support and respect they deserve.

 The above is written by some Sociologist, most likely never took OC and probably struggled through statistics at that. The two points highlighted are worth taking notice.

First, in all my years I never was pressured to take notice or parents wealth or position. In fact when at Columbia I had a student whose father was the CEO of a major US corporation. Needless to say it had no effect, and not even noticed, except amongst some students.

Second, my Junior year I spent $5 a week on food and $35 a month on rent. Rutabagas, dry milk, tea. Possibly a couple of apples. 25 credits a semester, no parental support and straight As. No cell phone etc! One was driven by succeeding and competing. Technology, none at all. Borrowed a type writer. 

Life is juggling, so get used to it.

 

Could Not Agree More

 Science has an editorial by Thorp bemoaning the need for Organic Chemistry as a sine qua non for Medical School. As the author notes:

Although there has been some progress, many faculty still refuse to update their teaching methods in the face of copious data showing how teaching could be improved, particularly toward the success of women and underrepresented groups. Universities have failed to deal with gaps in learning caused by remote teaching due to COVID-19 in high school and early college, which is a temporary problem, but the inability to deal with it is a readout of the apathy that universities have for dealing with the general issues.There’s only one way out. Everyone in this system—the administrators, the faculty, the medical schools, and the medical regulatory bodies—need to state the plain truth that the undergraduate education system that prepares students for medical school is broken. Quit selling a bill of goods to ambitious young people and their parents that the research universities offer a value-adding path to a career in medicine.

 I would take it one step further, When MIT started the HST program they isolated the MIT classes from the Harvard classes. Why. My opinion is that the classic Medical School program teaches What and How. Namely what is the diagnosis and how does one treat it. The MIT students kept asking Why. You don't really see that in Med School. I see that in many current physicians educated in the now classic manner. Part of the reason is to just go from patient to patient. It is really hard to address the Why. Why does this patient have this intractable itch? Instead the training is to find a what and then a how as prescribed somehow in the Tablets of the trade.

Now where does Organic Chemistry fit in? Simply, for those of us who have taken it? Simply in the second semester you memorize dozens of 19th century German reactions found mostly by massive trial and error. The current teaching attempts to place a patina of scientific understanding by moving electrons around but frankly that is just nonsense. It just adds to the memory burden. If the goal of OC is to assess memorization then perhaps Latin IV is just as good! Rarely does a physician ever use these German reactions. Biochemistry is fine as is Phys Chem, but OC is often just a waste.

Now what makes a good physician? Well it depends on what one wants. If the What and How is all we need for the local doc, then we need the technicians to deal with that. If however we have a serious issue then the Why is often needed. For example, Oncology and Oncologists are like cooks. They are handed a diagnosis, go to the cook book which says what therapy to use, and then just monitor the patient through the ascribed process. Not much is any Why here. In contrast Neurologists must find Whys often. 

Thus perhaps a good engineering undergraduate is often better than anything else. At least it was in my view.

Marx vs Ockham

 Aristotle expressed the belief in Universals, or as Marx would call a Class, namely an abstract grouping of entities into a common group. I will try to avoid the Russel paradoxes, but what we are saying is that for Aristotle there is an abstract universal say a blue flower. For Marx we have a Class as the proletariat. 

Now Ockham disavowed this totally and his reasoning is quite sturdy. He insists that there are no Universals, or shall we say Groups, but only individuals. Thus this blue flower is close to but not equal to that blue flower. Blue flowers are all different in some manner, they are individuals.

Thus the same for Marx and his construct of class. If one has obtained a BA in some subject that does not mean one is in this class with some Universal characteristic, indeed, one is still and remains an individual. The same for a PhD, and even more so for PhDs from top universities in say the most competitive courses. They are individuals and thinks as individuals. 

Along come some BA writing for the NY Times. This is just another BA from BU, let us say not a prestigious institution. And just a BA at that. He starts with the statement:

There Are Two Americas Now: One With a B.A. and One Without

Namely he uses Class and education level as a class determinant. That is grossly baseless. Admittedly in today's institutions there is significant indoctrination. I think now of the MIT Equity Commissars, Deans if you will, overlooking each department. This is to make certain that despite what should be an open and individualistic search for knowledge, that now this search is controlled in the confines of a proto-Marxist class structure. 

The destruction of the individual is essential for the proto-Marxist, the establishment of the Class is sine qua non. This author seems to be just of that ilk.

Educating the Wokes

 The NY Times has an interesting piece on a Professor of Organic Chemistry who got fired because the students felt the material too difficult and the grading unfair. They note:

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors. But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him. Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores. The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

 Now two comments. 

First, Organic Chemistry has two parts. The first semester covers bonds, reactions and the like. Good science is it should be easy. At least I found it so. The second semester is a pile of 19th century German reactions that the current authors attempt to explain on basic principles but in my opinion are mostly alchemy! It is a pure memorization semester, plain and simple. Any attempt to make this science is bound to fail. If you can memorize second semester then you can memorize anatomy in Med School. Thus the nexus. You never use any of the second semester in medicine, never!

Second the woke students know everything and they are used to getting medals for anything they do. Instead of attending class and finding out what the instructor wants, they feel that whatever is their opinion is of equal or more merit than the instructor. I have seen this evolving which is why I would never teach again, at least this crowd. They have been indoctrinated into the woke school of feeling rewarded just for showing up. Halfway through a professors sentence they interject their most valued opinion correcting the speaker. A baseless interjection usually, if not always.

Thus this is a clear example of how society is changing, for the worse. Pity.

License Plate Readers, NOT!

 EFF has an interesting post on Law Enforcement use of license plate readers. They note:

Over the last decade, a vast number of law enforcement agencies around the country have adopted a mass surveillance technology that uses cameras to track the vehicles of every driver on the road, with little thought or respect given to the ways this technology might be abused. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, that technology may soon be turned against people seeking abortions, the people who support them, and the workers who provide reproductive healthcare.  We're talking about automated license plate readers (ALPRs). These are camera systems that capture license plate numbers and upload the times, dates, and locations where the plates were seen to massive searchable databases. Sometimes these scans may also capture photos of the driver or passengers in a vehicle.

Now I have a counter example. I sold a car in July of this year to a person in West Virginia. I turned my NJ plates into the DMV in NJ and got a receipt. In September the new owner apparently went through an EZpass site without an EZpass. I then received a violation plus a fine. The plate recorded was the new owner but EZpass attributed the plate to me! I ended up paying just to avoid dealing with the grossly incompetent Government employees or their agents. 

Now this is not really the problem. What if there were a crime involved. I would have dozens of FBI agents smashing down my door and taking me away hooded and in cuffs! After all that is what the FBI is trained to do today, like the Gestapo, remember.

I recall a case of a prisoner sentenced to death based upon faulty cell data locations. I testified against the government expert, who frankly apparently had no expertise, and we got the poor fellow off death row! So the process of license plate readers is grossly flawed and can result potentially in death row situations. EFF has a point but it goes well beyond their position. Beware the Feds, not too smart but they have more guns!