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.
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.
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.
My son works at a company called Homodeus. It’s part of 4Catalyzer, an umbrella of seven medical biotechnology companies with a staff of 300 scientists and engineers. One of the Homodeus products, still waiting FDA guidance is a COVID-19, RNA self-tester called Homodeus Detect. It tests for COVID RNA directly, not for antibodies, with tests are much faster than hospital tests, taking 45 minutes, but more complex than the unreliable test strips. So far, the Detect tests have shown no false positives or false negatives. That would suggest 100% reliable, except but there are a fair number of invalid tests. The invalid tests are lares due to the complexity, and also to the fact that you are testing snot, essentially. There is no blood-taking involved, unlike with the test strips, but just a nasal swab, and the cost is moderate, about $35 per test. However you have to do some lab work. After you swab your nose, you put the swab in a heated liquid bath where chemicals break up the snot and dissolve the shells on any viruses or pollen present. After 30 minutes, you pass the liquid onto a detector strip that contains a conjugate protein that binds to SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Your answer appears 15 minutes later as one of three lines: one for positive, one for negative, or one indicating an invalid test. Invalid tests show up more often than they like, about half the time, especially when the test is done by amateurs.
Getting an invalid test result is a downside of the current product, but I don’t think it should prevent sales. You get better at doing the test, and speed and lack of false positives and negatives is a bigger plus. It seems worthwhile to fast-track offer this test for doctors offices and hospital admissions, at least. I’d also like to see it used for airplane boarding and interstate travel, so that a person traveling might avoid the two week quarantine that many states impose. I’d certainly pay $200 or more to avoid a two-week quarantine, and if I have to do a second or third test, I’d do that too.
At least some people realize it’s a big advantage to know if you are currently infections.
Because this test measures virus RNA, and not antibodies, it indicates infection virtually as soon as you’re infected. That’s a benefit for those wishing to fly, or to meet with people, an advantage that is not lost on Elon Musk at least (see tweet). The test also shows negative as soon as the virus is gone, and that’s big. In recent months the FDA has fast-track approved an antibody indicating test from Abbott Labs, but that test has many false readings and only indicates infection several days afterward, and it does not indicate when you are no longer infectious.
The FDA has not offered to fast track this test, or any other like it for approval. They have not even indicated what sort of reporting and privacy requirements they want, so things sit in limbo, both for Homodeus, and for competing companies. Here is a story in USA today: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/07/29/fda-opens-door-rapid-home-covid-19-tests/5536528002. One big issue that the FDA is contact tracing. The FDA would like to be able to trace all the contacts of anyone who tests positive, while maintaining privacy as demanded by the 4th Amendment.
One way around the 4th amendment concerns would be to require anyone who uses the test to sign a waiver allowing the government to trace their contacts. Alternately there could be a block-chain enabled app that would come with the test. An app coms already providing a timer for when to move to the next step, and it includes a machine-vision system to help analyze dim lines on the indicator. Perhaps the FDA would accept block chain as a way to allow full reporting while maintaining privacy The FDA has yet to provide guidance on what they want, though. Without guidance or fast-track approval, things sit in limbo. Here is a scathing legal analysis from the Yale Law Journal.
You can get a free test, but have to do it at Homodeus headquarters in Guilford, Connecticut. It’s free, and results appears in about 45 minutes.. Homodeus has been manufacturing the test in quantity; if you are interested, use the following link to sign up: https://www.homodeusinc.com/research. Healthcare providers are particularly welcome.
Why did the FDA fast-track approve Abott’s antigen/ antibody test. Maybe because the tests rethought to not lead to lower mask use. Alternately, Abott has more political pull. You can read the FDA’s explanation here. In my biassed opinion the Homodeus product is good enough to fast track especially for hospitals and healthcare providers. It could save lives while allowing the economy to reopen.
Robert Buxbaum, November 15, 2020 (with massive help from Aaron M. Buxbaum)
A few days ago, I asked for and received the PCV-13 pneumonia vaccine, and a few days earlier, the flu shot. These vaccines are free if you are over 65, but you have to ask for them. PCV-13 is the milder of the pneumonia vaccines, providing moderate resistance to 12 common pneumonia strains, plus a strain of diphtheria. There is a stronger shot, with more side-effects. The main reason I got these vaccines was to cut my risk from COVID-19.
Some 230,00 people have died from COVID-19. Almost all none of them were under 20, and hardly any died from the virus itself. As with the common flu, they died from side infections and pneumonia. Though the vaccine I took is not 100% effective against event these 13 pneumonias, it is fairly effective, especially in the absence of co-morbidities, and has few side effects beyond stiffness in my arm. I felt it was a worthwhile protection, and further reading suggests it was more worthwhile than I’d thought at first.
