Robert Buxbaum is a life-long engineer, a product of New York's Brooklyn Technical High School, New York's Cooper Union to Science and Art, and Princeton University where he got a PhD in Chemical Engineering. From 1981 to 1991 he was a professor of Chemical Engineering at Michigan State, and now runs an engineering shop in Oak Park, outside of Detroit, Michigan. REB Research manufactures and sells hydrogen generation and purification equipment. He's married with 3 wonderful children who, he's told, would prefer to not be mentioned except by way of complete, unadulterated compliments. As of 2016, he's running to be the drain commissioner/ water resources commissioner of Oakland county.
Rents in New York and San Francisco are far less expensive than before the pandemic. It’s been a boon for the suburbs, the south and the midwest, one that’s likely to continue unless Biden steps in. Before the pandemic, rent in San Francisco for a one bedroom apartment averaged over $3700 per month. New York rent was similar. People paid it because these cities offered robust business and entertainment, the best restaurants and bars, the best salons and clubs, the best music, museums, universities, and theater. New York was Wall Street, Madison Avenue and Broadway; San Francisco was Silicon valley and Hollywood. These cities were the place to be, and then the pandemic hit.
Post COVID-19, the benefits of big city life are gone, and replaced by negatives. The great restaurants are mostly gone; the museums, theaters, and salons, shut along with Hollywood. Wall Street and Madison Ave have gone on-line, as have the universities. If you can work and study from anywhere, why do it from an expensive hotbed of Corona.
People of means left the big cities with the first lockdowns. Wall Street moved on line, with offices in New Jersey, and many followed, along with college students, and hotel and restaurant workers. New York’s unemployment rate increased from 4-5% to over 9.5% today, among the highest rates in the nation, 9.5%. It would be higher if not for the departures. Crime spiked; the murder rate doubled. To keep people from leaving, landlords have lowered rents and many will now forgive a month or two of rent to keep apartments full with some rent coming in and an illusion of exclusivity. This is good for tenants, but tough on landlords.
Detroit rent history, 2014 to January 2021. Rents fell a lot on election day, maybe because of Biden, or because we think the pandemic is over.
As things stand, the suburbs and smaller cities are the beneficiaries of the exodus. Among the cities benefiting the most are cities in the south and mid-west: states that are more open and are relatively low cost: Phoenix, Oakland, Cleveland, St. Petersburg, and even Detroit. Detroit’s rents were already moving up as auto manufacturing returned from Mexico, see chart. Between early 2017 and October 2020, they went from $500/month to $1250/month for a 1 bedroom apartment, according to Zumper. Detroit rents fell after election day, but are still up 20% on the year. The influx of wealthier working folk to Detroit is welcome to some, unwelcome to tenants who find their rents are raised. I think it’s is a sign of a healthy economy that people follow life-quality, and that rents follow people. Our landlords are happy, but there are a lot of Detroit renters who are not
Joe Biden has promised to step in to make things right for everyone. He promised to have the government pay people’s rent so they don’t get evicted. I presume that means paying about double to people in NY and SF as to those in Detroit. He claims he will shutter smokestack industries too, and create the good jobs of the future in computers and high tech. It’s a nice claim. I suspect it’s a bailout of big city landlords, but what would I know. I suspect that the US would be better off if Joe just sat back and let New York rents fall, while allowing Detroit to gentrify. Detroiters need not worry about rents getting too pricy here. We’ve1500 shootings per year, that 15 times more than NYC, per capita. Unless that ratio changes, Detroit will continue to be the lower rent city.
There are two remarkable things about shootings in Detroit. One is how many there are. About 1500 Detroiters last year, about 0.2% of the city’s population. The other remarkable tidbit is that only about 1/5 of them died. More specifically, there were 1173 non fatal shootings. There were also 327 criminal homicides, but many shooting deaths in Detroit are non-criminal, as in self-defense, or police interventions, and there are also many criminal homicides that are done with knives or poison. Put this together and it seems that only about 1/5 or those shot, perhaps 327 out of 1500 total. The headline from June 21, 2020 reads: 1 fatal, 11 non-fatal shootings in Detroit overnight. You almost feel like getting these guys marksmanship lessons, but there seems to be more at play.
Even in photography, a fair percentage of shooters miss simple head shots.
