Waiting Game
September 18, 2020
An Eternal Second is 6.5 Zettayears (Zy) in an eternity of eternities
September 11, 2020Alexander Atkins has an interesting post up at his blog about the literary treatment of “eternity”.
……. The first to address this question, were two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (better known as the Brothers Grimm), German cultural researchers, philologists, and lexicographers that wrote a seminal collection of folktales titled Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), first published in 1812; a second volume was published in 1815. ……. But what interests us today, in discerning the length of eternity, is a lesser known story — the insightful, charming and timeless tale of the Shepherd Boy. A king summons a shepherd, who is famous for his tremendous wisdom, and challenges him to answer three questions.
The third question is: “how many seconds of time are there in eternity?” He answers: “In Lower Pomerania [northern Poland, at the southern tip of the Baltic Sea] is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.”
Even shepherds are subject to arithmetic.
In Grimms’ story the mountain would have a volume of 15.625 miles3 or about 65 x 109 cubic meters. Assuming a density of 2000 kg/ m3 (or 2 x 106 g/m3), the mountain would weigh about 130 x 1015 g. Assuming further that the bird pecked 2 mg each time, the mountain would disappear after 65 x 1018 visits. Since each visit would occur every 100 years, the mountain would last 65 x 1020 years. And since 1 Zettayear is 1 x 1021 years the mountain would last 6.5 Zettayears (Zy). And that would then be one second of Eternal Time. The curious thing is that one Eternal Year would have to consist of 31.55 million Eternal Seconds and thus
1 Eternal Year = 205,124 Yottayears where a Yottayear (Yy) is 1 x 1024 years
Eternity itself is, of course, endless even if an Eternal Year is bounded by the Diamond Mountain.
But we must not forget that for the word “eternity” plurals are allowed, and the deeper truth is that many eternities, each endless, are possible. In fact, there may well be an eternity of eternities.
Oxford Medieval Mysteries by Ann Swinfen
September 2, 2020
I only discovered the Oxford Medieval Mysteries by Ann Swinfen sometime last year. There are six books and I devoured the series. I found the mystery tales centered around a Medieval book seller wonderfully evocative. Of course what they evoke is only a picture of what it might have been like after the Black Death. The six books comprising the Oxford Medieval Mysteries, are set in the fourteenth century and recount the tales of bookseller (and book producer) Nicholas Elyot in the days before printing. He is a young widower with two small children, and is faced by murder and dastardly deeds in the troubled world around Oxford University traumatized by the Black Death. I found the detailed picture of everyday life very well researched and remarkably convincing. Ann Swinfen was a mathematician, a historian and an author. Perhaps it was that combination which makes her tales so believable.
I was eagerly looking forward to there being a seventh in the series but have just found out that Ann Swinfen died 2 years ago.
A strange sense of disappointment and of great loss.
Dr. Ann Swinfen (b. 1937 – d. 2018)
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching in English Literature. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public, which ran for fifteen years. …..
Her blog now seems to have been discontinued but from the parts that I have seen, her research into medieval life seems meticulous. This is an extract from a post she wrote just a month before she died.
Medieval Books
Until Nicholas Elyot, bookseller in fourteenth century Oxford, walked into my life, I had no more than a hazy knowledge of medieval books. The general impression I had gained, like most other people (I would guess), was that medieval books were limited in number, restricted as to contents, and confined to religious institutions and a very few royal and aristocratic houses.
Part of the problem lies in the terminology. ‘Medieval’ is a loosely defined term at the best of times, equivalent to ‘pertaining to the Middle Ages’, which can be extended to cover all the centuries from the end of the Roman Empire to the dawn of early modern Europe, another imprecise date. However, for our purposes, let us take it as beginning in England with the Norman Conquest and petering out in the Tudor period. As the new technology of printing was introduced toward the end of this period, in the late fifteenth century, I am interested in looking at medieval books before printing, the kind of books Nicholas sold and, increasingly, produced.
It is clear from the sheer numbers of exquisite medieval books which still survive in libraries, museums, and private collections that this is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. If we take into account the destruction wreaked by time, mice, damp, insects, and the savage attacks by zealots like Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell in England and Savonarola in Italy, the original number of medieval books must have been much, much greater than those which survive. The number was not so limited after all. Accustomed as we are to modern printing, it is difficult for us to grasp that every one of these books was handwritten, but a monastic scribe or a secular scrivener, working day after day, could produce a remarkable amount of work.