It is far from clear there will be a working vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COV-19. We’ve been trying for 40 years to make a vaccine against AIDS, without success. We have also failed to create a working vaccine for SARS, MERS, or the common cold. Why should SARS-CoV-2 be different? We do have a flu vaccine, and I took it, but it isn’t very effective, viruses mutate. Despite claims that we would have a vaccine for COVID-19 by early next year, I came to imagine it would not be a particularly good vaccine, and it might have side effects. On the other hand, there is a fair amount of evidence that the pneumonia vaccine works and does a lot more good than one might expected against COVID-19.
A colleague of mine from Michigan State, Robert Root Bernstein, analyzed the effectiveness of several vaccines in the fight against COVID-19 by comparing the impact of COVID-19 on two dozen countries as a function of all the major inoculations. He found a strong correlation only with pneumonia vaccine: “Nations such as Spain, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Peru and Chile that have the highest COVID-19 rates per million have the poorest pneumococcal vaccination rates among both infants and adults. Nations with the lowest rates of COVID-19 – Japan, Korea, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand – have the highest rates of pneumococcal vaccination among both infants and adults.” Root-Bernstein also looked at the effectiveness of adult inoculation and child inoculation. Both were effective, at about the same rate. This suggests that the the plots below are not statistical flukes. Here is a link to the scientific article, and here is a link to the more popular version.
An analysis of countries in terms of COVID rates and deaths versus pneumonia vaccination rates in children and adults. The US has a high child vaccination rate, but a low adult vaccination rate. Japan, Korea, etc. are much better. Italy, Belgium, Spain, Brazil, and Peru are worse. Similar correlations were found with child and adult inoculation, suggesting that these correlations are not flukes of statistics.
I decided to check up on Root-Bernstein’s finding by checking the state-by state differences in pneumonia vaccination rates — information available here — and found that the two US states that were hardest hit by COVID, NY and NJ, have among the lowest rates of inoculation. Of course there are other reasons at play. These states are uncommonly densely populated, and the governments of both made the unfortunate choice of sending infected patients to live in old age homes. At least half of the deaths were in these homes.
Pneumonia vaccination may also explain why the virus barely affected those under 20. Pneumonia vaccines was available only in 2000 or so. Many states then began to vaccinate about then and required it to attend school. The time of immunization could explain why those younger than 20 in the US do so well compared to older individuals, and compared to some other countries where inoculation was later. I note that China has near universal inoculation for pneumonia, and was very mildly hit.
I also took the flu shot, and had taken the MMR (measles) vaccine last year. The side effects, though bad, are less bad than the benefits, I thought, but there was another reason, and that’s mimicry. It is not uncommon that exposure to one virus or vaccine will excite the immune system to similar viruses, so-called B cells and T-cell immunity. A recent study from the Mayo Clinic, read it here, shows that other inoculations help you fight COVID-19. By simple logic, I had expected that the flu vaccine would help me this way. The following study (from Root-Bernstein again) shows little COVID benefit from flu vaccine, but evidence that MMR helps (R-squared of 0.118). Let men suggest it’s worth a shot, as it were. Similar to this, I saw just today, published September 24, 2020 in the journal, Vaccines, that the disease most molecularly similar to SARS-CoV-2 is pneumonia. If so, mimicry provides yet another reason for pneumonia vaccination, and yet another explanation for the high correlations shown above.
As a final comparison, I note that Sweden has a very high pneumonia inoculation rate, but seems to have a low mask use rate. Despite this, Sweden has done somewhat better than the US against COVID-19. Chile has a low inoculation rates, and though they strongly enforced masks and social distance, it was harder hit than we were. The correlation isn’t 100%, and masks clearly do some good, but it seems inoculation may be more effective than masks.
The hope diamond resides in the Smithsonian. It really is a deep blue. It has about 5 ppm boron.
If you’ve ever seen the Hope Dimond, or a picture of it, you’ll notice a most remarkable thing: it is deep blue. While most diamonds are clear, or perhaps grey, a very few are colored. Color in diamonds is generally caused by impurities, in the case of blue diamonds, boron. The Hope diamond has about 5 ppm boron, making it a p-semiconductor. Most blue diamonds, even those just as blue, have less boron. As it turns out one of the major uses of my hydrogen purifiers hydrogen these days is in the manufacture of gem -quality, and semiconductor diamonds, some blue and some other colors. So I thought I’d write about diamonds, colored and not, natural and CVD. It’s interesting and a sort of plug for my company, REB Research.
To start off, natural diamond are formed, over centuries by the effect of high temperature and pressure on a mix of carbon and a natural catalyst mineral, Kimberlite. Diamonds formed this way are generally cubic, relatively clear, and inert, hard, highly heat conductive, and completely non-conducting of electricity. Some man made diamonds are made this way too, using high pressure presses, but gem-quality and semiconductor diamonds are generally made by chemical vapor deposition, CVD. Colored diamonds are made this way too. They have all the properties of clear diamonds, but they have controlled additions and imperfections. Add enough boron, 1000 ppm for example, and the diamond and the resulting blue diamond can conduct electricity fairly readily.
