How deadly is the Wuhan virus really?

Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say? -- Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high by orders of magnitude. 

Authors Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya "are professors of medicine at Stanford. Neeraj Sood contributed to this article."

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

Population samples from China, Italy, Iceland and the U.S. provide relevant evidence. On or around Jan. 31, countries sent planes to evacuate citizens from Wuhan, China. When those planes landed, the passengers were tested for Covid-19 and quarantined. After 14 days, the percentage who tested positive was 0.9%. If this was the prevalence in the greater Wuhan area on Jan. 31, then, with a population of about 20 million, greater Wuhan had 178,000 infections, about 30-fold more than the number of reported cases. The fatality rate, then, would be at least 10-fold lower than estimates based on reported cases.

Next, the northeastern Italian town of Vò, near the provincial capital of Padua. On March 6, all 3,300 people of Vò were tested, and 90 were positive, a prevalence of 2.7%. Applying that prevalence to the whole province (population 955,000), which had 198 reported cases, suggests there were actually 26,000 infections at that time. That’s more than 130-fold the number of actual reported cases. Since Italy’s case fatality rate of 8% is estimated using the confirmed cases, the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%.

In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate.

The best (albeit very weak) evidence in the U.S. comes from the National Basketball Association. Between March 11 and 19, a substantial number of NBA players and teams received testing. By March 19, 10 out of 450 rostered players were positive. Since not everyone was tested, that represents a lower bound on the prevalence of 2.2%. The NBA isn’t a representative population, and contact among players might have facilitated transmission. But if we extend that lower-bound assumption to cities with NBA teams (population 45 million), we get at least 990,000 infections in the U.S. The number of cases reported on March 19 in the U.S. was 13,677, more than 72-fold lower. These numbers imply a fatality rate from Covid-19 orders of magnitude smaller than it appears.

How can we reconcile these estimates with the epidemiological models? First, the test used to identify cases doesn’t catch people who were infected and recovered. Second, testing rates were woefully low for a long time and typically reserved for the severely ill. Together, these facts imply that the confirmed cases are likely orders of magnitude less than the true number of infections. Epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for these factors.

The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism.

This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.

If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.

A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.

Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study -- New epidemiological model suggests the vast majority of people suffer little or no illness.

The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said.

The modelling by Oxford’s Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.
The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a “susceptibility-infected-recovered model” of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.

The modelling brings back into focus “herd immunity”, the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients.

But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.

To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised “neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity,” Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.

Stanford University School of Medicine seems to be casting a skeptical eye toward such claims. Example 1 - John Ioannidis, a professor there.

His expertise is wide-ranging—he juggles appointments in statistics, biomedical data, prevention research and health research and policy. Google Scholar ranks him among the world’s 100 most-cited scientists. He has published more than 1,000 papers, many of them meta-analyses—reviews of other studies. Yet he’s now found himself pilloried because he dissents from the theories behind the lockdowns—because he’s looked at the data and found good news.

In a March article for Stat News, Dr. Ioannidis argued that Covid-19 is far less deadly than modelers were assuming. He considered the experience of the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined Feb. 4 in Japan. Nine of 700 infected passengers and crew died. Based on the demographics of the ship’s population, Dr. Ioannidis estimated that the U.S. fatality rate could be as low as 0.025% to 0.625% and put the upper bound at 0.05% to 1%—comparable to that of seasonal flu.

“If that is the true rate,” he wrote, “locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.”

Example 2: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (again) of Stanford Medical School. Dr. Bhattacharya brings bad news:

1) Only a small percentage of Americans, less than one percent in his study, maybe two or three percent nationwide, have had COVID-19. Herd immunity requires something like 70 percent or 80 percent to have antibodies. So the disease has a very long way to go before it has run its course.

2) There is no vaccine for COVID-19 on the horizon, and there may never be one.

3) The shutdowns that have paralyzed the developed world have, to some degree, slowed the spread of the disease, at tremendous cost. But that only delays the inevitable. There will never be a time when it is “safe” to stop the lockdowns. The disease isn’t going away.

4) Dr. Bhattacharya is also eloquent in describing the disastrous human toll, in lives and misery, that the shutdowns have inflicted around the globe.

On the other hand, Dr. Bhattacharya has good news, too. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is low–worldwide, somewhere between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent, probably closer to the low end of that range. The typical seasonal flu is said to have a fatality rate of around 0.1 percent. So COVID-19 is probably somewhat worse than the average flu virus.

Here is the video in which he makes those points.

