Month: October 2022

Nobel Prizes for 2022

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The week is over. That first week in October when the world celebrates achievements in certain scientific fields through the awarding of the Nobel prizes. The week when stories of scientists living in the US being awakened by phone calls from Stockholm announcing the prize get their obligatory mention in the US media. The week when esoteric concepts are recognized for their impact on physiology, chemistry, and physics. All those who are not experts in the field nod in understanding, then silently acknowledge with gratitude that at least they didn’t have to really understand the achievements leading to the prizes. And then it is over. The nation’s attention span can morph to considering what the Kardashians are doing, or how the latest football sensation is making a fool of themselves on social media, or how the national political discussions have taken yet another turn towards nastiness.

In 2022, the awards in these areas showed that ongoing trends in diversity are not going to change soon. There was only one woman honored as part of a triumvirate for chemistry. Carolyn Bertozzi joined Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless for their contributions on implementing “click” chemistry. This is a way to create molecules which normally would not exist in nature. Meldal and Sharpless tried to get two types of molecules to react, molecules that act like a loaded spring with much energy to release, and found that using copper as a catalyst would cause the reaction to take place without excessive heat or other reaction conditions. Bertozzi wanted to use the reaction inside of cells, but copper is toxic. So she used a method that cranked up the spring-loading of the molecules further, and enabled reactions to take place inside of a biological cell. The application of this discovery has led to the development of a potential drug for cancer, now in clinical trials. But these discoveries have also led to development of a wide range of materials, including antimicrobials, herbicides, corrosion retardants, and many other potentially useful products. One never knows what will result from a new basic discovery.

The Nobel prize this year in Physiology, or commonly known as Medicine, went to Svante Pāābo. Normally a prize is awarded to multiple recipients, but Svante’s discovery was deemed so consequential that the prize went to him alone. He developed the methods and techniques to allow DNA to be sequenced from ancient fossils. Single-handedly he developed these techniques, ensuring that modern DNA did not contaminate the ancient bones he worked on. Now, you often may read that humans contain certain genes from Neanderthals. It was Svante’s techniques that have allowed for full expression of Neanderthal DNA from the remaining bones discovered in caves and other pre-historic sites. His contributions in this area are used by many researchers today, so eventually, it may be possible to reconstitute ancient animals from limited remains. Jurassic Park, anyone?

The prize in Physics this year went to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeillinger for their work on quantum entanglement. Let me say that in college, I studied quantum effects. Nevertheless, I share many feelings with Albert Einstein, in that I find it weird that pairs of electrons can be linked at a distance, and determining the condition of one electron automatically determines the state of the second electron. But that is exactly what these physicists determined, quantum effects are real, and can lead to such things as eventual development of a quantum internet. This work spanned the decades between the 1970’s through the 1990’s, based upon the thought experiment developed by John Bell in the 1960’s. If John Bell were still alive, he undoubtedly would have shared in this prize. But the Nobel committee will not honor someone who is already dead. The implications of this work? Still in development, but eventually we will have quantum computers capable of solving problems a digital computer is not able to resolve. Much like fusion energy, quantum applications seem like they are always just around the corner, but this is an area I am confident will remake our lives in the decades to come.

All of the work of the Nobel team, and those who win the prizes, is reliant upon the statistical principles developed in the 19th century. Since Alfred Nobel did not see fit to recognize this field of study when he endowed his awards, it has fallen upon another person to set up an award for statistical methodology. This is a new award, and there were five collaborators who won the prize for this year. Eventually we may see the Rousseeuw prize as significant as a Nobel, but until that time comes, this is a simple shout-out for a new award. Statistical methodology is fundamental in all fields of science, and is used to determine whether observed effects are real, or potentially due to chance. When we say believe the science, it is because the effects were statistically significant.

Sources:  Science magazine, 14-Oct. and 7-Oct. issues.

It Is Happening Here

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Original gerrymander

I will admit I am more than a bit puzzled over the direction politics have taken in this country. Not just since 2015 when Trump rode the escalator down to begin his campaign, but beginning back after Barack Obama was elected. I saw the Rick Santelli rant live in early 2009 that began the tea party movement, and realized at that time how prescient and how divisive his words were. They were prescient since they acknowledged this country was not of one mind, but had become a bimodal distribution, where one group had grabbed all of the growth in the economy, and one group had lagged behind, suffering competitive disadvantage as the world’s manufacturing was reconfigured to arbitrage labor and regulatory costs. The words were divisive since a sub-group of Republicans used the energy released from Rick’s rant to grab onto elective power, leading to such eminent personalities as Marjorie Taylor Greene.

We now have one of the two political parties in this country who have completely adopted a nihilist philosophy. This party believes our federal government is totally broken, and violence is justified in breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces, leading to its dissolution. That is why so many folks do not recognize 1/6/21 as an insurrection. To true believers of this philosophy, they internalize what Barry Goldwater claimed nearly 60 years ago.  “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” were the words Barry said in his acceptance speech for his presidential nomination in 1964. It has taken nearly 60 years, but that is now the mantra shared by far too many of the followers of Donald Trump.