Seeds of natural diamond are placed in a diamond growth chamber and heated to about 1000°C in the presence of ionized, pure methane and hydrogen.
While natural diamond are sometimes used for technical applications, e.g. grind wheels, most technical-use diamonds are man-made by CVD, but the results tend to come out yellow. This was especially true in the early days of manufacture. CVD tends to make large, flat diamonds. This is very useful for heat sinks, and for diamond knives and manufacturers of these were among my first customers. To get a clear color, or to get high-quality colored diamonds, you need a mix of high purity methane and high purity hydrogen, and you need to avoid impurities of silica and the like from the diamond chamber. CVD is also used to make blue-conductive diamonds that can be used as semiconductors or electrodes. The process is show in the gif above from “brilliantearth”.
Multicolored diamonds made by CVD with many different dopants and treatments.
To make a CVD diamond, you place 15 to 30 seed- diamonds into a vacuum growth chamber with a flow of methane and hydrogen in ratio of 1:100 about. You heat the gas to about 1000°C (900-1200°C) , while ionizing the gas using microwaves or a hot wire. The diamonds grow epitaxially over the course of several days or weeks. Ionized hydrogen keeps the surface active, while preventing it from becoming carbonized — turning to graphite. If there isn’t enough hydrogen, you get grey, weak diamonds. If the gas isn’t pure, you get inclusions that make them appear yellow or brown. Nitrogen-impure diamonds are n-semiconductors, with a band gap greater than with boron-blue diamonds, 0.5-1 volts more. Because of this difference, nitrogen-impure diamonds absorb blue or green light, making them appear yellow, while blue diamonds absorb red light, making them blue. (This is different from the reason the sky is blue, explained here.) The difference in energy, also makes yellow diamonds poor electrical conductors. Natural, nitrogen-impure diamonds fluoresce blue or green, as one might expect, but yellow diamonds made by CVD fluoresce at longer wavelengths, reddish (I don’t know why).
The blue moon diamond, it is about as blue as the hope diamond though it has only 0.36 ppm of boron.
To make a higher-quality, yellow, n-type CVD diamonds, use very pure hydrogen. Bright yellow and green color is added by use of ppm-quantities of sulfur or phosphorus. Radiation damage also can be used to add color. Some CVD diamond makers use heat treatment to modify the color and reduce the amount of red fluorescence. CVD pink and purple diamonds are made by hydrogen doping, perhaps followed by heat treatment. The details are proprietary secrets.
Orange-red phosphorescence in the blue moon diamond.
Two major differences help experts distinguish between natural and man-made diamonds. One of these is the fluorescence, Most natural diamonds don’t fluoresce at all, and the ones that do (about 25%) fluoresce blue or green. Almost all CVD diamonds fluoresce orange-red because of nitrogen impurities that absorb blue lights. If you use very pure, nitrogen-free hydrogen, you get clear diamonds avoid much of the fluorescence and yellow. That’s why diamond folks come to us for hydrogen purifiers (and generators). There is a problem with blue diamonds, in that both natural and CVD-absorb and emit red light (that’s why they appear blue). Fortunately for diamond dealers, there is a slight difference in the red emission spectrum between natural and CVD blue diamonds. The natural ones show a mix of red and blue-green. Synthetic diamonds glow only red, typically at 660 nm.
Blue diamonds would be expected to fluoresce red, but instead they show a delayed red fluorescence called phosphorescence. That is to say, when exposed to light, they glow red and continue to glow for 10-30 seconds after the light is turned off. The decay time varies quite a lot, presumably due to differences in the n and p sites.
Natural diamond photographed between polarizers show patterns that radiate from impurities.
Natural and CVD also look different when placed between crossed polarizers. Natural diamonds show multiple direction stress bands, as at left, often radiating from inclusions. CVD diamonds show fine-grained patterns or none at all (they are not made under stress), and man-made, compression diamonds show an X-pattern that matches the press-design, or no pattern at all. If you are interested in hydrogen purifiers, or pure hydrogen generators, for this or any other purposes, please consider REB Research. If you are interested in buying a CVD diamond, there are many for sale, even from deBeers.
Robert Buxbaum, October 19, 2020. The Hope diamond was worn by three French kings, by at least one British king, and by Miss Piggy. A CVD version can be worn by you.
You may know that engineers recently succeed in decreasing the tilt of the “leaning” tower of Pizza by about 1.5°, changing it from about 5.5° to about to precisely 3.98° today –high precision given that the angle varies with the season. But you may not know how that there were at least eight other engineering attempts, and most of these did nothing or made things worse. Neither is it 100% clear that current solution didn’t make things worse. What follows is my effort to learn from the failures and successes, and to speculate on the future. The original-tilted tower is something of an engineering marvel, a highly tilted, stone on stone building that has outlasted earthquakes and weathering that toppled many younger buildings that were built straight vertical, most recently the 1989 collapse of the tower of Pavia. Part of any analysis, must also speak to why this tower survived so long when others failed.
