Complex Systems' dependence on tiny changes in initial conditions

 I recently read a book (see below) that made me think of this podcast:

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-open-a-restaurant/

The podcast is entertaining, as almost all Freakonomics episodes have been, but cautionary: the part that got my attention is that on opening night that had one glitch in their process on opening night that goofed up most orders all night and produced chaos instead of yielding a smoothly running restaurant. The rest of the episode is worth listening to; I hope you enjoy it.

The book I read was this one:

It's about DevOps, the idea of deploying software more often and in smaller changes, and the book struck me as a fictional take on how the monolithic deployment strategy in use by some companies still today (I worked at such a company as recently as 2018) has back-office ramifications that are pernicious and generally not predictable. Here's the main author, Gene Kim, talking about some of this:

Enjoy!

Nathan Myhrvold says he has a fix for Climate Change

 The Freakonomics Team has a (relatively new podcast) starring the economist on the team: Steven Leavitt.

The title is "People I (Mostly) Admire"  and a recent one is a conversation with Nathan Mhyrvold.

Besides his career with Microsoft, Mhyrvold also has a Ph.D. in physics and is a partner is a recent company reimagining nuclear power, Terrapower.

Mhyrvold claims during the discussion that the Terrapower reactors could all by themselves displace all carbon generation in the entire world economy.

Unfortunately this isn't all that's required, but would be an excellent first step! You still have to remove the existing excess carbon in the atmosphere, now over 400 ppm ...

Did you enjoy the 2020 election? Here's another way it could work!

I guess some election nerds really like the "swing state drama" of the late counts in Pennsylvania and Georgia ... but Biden has wound up 5 million + in the popular vote, so ... why?

And then there was the entertaining aftermath:

Couldn't we skip all this hoohah and just use the popular vote?

Maybe:

 

 

I was surprised to see that my state, Washington, has already approved this act ... as have quite a few others totaling 196 electoral votes. This leaves only 74 electoral votes before the agreement goes into effect, rendering the Electoral College a thing of the past.

I can't wait!

Another podcast-killer (well, delayer), this time from Chuck Wendig

 I just finished this one:

I don't want to say much about the plot as it's a wild one, just:

• You thought 2020 politics have been bad? Try this book
• There are a broad range of wonderfully-rendered characters including some horribly evil bad guys
• It's very violent in spots ... be warned

I am now maybe a full week behind on my daily podcasts! The audiobook is 32+ hours long.

Five stars!

Another fabulous audiobook

 I just finished this one:

This is #5 of The Murderbot Diaries, which starts with 4 novellas:

All Systems Red

Artificial Condition:

Rogue Protocol

Exit Strategy

Network Effect is the first full-length novel and was reported to stand alone ... so I tried it with my Audible subscription.

What a pleasure! If you like space-opera-type action, vivid characters including some smart-aleck AIs, interesting bad guys / social issues ... Put it this way, I am a week behind on podcasts getting to the end of this.

Five stars! 

Why I support "Medicare for All"

 I have been mostly a contract computer programmer for the last 10+ years. Instead of their being a reasonable alternative health care alternative for that period, I've mostly just been buying health insurance with each job; usually this is less than $200 per month.

But this year I've been out of work since July 20, and once again the silly little company I was working for didn't offer COBRA, the law requiring most companies to offer a continuation of coverage to employees after they leave jobs.

This is the second time this has happened in 4 years; in this case the crummy little plan the employer offered was something I might have passed on anyway. But it's a stupid patchwork sort of system that is no match for the issue of the day:

If we have this underlying medical insurance for everybody, then I am not left without insurance any time ... 

But won't this break the bank?

No. I recently read a book on Modern Monetary Theory that made sense to me. I think we're plenty rich enough in the U.S. to do this without sparking inflation.

Readers (all two of you)? What do you think?

An interesting read on the "impossible burger" track

 I just finished this one:

The story is of a little company called JUST foods (formerly Hampton Creek). They became somewhat famous after getting into a spat with food behemoth Unilever on their Just Mayo eggless mayo product:

They initially argued that it wasn't marketed as 'mayonnaise' just as 'mayo' ... but finally organized a social media David vs. Goliath campaign to get the lawsuit dropped and Just Mayo got to stay on the shelves:

What about the billion dollar burger? JUST isn't going the same route as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, both of whom are creating meaty-tasting meat substitutes using plants. 

Instead, they're trying to grow actual meat cells in the lab, which is where the first success in this field came from, the $330,000 burger in 2013.

Costs are coming down quickly, though, and JUST plans to have an entry ....

I enjoyed this book very much; it was well written and the story moved along crispy. Four stars!

Costco has Wagyu burgers from New Zealand!

 Costco is terrific!

They had something new last week when I was in there: Wagyu beef from New Zealand!

