First Blog

We all expect Black Swans in our lives; we just don't know what they will be. This is how we survive. We now even write about them, predict them, and warn about them. But they are unlimited in magnitude, and thus we cannot regress events to any mean. Tricky, at least that what the Coronavirus tells me. Consider. This virus exploded upon the earth, claiming many lives and economic disaster.   It now seems to linger, just hanging about like some serpent waiting to strike.   Staying alert, we can control it a bit, but by nature modern humans are not alert. They take chances; they expect good outcomes; they feel mostly invulnerable. Moreover, staying alert would cause changes in all our lives we don’t want. With no vaccine forthcoming and with the virus not mutating to a harmless relative, we may have trouble ahead. Hopefully, this problem will be solved, but the next Black Swan is on the way, the nature of which we know not, from where we know not, and delivered how we k

Politics W.H.O. W.T.O. CARES Act PPP Supply chain Tariff Prime rate Discount rate Bilateral/Unilateral ____ Modern Monetary Theory Coronavirus Intensive care and ICU, CCU PPE Social distancing Antibodies, antibody test Aerosol contagion Pathogen Adaptive immunity Coevolution Antigenic variant Antimicrobial resistance Antibody For those keeping a very close interest, we have… Symptomatology Testing panel Zoonosis Novel virus Interspecies transmission Phylogeny Phylogenetic tree Transmission chain Intermediate host (e.g. domestic ducks to chickens to …) Koch’s postulates Association vs. Causation

Keywords of the week. If you're following the world-wide struggle against the coronavirus together with the usual politics, here are some words you have heard often. Intensive care and ICU Comorbidity Morbific Exempt Suspend Stockpile Ventilator Respirator Incubator Loan/grant Death and Infection rates? Doubling time Susceptible Asymptomatic Reopening Infectious Bipartisan Conference call Infrastructure Pandemic Epidemic Flatten the curve Therapeutic Vaccine Cure Guidance (from the CDC) Elective surgery Exponential growth Logarithmic growth* Model assumptions SIR type model (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) Phenomenological model Inflection point* *This term is often used incorrectly.

“There is no problem the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.” ― Samuel Johnson If you recall this quote, it may be from the 1946 Sherlock Holmes movie, “Dressed to Kill” starring Basil Rathbone.   It does make you think, but it also gives you hope. It gives hope we can solve anything we come across.   It gives hope we can ultimately answer every question – though some may take more time than others. Unfortunately, Dr. Johnson was wrong.  The problem here is that from the work of mathematicians, particularly Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), we see there are true propositions that cannot be proved, and can never be proved, true. Many have already been discovered.   It seems almost paradoxical that we can prove them unprovable, but cannot not prove them.   The implication is that problem can be set and then found can never be proved. Such problems are beyond unknown unknowns, they are undecidable.   In other language, we can with a slight linguistic stretc