In Sputnik’s Orbit

A few thoughts to tide you over…

 

A Moment Which Will Live in Infamy

1 comments

 

In this, the first week of May, 2020, many are arguing for the reopening of the US economy, often arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic just isn’t bad as the media makes out. Let’s look at that claim.

It is true that in 2020 thus far, with social distancing (such as it is), the US has seen “only” 75,000+ COVID-10 deaths compared to nearly 400,000 heart disease & cancer deaths in a typical year during the same period. But there is a vital difference that makes these numbers incomparable: we are not developing 200,000 new cases of cancer & heart disease every WEEK (as we are currently with COVID-19) and cancer and heart disease are not contagious and cannot double in number every few days as COVID-19 can.

Read More›

The Bounce Commeth

1 comments

Today, Texas is living in denial. In a month, its people will be paying the price.

Back in March, when Harris County unexpectedly cancelled the Houston Livestock & Rodeo, residents were taking things seriously. SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 has a slow incubation time, but the numbers don’t lie when you plot them. Slowly, new confirmation rates started growing at a slowing rate as the virus burned through the supply of infected but not yet ill people. Then, by the first week of April, the growth of new cases flattened, then actually started to drop.

Read More›

How Much Radiation Leaks From Your Oven?

0 comments

Very little, and it’s mostly in the form of light shining through the door.

“Radiation” just means anything projected through space. It includes potentially harmful neutron, gamma, and x-ray radiation, but it also includes sunlight, new ideas, and the petals of flowers.

The word “radiation” does not mean “magic death cooties,” and just because a device emits radiation doesn’t mean it can hurt you without falling off a counter and hitting your foot.

Read More›

COVID-19 is not the Flu.

0 comments

A huge misconception about the SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus is that it’s similar to seasonal fluenza. Well, both are respiratory infections (as are colds) but that’s where the similarities stop. And the more we learn about this new virus, the stranger it appears.

  • The Flu’s R0 number is 1.3 whereas COVID-19 is 2-2.5, meaning it’s about twice as contagious;
  • The incubation period for the flu is four days whereas COVID-19 is 14 days; meaning it can spread far and wide before it’s detected.
  • The average flu hospitalization rate is 2% whereas COVID-19 is 19%; meaning that even for the young and healthy, it’s more likely to be costly and leave lasting disability.
  • The flu’s case fatality rate is 0.1% whereas COVID-19 is 1-3.4%;
  • Currently, there is no COVID-19 vaccine whereas there is are effective vaccines for most flu virus strains;

There is, however, one way that SARS-Cov-2 is like the flu — an infected person is most infectious before they develop symptoms. This has been known about flu for decades, and why it hasn’t influenced public health advice much during the pandemic is hard to fathom.

Read More›

How To Quarantine At Home

3 comments

My wife was in class at Harvard University when the sirens went off. An Air-Force brat like me, the grinding wail of the rotary klaxon still makes her hair stand on end—still conjures visions of Cold War airmen rushing off into the night to call forth nuclear Armageddon. Usually, that’s overreaction. Usually, it’s just somebody testing the tornado alarms. Not today.

Read More›

COVID-19 Overreaction?

0 comments

Still think the US is overreacting and COVID-19 is “just a bad flu?” Read on…

The COVID-19 response team at Imperial College in London obtained what appears to be the first accurate dataset of infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy. They plugged those numbers into widely available epidemic modelling software and simulated what would happen if the United States did absolutely nothing — if we treated COVID-19 like the flu, went about business as usual, and let the virus take its course?

Read More›

Coronavirus Fears Overblown?

0 comments

Most years, flu virus causes between 12,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, has an R-naught of 1.3 (meaning on average, each infected person infects that many more people) and a mortality rate around .05%.

Read More›

Once And For All, It’s DUCK tape.

4 comments

Once and for all folks, that gray stuff is ducK tape, not ducT tape.

Duck tape was developed by Johnson & Johnson’s Permacel division during WWII, in direct response to a military requirement for waterproof tape to seal ammunition cases during storage and transit into the tropical Pacific theater.

Read More›

Winter Pledge Drive

0 comments

Harlan Ellison told the story of how once he, L Ron Hubbard, and a gaggle of other “Golden Age” writers were sitting around drinking and complaining (as writers do) about how impossible it was to survive on the going wage of a penny a word. As Harlan told it, Hubbard joked that the only way a writer could survive would be to start his own religion. The others laughed and spent the rest of their inebriation inventing ever more outlandish ideas with which this hypothetical scheme could squeeze blood from the stones of the gullible.  Some time later, Ellison told us, they were all horrified when Hubbard actually went out and did it–complete with all the outlandish blood squeezing.

This would have been some time around 1950, so a penny in those times would be worth almost eleven cents today. Friends, I can tell you with authority that genre writers today do not make almost eleven cents a word. The pro rate today is six cents a word, and the pulp market no longer exists, so it’s no longer possible to do what Hubbard did at his peak and sell 25 pro-rate stores a year.

Read More›

How Old is Earth?

1 comments

The Earth solidified 4.54 billion years ago, plus or minus 1%. That’s a fact, and if your belief is not aligned to this fact, then you are what we call “wrong.”

Read More›