Dr. Codd Was Right: Parallax View - part the twenty first

Leading an Insurrection is now an Official Act

The world is not linear.
-- Dr. McElhone/1974

Well, I'm going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them.
-- The Orange Shitgibbon^©anon./2024 [y'all get burkhas]

Scientists aren't vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don't believe in science, and they're being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders.
-- Drew Weissman/2022

To date, Microsoft is stating that organizations testing In-Memory OLTP have seen transaction speeds improve by up to 30 times compared to past performance, with the best performance gains achieved when the business logic resides in the database and not in the applications.
-- Jonathan Watts/2015 [my emphasis]

I have had to explain and re-explain and re-explain and re-explain, you know, how relational databases work, what is an eigenvector, what is dimensionality reduction.

-- Christopher Wylie/2018

... but Flash-based storage has such a different performance profile from rotating media, that I suspect that it will end up having a large impact on filesystem design. Right now, most filesystems tend to be designed with the latencies of rotating media in mind.

-- Linus Torvalds/2007

I believe quite strongly that, if you think about the issue at the appropriate level of abstraction, you're inexorably led to the position that databases must be relational.

-- Chris Date/2009

Election day's thought

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H. L. Menken/1915 [~~let's prove him wrong~~ guess not]

See you next week in a brand new show^{©Heckle and Jeckle}

Therefore:

In a time of SSD, multi-core/processor, two terabyte memory and Optane App Direct Mode machines, there is no reason not to build from BCNF data. Time to do what Dr. Codd demonstrated. Technology has finally caught up with the maths.

31 August 2020

Parallax View - part the twenty first

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 - 269
100 to 999 - 1,276

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,090. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster ex-President AuH₂O 2020's perpetual lying.

In an early April missive, I mused that the 'early' data and historical data with other coronaviruses implied that herd immunity was going to be an iffy proposition. Now, we have new reporting that Covid-19 immunity (in the individual) may be transient, at best. Batshit J. Moron spent his week acting like Covid-19 is in the rearview mirror. Of course he did; to do otherwise explicitly admits that he and his elves have screwed the pooch. I doubt that Mother Nature did anything other than flip him a Cosmic Bird. If there is a God, those almost 2,000+ nutballs on the South Lawn will all die of Covid. Before they can vote.

What caught experts' attention about the case of the 25-year-old Reno man was not that he appears to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes Covid-19) a second time. Rather, it's that his second bout was more serious than his first.

More to the point is whether letting Covid-19 run rampant (aka, Sweden) is a viable approach, aka enough folks get sick means that herd immunity is achieved before half the population is really, really sick or dead. If individual immunity is too short to remain effective among the earliest infected simply means that community immunity must plateau at the number in the community that can be infected and recover (the dead don't help gaining herd immunity; suffering with no benefit) within that timeframe, say three or four months. Which implies that there will never be enough time to reach herd level of immunity. There exists no evidence, that I've seen, that herd immunity level can be attained in such a short period. Unless you round up the lower classes, lock them in cattle cars, spray Covid, and hope that will be enough to reach herd. All without bothering the privileged.

But then, some 48 days later, the man started experiencing headaches, cough, and other symptoms again. Eventually, he became so sick that he had to be hospitalized and was found to have pneumonia.

So, a confirmed case with immunity kaput at two and half months. If, and that's a significant if, this patient is the norm, then the 'let them all get sick and we'll all be safe soon enough' is bullshit. With a batshit leader, I guess that's to be expected.

What none of the reporting I've seen has addressed: is re-infection due to lost immunity to Covid-19, or is it due to sufficient mutation of initial Covid-19 to make it less, or even in-, visible to the immune system? Confounding that is the contrary reporting that those who've been minimally affected by other coronaviruses, aka the common cold, may have some immunity to Covid-19.

In labs all over the world lately, scientists working on COVID-19 have stumbled on an intriguing sort of finding again and again. They've found that blood samples from healthy people who were never exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus contain reactive immune cells and targeted antibodies that could, perhaps, help stave off COVID-19.

Since my cold experience runs thus: onset is late afternoon, go to bed, stay in bed the next day, get out of bed on the third day; and I'm done with it. For me, Covid-19 appears to be a non-event. Or so one hopes.

Conflicting evidence. That's what makes science, unlike nutballs who assume they already, and forever, know everything. Bleach my hair. Bleach my skin (white is always better). Bleach my lungs.