First some basics. The tower of Pisa is an 8 story bell tower for the cathedral next door. It was likely designed by engineer Bonanno Pisano who started construction in 1173. We think it’s Pisano, because he put his name on an inscription on the base, “I, who without doubt have erected this marvelous work that is above all others, am the citizen of Pisa by the name of Bonanno.” Not so humble then, more humble when the tower started to lean, I suspect. The outer diameter at the base is 15.5 m and the weight of the finished tower is 14.7 million kg, 144 million Nt. The pressure exerted on the soil is 0.76 MPa (110 psi). By basic civil engineering, it should stand straight like the walls of the cathedral.
Bonanno’s marvelous work started to sink into the soil of Pisa almost immediately, though. Then it began to tilt. The name Pisa, in Greek, means swamp, and construction, it seems, was not quite on soil, but mud. When construction began the base was likely some 2.5 m (8 feet) above sea level. While a foundation of clay, sand and sea-shells could likely have withstood the weight of the tower, the mud below could not. Pisano added length to the south columns to keep the floors somewhat level, but after three floors were complete, and the tilt continued, he stopped construction. What to do now? What would you do?
If it were me, I’d consider widening the base to distribute the force better, and perhaps add weight to the north side. Instead, Pisano gave up. He completed the third level and went to do other things. The tower stood this way for 99 years, a three-floor, non-functional stub.
About 1272, another engineer, Giovanni di Simone, was charged with fixing the situation. His was the first fix, and it sort-of worked. He strengthened the stonework of the three original floors, widened the base so it wold distribute pressure better, and buried the base too. He then added three more floors. The tower still leaned, but not as fast. De Simone made the south-side columns slightly taller than the north to hide the tilt and allow the floors to be sort-of level. A final two stories were added about 1372, and then the first of the bells. The tower looked as it does today when Gallileo did his famous experiments, dropping balls of different size from the south of the 7th floor between 1589 and 1592.
Fortunately for the construction, the world was getting colder and the water table was dropping. While dry soil is stronger than wet, wet soil is more plastic. I suspect it was the wet soil that helped the tower survive earthquakes that toppled other, straight towers. It seems that the tilt not only slowed during this period but briefly reversed, perhaps because of the shift in center of mass, or because of changes in the sea level. Shown below is 1800 years of gauge-based sea-level measurements. Other measures give different sea-level histories, but it seems clear that man-made climate change is not the primary cause. Sea levels would continue to fall till about 1750. By 1820 the tilt had resumed and had reached 4.5°.
The 2nd attempt was begun in 1838. Architect, Alessandro Della Gherardesca got permission to dig around the base at the north to show off the carvings and help right the tower. Unfortunately, the tower base had sunk below the water table. Further, it seems the dirt at the base was helping keep the tower from falling. As Della Gherardesca‘s crew dug, water came spurting out of the ground and the tower tilted another few inches south. The dig was stopped and filled in, but he dig uncovered the Pisano inscription, mentioned above. What would you do now? I might go away, and that’s what was done.
The next attempt to fix the tower (fix 3) was by that self-proclaimed engineering genius, Benito Mussolini. In 1934. Mussolini had his engineers pump some 200 tons of concrete into the south of the tower base hoping to push the tower vertical and stabilize it. The result was that the tower lurched another few inches south. The project was stopped. An engineering lesson: liquids don’t make for good foundations, even when it’s liquid concrete. An unfortunate part of the lesson is that years later engineers would try to fix the tower by pumping water beneath the north end. But that’s getting ahead of myself. Perhaps Mussolini should have made tests on a model before working on the historic tower. Ditto for the more recent version.
On March 18, 1989 the Civic Tower of Pavia started shedding bricks for no obvious reason. This was a vertical tower of the same age and approximate height as the Pisa tower. It collapsed killing four people and injuring 15. No official cause has been reported. I’m going to speculate that the cause was mechanical fatigue and crumbling of the sort that I’ve noticed on the chimney of my own house. Small vibrations of the chimney cause bits of brick to be ejected. If I don’t fix it soon, my chimney will collapse. The wet soils of Pisa may have reduced the vibration damage, or perhaps the stones of Pisa were more elastic. I’ve noticed brick and stone flaking on many prominent buildings, particularly at joins in the chimney.
John Burland’s team cam up with many of the fixes here. They are all science-based, but most of the fixes made things worse.