The number of shootings are way up this year, and drugs – alcohol is to blame, here and in other cities. People have lost their jobs to COVID and globalization, more in Detroit than in most cities, but the government has offered checks that are used for alcohol and drugs. Most Detroit shootings begin as arguments that turn violent. There is also some gang shooting, enhanced by a bout of prison releases, because of COVID.
Drugs and alcohol help explain the low death rate. It’s hard to shoot straight when you’re drunk or stoned, and hard even if you’re not, as Alexander Hamilton found. In Detroit, many of these hit were hit in non-vital areas (I tell folks to avoid those areas :). But another part of the low death rate is lower caliber bullets. Military caliber bullets were in short supply this year, and as best as I was able to tell, a fair number of shootings were with 22 and 25 instead of the military cartridges, 9mm and bigger that were popular years ago. A 9mm cartridge is shown as the center picture below, between a 22lr and a 45. Big bullets make for big holes and high death rates.
Per capita, the Detroit shooting rate is about 15 times that of New York City. New York saw roughly the same number of shootings as Detroit, 1,531 in a city 15 times bigger, and 462 criminal homicides The cause does not appear economic. but social. When Detroit’s unemployment rate fell, the murder rate did not. Thanks to COVID, Detroit’s unemployment rate is lower than New York’s. My only thought is that the culture is the difference, that the culture in New York is such that arguments do not turn violent as regularly.
Size comparison; 22, 9mm, 45. Big bullets leave big holes.
Stricter gun laws will not help, I think. Michigan’s gun laws make it hard to own pistols with barrels less than 16″ long. The net result is that most crime in the city is done with illegal guns. In general, countries with strict gun laws have more violent crime, not less. I would like to encourage private citizens to choose smaller bullets for self defense though, 22 or 32, and not military grade, 9mm. As a private citizen, you have to bring in the criminal, or storm a building. Your only goal is to get the criminal to stop without harming yourself. A 22 will get the criminal to stop. It will killl too, just less often. A 22 caliber bullet killed Bobby Kennedy, and Reagan was nearly killed with one. A small caliber bullet is less likely to kill you in an accident, or to kill people standing behind the target. This year, some 11 police forces came to a consensus report on use of the minimum of force necessary; read it here. For a private citizen, that’s a 22. Besides, speaking from my own limited experience, I find it easier to aim a small bullet.
Part of the mandate to the 2020 election was to join with Europe and the rest of the western world in agreeing to stop the use of coal. It’s a low cost way to generate energy. Of course we still like to buy things, and we’ve largely turned to China, a country that still burns coal, and thus makes things cheap. The net result of this shift to Chinese goods is that China keeps building coal-fired plants while we shut ours. As it happens, China is worse than the US in terms of CO2 per output, but at least when China pollutes, we don’t see the smoke directly, and we don’t see their new coal plants at all. So we feel better buying things from China than from the US. Besides, slave labor is cheap.
From th eEconomist, December 2020.
Buying Chinese goods is good for the importers, and for the non-manufacturing consumer, at least in the short term. It has the effect of exporting jobs though, and eventually we have to support the displaced workers. It also means we don’t keep up our manufacturing technology. Long term, that affects innovation, and that starts to displace other industries. Antibiotic production has already left the US and along with it semiconductors. Still, we feel good about it since the Chinese don’t let us see the slave labor camps. We do get to see the haze of the pollution.
The Chinese expect this pattern to continue. China is building new coal-fired plants at a furious rate. Presently China has most of the world’s coal-fired power plants. Mostly these are only 4 to 12 years old, far younger than our forty year old plants China plans to build more, and keeps encouraging us to shut down ours. Even 10 years ago, China lead the world in CO2 output. And their fraction of the CO2 keeps climbing.
China is popular with the press. In part, I expect, that’s because they pay the international experts. lAlso, writers and editors are consumers industrial products, but not manufacturers. Consumers benefit from slave labor, or maybe not, but displaced American workers certainly suffer. Also, of course, the news requires pictures and personal stories to keep viewer interest. If you can’t get pictures of young protesters, like Grey Thunberg, you can get an interesting story. Our Chinese pollution is out of sight, and not in the press.
