About The Fat Lady - part the fifth

Well, so far we've lucked out. Last report of March is 979,930 deaths. On the other hand, in the neighborhood of 15 states are seeing Covid-π surges. Time will tell.

Ode to Bubba - part the third

In short order, yet another verse in the Ode to Bubba.

Bret Stepens isn't my favorite Token Right Wingnut (not sure having a favorite such would mean about me) on the NYT op-ed circuit. But, alas, every now and again he shows he's reading these missives. I'll take my props where I find them.

Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine's east, which contain Europe's second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway's).

So, which is it? The storehouse of riches in the ground? Or the second edition of the Great Russian Empire? Well, who said it can't be both? Putin's still a young guy, by dictator for life standards, just 69. He's overrun Chechnya, Georgia, Belarus, and of course, Crimea. So, he nibbles at Russia's west-facing borders, going for the resources first. Turns out, Bubba was right. In due time, he gets to be Tsar.

They're All Bozos on That Bus

Remember the missle (and bomber) gap?? Yet another stupid, paranoid tactic to endorse the Military-Industrial Complex's (Eisenhower warned you) thirst for profit at any cost. To the taxpayer, not themselves, of course.

So, today it's deja-vu all over again.

The top US general in Europe said Tuesday there "could be" a gap in US intelligence gathering that caused the US to overestimate Russia's capability and underestimate Ukraine's defensive abilities before Russia attacked Ukraine.

Ode to Bubba - part the second

Another episode of Bubba Was Right. Today the NYT has an interview with Masha Gessen, Russophile and frequent talking head on the Snowflake 'news' programs. The first half is the discussion, while the back half is a list of books she recommends.

The book that fits the bill is 'Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources.' By Alexander Etkind. Polity, 2021.

It's not entirely limited to Russia, but I think it actually goes a very long way to explaining how Russia works.

Donbas is a significant source of fossil fuels. And lots of Russian speakers. Two kinds of resources.

About The Fat Lady - part the fourth

Well, here we go. Now Covid-π is up to 35%. We know how Covid-π has run wild in the UK, much of Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, and China. Buckle up Huckleberry.

Thought For The Day - 20 March 2022

The boys basketball games ran into the usual "60 Minutes" slot, so I was able to catch the second segment on usurious single-house rental fees. Turns out, the report focused on the Sunbelt states and young folks moving there for 'the lower taxes and business friendly environment'. The signal couple, of J-ville Fla. had been in 'their' rental house for about a year. The initial rental was $1,000/month, but was raised to $1,400 in the second. Simple arithmetic makes that a 40% increase in one year. The boy allowed as how he was able to 'negotiate' $1,300.

Neither the boy nor the girl noted that the lax taxing is unlikely to compensate for $4,800 in lost discretionary funds. She did say that the increase had impacted their 'lifestyle'. As someone once coined, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch".

The report also interviewed some real estate folks who claimed that the problem was that there hasn't been much home construction in the wake of the Great Recession. Bullshit. Geezers are dying off, freeing up lots of houses, they just happen to be, mostly, in the Blue states where the geezers died. (I can't wait for 'The Villages' to become a ghost town.) That's one reason the real estate moguls have been able to stock up. The problem is that the knucklehead young folks are flocking to states without proper infrastructure. Not to mention: not enough water in most of the southwestern said states, and more than enough from tornados and hurricanes in the southeastern states, and a chaotic electric grid in Texas.

And, by the bye, Boeing decided to stick it to their unionized Blue state workers by building a new plant in South Carolina to assemble their fancy new plastic 787. Hasn't worked out so well, in that the Rednecks can't seem to figure out how to make one that works.

American population cohorts continue to breed smaller numbers of young ones. The young folk, like the lemmings they are, move to the least viable parts of the country. The South uses more of available resources than any other area, including demands for energy.

It's Impossible

One of the benefits of my addiction to "How the Universe Works" is that, every now and again, one scientist or another will remind the viewer that Infinity has never been encountered in the wild. Or, to put it more nastily, when the equations spit out an Infinity, there has to be something wrong with the equations.

The exception, more or less, is that the Big Bang Singularity hasn't been rejected. Well, at least not out of hand.

Which brings us to today's NYT's Covid China graphs. Mentioned frequently in these here parts. If you toddle over there soon, you'll get to see another Impossible Infinity: if you look you'll see that Covid-ο/Covid-π have gone skyrocket steeper than previous countries. Naturally, for a population of 1.4 billion, the numbers aren't anywhere near what happened in nearly every other country. But, as one might expect (and most of the experts have pointed to), the zero-Covid policy (test, trace, isolate) that kept Covid small before Covid-ο left the population with minimal natural immunity and not much more from vaccination. Whether China gets to hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths because of these factors remains to be seen. Keep in mind that Covid-ο's characterization as 'just a cold' by the nutballs here in the West, is grounded in the facts of natural immunity (idiot anti-vaxxers getting sick and not dying) and vaccine immunity to prior variants protecting, more or less, large swaths of the populations.