Covid-19, from a reliable source

I received this from a man, Ken, I have known for many years. He is a retired Master Sergeant of the Tennessee Army National Guard. Since retirement he has been a senior director of emergency management in Tennessee. He said he got this "From a reliable friend in the medical field." Well, I trust Ken.

Here is the man's assessment.
--------------

The virus is encircled by an oily, lipid layer that dissolved on contact with soap. Hence the push for hand washing. The virus enters the body through the mouth, nose, and/or eyes and needs cells with ACE2 receptors to attach. These are found primarily in the heart and lungs. ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme) is a protein associated with both diabetes and HTN, both conditions which place an individual at a heightened risk; 40% of patients with HTN experienced severe infections.

The virus then attaches to healthy cells with that fatty, oily layer and hijacks the cells, making proteins to keep the immune system at bay. The immune system mounts a defense and sometimes attacks healthy lung cells. The lungs fill with fluid and dying cells. This can lead to ARDS which is most often fatal, basically an acute, lethal pneumonia. That's what killing people. It's not unlike the Spanish Flu. That flu attacked healthy individuals and created a "cytokine storm" and people drowned from the fluids in their lungs. We now know the virus is found in the bloodstream, GI tract, CNS, and possibly brain. It can cause damage to the lungs, heart, bone marrow, and liver, possibly nerve cells. Should you survive a severe infection because you're young and healthy, you can expect a 20-30% decrease in lung capacity. What this means is that a flight of stairs will wind you. You can expect lung scarring and damage. We do not know the long term effects as this is an entirely new virus. When a virus makes that first jump from one species to another, it is at its most lethal. That is what we are seeing with SARS-CoV-2.

A new study is out that shows the droplets can "hang" in the air for up to three hours. This may mean the virus is aerosolized which answers the question why it appears to be so contagious when it only has an R0 of 2.4. This study was conducted by NIH, Princeton and UCLA and is not yet peer reviewed. This study also showed the virus is viable on plastics for 3 days; on the glass of cell phones 9 days; and on cardboard for 24 hours.

Contrary to the other four coronaviruses that are endemic in our population, this one does not seem to be susceptible to heat and humidity as we had first hoped. The transmission of the virus will go down come summer, but that is a function of schools' closing for the summer break rather than a response to heat/humidity. There will be an uptick in cases once fall arrives due to the close quarters. This virus is not going away anytime soon. There are three courses a novel virus can take - 1. It can appear, be devastating, and disappear unexpectedly like both SARS and MERS. This one did not do that so this option is out. 2. It can cause a global pandemic and a lot of people will lose their lives or be disabled from the infection. May be happening. 3. It can become endemic in our population like the other 4 coronaviruses we see during cold and flu season and account for up to 30% of our "colds." This is highly likely.

Myths:

1. Keep your mouth moist (another version is to spray your nose with saline) and the virus can't "take hold." Staying hydrated helps your immune system. It does not do anything to the virus.

2. Keep your mouth moist and take sips frequently to "swallow the virus."

3. Drink a solution of diluted bleach and water. No. Do not ever drink bleach. Or take acetic acid or any number of the "natural cures" out there. If there was a natural cure, doubtful almost 6k people globally would have died.

4. Take vitamin C. Vitamin C was a great marketing campaign in the 50s by Linus Pauling. It's such a great campaign, it perpetuates today. It does absolutely nothing for the prevention or treatment of colds/viruses.

5. There are antibiotics for this virus. Antibiotics only work on bacterial infections. We don't know which, if any, antivirals work on this novel virus.

6. I'm young and healthy. If I get it, it won't affect me. There can be long term damage or even organ failure due to the virus. We will not know for many years the extent of the damage.

7. The flu shot will prevent the virus. The flu and this virus are completely different viruses. However, getting the flu shot does two things: decreases your chances of becoming ill from the flu and having a weakened immune system making you more susceptible to the coronavirus and keeps you out of the hospitals allowing providers the time and resources to care for victims of the pandemic.

8. Black people don't get the coronavirus. OMG. NO! This is not only racist, it's completely wrong. Africa has over 100 cases.

9. I should wear a mask. No. Just no. (I can elaborate at length why this is not a good idea)

10. Kids can't get the virus. Not only is this not true, it may be deadly. Yes, children can get the virus and many are asymptomatic. So far, thankfully, there haven't been any deaths in children under 9. Newborns have gotten the virus. We just don't know what the long term effects will be. If you can protect your children, do so.

11. Schools are closed; I can take my child to the museum, zoo, theater, etc. NO. The idea of social distancing is to stay home. Do just that. Stay home. If you do not, people will die. It's that simple.