Near the beginning of the movie “The social network”, Zuckerberg asks his Harvard roommate, Saverin, to explain the chess rating system. His friend writes an equation on the window, Zuckerberg looks for a while, nods, and uses it as a basis for Facemash, the predecessor of Facebook. The dating site, Tinder said it used this equation to match dates, but claims to have moved on from there, somewhat. The same is likely true at J-swipe, a jewish coating site, and Christian mingle.
Scene from the social network, Saverin shows Zuckerberg the equations for the expected outcome of a chess match between players of different rankings, Ra and Rb.
I’ll explain how the original chess ranking system worked, and then why it works also for dating. If you’ve used Tinder or J-swipe, you know that they provide fairly decent matches based on a brief questionnaire and your pattern of swiping left or right on pictures of people, but it is not at all clear that your left-right swipes are treated like wins and losses in a chess game: your first pairings are with people of equal rating.
Start with the chess match equations. These were developed by Anand Elo (pronounced like hello without the h) in the 1950s, a physics professor who was the top chess player in Wisconsin at the time. Based on the fact that chess ability changes relatively slowly (usually) he chose to change a persons rating based on a logistic equation, sigmoid model of your chances of winning a given match. He set a limit to the amount your rating could change with a single game, but the equation he chose changed your rating fastest when you someone much better than you or lost to someone much weaker. Based on lots of inaccurate comparisons, the game results, you get a remarkably accurate rating of your chess ability. Also, as it happens, this chess rating also works well to match people for chess games.
The knowledge equation, an S curve that can be assumed to relate to the expected outcome of chess matchups or dating opportunities.
For each player in a chess match, we estimate the likelihood that each player will win, lose or tie based on the difference in their ratings, Ra -Rb and the sigmoid curve at left. We call these expected outcome Ea for player A, and Eb for player B where Ea = Eb = is 50% when Ra = RB. It’s seen that Ea never exceeds 1; you can never more than 100% certain about a victory. The S-graph shows several possible estimates of Ea where x= Ra-Rb, and k is a measure of how strongly we imagine this difference predicts outcome. Elo chose a value of k such that 400 points difference in rating gave the higher ranked player a 91% expectation of winning.
To adjust your rating, the outcomes of a game is given a number between 1 and 0, where 1 represents a win, 0 a loss, and 0.5 a draw. Your rating changes in proportion to the difference between this outcome and your expected chance of winning. If player A wins, his new rating, Ra’, is determined from the old rating, Ra as follows:
Ra’ = Ra + 10 (1 – Ea)
It’s seen that one game can not change your rating by any more than 10, no matter how spectacular the win, nor can your rating drop by any more than 10 if you lose. If you lose, Ra’ = Ra – 10 Ea. New chess players are given a start ranking, and are matched with other new players at first. For new players, the maximum change is increased to 24, so you can be placed in a proper cohort that much quicker. My guess is that something similar is done with new people on dating sites: a basic rating (or several), a basic rating, and a fast rating change at first that slows down later.
As best I can tell, dating apps use one or more ratings to solve a mathematical economics problem called “the stable marriage problem.” Gayle and Shapely won the Nobel prize in economics for work on this problem. The idea of the problem is to pair everyone in such a way that no couple is happier by a swap of partners. It can be shown that there is always a solution that achieves that. If there is a singe, understood ranking, one way of achieving this stable marriage pairing is by pairing best with best, 2nd with second, and thus all the way down. The folks at the bottom may not be happy with their mates, but neither is there a pair that would like to switch mates with them.
Part of this, for better or worse, is physical attractiveness. Even if the low ranked (ugly) people are not happy with the people they are matched with, they may be happy to find that these people are reasonably happy with them. Besides a rating based on attractiveness, there is a rating based on age and location; sexual orientation and religiosity. On J-swipe and Tinder, people are shown others that are similar to them in attractiveness, and similar to the target in other regards. The first people you are shown are people who have already swiped right for you. If you agree too, you agree to a date, at least via a text message. Generally, the matches are not bad, and having immediate successes provides a nice jolt of pleasure at the start.
Religious dating sites, J-swipe and Christian Mingle work to match men with women, and to match people by claimed orthodoxy to their religion. Tinder is a lot less picky: not only will they match “men looking for men” but they also find that “men looking for women” will fairly often decide to date other “men looking for women”. The results of actual, chosen pairings will then affect future proposed pairings so that a man who once dates a man will be shown more men as possible dates. In each of the characteristic rankings, when you swipe right it is taken as a win for the person in the picture, if you swipe left it’s a loss: like a game outcome of 1 or 0. If both of you agree, or don’t it’s like a tie. Your rating on the scale of religion or beauty goes up or down in proportion to the difference between the outcome and the predictions. If you date a person of the same sex, it’s likely that your religion rating drops, but what do I know?