In 1990, a committee of science and engineering experts was formed to decide upon a fix for the tower of Pisa. It was headed by Professor John Burland, CBE, DSc(Eng), FREng, FRS, NAE, FIC, FCGI. He was, at the time, chair of soil mechanics at the Imperial College, London, and had worked with Ove, Arup, and Partners. He had written many, well regarded articles, and had headed the geological aspects of the design of the Queen Elizabeth II conference center. He was, in a word, an expert, but this tower was different, in part because it was an, already standing, stone-on stone tower that the city wished should remain tilted. The tower was closed to visitors along with all businesses to the south. The bells were removed as well. This was a safety measure, and I don’t count it as a fix. It bought time to decide on a solution. This took two years of deliberation and meetings
In 1992, the committee agreed to fix no 4. The tower was braced with plastic-covered, steel cables that were attached around the second and third floors, with the cables running about 5° from the horizontal to anchor points several hundred meters to the north. The fix was horribly ugly, and messed with traffic. Perhaps the tilt was slowed, it was not stopped.
In 1993, fix number 5. This was the most exciting engineering solution to date: 600 tons of lead ingots were stacked around the base, and water was pumped beneath the north side. This was the reverse of the Mussolini’s failed solution, and the hope was that the tower would tilt north into the now-soggy soil. Unfortunately, the tower tilted further south. One of the columns cracked too, and this attempt was stopped. They were science experts, and it’s not clear why the solution didn’t work. My guess is that they pumped in the water too fast. This is likely the solution I would have proposed, though I hope I would have tested it with a scale model and would have pumped slower. Whatever. Another solution was proposed, this one even more exotic than the last.
For fix number 6, 1995, the team of experts, still overseen by Burland, decided to move the cables and add additional tension. The cables would run straight down from anchors in the base of the north side of the tower to ten underground steel anchors that were to be installed 40 meters below ground level. This would have been an invisible solution, but the anchor depth was well into the water table. So, to anchor the ground anchors, Burland’s team had liquid nitrogen injected into the ground beneath the tower, on the north side where the ground anchors were to go. What Burland did not seem to have realized is that water expands when it freezes, and if you freeze 40 meters of water the length change is significant. On the night of September 7, 1995, the tower lurched southwards by more than it had done in the entire previous year. The team was summoned for an emergency meeting and the liquid nitrogen anchor plan was abandoned.
Tower with the two sets of lead ingots, 900 tons total, about the north side of the base. The weight of the tower is 14,700 tons.
Fix number 7: Another 300 tons of lead ingots were added to the north side as a temporary, simple fix. The fix seems to have worked stabilizing things while another approach was developed.
Fix number 8: In order to allow the removal of the ugly lead bricks another set of engineers were brought on, Roberto Cela and Michele Jamiolkowski. Using helical drills, they had holes drilled at an angle beneath the north side of the tower. Using hoses, they removed a gallon or two of dirt per day for eleven years. The effect of the lead and the dirt removal was to reduce the angle of the tower to 4.5°, the angle that had been measured in 1820. At this point the lead could be removed and tourists were allowed to re-enter. Even after the lead was removed, the angle continued to subside north. It’s now claimed to be 3.98°, and stable. This is remarkable precision for a curved tower whose tilt changes with the seasons. (An engineering joke: How may engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? 1.02).
The bells were replaced and all seemed good, but there was still the worry that the tower would start tilting again. Since water was clearly part of the problem, the British soils expert, Burland came up with fix number 9. He had a series of drainage tunnels built to keep the water from coming back. My worry is that this water removal will leave the tower vulnerable to earthquake and shedding damage, like with the Pavia tower and my chimney. We’ll have to wait for the next earthquake or windstorm to tell for sure. So far, this fix has done no harm.
Robert Buxbaum, October 9, 2020. It’s nice to learn from other folks mistakes, and embarrassments, as well as from their successes. It’s also nice to see how science really works, not with great experts providing the brilliant solution, but slowly, like stumbling in the dark. I see this with COVID-19.
Today, Michigan and several other, Democrat-run states are in fairly broad COVID lockdown. The justification for this is that it is “THE science”, as if this were the only possible behavior if you believe the disease is deadly and contagious. The other fellows, the governors of Republican-run states are framed as deniers of the science. Strangely enough, although this disease is most -definitely contagious and deadly, killing 209,000 Americans so far, about 0.064% of the US this year, it is far from clear that a broad lockdown is the only way to stop the disease. Sweden avoided a general lockdown, leaving its schools and restaurants open, and has seen the disease follow an almost destructive path to that of the US, with a death rate that is currently slightly lower than ours. See the excess death plot below. Sweden seems to have avoided a second, summer spike.
Mortality is Sweden vs the US; Ignore the last 2-3 weeks, it takes time for this data to be compiled
It’s bad enough for “THE SCIENCE” when you see the anti-science, no-lockdown solution provide the same result, or close. Earlier in the summer I noted that Sweden and Michigan had near the same outcome, with Sweden slightly better. It’s now the case that Sweden is doing better than the US, and much better than the D-lead lockdown states. The highest six death rate states are all D-lead, lockdown states, NY, NJ, Mass, Conn, LA, and RI, and rates are double the US average in New York and New Jersey. Perhaps the solution is a general opening, like in Sweden, but before we rush to this, it’s probably worthwhile to do some re-thinking.