The content of medieval books covered a very wide range. In the first place, we can easily divide them into two main groups – those intended as practical and business records and those intended for scholarly or leisure reading. The former group includes all those manorial records which are full of fascinating details about the buying and selling of land, rents, the employment of servants, crops, game, household expenses (three yards of silk for a christening gown, twenty hogsheads of canary wine…) and the like. It also includes the chartularies of the monastic houses which may cover similar details but more particularly the gifts of benefactors and the rights and privileges of the institution. The surviving records of government run to thousands and thousands. As time passed and the merchant class expanded and grew rich, their businesses required detailed record keeping as well. Many of these are not ‘books’ as we would recognise them, for they were more conveniently kept as scrolls, so that additional pieces could be sewn on as required. ……..
I am trying to retrieve more of her posts but that will have to wait for another day.
At least 44 vaccines under Phase 1 -3 trials
September 1, 2020There may never be a vaccine.
A vaccine may apparently be developed but long term effects will be unknown.
The most plausible scenario is that there may be promising vaccine available for mass usage, and with a reasonable level of safety, in the summer of 2021.
RAPS has an illuminating post detailing the various vaccines under trial and their status:
Researchers worldwide are working around the clock to find a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts estimate that a fast-tracked vaccine development process could speed a successful candidate to market in approximately 12-18 months – if the process goes smoothly from conception to market availability.
To date, just one coronavirus vaccine has been approved. Sputnik V – formerly known as Gam-COVID-Vac and developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow – was approved by the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation on 11 August. ……….
The pandemic has created unprecedented public/private partnerships. Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a collaboration of several US federal government departments including Health and Human Services and its subagencies, Agriculture, Energy and Veterans Affairs and the private sector. Within OWS, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has partnered with more than 18 biopharmaceutical companies to accelerate development of drug and vaccine candidates for COVID-19 (ACTIV). The COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN) has also been established, which combines clinical trial networks funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID): the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN), HIV Prevention Trials Network (HPTN), Infectious Diseases Clinical Research Consortium (IDCRC), and the AIDS Clinical Trials Group.
The COVAX initiative, part of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, is being spearheaded by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and WHO. The goal is to work with vaccine manufacturers to offer low-cost COVID-19 vaccines to countries. Currently, CEPI’s candidates from companies Inovio, Moderna, CureVac, Institut Pasteur/Merck/Themis, AstraZeneca/University of Oxford, Novavax, University of Hong Kong, Clover Biopharmaceuticals, and University of Queensland/CSL are part of the COVAX initiative. There are further candidates being evaluated in the COVAX Facility from the United States and internationally.
The US government has chosen three vaccine candidates to fund for Phase 3 trials under Operation Warp Speed: Moderna’s mRNA-1273, The University of Oxford and AstraZeneca’s AZD1222, and Pfizer and BioNTech’s BNT162. Members of ACTIV have suggested developing safe controlled human infection models (CHIMs) for human trials could take 1-2 years. A sponsor would need to provide data from placebo-controlled trials indicating their vaccine is at least 50% effective against COVID-19 in order to be authorized for use, according to FDA guidance issued and effective 30 June.
The 44 candidates ( as of 31st August 2020) are:
AAVCOVID, Ad26.COV2-S, Ad5-nCoV, AdCOVID, Adenovirus-based vaccine, AdimrSC-2f, Adjuvant recombinant vaccine candidate, AZD1222/Covishield, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) live-attenuated vaccine, bacTRL-Spike, BBIBP-CorV, BNT162, ChAd-SARS-CoV-2-S, CoronaVac, COVAX-19, Covaxin, gp96-based vaccine, GRAd-COV2, GRAd-COV2, HaloVax, HDT-301, Ii-Key peptide COVID-19 vaccine, Inactivated vaccine, INO-4800, LineaDNA, LUNAR-COV19, Molecular clamp vaccine, mRNA lipid nanoparticle (mRNA-LNP) vaccine, mRNA-1273, mRNA-based vaccine, mRNA-based vaccine, NVX-CoV2373, PittCoVacc, Plant-based adjutant COVID-19 vaccine candidate, Protein subunit vaccine, Recombinant vaccine 1, Recombinant vaccine 2, SCB-2019, Self-amplifying RNA vaccine, Sputnik V, T-COVIDTM, V590, V591, ZyCoV-D
Covid candidate vaccines (pdf)
Parts of Sweden burn while the Social Democrats fiddle
August 29, 2020I was recruited to Sweden in the 1980s and stayed on. That makes me an immigrant, now a Swedish national of Indian origin, but where my “Indian culture”, in everyday life, is subordinated to the dominant, mainstream, “Swedish culture”. However my presence here probably does contribute – even if in very small measure – to bringing some little parts of my culture into the evolving mainstream.