One way or another, this system seems to work at least as well as other matchmaking systems that paired people based on age, height, and claims of interest. If anything, I think there is room for far more applications, like matching doctors to patients in a hospital based on needs, skills, and availability, or matching coaches to players.
Robert Buxbaum, December 31, 2020. In February, at the beginning of the COVID outbreak I claimed that the disease was a lot worse than thought by most, but the it would not kill 10% of the population as thought by the alarmist. The reason: most diseases follow the logistic equation, the same sigmoid.
Large chunks of Michigan shut down for the prime days of hunting season, from the middle of October to early November. About 8% of the state gets a hunting license each year, some 800,000 people, all trying to “Bag a buck.” Michigan is an open carry state for rifles and holstered pistols, something seen recently in the state capitol, I’d say this was an illegal example since there is also a brandishing law, but it gives a sense of things here. About 29% of the state owns at least one gun, and usually more. There are about as many guns as people. Getting bullets, on the other hand, is near impossible, both for handguns and for most rifles, shotguns excluded.
A lot of the attraction of hunting is that you get to eat what you kill. Mot people do this or donate it to a food back. Hunting is also cheaper than golf. Rural farmers also hunt to protect their crops from crows, squirrels, rabbits, rats, snakes, and raccoons. This is legitimate hunting, in my opinion, even though you typically don’t eat crow. Some people do hunt bear, but that’s a different story (I like to be dressed). It’s possible that the bullet shortage is just a hiccup in the supply chain, “supply and demand” but it’s been going on for 12 years now so I suspect it’s here to stay.
Michigan, was once a Republican, pro-gun stronghold. It has swung Democrat and anti-gun for the last few years. Bulletes have been scare for about that long, at least since the Obama election or the Sandy Hook shooting. Behind this is a general trend of urbanization and class-action law suits. At this point, few sporting stores carry guns or bullets, and those that do, tend to hide them in a back room. Amazon carries neither bullets nor guns, and the same holds at e-bay, Craig’s list, and Walmart on line. Dunhams still sells guns but the only bullets, when I visited today were, 17 caliber, 227 and duck-hunting, shotgun shells. Gone were normal handgun calibers: 22, 25, 32, 38, 45, 357, and 9mm. The press seems OK with duck or moose hunting; not so OK with anything else.
The salesman at Dunham’s said that he had moved to bow hunting, something that’s becoming common, but it’s incredibly difficult even with modern bows. I can rarely hit a non-moving target at 50 feet on the first arrow, and I can only imagine the frustration of trying to hit a moving target after sitting in a cold blind for days waiting for one to appear whose distance and placement is unknown, and that might disappear at any moment, or attack me then disappear.
Part of the problem is that arrows travel at only about 250 ft/s, or about 1/6 the speed of a bullet. Thus, an arrow fired from 50 yards takes about 0.6 seconds to hit. In that time it drops about 6 feet and must be aimed 6 feet above the deer if you hope to hit it. A riffle bullet falls only about 2 inches, about 1/36 as much. Whaat’s more, though an arrow is about three times heavier than a hunting bullet, its slow speed means it hits with only about 1/10 the kinetic energy, about the same as hunting with a 22 from a handgun.
There are those who say the bullet shortage will go away on its own because of supply and demand. That’s true until the government steps in in the name of public safety. Though recreational marijuana and moonshine are both legal, government regulation means that prices are high and supply is limited, with a grey market of people buying high and selling higher. I’m seeing the same with ammunition; there is tight supply, a grey market, and a fair number of people trying to reload spent ammunition using match-tips for primers. Talk about white lightning.
COVID-19 has a decided racial preference for Western blood, killing Americans and Europeans at more than ten times the rate of people in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, or Vietnam. The chart below shows the COVID-19 death rate per million population in several significant countries countries. The US and Belgium is seen to be more than 100 times worse than China or Hong Kong, etc., based on data from http://www.worldometers.info. IN the figure, the death-rate rank of each country is shown on the left, next to the country name.