Deaths per week, under 18. Any excess deaths caused by COVID-19 are invisible here, lost in the scatter.
One thing that Swedes seem to have appreciated that the US experts didn’t is that the disease hardly affects those the under 18, and that’s basically the entire K-12 student body. Sweden therefore left their K-12 schools open, while we closed ours in the US beginning in early April. At right I’ve plotted the US deaths per week for under 18 for the last three years, that is from before COVID till now. There is no evidence of excess COVID-19 deaths for this group. If anything anything, the under 18 death death rate is lower after COVID than before. This resistance of this group helps explain part of why the Swedish approach didn’t cause increased deaths. Kids in Sweden got the disease, but didn’t die of it, and likely infected their parents. The Swedes didn’t bother trying to protect everyone, but only the most vulnerable, the old people. Sweden was not completely successful at this, but we were perhaps worse, despite the general lockdown.
The excess deaths US for the 65+ bracket plotted by week of the year for 2020 (blue), 2019 (grey) and 2018 (yellow). Nearly 200,000 of the excess deaths of 2020 — the vast majority — are in this age bracket.
But what about the middle-age people that the kids would have infected, the parents and teachers. For middle age people, those in the 18-65 range, it seems to make a difference how physically fit you are, and the Swedes tend to be fit. Obesity is a big co-morbidity for this disease, and Americans tend to be obese, with things getting worse during the lockdown. Swedes also wash their hands more than we do (or so is their reputation) and they go out in the sun. There is evidence that the sun helps, and vitamin D too. A stark way of seeing how much fitness helps, for even those over 18 is to consider that, of the 1.3 million men and women of the US military, there have been only 7 COVID deaths. That is a rate 1/100 of the national average for a population that is entirely over 18. This is not to say that the death rate is quite 5 per million, (7/ 1.3 million = 5 per million), but it’s probably below 50 per million. That is to say, at least 10% of the military was likely infected.
I’m inclined to agree with Dr. Fauchi that we are not yet at herd immunity, or even close, even in states like Michigan where death rates have leveled out. Only 20% of the state shows antibodies and real herd immunity would require 75% or so. Further supporting this, our death rates are 1/2 that of New Jersey. If we were at herd immunity, that could not have happened. It is possible though that we have a sort of pseudo herd immunity, where many people in the MI population have some level of T-cell immunity. T-cells do a good job eating disease (here’s a video) but they get overwhelmed when we are exposed to more than a low dose of virus. This dose-response is common in respiratory diseases, and Dr. Fauchi has related it to T-cell immunity, though he does not speak in these directions often.
Michigan death rates to September 2020 The disease seems to be over, though only about 20% of the state shows antibodies.
T-cells can cause someone to be immune to a few viral hits, but not immune to higher doses. Assuming that’s what’s going on in MI and MA, and NJ, I’m inclined to suggest we can open up these states a bit, according to the Swedish model. That is make careful efforts to clean public transport, and encourage hand washing and surface cleaning. That we prohibit large gatherings, and we take care isolate those over 65 and protect old age homes. In the US, virtually all the deaths were of people over 65, and about half were people over 85, with men being particularly vulnerable. A heterogeneous opening of this sort has been recommended by scientists as early as March.
There are three major problems with lockdowns that keep us from all virus particles. These lockdowns kill the economy, they leave us with lousy education, and they likely leave us as at-risk for the disease later on, when the lockdown is lifted. Instead a heterogeneous opening leaves the economy running and exposes us to some small exposure, at a level that our typical level of T-cell immunity may be able to handle. Over time we expect our T-cell immunity will rise and we’ll be able to take off our masks entirely. It’s a nice route to a cure that does not require a vaccine.
The above approach requires us to trust that people will do the right thing, and requires us to accept that each may do it in his/her own way. Some may not wear the mask all the time, but may chose exercising, or staying in the sun and taking vitamin D. Some may keep to masks, or focus on hand washing. Some may try unapproved drugs, like hydroxychloroquine. We will have to be able to accept that, and our experts will have to be able to step back from running everything. In China and Russia, the experts tried run every aspect of farm production, using only science methods. The result was famine. A similar thing happened in Ireland and got a potato famine. It’s good to have expert advice, but as far as making the actual decision in each location, I put a lot of weight on the choices of those who will bear the consequences.
Robert Buxbaum September 30, 2020. As a summary, I’m for opening schools, opening most states, with masks, and hand-sanitizer, at lower occupancy ( ~50%), limiting large gatherings, going to zoom as much as possible, and isolating the aged particularly the old age homes. I also recommend vitamin D and iodine hand sanitizer.
There are two main routes for catching flu. One is via your hands and your eyes and nose. Your hands pick up germs from the surfaces you touch, and when you touch your eyes or nose passages, the germs infect you. This was thought to be the main route for infection, and I still think it is. I’d been pushing iodine hand sanitizer for some time, the stuff used in hospitals, saying that that the alcohol hand sanitizer doesn’t work well, that it evaporates.
