Category: Miscellaneous

Military Intel, Russia, and COVID

As I’m reading that Russia tripled their reported COVID death toll, I cannot help but recall an old rule of military intel analysis. If the report is a good thing (e.g. amount of grain produced this year), halve it. If the report is a bad thing (here, the number of people dead from a virus), double it. I never took the maxim literally, but rather thought of it as a reminder that ‘the bearer of bad news’ was not something you wanted to be within the Russian government. Thus numbers picked up from internal reports were apt to be CYA inaccurate.

Not sure if that rule was meant to apply to revised numbers (basically our fake numbers are off by a power of ten, so we’re going to adjust within the half/double rule to produce stats that are within the realm of possibility) or if not (reality was so readily apparent that the official numbers had to be revised close to reality).

School’s out for winter

My local school district is moving to remote learning for what’s left of December and a few weeks in January. Not unexpected, and a part of the reason we chose a different learning option for Anya this year. The Superintendent’s message highlights the two big problems I expected with in-person learning. Firstly, 28 positive cases resulted in 467 quarantined individuals. That’s about 16 people in quarantine for every infected individual. The district had about 3,000 students before some percentage opted to use virtual learning this year. Add some 300 staff — they’ve had about 15% of the school out in quarantine in the past three weeks. And that’s before any increase in infections from Thanksgiving. Secondly, people who send their kids to school with COVID-like symptoms (I believe they have a special nurse’s office in each school for those kids to hang out in all day so people who have to swing by the nurse’s office to get medication or a scrape patched up aren’t exposed to a room full of sick kids) and even while awaiting test results.

Liberatarianism is great in theory … but, in practice, the entire point of the belief system is that you’re free to make whatever choice you decide to make. Even if you want to ignore the bears.

Winter Wonderland

It was warm over the weekend, rained Monday — and, as the temperature dropped, it changed over to ice and snow. The tree branches are all covered in a bit of ice with a lot of snow sticking to the ice. With saplings drooping over and tree boughs pulled down, we have a winter wonderland.

Autumn Wrap-up and Winter Projects

Autumn is coming to a close. We had an great growing season this year — I covered the lettuce beds with fabric tents three or four nights in November because temps would be near freezing. We had a few nights where our small pond froze on the surface, but tomorrow night will be the first sustained sub-freezing temperature. I got a bit of a late start to outdoor gardening because we rebuilt the garden beds in a sunnier location, but I still managed a 200 day growing season. Adding another six weeks for the seeds started indoors, I had plants growing for 244 days — about 2/3 of the year! Moving the beds to a sunnier location greatly increased productivity, and the compost in the garden area has turned into a large pile of dirt. We’ve been adding new stuff to the north side of the pile, and I’ve been moving everything south as I turn the pile. It is impressive how much the pile of grass and leaves shrinks down as it decomposes. In early autumn, I put about 16 cubic feet of compost into the garden beds to make a lettuce and kale bed. Yesterday, I amended another fifteen cubic feet of the lettuce bed. Anya and I used two cucumber A-frame trellises and a few of the tomato trellises to create a structure and covered the lettuce bed with greenhouse plastic. Hopefully we’ll be able to continue growing lettuce throughout the winter. I also plan on planting the broccoli, brussle sprouts, and cabbage under the cover next April.

I was worried the chicks we got in August would be too small when the temps dropped, but they are fifteen weeks old today. They love being outside and fluff up really big when it gets cold. Both the coop and chicken tractor have a wide roost so they can keep their toes under their warm feathers.

In the next few weeks, we’ll build some nesting boxes and get the coop finalized. I also want to finish making packets for the seeds we harvested this year and file them into my seed storage boxes. In the next week or two, I will be making a lot of candied almonds — vanilla cinnamon candied almonds, maple roasted salted almonds, and some plain candied almonds — for us and to give away to neighbors.

This winter, I want to finish the crochet blanket I am making for our family room. It should be a thick, warm blanket that we can all snuggle under. I want to finish Anya’s new Peppermint Swirl dress. I also want to make her micro-corduroy dress/tunic/shirt to replace the one she outgrew this past year. Both will be worn in the spring/summer, but sewing is a cold/snowy day activity for me.

Understanding Exponential Growth

Using the data from https://covidtracking.com/data/national/cases: in the most recent seven day span (10-16 November), 1,056,346 people in the US have been infected with this coronavirus. The total number of cases yesterday was 11,047,064. That means 9.562% of the *total cases* in the US were new cases in the past week.

 

This is how exponential growth works — and why you heard a lot about ‘flattening the curve’ earlier in the year. If you put a penny on the first square of a chess board, double it and put two pennies on the second square, double it and put four pennies on the third square, and continue in that fashion … mathematically, you have 2^n pennies on each square, where n is the numeric sequence of the square, 0-63. On the last square in the first row, square #7, there are 2^7 pennies — 128 pennies, or a buck and twenty eight cents. Not a lot. And the end of the second row, you have 2^15 pennies — 32,768 pennies. That’s $327.68 — over three hundred bucks. A lot more than a buck, but not a huge amount of money. But you’re up to 2^23 at the end of the third row — 8,388,608 pennies or $83,886.08. Eighty three grand is a lot of money. By the time you get to the mid-point on the board, the end of the fourth row, you have 2^31 pennies on a square. 2,147,483,648 pennies for $21,474,836.48 — over twenty million dollars. A lot of money, but it’s possible. The second half of the chessboard is where exponential growth becomes unsustainable. The end of the fifth row is 2^39 — 549,755,813,888 pennies. The end of the sixth row is 2^47 — 140,737,488,355,328 pennies. The end of the seventh row is 2^55 —  On the final square, you have 2^63 … 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 pennies for $92,233,720,368,547,758.08 … 92 quadrillion dollars. If the going price of Earth is only five quadrillion dollars, you’re putting a marker for the entire solar system (and then some) on that last square.

And that ignores the accumulating total — while you have 92 quadrillion dollars on the final square, you have another 92 quadrillion dollars on the entire rest of the board. Now, obviously, we are not doubling our rate of infections every day. But we’re entering “second half of the board” territory just the same.