12. Heat (or cold) will kill the virus. Nope. This nasty bugger is strong and kicking our butts. Neither a hot or cold bath or a hair dryer will kill the virus. (Seriously, WHO, who is using a hair dryer to kill the virus??)

13. Garlic. What? No, of course garlic doesn't prevent or treat the virus. I mean, look at Italy.

14. There are medicines to treat the virus. No, there are no specific meds to treat this virus. South Korea seems to have found a sweet spot with a combo of drugs, but we have no idea if that actually works, how effective it is, long term effects, etc. We are years away from a vaccine.

15. Essential oils. No. Always no.

And the big one - 16. "It's just the flu." Nope. At the worst, its 30x more fatal than the seasonal flu (Chinese/WHO figures) at its best, 10x more fatal (South Korea figures). This is NOT just the flu. Seasonal flu has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.6% annually. This virus, depending on which country you run the stats has either a 3.4% CFR or a 1.2% CFR. Both are substantially higher than the flu. For comparison, the Spanish Flu had a CFR of 2.5%.
-----------

Read this, too: Influenza kills more people than coronavirus so everyone is overreacting, right? Wrong — and here’s why

Folks, this virus is bad news. Treat it that way.

Freeman Dyson blows up global warming alarmism

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus:

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

He was one of the first scientific figures to recognize that environmentalism had become a religion in its own right:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

From "Environmentalist religion explained."

In 2011, The Independent published, "Letters to a heretic: An email conversation with climate change sceptic Professor Freeman Dyson."

World-renowned physicist Professor Freeman Dyson has been described as a 'force-of-nature intellect'. He's also one of the world's foremost climate change sceptics. In this email exchange, our science editor, Steve Connor, asks the Princeton scholar why he's one of the few true intellectuals to be so dismissive of the global-warming consensus.

In the interview, after concise explanation of why climate modeling is useful but not determinative:

My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. 

Read the whole thing.

You can buy the science you want

This according to NPR. So now we know the reason Americans started getting obese at the same time the government started telling us what to eat. The result? Today, almost one-third of all American adults are obese and the rate is increasing. And this year, for the first time, a majority of American adults are either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

But remember when you are told that you are killing the planet: global warming research has nothing to do with money! It's hard science and scientists would never let their research and publishing be influenced by grants, awards, and seats at international conferences!

Update: The science is settled!

Update: Dozens of Failed Climate Predictions Stretch 80 Years Back

Why renewable energy cannot save the planet

Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment.

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road.

Gimme that Old New- Time Religion

Noted Physicist Says Multiverse Theory Of Creation Is Religion, Not Science

The very existence of the universe is so vexing to comprehend (see "anthropic principle") unless one posits a creator thereof, that determined atheists have come up with many ways to avoid a deity. That there are countless billions of universes, all existing apart from one another, is one proposition. Our universe only appears inexplicable without a creator because it is the only universe we apprehend. But universes are actually common and ours is just one of them; the rest are different and not anthropic at all. So they say.

But there is zero scientific evidence for the existence of any other universes. I remember reading an article some time ago by a physics professor of the University of Toronto, who said she believes that multiverses are real, but said it was time for scientists to state plainly that there was no evidence of them.

But wait! It's all unreal anyway! New Technology Makes It Plausible the World Is a Simulation. But that means the technology is only simulated, too, amirite?

But let's move on to The Most Post-Christian Cities in America: 2019

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds, who commented,

Six of America’s 10 most “post-Christian cities” are in New England, once the “City on a Hill” of the Puritans, and all 10 are in deep blue states, according to The Barna Group’s latest annual survey results for the top 100.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, seven of the 10 least post-Christian are in the states of the old Confederacy or border states that were culturally attached to the South. All of those, of course, are today either mostly or deeply red.

Which leads me to politics as religion, and who best to explain that (unintentionally) but Piers Morgan?

Piers, being from across the pond, might want to explain just what it is about Europeans that makes them so, well, enduringly European: Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels. I only slightly paraphrase Goerthe: Inside the breast of every European beats the heart of a barbarian.

Speaking of new-time religion and Europeans, let's turn to environmentalism, the hip religion for people who want other people to make huge sacrifices in the way they live, but not themselves because hypocrisy, it turns out, is a status symbol among the environmentally woke.

And who knew that religious environmentalism (there is no other kind, though) is a religion of human sacrifice? Well, thousands and thousands of sacrificed Europeans did, and some may have figured out right before they died what altar they were being sacrificed on, because Environmentalists Killed More Europeans Than Islamic Terrorists Did.