75% lean, 25% fat too, so delicious on the grill! You get 12 for $19.99 -- $1.67 each!

They also have the more rounded looking patties on Costco.com for $119.99! 

 Bon apetit!

A compelling story from World War Two's U-boat war

My friend Lucy and I have been exchanging reading material over our summer birthdays for maybe 20 years. This year the top of my list was this one:

It focuses on the Wrens, a group of young women tasked with figuring out a strategy to keep German U-Boats from starving Britain into submission.

A quote from the book:

In December 1939, researchers from the University of Cambridge had tested whether Britain could survive with only domestic food production if U-boats forced an end to all imports. After subjecting themselves to a tough regime of work and a minimal diet, the researchers and their volunteers found  that they could survive, while  noting a 'remarkable' increase in flatulence ..

Fuel and clothing were worse .... rationed by 1941.

The solution: a game. The idea was to give sea captains the same look at the battle space they might get at the helm of their ships:

The game helped Britain come up with anti-U-boat tactics that turned the tide and kept the essential convoy goods coming throughout the war.

This is my favorite nonfiction read of 2020 so far. Five stars!

Audiobooks Vs. Podcasts: two extremes

There has been an explosion in good podcasts recently; there are enough out that they tend to make my Audible subscription recede into the background when I don't have a super-compelling audiobook at the top of the stack.

A recent pair of examples:

It took me a while to get into this one ... it's a very somber war story. It's based in some future where there is faster-than-light travel and some part of humanity has splintered off and become "savages" with different/greater capabilities and who think it's their duty to wipe out the previous version of humanity.

OK ... I gave this enough time to get to the moderately-compelling last part of the book: "Colonel Marx" is revealed to be ... well, I won't spoil the story by giving this one but overall ... well, 3 stars. I paused every time I had a marginally compelling podcast to listen to.

A vivid contrast:

This is the end of a trilogy that starts with The Collapsing Empire ... the first two of these are compelling enough, but not a blockbuster like this one. I stopped most podcast listening and even stayed up later than usual to listen to the end of this one ... one of the most fun endings of a novel I've experienced in a long time! (Even better than Scalzi's Android's Dream!)  Five stars!

Since I finished this two nights ago I have been catching up on podcasts, notably Marketplace, Freakonomics and Radiolab ...

I started "rereading" (via audiobook) the first of the trilogy to see if the first two were more fabulous than I remembered ... not so far. I wouldn't be surprised if everything was to set up the fabulous third book, sneaky and talented Scalzi!

RoundUp (glyphosate) causes cancer ... but don't look for it on the label!

The New York Times published this today ... Looks to me that the preponderance of the evidence shows that Roundup (glyphosate) causes cancer:

Part of the agreement is that Bayer (owner of Roundup) can't be forced to put a cancer warning on the label.

That's why I'm telling you ... OK?

How the gold standard in our minds messes up our economy

For decades the U.S. and other countries in the developed world were on the gold standard, making sure that they didn't issue any more paper money than their holdings in gold could support. In the U.S. the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce, so you couldn't inflate the currency very much at all before investors around the world cleaned you out of your gold reserves.

The gold standard sounds good to many, having money that's "based on something" rather than "just paper." But the effects of the gold standard are a real drag on a modern economy. If you need to do some things that are up for the U.S. right now:

• $1 trillion infrastructure investment ... just a start, according to many experts, proposed again today by Trump

• $2 trillion or more for supporting the country through the pandemic that is "just getting started" according to many public health experts

• All the regular trillions for all the regular stuff that goes on in the U.S. as normal ...

If you start to bump up against the gold in your vault, where do you cut at a time like this?

I just read an excellent book that explains the explains the situation in detail:

Fortunately we ditched the gold standard in the U.S. for good in 1972 ... unfortunately not many noticed how different a "fiat currency" regime such as those now in place in the U.S., Great Britain and Japan, among others, operates:

• There is no fixed quantity of money ... the central banks (Federal Reserve in the U.S.) can create as much money as needed by changing accounting entries in their computers
• The only real limit is inflation, and as we in the U.S. have seen the last few years, the economy can take a whole ton of extra money sloshing around it with "quantitative easing" and all the money that Congress and the Fed threw into the mix since the 2008 financial crisis ... no inflation, not even the 2% target that the Fed says it wants!
• There's no reason for a fiat currency country EVER to default on a payment ...
• And certainly not a social security payment, which is supposedly "underfunded for the long term" and blah blah ... not so.

Dr. Kelton was on Senator Bernie Sanders' staff for some years and lately has reportedly been consulting with the Biden campaign ... Let me end this post by letting you hear from Dr. Kelton herself:

Michael Lewis interviews "Inner Game of Tennis" author

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors; his books include The Big Short, Liars Poker, and several other excellent titles.