The other route, the one touted by the press these days is via direct cough droplets, breathing them in or getting them in your eyes. Masks and face shields are the preferred protection from this route, and the claim is that masks will stop 63% of the spread. The 63% number has an interesting history, it comes from this test with infected hamsters. Hamsters are 63% less likely to infect other hamsters when they wear a mask. Of course, the comparison has some weaknesses: hamsters don’t put their fingers in their noses, nor do they rub their eyes with their hands, and hamsters can be forced to keep the mask barrier all the time — read the study to see how.
A more realistic study, or more relevant to people, in my opinion showed a far lower effect for masks, about 20%. During the HiNi flu pandemic of 2009 a group of 1437 college students at a single university were divided into three randomized groups, see the original report here. Students at a few chosen residence halls were instructed to wash their hands regularly, use sanitizer, and wear masks. Students at other halls were either told to wear masks only, or told to go on as they pleased. This was the largest group, the control. They included students of the the largest residence hall on campus. The main results appear as the graph below, Figure 1 of the report. It shows a difference of 6% or 20%, depending on how you look at things, with the mask plus hand-health group, MPHH, doing the best.
After 6 weeks of monitoring, approximately 36% of the control group had gotten the flu or some collection of flu symptoms. The remaining 64% of the residents remained symptom free. This is he darkest line above.
Of the FM Only group, the medium line above, those instructed to wear face masks only. 30% of this group showed flu symptoms, with 70% remaining symptom free. Clearly masks do help with humans, but far less than what you’d expect from the news reports.
Sweden kept the primary schools open and allows people to wear masks and social distance at they see fit. The death toll to August 1 is identical to Michigan, or slightly bette Sweden’s top virologist recommends that the US follow suit. Open up and trust people.
The group that did best was FMHH, the group who both wore facemarks and used hand health, regular hand washing plus hand sanitizer. This group reported an average of 3.5 hours per day of mask use above the control group average. This is about as good or better than I see in Michigan. Adding the hand health provided an additional 1% improvement, or a 3% improvement, depending on how you look at these things. The press claims hand health is wasted effort, but I’m not so sure. I argue that the effect was significant, and that the hand sanitizer was bad. I argue that iodine hand wash would have done better at far less social cost.
I also note that doing nothing was not that much worse than mask use. This matches with the observation of COVID-19 in Sweden. With no enforced social distancing, Sweden did about the same as Michigan — slightly better, despite Michigan closing the schools and restaurants, and imposing some of the toughest requirements for social distancing and mask use.
Other things that affect how likely you are to get flu symptoms. I find these rustles more interesting than the main face-mask result.
There were other observations from the university study that i found isignificant. There are racial differences and social differences. The authors didn’t highlight these, but they are at least as large as the effect of mask use. Asians got the flu only 70% as often as others, while black students got it 8% more often. This matches what has been seen in the US with COVID-19. Also interesting, those with a recent flu shot got flu more often; those with physical activity 13% more often. Smokers got the flu less than non-smokers and women got it 22% more often than men. The last two are the reverse with COVID-19. I could speculate on the reasons, but clearly there is a lot going on.
Why did Asians do better than others? Perhaps Asians have had prior exposure to some similar virus, and are thus slightly immune, or perhaps they used the masks more, being more socially acceptable. Why were smokers protected? It’s likely that smoke kills germs; was that the cause. These are speculations, and as for the rest I don’t know.
I am not that bothered that the students probably didn’t wear their masks 100% of the time. Better would be better, but even with mask use 100% of the time, there are other known routes that are almost impossible to remove: clothing, food, touching your face. I still think there is a big advantage to iodine hand wash, and I suspect we would be better off opening up a bit too.
When I was eight or nine year old, I went to the 1963-64 World’s Fair in New York. Among the attractions, in “the kitchen of the future”, I saw the first version of an amazing fry-pan that was coated with plastic. You could cook an egg on that plastic without any oil, and the egg didn’t stick. The plastic was called teflon, a DuPont innovation, whose molecule is shown below.
The molecular structure of Teflon. There is an interior carbon backbone that is completely enclosed with tightly bound fluorine atoms. The net result is a compound that does not bind readily to anything else.
Years later, I came to understand that Teflon’s high-temperature stability and non-stick properties derive from the carbon-fluorine bonds. These bonds are much stronger than the carbon-hydrogen bonds found in food, and most solid, organic things. Because of the strength of the carbon-fluorine bond, Teflon is resistant to oxidation, and to chemical interaction with other molecules, e.g. in food. It does not even interact with water, making it hydrophobic and non-wetting on metals. The carbon-carbon bonds in the middle remained high temperature stable, in part because they were completely shielded by the fluorine atoms.
This is a PFAS. The left side is just like teflon, and very hydrophobic. The right side is hydrophilic and highly bonding to pans, and many other things like water or cotton.