A 2003 heat wave killed 15,000 people in France. And, in response, the authorities have deployed Chalex, a database of vulnerable people who will get a call offering them cooling advice.

The advice consists of taking cold showers and sticking their feet in saucepans of cold water.

Desperate Frenchmen trying to get into any body of water they can have led to a 30% rise in drownings. The dozens of people dead are casualties of the environmentalist hatred of air conditioners.

Only 5% of French households have air conditioning. Even in response to the crisis, the authorities are only deploying temporary air conditioning to kindergartens.

The 2003 heat wave killed 7,000 people in Germany. And, today, only 3% of German households have air conditioning. Germany’s Ministry of the Environment refused to back air conditioning as a response to global warming. 

Ending air conditioning in America has long been a goal of the American environmentalist Left, to which I say, Stop using air conditioning? Washington first! But that'll never happen.

Bill Gates vs. Green New Deal

It's only two minutes long.



HT: Gerard

Welcome, neutrino oberservers!

Very interesting this morning to see that some of the referring URLs to this site belong to the Ice Cube South Pole Neutrino Observatory!

Welcome!

Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus?

Well, yes, as it turns out, and an enormous number across the scientific disciplines do. Some of them explain why.

The Resurrection is certainly an extraordinary claim. However—although extremely unlikely based on our experience so far—the probability of such an event also cannot be demonstrated to be zero. Regarding the Resurrection of Jesus, no evidence to the contrary—such as an identified body—exists. As a supernatural, one-off, historical phenomena, we cannot expect the Resurrection to be definitively confirmed or denied by any specific scientific test. This does not, however, negate other evidence that supports the plausibility of the Resurrection as a real event embedded within a true gospel story. This evidence includes but is not limited to: records of eyewitness accounts, peculiarities of the Bible compared to other historical or religious texts, and of course personal experience. When considered individually, this evidence is not overwhelmingly compelling but cumulatively converges upon plausibility.

Personally, I choose to believe that not all things worth knowing can be examined through the scientific lens, which makes faith entirely reasonable. 

 Sarah Bodbyl Roehls, research associate/senior scientist specializing in evolutionary biology and education, Michigan State University

Why do we trust our own thinking?

John Lennox is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has also gained fame as a defender of the rational basis of Christian faith. "In his view, religious belief is entirely compatible with the scientific quest."

... he argues that the scientist’s confidence in reason ultimately depends on the existence of a rational and purposeful Creator. Otherwise, our thoughts are nothing more than electro-chemical events, the chattering of soul-less synapses. “If you take the atheistic, naturalistic, materialistic view, you’re going to invalidate the reasoning process,” he says, “because in the end you’re going to say that the brain is simply the end product of a blind, unguided process. If that’s the case, why should you trust it?" 

The materialist view inevitably gives birth to a form of determinism that appears to mock our essential humanity. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and atheist, expresses the modern scientific outlook thus: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its tune.”

Dawkins routinely falls into confirmation bias: he examines the universe expecting to find purposelessness, and voila! That is indeed what he finds. And he says that his determination is scientific. Yet such a claim is not at all scientific because there is no "scientific" proof of any kind that the universe is purposeless.

To claim, as Dawkins does (along with other atheists) that there is no God is to claim, really, that one possesses infinite knowledge - enough to claim that no being exists that has infinite knowledge! But this kind of militant atheism is not a rational stance, it is a rebellious, emotion-based  stance, as openly admitted by atheist Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God!  I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind… This is a somewhat ridiculous situation… [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist. (The Last Word, pp. 130-131, quoted by fellow philosopher Edward Feser.)

Personally, I do not insist that atheism is either irrational or non-rational, though as Nagel points out, that is a very common stance among self-described atheists. I do say, however, that atheism is very unwise, as mathematician Blaise Pascal rather decisively demonstrated.

Question of the year

Milky Way galaxy to be destroyed - we are all going to die!

The universe keeps trying to find new ways to obliterate us all! 

The Milky Way Could Crash Into Another Galaxy Billions of Years Earlier Than Predicted

Galaxies orbit millions of light-years apart, but gravity, the immutable magnet of the cosmos, can pull them together, producing spectacular collisions that reshuffle stars millions of years. According to the leading theory, the Milky Way will collide with one of its closest neighbors, Andromeda, sometime between 6 billion and 8 billion years from now.  

But the Milky Way may face another galactic threat before that, from a different neighbor. A new study predicts our galaxy will collide with a galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud between 1 billion and 4 billion years from now.

So really, what is the point of long-range planning? In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes so famously explained, "We are all going to die!"