White people wiped out on the order of 90% of Pre-Columbian New World populations with viruses. Not so common to The First Americans. Go look at the Spring 2020 graphs; I'm willing to bet a gonad that China will repeat that.

Here's the kicker: under the heading "Latest trends", it says "Deaths have increased by Infinity percent." Huh?? Had been close enough to zero, such that the calculator went into underflow when figuring the increase. Nobody noticed.

Ode to Bubba

Much is being made these days with regard to Vlad The Impaler's ambitions in Ukraine. Some take his 'Ukraine was always Russia, and must be again' at face value. Some assert that he's on the march to rebuild the USSR. Still others (my take, early on) that he's out to outdo the USSR, and restore Imperial Russia which encroached on Europe.

But, what's the point? As a country, Russia is by far the largest already. Why does it need more ground?? Well, the simple answer, to steal from Bubba Bill is, 'It's the resources, Stupid!' Most of Russia is frozen wasteland, and has from the beginning always pushed West into more temperate land. The Imperial Russia was that, USSR was that, the post-WWII Satellites was that. Ukraine has been know as the 'Breadbasket of Europe' for at least a century. Wheat doesn't grow so well on tundra. And, of course, you can't do nearly as much trade without year-round ports.

At the height of its expansion, the Russian Empire stretched across the northern portions of Europe and Asia and comprised nearly one-sixth of the earth's landmass; it occupied modern Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Finland, the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), the Baltic Republics (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), and significant parts of Poland and Turkey. The vast plains with few natural obstacles affected the Russian Empire's expansion into Eastern Europe and, beyond the Ural Mountains, to the Pacific Ocean, and even into Alaska and California in North America. However, with only a coastline on north of the Arctic Ocean, the Russian Empire continually searched for a warm-water outlet.
[my emphasis]

Note that Ukraine has such ports.

Here's the map of Russia by population density. It's not snuggled up to its Western borde as drastically as Canada is to the USofA, but nearly so. Were it not for petro resources, Russia would still be a third world country. Note the graphs: production and export didn't amount to much until the mid-1990s. Guess how that came about?

Egoistic empire building is the easy answer to Vlad The Impaler, but the real reason, as it has been for centuries, is natural resources. The kind you can actually use.

In The Mail

For better or worse, I keep getting come-ons for silly 'database' stuff. Got two in a row so far this week, and they both relate to 'relational' databases. Dr. Codd would be so depressed.

The first is from O'Reilly (the Tech site, not auto parts). It tries to make a case for a cross-SQL database stored proc language, although the author doesn't phrase it quite that way.

So database management systems and SQL, the language that is used to interact with them 99 percent of the time, were one of the very first applications of computers.
[it gets sillier from there]

That, as any reader here knows, is total bullshit; but kind of expected from the Kiddie Korp. To review: first there were sequential files, then there were indexed sequential files, then there were 'relative' files (all IBM jargon), then there was the quasi-relational database IDMS (the implementation of the network data model), then there was IMS (the IBM response with a purely hierarchical data model, damn you xml), then there was the Relational Model. That last was first implemented, in a commercial setting, not by IBM by what came to be known as Oracle. It wasn't nearly complete in any kind of meaningful faithfulness to the RM, but it was very different from hierarchy, and didn't do all that much. In typical Rightwing fashion, the first release was name 'V2'. Not kidding.

He then spends the rest of the interview lobbying for 'portable' non-SQL syntax; as if that were feasible. SQL, while far from what Dr. Codd expected of a database language (see: most anything by Chris Date on the issue), has, from the beginning, such a malleable spec that most anything any vendor called SQL qualified. The first 'standard' did explicitly that; grandfathered any product that asked. Moreover, so far as Codd was concerned, he didn't give a flying fuck how vendors implemented the RM, and said so. Not with the flying fuck syntax so far as I know. The point of the RM was that it is a user-level logical model of data, not a spec for engine construction. And, very importantly, the data language would work with any engine. That part hasn't worked out quite so well. Part of the problem is that most data management tasks are outside of the SQL committee purview, and are engine specific.

Over time, vendors saw demand for, and attempted to implement, additional data manipulation algorithms. The author gnaws on analytic functions, but there are bunches. Eventually, he makes mention of the fact that SQL database engines are proprietary entities; even the open source ones. And there remains the bifurcation between locking engines and MVCC engines, which affects how non-SQL procedures get implemented.