Michael Lewis

His podcast, though Against the Rules, has emerged from the large pack of podcasts now in existence and now is one of the best I know of.

This season he's focusing on the "rise of coaches" and these are so far even better than his first (excellent) season on "referees."

The episode "The Coach in Your Head" is an interview with Timothy Gallwey, the author of this book:

I bought a copy of this book shortly after it came out and appreciated it for what it was (tennis instruction as I was playing in those days), but what I didn't know was that Gallwey was inundated with requests from corporate executives and others to "do what you did for the tennis players."

The coaching stories discussed in this episode of the podcast are fascinating, from corporate executives

To firefighters:

To his daughter, Dixie, trying to improve her hitting so college softball coaches would notice her:

Probably not Dixie but I couldn't find a picture of her

Anyway, fascinating stuff ... five stars!

Modern job hunting hacks 2020

... is published on Medium ... Thanks for reading!

Excellent New Yorker this week!

This week's New Yorker:

... is the best complete issue I remember in quite a while. The stories include:

• Nick Paumgarten on various traders' take on the pandemic, including an Australian who bought a bunch of out-of-the money calls on an N95 mask maker ....
• Rebecca Mead on Harry and Meghan's exit
• Michael Specter on Anthony Fauci and his long career
• Jane Mayer on Mitch McConnell
• Jerome Groopman on surgically implanted devices and their lack of regulatory oversight

I got my copy for free via the RBDigital app, which I've recommended here before. What are you waiting for?

Compelling Coronavirus Coverage from RadioLab

RadioLab has been running a series on the Coronavirus that's been very compelling, especially the latest one:

Dr. Tatiana Prowell of Johns Hopkins

The interview with Dr. Prowell is extraordinary! It's in the latest episode, Dispatch 3, about 1/2 way through the episode (though the whole episode is worthwhile, as is all Radiolab content!)

The idea she's discussing is plasma donation from those have recovered from coronavirus to treat the currently infected!

Fascinating and hopeful!

My latest afib (and general health) regimen

A couple of years ago I gave the list of supplements I was taking to keep afib under control.

One I was taking then:

This became unavailable for quite a while so I substituted copper and zinc, two minerals it includes. I get enough calcium, vitamin D and magnesium from other sources, food and supplement-wise.

Then finally Twinlab got its production back on line and I got a bottle ... but:

I had a relatively mild episode, fortunately, but I wondered WTF and through a tiny bit of research found this:

High Levels of Calcium Interfere With Potassium Uptake In Cells

Harrumph. So the Tri-Boron Plus went back on the shelf.

So now my regimen (no more afib episodes and no cold since the one I had in March 2019):

• Biocardiozyme Forte 4 per day    Biotin Research -- only officially available through a local provider
• Potassium 99mg   6 per day  Vitamin Shoppe
• Magnesium 400mg 2 per day Nature Made via Costco
• Vitamin D   1000iu  4 per day Nature Made via Costco
• Vitamin C  1 gram 1 x per day though considering going to 2-3 grams
• Kelp 600mcg iodine or so per day, split into 2 doses
• Selenium 200mcg 
• Copper + Zinc 1 tab per day 

And I'm working from home and mostly staying home keeping the Other Thing at bay:

Be well!

Coronavirus yields skipped card payments ... but you have to call and ask!

A recent article in the New York Times mentions some banks waiving payment penalties (some even skipping interest charges) in the wake of the coronavirus.

The waivers:

• Goldman Sachs with its Apple Card and Marcus loans
• Capital One
• American Express

Still charges interest but allows you to skip a payment:

• Discover

You pretty much have to call them all to get this. I got ahold of Capital One, American Express and Discover all this evening (Saturday) ... American Express said a late fee ding would appear in the account but would be removed within 7 days. Discover did mention that they continue to charge interest, and I got Capital One in only about 10 minutes after failing the last couple of days, but they just moved my existing payment from April 4 to May 4. Wahoo!

Let's all keep washing our hands!

Atul Gawande on the end of life

I have been reading Atul Gawande in the New Yorker for years, but this is the first book of his that I read:

It was terrific!

I'm still young enough that I hadn't thought much about the issues he brings up:

• Nursing homes and why they're generally awful
• Assisted living's initial promise and how it's been adulterated
• What happens when you add animals to an elder-care facility
• How his grandfather lived to 110 without any of US-style elder care
• Why everyone is different in choosing what a desirable end of life is

Recommended to anybody who's mortal ... i.e. all of us! Five stars!

Dylan Ratigan bitten by a tick, alas

I heard about the tick-borne meat allergy on this podcast:

I heard another podcast episode, Truth or Skepticism, with Tom Sosnoff and Dylan Ratigan, where Ratigan reports the meat allergy after having been bitten by the lone star tick.

The tick in question:

If you get bitten by one of these, you're then restricted to fish, chicken and Impossible meats. Beware!