It is, once again,The End Of Life As We Know It! Let me count the ways:

1. The giant asteroid that could be on course to hit Earth causing massive devastation! 
2. Or the scenario this year as an obscure Planet X -- or Nibiru -- heads toward or collides into Earth. 
3. Or that "Unseen dark comets 'could pose deadly threat to earth'." 
4. That's if we live long enough - doubtful because of the comet Genondahwayanung is on its way back and it pretty much annihilated most life in North America when it came here the first time.
5. Not to worry about that, though, since we face supernova and galaxy-attack scenarios. 
6. And then the massive gas cloud speeding toward a collision with the Milky Way! 
7. But really, who cares about threats from outer space when out own atmosphere may detonate? 
8. And then the asteroids. 
9. Then the black hole death stars! 
10. And we might be swallowed whole by the sun. 
11. And there's an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way. 
12. Then there was the fear that "human society is very quickly headed to a violent and disturbing end." 
13. Then the earth began to kill people for changing its climate. 
14. Then there is the voracious, galactic Hoover in Switzerland that will suck the whole planet into a black hole. 
15. And the massive destruction along the coasts of countries like the USA, UK and many on the African continent, within a matter of hours.
16. But don't worry about the universe collapsing since that cannot happen before our galaxy rams into another one.
17. But don't forget that The Universe is Going to Collapse anyway!
18. Scientists discover super volcano trigger that could herald humanity's doom.
19. The Internet is going to kill every one of us!
20. There is a stellar Death Star coming right at us. Surrounded by whirling comets, it's like a stellar shotgun! 
21. The universe is just going to collapse in The Big Cosmic Crunch!
22. A distant galaxy is rushing towards Earth at one million mph - with no hope of deviation!
23. Then there is a mysterious planet that wiped out life on Earth millions of years ago could do it again, according to a top space scientist.
24. Or the universe might just rip itself apart before we collide with the Magellanic Cloud!

I tell ya, I'm starting to think that sooner or later, every one of us is going to wind up dead!

This calls for a rock song! 

Honor-Shame dynamics enter the STEMs

I have posted before of how the Left's social dynamic, its basic way of relationships with other persons, is one of honor-shame. Honor-shame is the basic dynamic that human beings evolved with and is still found in Arab and other cultures around the world. 

The Middle East Quarterly explains the essence of the honor/shame culture:

[I[n traditional Arab society ... a distinction is made between two kinds of honor: sharaf and ‘ird. Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

Honor, then, is what is granted by the community, by the social units of society. Likewise, shame or disgrace is also so given. The psychologist who used the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

Now we come to this, which I present as another exhibit in my premise: "Profs say female STEM grades don’t reflect ‘perceived effort’."

Four professors from Otterbein University argue in a recent academic journal article that "grading practices" may be at least partly responsible for the lack of women in STEM fields.

Based on surveys of 828 STEM students, the professors conclude that female students believe they work harder than their male classmates for similar grades, indicating that "women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

 [The] Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades.

After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

"Science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention."    Tweet This

"This, in turn, returns us to questions of grading practices,” the professors write. “Does a course grade primarily reward conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability, or does it primarily reward hard work, reflected in course attendance, submission of assignments on time, etc., or some mixture of the two?”

Let's consider this sentence fragment: "... while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades... "

This is literally a Marxist view, the labor theory of value. The women worked harder, so they should get better grades. That the women may not have worked better seems not to have crossed their minds.

In my college days, my friends were envious that I rarely typed (as in, with a typewriter; I am a fossil) a draft of my term papers. I just sat down, banged the keys for awhile, and voila! A term paper came forth, for which my usual grade was an A. My buddies, meanwhile, would labor over draft after draft before going final, and maybe they got an A and maybe they didn't.

I was simply a better writer than they were; it just came naturally to me. But I could labor hours over math assignments and still not finish them, while my friends had long finished theirs and were out dancing with the cheerleaders. However, the professors apparently think that effort counts more than results, even in engineering, and for term papers I should have received only a C or so, and my friends an A because they worked harder than I did, and the reverse for math, right?

Labor is in itself valueless. Example: I hire a local young man to cut my grass and edge the walks and driveway. It's his business. He arrives with a large riding mower and knocks out my half-acre of green in probably not more than 15 minutes, maybe 20; I have never timed him. Now, I could buy a lawn mower, although not one as expensive as his, and I could cut my own grass. But it would take me much longer and require more effort from me than it does from him.

But would my yard be better maintained or look nicer just because I worked harder at it than he did?

