We Just Need Will And Leadership

Researchers , and governments, also still need to figure out a better way to coordinate this effort around the globe.  “We haven’t learned this much about any disease so quickly, I would say, in the history of science that I’m aware of,” says Sumit Chanda, the director and a professor of the immunity and pathogenesis program at Sanford Burnham Presbys Medical Discovery Institute.  “Genomic technology allowed us to get here.  But if we really want to get serious about preparing for the next pandemic, there needs to be a global command and control infrastructure, with transparency from all governments around the world.  These viruses don’t know national boundaries, so it does not make sense to have a balkanized response to the virus.”
…
“We got pretty lucky that [COVID-19] vaccines work as incredibly well as they do,” says Sanford Burnham’s Chanda.  “But we can’t just rely on luck.  We need to make a global commitment and come up with an organization that has some teeth and has some funding whose job it is to survey, track and share genetic information.  We have the tools to do it – we just need the will and leadership and especially the public to demand that the devastation of COVID-19 is something that shouldn’t have happened and that we never want to have happen again.”
—     Alice Parker
From her article:  “The Sequencing Solution:  Genetic Surveillance Is The Key To Controlling Future Pandemics“
Appearing in:  Time Magazine;  dtd:  21/28 June 2021
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On This Day In:
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2019	I Think I’ve Been Blurred
2018	Progress On The Honey Do List
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2017	Both Dismissed
2016	Poetry Isn’t Going To Work
2015	MA Fix
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2014	Actually
2013	Unfortunate Evolutionary Accidents
2012	Tense (Past, Present And Future)
2011	What Is Your Preference?

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I’m Just Sad (1,000,000 In U.S. Dead From COVID)

We were very encouraged by the rapid development of the vaccines, and everybody really thought we were going to vaccinate our way out of this,” he said.  “But then we had people that wouldn’t even take the damn vaccine.”
…
“We know vaccines work.  We know masks work.  We know social distancing works, and we know crowd control, limiting crowded spaces, works.  This is like a no-brainer, but we cannot seem to do it.”
—     Dr. Robert Murphy
Executive director of the Havey Institute for Global Health
Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine
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On This Day In:
2021	I’ve Still Not Found #45’s One Thing
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2020	Listening To A #IncompetentDonald COVID-19 Press Briefing
2019	I Am Doubtful
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2018	True Measures
2017	Hoping For Tapes
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2016	On Viewing This Mudball
2015	It Takes A Village
2014	In God’s Eyes
2013	We Root For Ourselves
2012	Like A Shark
2011	Discernible Virtue

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Not Exactly Preventing Or Realizing

History is not an exact science.  And ‘the historian of the future’ is as much artist as scientist or academic.  But the futurologist cannot be taken lightly.  He bases his conclusions on perceived trends, and his predictions themselves may possibly have some effect on the future:  in helping either to prevent his predictions coming true or to realize them.
—     General Sir John Hackett (et al)
From:  “The Third World War: August 1985“
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On This Day In:
2021	Maybe He Agreed With His Mum
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2020	Imagine Existence
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2019	Voices Of The Past
2018	Sunrises, Rainbows And Newborn Babies
2017	Untold Agony
2016	Just Borrowed
2015	Warning
2014	Always More Productive
2013	Is Not
2012	Loosely Translated
2011	Your Opinions Are Not My Facts

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Might Still Flicker Or Shine

The central contention of physics has it that the building blocks of the universe will endure even if, or even when, the humans who tally them, and the planet we live on, all die.  To see into the deathless universe is to try to see nothing so flamboyant as [William] Wordsworth’s favorite daffodils and walnut groves, but to peer into the coldest spaces, the black holes and the fractional electric charge of theoretical subatomic particles.  These entities have no blood flow, of course, but also no DNA;  they’re not susceptible to pandemics, however virulent, or the dividends and ravages of carbon.  They don’t live, so they don’t die.  To model the universe as precisely as possible is to try to see the one thing that even the strictest atheist agrees is everlasting — to try to achieve, in a lab, an intimation of immortality.
Back to the living world that’s under our feet.  [Carlo] Rovelli is right to caution against the potential delusions of those who are greedy for eurekas.  But, as a fellow physicist with a radical streak, he is also sympathetic to their ambitions, a drive to “learn something unexpected about the fundamental laws of nature.”  To Rovelli, whose latest book describes quantum mechanics as an almost psychedelic experience, a truly radical discovery entails the observation of phenomena that fall outside three existing frameworks in physics:  quantum theory, the Standard Model of particle physics, and general relativity.  Only by blowing up one of those frameworks can one achieve the kind of immortality that scientists get, the glory of someone like Einstein or Heisenberg.
But to keep looking, as Rovelli has, as Fermilab has with this study on the muon’s magnetism, is also to apprehend hints.  To follow hints.  In that way, the physicist’s work and the poet’s are the same.  And if Wordsworth is right, immortality can be found, of all places, in the hint — the staggering proposition by nature itself that, in spite of all the dying around us, something of all we love might be imperishable, might still flicker or shine or wobble when the rest of our world is gone.
—     Virginia Heffernan
From her article:  “Muonstruck“
Appearing in:  Wired Magazine;  dtd:  June 2021
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On This Day In:
2021	Keep Growing
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2020	I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Plans
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2019	Beautiful Rules
2018	Skepticism
2017	WWGD?
2016	Growing Greatness
2015	When It Is Darkest
2014	Knowledge And Doubt
2013	Three Thoughts
2012	Gentle Reader
2011	Leave The Light On For Me Anyway