Toward the end, he allows:

Well, open source code was an absolute revolution in software development, so the same thing could happen for SQL developers — it could be a catalyst.

Of course, there's a vast difference between an open source coding language, like C, and an open source SQL engine; of which there are essentially two, and so far as I can tell, they don't interoperate all that well. Adding user-level syntax is doable, if not very fast, by offering it to the ANSI committee and, may be, in a few years it is added to the standard. The notion of C level analytic functions, as an example, that can be called by any SQL engine is absurd. On the other hand, the syntax of any desirable user level analytic function, as an example, can be codified. It's just not a walk in the park.

The other piece of mail was a job advert, again so it said, for a 'Data Scientist / Data Analyst'. Mentions SQL rather prominently

SQL expertise (including complex joins, grouping, aggregation, nested subqueries, and cursors)

Nested subqueries and cursors (damn your eyes) are, more or less, tied to the engine in question. Which, naturally, the blurb doesn't mention. And, really, would any self-respecting relationalist cower to cursors?? C'mon, man!! The Hell of row by agonizing row?

Thought For The Day - 9 March 2022

Well, I guess it's time to admit the truth. The GOP no longer exists. It's now the Grand Olde Neville Chamberlain Party. May they rot.

Thought For The Day - 9 March 2022

"But, but,... Vlad!!! You said I was going to have that nice apartment in Kyiv when we won, but you just blew it up!!"

Fifth Column

Dedicated reader will recall earlier missives where the notion that Covid-19, et seq, have been, on the whole, trading virulence for contagion. Not, of course, that the wee critter makes such a conscious decision. Not enough brains for that; it's just that the Darwin imperative (that the environment chooses the winners) rewards contagion. We know that the virulence end of the spectrum, SARS and MERS, have been very limited in time and space. They kill off hosts too quickly. Which led me to muse that the main branch of Covid-19, currently Covid-ο, will continue to spit out variants, and that the trade of virulence for contagion will continue.

Two aspects remain unknown:
- will the Covid-ο variant not only be the basis for future variants, but that this main branch will carry on with the less virulent individual mutations.
- will we also see, as with Covid-ε, the occasional more virulent, but limited, variant.

I'm betting yes to both, as dedicated reader will remember. Until last night, I found myself alone, wrt the professionals. But, then "60 Minutes" ran an update on Covid-19, and one of said professionals offered up that very possibility (the former, not yet the latter).

Here

Dr. Jon LaPook: Is it possible that the coronaviruses that now cause the common cold long ago began as fiercely, as dangerous, as deadly as SARS-CoV-2 and that, over time, it became weaker and weaker? Now we have the common cold?

Paul Duprex: Oh, I would say it's more than possible. I would say it's very likely. But we just have to wait and see where the virus ends up, and that's just good science. Scientists follow the virus, keep a close eye on it, and we understand how that virus changes over time and where it will go.

This is Dr. Duprex.

A truly intriguing possibilty that follows from this possiblity, is the reduction of the common cold. There are four coronaviruses identified with the common cold. Together they account for ~40% of colds. Add a fifth, and we could be looking at half of colds caused by a class of virus for which we can make vaccines. The major issue, beyond whether it's a waste of resources to vaccinate against 'just a cold', is whether Covid-19 will settle down to a more stable virus. We know that endemic flu is caused by many viruses, and the professionals have the burden of guessing which one(s) will be prevalent for the coming season, so that the flu shot can target those strains. The flu shot fails some seasons, not because the shot is bad, per se, but because the targeted strains turn out not to be the most prevalent. The vaccines work, but only if the targeted viruses appear. The same could end up being the case with Covid-19 in the future.

We surely know from Covid-ο that Covid-19 can spawn a variant, cycle up, and cycle down far faster than the drug industry can respond with a targeted vaccine. Luckily, Covid-δ didn't break the 'trade-off rule', by being not just a bit more virulent and contagious, but a lot of both. That's a bullet I'm not eager to dodge again.

About The Fat Lady - part the third

Well, well. Here's today's CDC page. And guess what? Covid-π is over 8%. From the original Fat Lady missive:

BA.2 has now been found from coast to coast and accounts for an estimated 3.9% all new infections nationally, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It appears to be doubling fast.

"If it doubles again to 8%, that means we're into the exponential growth phase and we may be staring at another wave of COVID-19 coming in the U.S.," says Samuel Scarpino, the manager director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation.
[my emphasis]

Up we go. Perfect time to drop mitigations.