But that is not even the real point of the professors' study. The real key point is this: "women felt they put more effort" than the men. How would they know? They can't know. The whole thing is not really about what actually happened, it's about how they felt about what happened. This is foolish, of course, and indicates another step down the road of what I have maintained for many years: led by the Left, America is adopting an honor-shame social ordering and dynamic.

Think of it this way -- these women students feel shamed by their perception of their inferior academic performance. The answer is not to work harder or smarter. It is to recover their honor. And that means that grading must be preferentially curved to do that:

Citing research by Kevin Rask, now a professor at Colorado College, they propose that “science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention.” 

Yeah, the bridge you will be driving across the chasm a 10 years from now will have been designed by an engineer who was literally given a pass in order to keep her "motivated." Good luck with that.

Update: As someone commented elsewhere, "Grades should reflect knowledge and ability, not effort. I don't want my brake system designed by somebody who's degree is basically a participation trophy."

Syria Sarin Attack a Hoax?

Update: A few readers have pointed out that the linked article herein actually refers to last year's sarin attack, not last week's. I regret my error. I plan to post a follow-up soon.

Is Trump being played by anti-Assad elements who staged the recent sarin attack in the hope that Trump would go his usual bananas at being defied?

Well, that would depend on the attack being a staged or hoaxed attack to begin with. And an MIT expert claims that the chemical weapons attack in Syria was staged.

A leading weapons academic has claimed that the Khan Sheikhoun nerve agent attack in Syria was staged, raising questions about who was responsible. ...

Theodore Postol, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [said] ... "I have reviewed the [White House's] document carefully, and I believe it can be shown, without doubt, that the document does not provide any evidence whatsoever that the US government has concrete knowledge that the government of Syria was the source of the chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun, Syria at roughly 6am to 7am on 4 April, 2017.

 Referring to the photo above,

His analysis of the shell suggests that it could not have been dropped from an airplane as the damage of the casing is inconsistent from an aerial explosion. Instead, Postol said it was more likely that an explosive charge was laid upon the shell containing sarin, before being detonated.

Read the whole article. Postol is a former science adviser to the defense department.

Among the credentials of my military career was that of nuclear and chemical target analysis. I was trained and qualified to determine the manner of attacking a target with chemical weapons, including sarin, attack calculations that would include amount of agent and technical attack profile.

Sarin is heavier than air. It has been many years since I worked such a problem, but I cannot recollect solving an attack profile with a ground burst. Lay persons simply do not know that enormous quantities of gas are required. Some of the problems we worked to attack Soviet formations actually required more nerve agent for one attack than the US had in its entire inventory.

Actually, sarin is not a gas, but a liquid. The warhead's charge is designed to explode the liquid sarin into basically a mist that is borne by prevailing winds over the target area, where the mist settles. Sarin can evaporate into a vapor, but doing so lessens it lethality by lowering the concentration in the air.

The linked article implies that a sarin delivery warhead explodes the way a high-explosive projectile would. That is not the case. Such an explosion would destroy much of the sarin content. Instead, a shell or bomblet would be designed to basically disassemble, releasing the interior container to dispel the sarin liquid in mist form.

However, the pieces  of the projectile simply drop to the earth. The article's photo shows what appears to be an intact casing, deformed in a crater in a concrete or asphalt street.

Um, no. First, while some delivery systems did retain an intact projectile (such as the US 155mm artillery projectile), cratering would be most unlikely in impact. There would be no HE to explode. Furthermore, having also been trained in crater analysis at the US Army Artillery Center and School, I absolutely guarantee that no such casing causing such a crater would conveniently remain nearly intact in the middle of the crater.

So I think that MIT Prof. Postol is correct. And sane heads within the defense department probably have been heard at the White House (I am guessing here) so that Trump has backed off his initial outrage.

Maybe they need to remember the old adage: "First reports are always wrong."

Shot bombers and school shootings

In trying to decide what to do about school shootings, especially mass shootings, are we making a fundamental error by considering only the schools that suffered them and the men who committed them? Or should we base our decisions mainly by examining schools that have not suffered them?

In  my prior post on why we are probably alone in the universe ("Where is everybody? They're dead"), I included what the analysis of combat-damage assessment of World War II bombers had to do with the existence of life on other worlds.

The Atlantic writes of World War 2 bomber crews who did pattern analysis of bullet holes from enemy fighters attacks. They thought if there was a pattern, then they could lessen the number of bombers shot down by increasing the armor in the hit sections of the bomber.

But the Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald, and his colleagues at the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, had a novel, if counterintuitive, prescription. Don’t protect the planes where they were taking the most damage, Wald said. Armor the planes where there were no bullet holes at all.