In recent times, it has become very clear that parallel cultures have splintered society. Criminal (mainly immigrant) gangs have been running rampant in some parts of large cities in Sweden. There have created no-go areas with their own rules and social hierarchies. Cars are torched every weekend and kids are knifed as initiation events. Rival gangs bomb each others hangouts. They set up their own checkpoints, indulge in shoot-outs with rival gangs and even torture victims with methods that ISIS would be proud of. It may not be due to their religion, but I perceive Muslim immigrants as being hugely over-represented among the criminal gangs.
It is my contention that over the last 50 years the liberal left in Sweden (and in Europe) has not had the common sense (or the courage) to distinguish between multi-ethnic and multicultural. A multi-ethnic population needs a unifying culture to form a coherent society. Having multiple cultures without an over-riding culture only gives a fractured society. Having many cultures present as sub-cultures enriches society but multiculturalism tries to deny that one must dominate. Promoting multiculturalism prevents integration, and together with a multi-ethnic community can only give multiple, parallel, abrasive, communities which makes a fractured society inevitable.
The future of Europe is multi-ethnic but not multicultural
I have for long held the position that a society needs a single overriding culture to be a society. All cultures are dynamic and change as times change and as new groups may be assimilated into it. The new culture inevitably contains elements of what new communities bring to the table and the original culture of that community – in some adjusted form – can continue as a sub-culture, but subordinate to the overriding culture. What is not tenable is the idea that a single society can remain a single society when it is splintered into a collection of many parallel cultures (and which are not subordinate to an overriding culture). It has been the misguided, do-gooding, politically correct approach of the “liberal left” in Europe which has actively encouraged new communities to maintain the cultures of where they came from and remain separate to the existing, prevailing culture. There has been little emphasis on getting new communities to assimilate and a far greater emphasis on separateness. This approach has also given rise to the fear of demanding assimilation from new communities. That has in turn led – and not very surprisingly – to the immigrant ghettos, the no-go areas and large parts of the new population who cannot even speak the local language (into the 3rd generation in some cases).
I have a theory that part of the problem in Sweden is that governments have been so ashamed, and so afraid, of Sweden’s past role in promoting Race Biology and eugenics, that they have overcompensated and been blind to the folly of multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic community. Many of the leading politicians (including Social Democrats) of that time were part of the Eugenics Network which provided the Nazis with the academic legitimacy and support they needed for their own Race Biology theories. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were among the leading Social Democrats who supported eugenics but so also did George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and Leon Trotsky. The Sami and the Roma (rather than the Jews) were the main targets for Swedish eugenics.
The collective Swedish amnesia about sterilisation is difficult to explain. From the outset it was viewed as an integral and widely-proclaimed part of the Swedish welfare programme. … The Swedish commitment to eugenic sterilisation was especially emphasised in the widely-known writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal; their book on the Crisis of the Population Question of 1934 achieved best-seller status, and was translated into English in 1940. The sequel, Alva Myrdal’s Nation and Family, appeared in English in 1941. Both books forcefully argued the case for sterilisation on eugenic grounds, and the second described the work of the Swedish Royal Commission on Population, which produced a report on sterilisation in 1936. This led to strengthening of the sterilisation law, as a consequence of which the number of sterilisations increased and peaked shortly after World War II.
Though the Swedish eugenics movement started in 1909 and was most active before WW2, Sweden’s sterilisation policies continued all the way till 1976 under a series of Social Democrat governments.
Between 1934 and 1976, when the Sterilisation Act was finally repealed, 62,000 people, 90 percent of them women, were sterilised. 15-year-old teenagers were sterilised for “crimes” such as going to dance halls. One woman was sterilised in 1960 for being in a motorcycle gang. Orphans were sterilised as a condition of their release from children’s homes. Others were pinpointed on the basis of local neighbourhood gossip and personal grudges. Some were targeted because of their “low intelligence”, being of mixed race, being gypsies, or for physical defects.
Sweden’s Race Biology Institute included leading academics and politicians and played a crucial role in selling Eugenics not only to Germany but throughout Europe and the USA. (The origins of Planned Parenthood, for example, in the US lie with Margaret Sanger and eugenics and a desire to control black fertility).
The eugenics network consisted mainly of academics from a variety of disciplines, but with medicine and biology dominating; connections with German scientists who would later shape Nazi biopolitics were strong. The paper ……. also outlines the eugenic vision of the institute’s first director, Herman Lundborg. In effect the network, and in particular Lundborg, promoted the view that politics should be guided by eugenics and by a genetically superior elite. The selling of eugenics in Sweden is an example of the co-production of science and social order.
Whether the overcompensation for the past eugenics connections is the main reason for promoting multiculturalism or not, the fact remains that Swedish cities are now paying the price for the stupidity of promoting multiculturalism in a multi-ethnic community.
