Week of February 26, 2024
Last week, my 17-year-old son offered to help reach my bag from the overhead bin at the end of a flight home. In a moment of hubristic pride (I am not that frail (yet)!) I declined his offer and grabbed my bag. As I pulled, a section of the luggage bin broke and accompanied my suitcase to the floor. My son's non-verbal stare screamed: "I told you so; you are an embarrassment, and I have serious questions about your mental competence." On the upside, I now know what to expect when I am 80, and I forget to take my pills.
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Hospitalization rates are declining, and the PMC forecast for the next 14 days indicates dropping wastewater RNA concentrations.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker reflects only CDC-gathered hospital data. Hospitalization data are a (lagging) indicator.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
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COVID articles
Dr. Jeremy Faust dedicated a blog post reviewing some meta-analyses on the relationship between ventilation and viral spread. His comments at the end of the article capture the summation of the best data we have - "I believe we can decrease 90%-99% of flu, RSV, and Covid-19 transmission with a combination of upgraded air exchange/ventilation systems, semi-quantitative rapid tests that indicate if/when you are super-shedding, and making sure people have access to high-quality masks for when they are outside of their super-shedding window. Ideally, we'd live in a world in which people are isolated for their whole illness."
https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/how-much-does-air-exchange-really
Drs. Ziyad Al-Aly and Eric Topol shared a concise yet comprehensive review of what is known and not known about "long COVID." It is a quick, consumer-friendly read highlighting the prevalence, symptoms, and current data.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/towards-solving-the-long-covid-puzzle
Medical Trends and Technology
New data from a consortium of researchers demonstrate that "women, compared with men, derived more significant gains in all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk reduction from equivalent doses [of exercise]." The infographics are excellent and describe the most benefit for women who engage in moderate to vigorous cardiovascular exercise for 90-100 min per week and engage in 2 to 3 weekly episodes of resistance training.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109723083134
Neuralink (Elon Musk's computer-human interface implant company) has reported the first quadriplegic volunteer recipient is doing well and controlling a mouse through thought. I will be curious to see objective data and an interview with the first patient. For the moment, the company is not sharing a lot of information.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00550-6
and
https://twitter.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1759836438739222593
Trauma surgeon Dr. Ron Barbarosa offers a fantastic medical analysis of whether the many (117!) killed characters from the Iliad would have survived if there was a modern level-1 trauma center available near the battlefields of Troy. (I am a sucker for this kind of intellectual game.)
https://twitter.com/rbarbosa91/status/1759129319765578007
Infographics
Here is an animated infographic comparing the number of people killed each year by animals. Snails and mosquitos are more dangerous than you might realize.
https://x.com/HowThingsWork_/status/1760820473925927120
as to why:
https://theworld.org/stories/2016-08-13/why-snails-are-one-worlds-deadliest-creatures
If you want a more upbeat infographic, try a well-referenced blog post about How Music impacts work from Toggl, a time-tracking software company.
https://toggl.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/How-does-music-affect-work-infographic.jpg
from
https://toggl.com/blog/how-does-music-affect-work-infographic
Things I learned this week
We watched a live-streamed, audience-interactive reading of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on Saturday night. I had not read or seen this play before and was surprised it did not get more press at the height of the pandemic - it explores the dynamics in a rural Norwegian town that vilifies a local physician for publicizing a public health emergency at the expense of the town's economic well-being. This play surfaces many issues about science vs. belief, being sure of oneself in the face of social isolation, and a shockingly modern look at populism (as a political construct). Some well-known actors reading parts and NIH scientists (Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, for example) are participating in the project. There are a few more streamable readings scheduled for April.
About Ibsen's play:
Recognizing that this is a lecture from the Ayn Rand Institute (which offers a very libertarian view of the world), here is a good analysis of Ibsen's play:
https://newideal.aynrand.org/a-drama-for-our-time-ibsens-enemy-of-the-people/
The production we watched:
and
https://theaterofwar.com/projects/an-enemy-of-the-people
Shameless plug - if you want to see this play in full production, it is currently on Broadway (starring Matt Jeffers, a member of my family!):
https://www.newyorktheatreguide.com/show/29430-an-enemy-of-the-people-tickets
At the suggestion of a loyal reader, I am enjoying Kelly and Zach Weinersmith's A City on Mars. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292) The book explores the practical limits to colonizing space (think radiation, vacuum, no gravity, and distance) and an in-depth review of international laws that could (or won't) regulate colonization and resource claims. In a section exploring the legality of space cannibalism (or when is it OK to eat your crewmates in the setting of disaster), they quoted a 1978 paper from lawyer and nanotechnologist Robert Frietas, "Survival Homicide in Space," one of the more unique journal articles I have ever read.
Here is the abstract:
A legal and ethical conundrum immediately presents itself: Is it permissible to sacrifice the life of one to save the lives of two? The sacrifice, when performed by the two in a situation where only two can survive, is called "survival homicide." [...] This paper [explores] the manner of [victim selection] and the legality of the sacrifice in the context of a space disaster.
https://www.nanomedicine.com/Papers/SurvivalHomicideInSpace1978.pdf
Living with A.I.
A.I. is helping stabilize nuclear fusion reactions in tokamaks reactors. Though this is a press release from the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, it is a well-written description of the current state of nuclear fusion and how A.I.-automated regulation of the plasma reactions may solve some fundamental operational problems. https://www.pppl.gov/news/2024/engineers-use-ai-wrangle-fusion-power-grid
Here is an A.I. industry observation in close this week. Google is demonstrating how fluid the world of A.I. is at the moment. In the last seven days, I have seen discussions claiming Google is falling behind (Gemini, their ChatGPT-like LLM, was demonstrating bias and needs reprogramming) and pushing the industry forward in new ways (they released Genie, a generative A.I. interactive world generator). We will not know who will win the A.I. game for a while. Please read the Twitter links above with appropriate critical thought and hyperbole filters.
A.I. art of the week - a mashup of themes from this week's articles
A Greek hoplite attached to a handheld computer via wires emanating from his helmet uses telekinesis to remove his luggage from the overhead bin in a crowded airplane. Make it in the style of a DaVinci sketch. Make it look like a few pieces of luggage are floating above the plane aisle.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q1Gd2qoYfmsRSQroXtVRCJJ5oaqfcezD/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds, team
Adam
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