I gave DavidS the abbreviated version of my public and friends-only posts about him over the past week, because that's what I do now, I talk about my emotions with people in person,

He listened respectfully and caringly and said that I'm overthinking this,

But I sit here thinking the only reason I saw him today was because I DID overthink this, ( Read more... )

"Americans increasingly see those they disagree with as the enemy"

A friend was telling me last week he got into an argument with some people on Facebook about a TV show, and they "defriended" him over it. Good to hear things haven't changed since I quit Facebook ( Read more... )

We won't be able to tell anything useful about COVID's spread or death rate until after the holiday data hole ends in early Janaury -- testers, lab technicians, data entry clerks, and statisticians usually get the holidays off. Last year the data stream didn't catch up until the Tuesday after New Year's. This time the tabulations will catch up on ( Read more... )

Two Pfizer shots 35% effective, with a booster 75% effective, against Omicron -- UK data. That's a 20% drop from effectiveness against Delta.

And between 2x-3x as contagious. Cases doubling every 2-3 days.

Can we please update the shots now, world?

Yeah, in practice science deals with uncertainty, it's not as tidy as those equations we learn in our physics and chemistry textbooks, and science progresses via a system of falsification - showing that previous theories are false ( Read more... )

A big part of the fascination I've had for the COVID pandemic is how much data we have about it, and the ability to model it. Modeling the course of the pandemic became more complex over time, as human behaviors cycled between shutting everything down and pretending it isn't happening at all. Then we started vaccinating people, but then we began ( Read more... )

One of the weird things to me about viral social media is that lots of people become obsessed about individual cases that may or may not reflect statistical models of the entire population. This one person was raped. This one animal was killed. This one human was killed. These viral stories represent, to me, the primacy of anecdotes over data. ( Read more... )