Why they’re winning. The “elites” (as has been the case for many years now) have not covered themselves with glory here.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Ferguson’s Imperial Model
A code review.
Good lord.
This reminds me an awful lot of the code that was leaked from CRU. S**t climate coding has done a lot of economic damage, but nowhere near as rapidly as this has, with tens of thousands of deaths to boot.
[Update a few minutes later]
A devastating conclusion:
All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.
Same with climate modeling. Get it out of the universities. Particularly Penn State.
[Update a while later]
What Ferguson’s booty call tells us about our “elites.”
[Friday-afternoon update]
The model that panicked the world was junk.
Viral Load
Thoughts on taking it seriously.
This would have a huge impact on policy.
The Social-Distancing Experiment
…has failed.
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke about the kid in a classroom, asking if Marx was the greatest scientist in history. After being assured by the teacher that that was the case, he asked “Well, why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”
[Update a while later]
Policy and punditry must adapt to new data.
LGBT What
No, there is no such thing as an LGBT person.
Postmodernism
It’s the latest victim of the plague.
As the old saying goes, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
Orange County
A judge has refused to overturn Newsom’s capricious order to shut down its beaches.
Ventilators
Why is JPL building them?
On top of the point that they still have to be mass produced, we now have a surplus, and we’re finding out that in many cases we don’t need them (and may have been killing people with them).
[Update a few minutes later]
Related Twitter thread. Pronation seems to be more effective and safer than ventilators.
Bursts Of Exercise
Doing it intermittently throughout the day may be able to undo the damage caused by sitting all day.
From Sedentary To Cross Fit
“How I did it in one day.”
Well, started to do it.