But as remarkable as teflon’s non-stick properties are, perhaps the most amazing thing was that it somehow sticks to the pan. For the first generation pans I saw, it didn’t stick very well. Still, the DuPont engineers had found a way to stick non-stick Teflon to a metal for long enough to cook many meals. If they had not found this trick, teflon would not have the majority of its value, but how did they do it? It turns out they used a thin coating of a di-functional compound called PFAS, a a polyfluoro sulphonyl (or polyfluoroalkyl) substance. The molecular structure of a common PFAS, is shown above.
Each molecule of PFAS has one end that’s teflon-like and another end that’s different. The non-Teflon end, in this case a sulfonyl group, is chosen to be both high temperature stable and sticky to metal oxides. The sulphonyl group above is highly polar, and acidic. Acidic will bind to bases, like metal oxides. The surface of the metal pan is prepared by applying a thin layer of oxide or amidine, making it a polar base. The PFAS is then applied, then Teflon. The Teflon-end of the PFAS is bound to teflon by the hydrophobicity of everything else rejecting it.
There are many other uses for PFAS. For example, PFAS is applied to clothing to make it wrinkle free and stain resistant. It can also be used as a super soap, making uncommonly stable foams and bubbles. It is also used in fire-fighting and plane de-icing. Finally, PFAS is the main component of Nafion, the most common membrane for PEM fuel cells. (I can think of yet other applications..) There is just one small problem with PFAS, though. Like teflon, this molecule is uncommonly stable. It doesn’t readily decompose in nature. That would be a small problem if we were sure that PFAS was safe. As it happens it seems safe, but we’re not totally sure.
The safety of PFAS was studied extensively before PFAS-teflon pans was put on the market, but the methodology has been questioned. Large doses of PFAS were fed to test animals, and their health observed. Since the test animals showed no real signs of ill-health though some showed a slight liver enlargement, PFAS was accepted as safe for humans at a lower exposure dose. PFAS was approved for use on pans and allowed to be dumped under conditions where humans would be exposed to 1/1000 of that used on the animals. The assumption was that there would be little or no health hazard at these low exposure levels.
But low risk is not no risk, and today one can sue for even the hint of an effect though use of a class action suit. That is, lawyers sue on behalf of all the people who might have been damaged. My city was sued successfully this way for complicity in sewage over-flows. Of course, since the citizens being paid by the suit are the same ones who have to pay for the damage, only the lawyers benefit. Still, the law is the law, and at least for some judges, putting anyone at risk is enough evidence of willful disregard to hand down a stinging judgement against the evil doer. Judges have begun awarding large claims for PFAS too. While no individual can get the claim more than a tiny amount of money, the lawyers can do very well.
There is no new evidence that PFAS is dangerous, but none is needed if you can get yourself the right judge. In this regard, an industry of judicial tourism has sprung up, where class-action lawyers travel to districts where the judges are favorable. For Teflon suits, the bust hunting grounds are in New York, New Hampshire, and California, and the worst are blood-red states like Wyoming and Utah. Just as different judges promote different precedents, different states allow vastly different PFAS concentrations in the water. A common standard, one used by Michigan, is 70 ppt, 1 billion times stricter than the amounts tested on animals. This is roughly 500 times stricter than the acceptable concentratios for lead, a known poison. The standard in New York is 7 times stricter than Michigan, 10 ppt. The standard in North Carolina is 140,000 ppt, in in several states there is no legal limit to PFAS dumping. There is no scientific logic to all of this, and skeptical view is that the states that rule more strictly for PFAS than lead do so make money for lawyers. Lead is everyone in the natural environment, so you can’t sue as easily for lead. PFAS is a man-made intruder, though, and a strict standard helps lawyers sue. You can find a summary of state by state regulations here.
Any guideline stricter than about 1000 ppt, presents a challenge to the water commissioner who must measure it and enforce the law. There are tricks, though. You can use the surfactant quality of PFAS to concentrate it by a factor of 100 or more. To do this, you take a sample of river water and create bubbles. Any bubbles that form will be highly concentrated in PFAS. Once PFAS can be identified this way, and the concentrators estimated, the polluters can be held liable. Whether we benefit from the strict rulings is another story. If I were making the law for Michigan, I’d probably choose a limit about 1 ppb, but I’m not making the law. The law, as written, may be an idiot, as Bumble said, but the Law is the Law.
In terms of Michigan fishing, while some rivers have PFAS concentrators above the MI-legal limit, they are generally not far over the line. I would trust the fish in the Huron River, even west of Wixom road but I’d suggest you avoid any foam you find floating there. The PFAS content of foam will be much higher than that of the water in general.
Robert E. Buxbaum, June 30, 2020, edited July 8, 2020. There are seven compounds known as PFAS’s: perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), perfluorohexanesulfonic acid (PFHxS), perfluoroheptanoic acid (PFHpA), and perfluorobutanesulfonic acid (PFBS).