What is worse, this philosophy has been successful at the state level far too many times. While Democrats were congratulating themselves over their success at a national level, the real power was slipping between their fingers at the state level. Indeed, we are about to see the fruits of two rounds of redistricting solidify control of Red legislators at the state level. You now have states like North Carolina, which had a 50% (Republican) to 49% (Democratic) result in voting for state legislative seats. Due to just one round of gerrymandering, this resulted in a 69 (Republican) to 51 (Democratic) margin in the North Carolina house. What will happen this year after a second round of gerrymandering? It will probably increase the margin of Republican legislators despite what the voters of the state really want as reflected by their votes.

So the Republican Nihilists are not yet resting on their laurels. They have discovered another tier of government they can eat away at like termites chowing down on a stack of 2×4’s. The down ballot races at the state level, like Attorney General, and Secretary of State, are actively being devoured by deniers. Soon these false prophets will have us writing out our choices for any office in cursive, and woe be to those whose script is deemed illegible. These luddites do not accept that machines have an error rate orders of magnitude less than humans. They realize they only need one cycle of elections to break the habit of citizens to vote. So much of our democracy rests on the premise that our votes count, even if candidates we support are unsuccessful. If an election cycle goes through where it becomes obvious that inconvenient votes do not count, millions who are only tangentially connected to the voting process will make the decision to skip any future elections.

That is when the Republican Nihilists will have truly won. What travesties they will attempt to institute when there is no one to provide a counterbalance, one can only guess. All I keep thinking about is the question I heard growing up – how could the Germans have supported a system that led to Hitler taking power? In future years, after I am gone, I can only hope we do not have future generations asking how we in the United States could have gone so wrong. It can indeed happen here.

Washed in the Bodily Fluids of The Man

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Let me introduce myself. I am the newly anointed nominee for Senator in this state. Why, the big man has approved me because I was willing to lick his boots in exchange for his endorsement. And once I’ve gotten the endorsement for the nomination from The Man himself, I’ve been forgiven of all of my sins in the past.

What sins, you may ask? Well, let me go and summarize just a few of them. But it is important to note that all of my sins are now washed away in the blood of the lamb, or whatever bodily fluid happens to emanate from The Man.

There was the time I may have paid for one of my many admirers to have an abortion. It is important to note that now I am totally against any abortion at any time, no matter the circumstance. But in my past, my sinful past, I had many admirers, and one of them seduced me in a moment of weakness. Wouldn’t you know it? The condom broke, and this admirer found herself in a state of pregnancy. Well, I couldn’t allow that to happen, could I? A good family man like myself carrying on like a teenager? I was much older than that, and I knew better. And I knew there was a way out of this dilemma. I took it, and I’m not proud of it. But you already knew about my sinful past, now that I’ve been totally forgiven for all my earlier transgressions.

Oh, and about the school set up in my name, that seems to have been totally a scam? I can’t believe I could convince so many people to grab another mortgage on their house just to hear my words and learn my tricks. Of course, talking a foreign bank into taking yet another flyer on me and my wonderfulness for a high-rise development is so different from convincing a local bank to allow you to leverage yourself further in order to buy another rental home. But the rubes just kept coming. I couldn’t believe it when the state required me to desist and broke up my school. I even had to refund a portion of the fees! Imagine that. I was held responsible for my actions! Never happened before, never will again. Remember I’ve been forgiven of all of my previous transgressions.

Then there was the time when I used my own weapon to put down some of those rioters way back in 2020. See, I was only trying to protect the law-abiding property owners from the potential harm from the sea of protestors marching down the street. What else was I to do when some of them actually tried to pry my gun from my twitching fingers. Yeah, I’m sorry that two of them were killed, but all of that was in my before times. All of that has now been forgiven.

Look, I know some of the lamestream press went off when they saw those pictures of me in a confederate uniform. For God’s sake, I was at a battle reenactment and you needed some of those taking part to be on the losing side, even though their cause was just. And the uniform fit so well, I just had to wear it for Halloween, and that fancy costume party I went to. And can you imagine someone took pictures of me, and tried to show I had a pattern of only wearing the greys?  Just because I made some posts during the early days of social media wishing wistfully for the return of the previous era, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been totally redeemed and forgiven. I’m a changed man now.

As far as my beliefs go, I will admit that I dabbled in Q-anon, but all of that is now behind me. Just because I have called for my state to reverse its actions in the election two years ago, it does not mean I really believe a group of Democrats are kidnapping tens of thousands of babies, and draining their blood in satanic rituals in order to extract the youth-restoring compounds. Who in their right mind would believe that? And after all, this all occurred in my before times, before I found forgiveness. My past does not matter.