For clarity, I didn’t include all the countries of Europe, but note that European countries are the majority of the top ten in terms of deaths per million. Belgium is number one with over 1,400. That is somewhat over 0.14% of the population has died of COVID-19 so far.
Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate in South America at over 1000 per million, 0.1%. The US rate is similar, 0.082%. These are shockingly high numbers despite our best efforts to stop the disease by mandating masks, closing schools, and generally closing our economies. Meanwhile, in China and Japan, the economies are open and the total death rate is only about 1/100 that of Europe or the Americas. Any health numbers from China are suspect, but here I tend to believe it. Their rates are very similar to those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At 3 per million, China’s death rate is 1/400 th the rate of the US, and Taiwan’s is lower.
This is not for lack of good healthcare systems in Europe, or lack of preparation. As of December 1-10, Germany, a country of 80 million, is seeing a COVID death rate of 388 per day. Japan, a country of 120 million, sees about 20. These are modern countries with good record keeping; Germany is locked down and Japan is open.
The question is why, and the answer seems to be genetics. A British study of the genetics of people who got the disease particularly severely found a few genes responsible, among these, TYK2. “It is part of the system that makes your immune cells more angry, and more inflammatory,” explained Dr Kenneth Baillie, a consultant in medicine at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, who led the Genomicc project. He’s theory is that versions of this gene can allow the virus to put your immune response “into overdrive, putting patients at risk of damaging lung inflammation.” If his explanation is right, a class of anti-inflammatory drugs could work. (I’d already mentioned data suggesting that a baby aspirin or two seems helpful).
As reported in Nature this week, another gene that causes problems is IFNAR2. IFNAR2 is linked to release of interferon, which helps to kick-start the immune system as soon as an infection is detected.
It could be accidental that Asians are just lucky interns of not having the gene variations that make this disease deadly. Alternately, it could be that the disease is was engineered (in China?) and released either as a bio-attack, or by accident. Or it could be a combination. Whatever the cause of the disease, that east Asians should be spared this way is really weird.
Suggesting that this is not biowarfare is the observation that, in San Francisco, the Asian, per case fatality rate is as high as for white people or higher. One problem with this argument is that there is a difference between death rate per confirmed case and death rate per million population. It is possible that, for one reason or another Chinese people in San Francisco do not seek to be tested until they are at death’s door. Such things were seen in Iran and North Korea, for example. It pushed up the per-case death rate to 100%. Another possibility is that the high death rates in the west reflect disease mutation, or perhaps eastern exposure to a non-deadly variant of COVID that never made it west. If this is the case, it would be just as odd as any other explanation of a100x difference in death rates. Maybe I’m being paranoid here, but as the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies.
Before a pacifist buys a gun, there are two critical questions to ask: One is ‘how would I feel if I killed a criminal?” The other is ‘how would I feel if I missed and killed someone else? In my case, I’d feel awful either way. My thinking, even with the criminal, is that I tried my best to do more good than bad, and part of that is to minimize the chance of killing needlessly. Statistics suggest that gun carrying, in general, does good by deterring violent criminals. To be able to stop a deadly attack, while minimizing the chance of killing– particularly an innocent bystander — I’m inclined to a low power gun that’s easy to conceal and easy to aim well. This leads me to suggest a 22 revolver with a barrel that’s not too long to conceal, nor too short for good aiming, 2.5-4″ seems ideal.
An analysis of what percent of people stop attacking when hit by one bullet of different calibers. The 32 and shotgun are the best, in part because the shooter tends to stop shooting at one shot. With a 9 mm, the shooter keeps on shooting, likely doing more damage than necessary.
At this point I’d like to say that I am not a gun expert. I’ve fired perhaps 15 guns in my life including 5 revolvers. The easiest of these to shoot was a Glock 9mm, heavy, large and powerful, but it think it would be too large to carry or draw in a deadly situation, and the Glock was not cheap. The 22s were all smaller guns, and the 22 cartridges, especially the 22lr, are dirt cheap, costing 8 to10¢ each, or $40-$50 for a box of 500. It’s not the 9mm are super expensive, but they cost 25-30¢ each or $25 to $30 for a box of 100. The price is higher today, over $1 each, because of an ammo shortage, but it’s coming down.