The world adds 1,000 new murderers every day
August 28, 2020Of all the causes of deaths, violent deaths probably account for 2 -3%. Intentional homicides globally account for less than 1% of all deaths, though in some countries it can be as high as 10%.
Some murderers kill more than one person. Say 2 of every 10 murderers kills two (10 murderers = 12 murders). That gives us 410,000 fresh murderers every year. Let us further suppose that murderers are 10 times more likely to be murdered than the general population. Even if we take the worst country homicide rate of 50/100,000 and assume that murderers are killed at the rate of 500/100,000, this only rids us of 2,050 murderers annually. The clearance rate of recorded homicides globally is probably less than 50%. However, clearance rates don’t affect the number of murderers in our midst. Execution rates are so low as to not be significant in reducing the growing population of the world’s murderers.
The incontrovertible reality is that we add over 1,000 murderers to the population every day.
Estimating how many murderers are around is more uncertain, but the arithmetic says it should currently be around 25 million (35 / 100,000 of population). To put that in perspective, any cricket match with 30,000 spectators would include 10 murderers in the crowd.
So how does a life sentence for Brenton Tarrant serve anyone?
August 26, 2020UPDATE!
Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch terrorist, was today sentenced to spend the rest of his natural life in prison without any possibility of parole.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said there was no reason to speak his name any more and he deserved to have a lifetime of “complete and utter silence”.
The sentence serves no one.
I can only conclude that abolishing the death penalty is a form of sanctimonious cowardice.
The Christchurch terrorist (51 killed, 49 injured) has pleaded guilty and will probably be sentenced to a life sentence this week. He is 29 years old. If he gets parole after 17 years he will be out on somebody’s streets in 2037 at the age of 46. If not, he is going to cost New Zealand a great deal. He will either be subject to the righteous wrath of other prisoners or he will live in isolation. With the expected security to protect him from others in prison, the total cost of his imprisonment is likely to be more than 50 million dollars. If he gets transferred somehow to a prison in his native Australia, the cost will not be any less.
A minimum of 17 years is required for a murder committed as part of a terrorist act, and Tarrant has admitted to 51 such murders (among other crimes). …….
To lock Tarrant up in perpetuity will be very expensive. He is currently costing just over NZ$4,930 a day due to the extra levels of security, considerably more than the average of about $338 for a standard prisoner. The next two years alone will cost New Zealand taxpayers about $3.6 million. The final sum for the 29-year-old terrorist will depend on how long he lives and the ongoing level of security he requires. If he has a normal life span the cost may be in the tens of millions per decade.
He has been variously called a maggot, an animal, less than human, not human ……..
What then is the virtue in keeping him alive?
By what scale does his life weigh heavier than those of his 51 victims? Before any of those 51 were killed, it would have been right and perfectly acceptable if an armed guard had shot the terrorist dead. However, after the 51 were dead, capital punishment is no longer acceptable. Clearly the lives of the 51 no longer count once they are dead.
And where went justice?
No mask needed, just don’t breathe
August 25, 2020There are some who believe that epidemiology is a science. Others believe it is an art and yet others that it is the study of social behaviour based on gut-feel and science.
Whatever it is, it is not settled science.
An enveloped virus such as the Wuhan virus can survive for up to 2 months in a refrigerated corpse.
In studies looking at how bird flu (avian influenza virus, an enveloped virus) survives in chicken carcasses, 90% of the virus was inactivated in around 15 days when the carcass was left at room temperature. But if the carcass was held at refrigerator temperatures (4C/40F), the virus lasted 4.5 times longer—that’s more than two months.
Losing sleep
August 24, 2020I have yet to find a political party which represents my views.
But of all the various parties from left to right, I find I am diametrically opposed to the various green parties on almost every issue. They have almost cornered the market on stupidity.
There’s carbon and there is organic
August 19, 2020Organic chemistry is the study of the structure, properties, composition, reactions, and preparation of compounds containing carbon.
Carbon, at 4,600 ppm (by mass) is the 4th most abundant element in the Milky Way galaxy after Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen.
The abundance of the element Carbon on Earth is not accurately known and estimates vary from 300 ppm to 1,800 ppm (by mass).
For historical, but no good logical, reasons, some carbon-containing compounds (e.g., carbonate anion salts carbon dioxide and cyanide salts), are not classified as organic compounds.
The most abundant organic compounds on Earth are the carbohydrates, and Cellulose is the most plentiful of the carbohydrates.
Carbon is the primary component of all known life on Earth, representing approximately 45–50% of all dry biomass.
Carbon chauvinism is the assumption that if life exists elsewhere in the Universe, it will also be carbon-based.
All fossil fuels are organic compounds containing carbon.
And then there is organic farming.
The k2p blog 