“You put armor where there are no holes, because the planes that got shot there didn’t return to the home base,” says Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “They crashed.”

The holes didn’t show where returning planes were likely to get hit, but only what it was possible for later observers to see. This is known as an observer selection effect, and the same sort of bias might apply not only to perforated planes, but to whole worlds as well.

Observer selection effect means that we are able to observe something only because we survived the causes. It is not the same as observer bias, in which our interpretations of what we observe is shaped by preconceptions. No, OSE means that we can observe in the first place because we are observing only non-negative outcomes.

I asked my chemical engineer daughter about the shot bomber problem and she immediately said that the bombers that did not return were of greater assessment value than the ones who did. She explained that OSE is a well-understood hazard in science and engineering and was a topic of discussion in her statistics and probability courses.

And so to schools: Are we looking in the wrong places for indicators of what to do? Maybe the characteristics of schools and their students who have not been subjected to the violence could be more informative than the ones who have.

Or maybe there are simply too few school massacres (fortunately) to do an OSE analysis. I do not know, I am neither an engineer nor mathematician. But if not, I wonder whether that might mean we are doomed to know too little to do anything effective until there have been a large number more such horrors.

Where is everybody? They're dead.

Fermi's Paradox was first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. It goes like this: The universe is many billions of years old. Fermi calculated that an alien species smart enough to become spacefarers could reach any point in our galaxy in five million years. But we we have no scientific evidence that aliens beings have been here.

So, Fermi asked, where is everybody?

Many answers have been proposed by serious, highly-credentialed scientists - more than 50 different answers, as I recall. I have written a lot about the paradox.

Now, Astronomy.com offers this: The aliens are silent because they are extinct:

Latest theory: This will never hear anything.

Life on other planets would likely be brief and become extinct very quickly, said astrobiologists from the Australian National University (ANU).

In research aiming to understand how life might develop, scientists realized new life would commonly die out due to runaway heating or cooling on their fledgling planets.

“The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens,” said Aditya Chopra from ANU.

“Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive.”

“Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable.”

About four billion years ago, Earth, Venus, and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said Charley Lineweaver from ANU.

“Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet’s climate,” he said.

Then there is recent study, published in the prestigious journal Science, that life is simply impossible in probably 90 percent of galaxies in the universe because of intense gamma radiation. And ordinary solar and cosmic radiation would have stopped life here on Earth without the Earth's magnetic fields shielding the planet, but planetary magnetic fields apparently are very uncommon; they have not been detected on any other planet anywhere. (See here.)

Update: The Atlantic writes of World War 2 bomber crews who learned not to up-armor planes where they had been struck by flak or enemy fire. After all, those hits were survivable.

Don’t protect the planes where they were taking the most damage, Wald said. Armor the planes where there were no bullet holes at all.

“You put armor where there are no holes, because the planes that got shot there didn’t return to the home base,” says Anders Sandberg, a senior research fellow at University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. “They crashed.”

The article goes on to explain "observer selection effect," where we are able to observe something only because we survived the causes. We look at our own world and see life in enormous variety, flourishing everywhere, even in rocks and immense pressures of the deep sea and hot springs of near-boiling temperatures.

And we easily conclude, "Life is everywhere on our planet, so it must be everywhere out there." This powers the SETI programs, in fact, and is so pervasive it even has a name: the Principle of Mediocrity, which means simply that earth and its biosphere are unexceptional. The earth and its life are merely average in the universe - average, which is what "mediocre" means. But it is just as likely - probably more so - that our conclusions spring the the observer selection effect: we conclude that what we see is normal.

What see are 100-mile-wide "bullet" holes on our planet, and hey, we're still here. All is well and this is cosmically normal. But there's a problem.

After all, there are 100-mile impact craters on our planet’s surface from the past billion years, but no 600-mile craters. But of course, there couldn’t be scars this big. On worlds where such craters exist, there is no one around afterward to ponder them. In a strange way, truly gigantic craters don’t appear on the planet’s surface because we’re here to look for them. Just as the wounds of the returning planes could reflect only the merely survivable, so too for our entire planet’s history. It could be that we’ve been shielded from these existential threats by our very existence. ...

 “Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.”

If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood. 

"Stark silence." Where is everybody? They're dead.

Perhaps we’re truly extreme oddballs, held aloft by a near-impossible history—one free from deadly migrating gas giants and solar-system chaos, but also filled with freakishly favorable accidents, like a cataclysmic impact early in our history that created a strange, gigantic moon that stabilized our orbit and allowed complex life to flourish. As the solar system continued to shake out, we somehow ended up with just the right amount of water to lubricate plate tectonics, keeping the climate habitable over hundreds of millions of years and preventing a Venus-style planetary resurfacing catastrophe, but not so much water that we wound up on a lifeless water world.