Another advantage of the 22 is that the kill power is lower. A 9mm round will go through the person you are shooting at, and kill the person behind, and can kill on a riccoshet. I like that the 22 won’t do this. I also like that the 22, more effective than almost any other round at stropping a criminal, and getting him to go away. As the chart above shows, there is a 60% stop after the perpetrator is hit once, and that’s my goal — getting him to go away. A shotgun is far more effective as a deterrence, over 80%, but it is much more likely to kill, and much harder to conceal carry. The chart above is from a wonderful analysis of the effect of different calibers used in crimes, read it here. The author, Greg Ellifritz, suggests that the reason the 22 is so effective at stopping a criminal is psychological: criminals stop if shot even once, especially from a civilian, and only civilians use 22s. Larger calibers are better appear to be less effective, though they will be better at stopping a really determined attacker, e.g. someone on PCP. But that’s not the environment I work in, and I suspect it’s not the majority of crime. Overall, one shot from a 9mm does not do a good job stopping an attacker. Another good option is a 32. It was the choice of Theodore Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover. It tends to be used by detectives and other professionals, but the bullets are expensive.
I’ve done a meta-analysis of Greg Ellifritz’s death data, and confirm that the 22 is the second least deadly of all bullet types, after the .25. Of 154 people hit with 22 bullets, there 28% fatalities, 43 deaths. The 9mm is more deadly: of those hit with a 9 mm bullet, 44% died, in part because people shooting 9mm tend to shoot more bullets, nearly twice as many as 22 shooters in danger situations.
It takes two hands to cock a semi-automatic, that is to draw the first round into the chamber. Gif from ammuniotndepot.com
Handguns for 9mm rounds tend to be semi-automatic with light triggers and large magazines. Guns for 22 tend to be revolvers with heavier triggers and small loads, 5 to 7 rounds. I suspect that a light trigger leads to more missed shots and misfires, and I notice that many folks with semiautomatics, find they jam in danger situations. In the famous duel between Hamilton and Burr, Hamilton hit the branch above Burr’s head, likely because he’d set his trigger very light. Burr’s trigger was set heavy, and he shot straight. When you are nervous, gun with a light trigger can go off early and miss or kill the wrong person. A lot of the people killed with guns in Detroit, I notice, were killed by mistake, because the shooter missed, or because of a ricochet (I did an analysis of Detroit crime early on in this blog). A ricocheting 22 has very little kill power left.
A single action revolver requires cocking by that can be done with one hand; a double action doesn’t need any cocking. Gif from ammuniotndepot.com
Every semi-automatic I’ve tried required a two handed, “racking” step, see above. Thus, unless you leave a cartridge in the chamber while walking around, you need two free hands and an extra second or two to rack the first bullet before you can shoot. That’s OK on a range, but in a danger situation racking is a problem. Even trained policemen with semi-automatics have been killed by knife-wilding criminals because the criminal didn’t need the extra second or two while the policeman racked the first round.
Racking takes strength and coordination, plus an awareness of legal isuess. If you rack too soon and the situation de-escalates, you could be charged with “brandishing.” In most states it’s illegal to brandish a weapon in a non-deadly situation. You have to wait with your gun in your pocket or holster until you are in mortal danger. With a revolver, you don’t need to rack. Even a single action revolver can be cocked with one hand while the weapon is in your pocket. See the process in the figure above. Double-action revolvers don’t require cocking, and that can be a plus. On the other hand, I figure that the sound of a gun cocking might be useful to signal to a criminal that you are serious without getting you into the problems of brandishing.
De-cocking a single action revolver.
Revolvers have another interesting plus in that it’s easy to un-cock revolver, even using one hand, see gif. With semi-automatic pistols, there rarely a graceful way to remove the bullet from the chamber, certainly not with one hand. In theory, you can shoot from your pocket too; it’s something I’ve seen in the movies, but a semi-automatic will almost certainly jam if you try. If the assailant grabs your arm, or otherwise attacks you, you have every right to fire, but you don’t want a jam, or to hit yourself. Most defensive shootings are from close range.
Speaking of jamming, even experts get jams on a fairly regular basis, and beginners have this problem a lot. They forget to hold the gun tightly enough, or they buy rounds that don’t quite match the gun. Rounds that are too weak or powerful cause problems for semi-automatics. I’ve never seen a revolver jam, and if the round doesn’t fire, you can click again, and another round will appear. With a semi-automatic, clearing a jam is a lot of work: more than I can expect in a danger situation.