I will admit I had to grovel in front of The Man and proclaim him the rightful winner of the last election. Of course, that means the person in the White House is a usurper, and any actions taken to remove a usurper are perfectly in line with the moral compass of the universe. I do believe we will be able to reinstate The Man to his rightful role, and ignore that stupid clause in the Constitution limiting the terms in office. Why, I see no reason ever to limit the length that The Man can serve in office. And as healthy as he is, he should be able to drive that golf cart down the fairway of life for a long time. Not like that relic usurper, pretending that bike riding is morally and physically better than golfing. You won’t find me doing useless exercise. I don’t want ever to take away from my lifespan by breaking a sweat.

Well, there you have it. I hope you now know much more about me, and you will certainly want to vote for me instead of that Nobel Laureate I am running against. What do those folks on the Nobel committee ever do? Just keep rattling on about contributions to humanity. Well, I have so much more to offer than one of those fakers the Nobel committee chooses to honor. I don’t see that my opponent has ever been forgiven by The Man. That is the highest honor in the world to me.

Are You Calling Me A Socialist?

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I’m doing something I’ve not done before in this blog. I am reprising one of my old posts. I wrote this back in May of 2017, but it is still valid. Some of the figures may have changed over the years, but the sentiments are just as valid today as when I wrote it.

Disgruntled Republican Voter: I’m sure glad that I’m not one of those takers who expect the government to subsidize their health care. Everyone who takes a subsidy from the government is lazy and needs to get a better job that covers them.

Disembodied omniscient voice from above (think James Earl Jones): I’m glad you don’t want your health care subsidized by the government. So you will be in favor of having your health care from your employer being declared as income, and then you can pay taxes on it, right?

Disgruntled: I say – what are you talking about?

Disembodied: Health care benefits have never been considered as taxable income. This is a historical artifact from the time that health care was first provided to employees in WWII as a way to skirt wage controls.

Disgruntled: So what difference does it make who pays for it?

Disembodied: If businesses had to declare the value of health care as income for their employees, then the employees would be liable for taxes on this income. You just said you’d be happy to pay the taxes, right? Just so you wouldn’t be taking a subsidy from the government.

Disgruntled: I’m not sure … how much are we talking about here?

Disembodied: Let’s just use average figures here. You have family coverage, right?

Disgruntled: Yeah.

Disembodied: Average employer cost for a family policy last year was $12,600 per year. Now you are pretty successful, you make between $19,000 and $75,000 per year, right?

Disgruntled: Yeah.

Disembodied: Then you are in the 15% tax bracket. So if you had to declare $12,600 more in income, that means that the federal government is giving you about $1900 in tax subsidy for your policy from your employer. The one that distinguishes you from the moochers who get a government handout, right?  But then there’s more.

Disgruntled: More?

Disembodied: You live in a state with an income tax, right? Say the tax bracket for your state is 5% for your income. Then the state is giving you a tax subsidy of over $600.  That brings your total tax subsidy to about $2500 per year. But then, there’s the FICA tax to consider.

Disgruntled: What?

Disembodied: Since your taxable income just went up, you owe social security and medicare tax on this new income. So for $12,600, your tax that you don’t have to pay at all is almost another $1000 per year.  And your employer also avoids another $1000 per year that they’d have to pay to match your contribution.

Disgruntled: Ouch!

Disembodied: I calculate that due to the way that health care is accounted for in the tax code, your avoided tax is just about $3500 per year, and your employer avoids paying an extra $1000. So I’m glad that you’ve decided not to be a taker of government money, because your government could sure use the extra $4500 that you said you’d be willing to pay.

Disgruntled: Now wait a minute, I never said …

Disembodied: Oh yes you did. You said that you’d never want to be one of the takers who takes a subsidy from the government. That means you want to correct this problem in the tax system. Of course, if you were in a higher tax bracket, like 25%, you’d be getting even more free money from the government.

Disgruntled: You’re using fake facts. You’re probably part of the lying media. I’ve never seen anything about this on Facebook.

Disembodied: Believe what you will. Reality does not change based upon your beliefs. The facts are that you get money from the government to subsidize your health care benefit that you earn. Of course, you still pay all of the out-of-pocket and shared premium as well.

Disgruntled: And they keep going up and up. It’s all due to Obamacare.

Disembodied: Health care costs have been going up faster than inflation for decades before the ACA came into being. One reason is due to the screwy way health care gets paid for. We spend over 25% just on the administration. Funny thing is, when you have a single payer system like Medicare, that administrative burden goes down to about 5%.

Disgruntled: You mean single-payer would cost less? Why don’t we consider it?

Disembodied: Because the 1% class you put into the government believes that only moral reprobates who have immoral habits get diseases or have accidents, and they are the ones who drive up costs for the superior class of folks who have employer-paid health care. Besides, the 1% gets a hell of a lot of tax cuts when the taxes that supported the ACA are backed out.

Disgruntled: Yeah, but isn’t single payer socialism?

Disembodied: You mean the current system that gives free money to taxpayers and employers to have employer-based coverage isn’t socialism? Isn’t that government picking winners and losers? You’re a loser if you work three part time jobs and 60 hours a week but none of your employers provide health care and you don’t deserve any government subsidy? You’re a winner if you work for someone who provides health care as a benefit?

Disgruntled: Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.