So far, empirical evidence supports the conclusion that we are alone.

Hurricanes and global warming

The Myth That Climate Change Created Harvey, Irma

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent scientific assessment that “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

Further, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [such as ‘Superstorm’ Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

Other media outlets tying Harvey to climate change took a more measured approach.

For instance, Vox wrote that man-made global warming did not actually cause Harvey, but simply exacerbated the natural disaster by creating heavier rainfalls.

But this claim is discredited by University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass, who after examining precipitation levels in the Gulf found that “[t]here is no evidence that global warming is influencing Texas coastal precipitation in the long term and little evidence that warmer than normal temperatures had any real impact on the precipitation intensity from this storm.”

Mass went on to explicitly refute those who attribute Hurricane Harvey to climate change:

The bottom line in this analysis is that both observations of the past decades and models looking forward to the future do not suggest that one can explain the heavy rains of Harvey by global warming, and folks that are suggesting it are poorly informing the public and decision makers. 

Politicians seeking to exploit Harvey and Irma as reasons to act on climate change would only make a bad situation worse. Climate policies and regulations designed to prevent natural disasters and slow the earth’s warming simply will not do so.

Then there is the NOAA: 

It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations, or are not yet confidently modeled (e.g., aerosol effects on regional climate). ...

In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic.

Speaking of climate-change, remember all the alarm about how the world's glaciers were melting? Well, as it turns out, they are. And they've been melting for 400 years.

Remember, even former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer saw through the smokescreen:

"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

"We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer.

That is what "climate change" is really about: its advocates just want our money.

Hmm:

Taken from this interesting lesson.

Update: Heh!

Update: This is informative, too: Hurricanes, Rainfall, and Climate Change

Evolution: Nature just won't cooperate

Recognizable modern human footprint fossils have been found in Crete dating to almost two million years before current evolution theory holds they evolved:

Footprint find on Crete may push back date humans began to walk upright
HUMAN-like footprints have been found on an ancient sea shore. They shouldn’t be there. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This story was also carried by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, so lest anyone think this is a thinly-disguised creationist fake news report, well, no. And don't you just love that final headline: "They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time." How dare nature show up when it's not welcome!

Anyway, here is the summary. A Polish palaeontologist, Gerard Gierlinski, was on vacay on Crete in 2002 when he found the footprints. He has taken more than a decade to analyse his find. Human footprints are absolutely distinctive in the hominid family, in fact among all animalia. Here is why:

Photo (h) shows the bottom of a modern human foot. Photo (i) is of one of the footprints in Crete.

The prints have been dated to 5.7 million years old

... using foraminifera (analysis of marine microfossils) as well as their position beneath a distinctive sedimentary rock layer created when the Mediterranean Sea dried up about 5.6 million years ago.

But evolution theory holds that no footprints like that should have been left anywhere until only four million years ago.

Humans have parallel toes with no claws. As the other photos show, bears have parallel toes, but definitely have claws. Non-human primates such as monkey and apes have no claws, but their feet do not have parallel toes nor is the big toe enlarged as on humans. In fact, primates' feet resemble their hands a great deal.

Furthermore, only humans have balls of their feet. Only human have a significantly arched foot. Primates have neither.

So how did modern footprints wind up on Crete 1.7 million years "early?" No one knows now but I assume that focused research will be forthcoming on site.

My daughter and I joked about writing a mad scientist book whose subject invents a time machine that he uses to leave anachronisms throughout history. Such as a Swiss ring watch in a sealed Ming Dynasty tomb. Or these footprints.

"Ah, they found the Crete footprints! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!"

Don't get your hopes up - they're 3 billion years old

NatGeo:

Something has breathed new life into a faraway cosmic mystery machine and caused it to repeatedly hurl tremendous amounts of energy into the void.

It’s not clear exactly what that object is, but scientists refer to the observable phenomenon as a fast radio burst: a fleeting but extremely powerful blast of radio waves. In this case, astronomers caught a rapid stream of radio bursts coming from a galaxy about three billion light-years away.

This phenomenon was only type classified 10 years ago. Astronomers thought then it would turn out to be a one-off, but it's back. No one knows much about it.

The article also has a stunning array of Hubble telescope images, worth your time if you are interested in that sort of thing.

The Large Magellanic Cloud, visible only from the southern hemisphere.