I should mention that the folks from ammunition depot, the place I got the gifs, recommends 9mm semi-automatics for personal protection because of the extra “stopping power”. Read their opinion here. I disagree, and here is one last reason: Like many other suppliers, they are out of 9mm cartridges, and have been for months. Perhaps it’s panic buying like with toilet paper, or a manufacturing disruption; 22 lr cartridges are still in stock. Supply problems will likely go away, but it’s another reason to look at the 22.
Robert Buxbaum, December 11, 2020. Some vocabulary words: a bullet is the projectile that comes out the barrel. A round = a cartridge. It’s the thing that you put in the gun before shooting. There are several 22s, all with the same size (diameter) bullet, 0.223″ OD, but with different lengths and power, from short to wmr. Different guns can use different cartridges. Meir Kahane was killed by a 22, as was Bobby Kennedy.
Enjoy those loaves and fishes. Even the ones from the store are miracles.
Enjoy dinner with your family and friends, even if it’s awkward. It’s the awkwardness of your friends that makes you love them. No one really loves perfection. And enjoy your dinner. No one really likes a prig, not even God.
My cousin and his wife are coming to dinner. They’re both Bugs Bunny fans. He proposed via a WhatsApp.doc
In terms of the holiday ham; Jesus was Jewish. No ham. When doing with the disciples, he probably ordered falafel and 13 glasses of water.
Relatives are easier if you don’t have to look at them.
Most people know that aspirin can reduce blood clots and thus the risk heart attack, as shown famously in the 1989 “Physicians’ Health Study” where 22,000 male physicians were randomly assigned to either a regular aspirin (325 mg) every other day or an identical looking placebo. The results are shown in the table below, where “Myocardial Infarction” or “MI” is doctor-speak for heart attack.
Treatment
Myocardial Infarctions
No Infarction
Total
fraction with MI
Aspirin
139
10,898
11,037
139/11,037 = 0.0126
Placebo
239
10,795
11,034
239/11,034 = 0.0217
Over the 5 years of the study, the physicians had 378 MI events, but mostly in the group that didn’t take aspirin: 1.28% of the doctors who took aspirin had a heart attack as opposed to 2.17% for those with the placebo. The ratio 1.28/2.17 = 0.58 is called the risk ratio. Apparently, aspirin in this dose reduces your MI risk to 58% of what it was otherwise — at least in white males of a certain age.
A blood clot showing red cells held together by fibrin fibers. Clots can cause heart attack, stroke, and breathing problems. photo: Steve Gschmeissner.
Further study showed aspirin benefits with women and other ethnicities, and benefits beyond hear attack, in any disease that induces disseminated intravascular coagulopathy. That’s doctor speak for excessive blood clots. Aspirin produced a reduction in stroke and in some cancers (Leukemia among them) and now it now seems likely that aspirin reduces the deadliness of COVID-19. Data from Wuhan showed that excessive blood clots were present in 71% of deaths vs. 0.4% of survivors. In the US, some 30% of those with serious COVID symptoms and death show excessive blood clots, particularly in the lungs. Aspirin and Vitamin D seem to help.
.The down-side of aspirin use is a reduction in wound healing and some intestinal bleeding. The intestinal bleeding is known as aspirin burn. Because of these side-effects it is common to give a lower dose today, just one baby aspirin per day, 81 mg. While this does does some good, It is not clear that it is ideal for all people. This recent study in the Lanset (2018) shows a strong relationship between body weight and aspirin response. Based on 117,279 patients, male and female, the Lanset study found that the low dose, baby aspirin provides MI benefits only in thin people, those who weigh less than about 60 kg (130 lb). If you weigh more than that, you need a higher dose, perhaps two baby aspirin per day, or a single adult aspirin every other day, the dose of the original doctors study.
In this study of COVID patients, published in July, those who had been taking aspirin fared far better than those who did not A followup study will examine the benefits of one baby aspirin (81 mg) with and without Vitamin D, read about it here. I should note that other pain medications do not have this blood-thinning effect, and would not be expected to have the same benefit.
While it seems likely that 2 baby aspirins might be better in fat people, or one full aspirin every other day, taking a lot more than this is deadly. During the Spanish flu some patients were given as much as 80 adult aspirins per day. It likely killed them. As Paracelsus noted, the difference between a cure and a poison is the dose.
I’m not crazy about the COVID isolation, but there are up-sides that I’ve come to appreciate. You might too. Out of boredom, I was finally got into meditation. It was better than just sitting around and doing nothing.
It’s best not to look at isolation as a problem, but an opportunity. I’ve developed a serious drinking opportunity.
And it’s an opportunity to talk to myself. I told myself I’ should quit drinking. Then I figured, why should I listen to a drunk who talks to himself.
A friend of mine was on drugs, but then quit. Everyone in his house is happy, except for the lamp. The lamp won’t talk to him anymore.
The movies are closed, and the bars, and the gyms. It gives me another reason not to go to the gym.
Did you know that, before the crowbar was invented, crows used to drink at home.
The real reason dogs aren’t allowed in bars: lots of guys can’t handle their licker.
There’s time to spend with my children. And they look like me.
I like that I don’t commute. Family events are over zoom, funerals (lots of funerals), meetings, lectures. They come in via the computer, and I don’t have to dress or attend. No jacket, no pants… no travel …. no job.
My children are spending more time with us at home. We have virtual meals together. I discovered that I have a son named Tok. He seems to like my dad-jokes.
My wife is finding it particularly tough. Most every day I see her standing by the window, staring, wondering. One of these days, I’ll let her in.
I asked wife why she married me. Was it for my looks, or my income, or my smarts. She smiled and said it was my sense of humor. 🙂
My wife is an elementary school teacher. She teaches these days with a smart board. If the board were any smarter, it would go work for someone else. It’s necessary, I guess. If you can’t beat them, you might as well let the smart board teach. I think the smart board stole the election. It began by auto-correcting my spelling. Then it moved to auto correct my voting. The board is smarter and better than me (Hey, who wrote this?)
I’ve learned to love masks, though some of them are hot.
You’d think they’d reduce the number of administrators in the schools, given that it’s all remote. Or reduce the price of college. It would be nice if they’d up the number of folks who can attend. So far no. Today the Princeton alumni of Michigan is sponsoring video-talk by Princeton alumnus, George Will. I wanted to attend, but found there was limited seating, so I’m on the waiting list (true story). By keeping people out, they show they are exclusive. Tuition is $40,000 / year, and they keep telling us that the college is in service of humanity. If they were in the service of humanity, they’d charge less, and stream the talk to whoever wants to listen in. I have to hope this will change sooner or later.
Shopping for toilet paper was a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic, but I’ve now got a dog to do it for me. He goes to the store, brings it back. Brings back toothpaste too. He’s a lavatory retriever. (I got this joke from Steve Feldman; the crowbar joke too.)
I don’t mind that there are few new movies. There are plenty of old movies that I have not seen, and old TV shows too.
This fellow is the new head of Biden’s COVID-19 task force. He’s got a science-based plan for over-population and the disease.
I like that people are leaving New York and LA. It’s healthy, and saves on rent. Folks still travel there, mostly for the rioting, but lockdowns are nicer in Michigan.
More people are hunting, and hiking, and canoeing. These are active activities that you can do on lockdown. The old activities were passive, or going out to eat. Passive activities are almost a contradiction in terms.
We’re cooking more at home, which is healthier. And squirrel doesn’t taste half bad. If I live through this, I’ll be healthy.
I’m reading more, and have joined goodreads.com. I’ve developed a superpower: I find can melt ice cubes, just by looking at them. It takes a while but they melt.
A lot more folks have dogs. And folks have gotten into religion. Wouldn’t it be great, if after death we fond that dyslexic folks were right. There really is a dog.
Let’s love the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse.
There was an election last week. My uncles voted for Biden, which really surprised me. They were staunch Republicans when they were alive. My aunt got the ballot and convinced them. She was a Democrat when she was alive.
Before COVID, the other big crisis was global warming. Al Gore and Greta Thunberg claimed we had to shutter production and stop driving to save the planet. COVID-19 has done it. The next crisis is over-population. COVID is already curing that problem — not so much in China, but in the US, Europe, and South America.
Just As a final thought, let’s look at the bright side of the virus. If we don’t, the next crisis will be worse. Take Monty Python’s advice and Always look at the bright side of life.