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Hope And Fear: Global Warming / Climate Change

The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.
—    Guy Finley
In these times – where social appearance is more important than spiritual substance – what has become our longing to change is really the unconscious desire to control not just the shape of our bodies (according to prevailing values) but to dominate our environment as well, regardless of the cost.
—    Guy Finley
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On This Day In:
2021	I Should Have Started Earlier
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2020	Let’s Make It So
2019	Today’s Question
2018	A Moment Of Union
2016	Symptoms
2016	Tossers
2015	Hunger
2014	Outside Dependence
2013	Doing Right
2012	A Short Course In Human Relations
	If Death Be My Future
	Strive
	Such A Fool
2011	I’m Working For A Living

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This Dot – Our Home

Consider again that dot.  That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s us.  On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.  The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.  Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.  Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life.  There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.  Visit, yes.  Settle, not yet.  Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.  There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
—    Carl Sagan
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2019	Only One Direction
2018	Respect Is Long Gone
2017	Dream Of Dreamers
2016	Dear Automakers
2015	And Some Not So Brave Too
2014	In My Lifetime…
2013	Democracy
2012	Borrowed Expectations
2011	Not Necessarily True

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One Hour Per Year

If we’re going to live together, the [tech] giants and me, I’d like to ask them something.  Humbly. If you’re a product manager working on a feed or search interface inside of a giant tech company, you have access to hundreds of billions of hours of human attention.  Could you help your users spend one hour a year learning about what’s coming for the world, climate-wise, with a small dose of civics to go with it?
Because, if you did, that would be 2 or 3 billion hours of shared experience.  Two to 3 billion hours of people learning how important it is that we come together calmly.  And that is a beautiful canvas of time upon which to paint a future.  It would be one hell of a product.  We’re counting on you.
We have no choice.  You won.
Billions of us need help making millions, billions of decisions.  Decisions about whether to upgrade HVAC systems, or how to fuel our shipping, or what to plant in the backyard.  Sometimes it feels like the paradigm has inverted.  Technology was the mold growing across human systems.  Software was eating the world.  Now it feels like humans are the mold growing on technology.
I said that there’s no next big thing.  But deep in my soft, uncynical heart, where I keep my most embarrassing predictions, I do know what it is.  The next big thing is us.  Just plain old people.  Humans using language.  Humans accepting limits.  I can’t help you turn it into Q4 results.  I don’t know how to invest in it, nor who should run the conference series.  Nor could I tell you who should host the podcast.
I just know that it’s got to be our turn.  I love technology, but this is faith.
—     Paul Ford
From his article:  “The Great Unbundling“
Appearing in:  Wired Magzine;  dtd:  May 2021
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2018	Small Things
2017	Clear And Warm To Me
2016	Ripple
2015	Amazing Or Full Of Wonder?
2014	Are You Confused?
2013	But The Odds Are Against It
2012	Far Better Off With Books
2011	Timid And Fainthearted

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A Whole New Kind

Programmers know how to get a computer to perform deductions, because the mathematics involved is well understood.  But if you want a computer to perform the conjectural — but usually correct — commonsense reasoning upon which human survival depends, you must invent a whole new kind of mathematical logic.
—    Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere
From their book:  “Out Of Their Minds:  The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists“
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2018	United States
2017	Out Of Luck
2016	Wavelengths Of The Earth
2015	God Said What To You?
2014	Not Saying
2013	Ears And Tongue
2012	The Story Of Joe (Middle-Class Republican)
2011	Happy Birthday, Diana
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Seek Good

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
―     Socrates
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2017	Still Waiting…
2016	Same Old, Same Old
2015	Shout!
2014	I Hear Voices
2013	Ethics And Standards
2012	Swing Higher
2011	Convicted For Life

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I Learn Something New

THE IMPORTANCE OF PERIODIC REVIEW
For precisely the reasons I’ve just outlined — that science is a process, not a set of accepted facts — it’s a good idea (and very common) for scientists, whether professionals or students, to review for themselves both how the scientific web of knowledge was assembled historically, and how it holds together nowadays.  This kind of exercise is a sort of brain calisthenics;  it keeps the mind fresh and clear.
Every time I reconsider what I know from scratch, I learn something new.  Typically I find connections between well-known facts that I hadn’t previously recognized.  Sometimes I discover gaps in my own logic, and a couple of times in my career I’ve even discovered gaps in the scientific community’s logic.  So it’s well worth going through this kind of introspection, even starting at the beginning with basic astronomy.
—     Professor Matt Strassler
[Found at one of the blogs / websites I follow:  “Of Particular Significance“, at:  https://profmattstrassler.com/
The specific post is:  https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/02/11/why-simple-explanations-of-established-facts-have-value/
Please visit the original site if you have a few spare moments.    —    KMAB]
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2015	Not Today
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2014	…Am Too
2013	Credible?
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2011	Risking Hidden Linkage

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A Little Perspective

Who are we?  We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
—    Carl Sagan
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2019	Sunlight Stream
2018	Wars Without Taxes
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2016	I Went To The Woods…
2015	I’ve Got To Run
2014	Which Is It?
2013	Making You Stronger
2012	Sick Of Being Sick
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2011	Clear, Specific And Measurable
2010	The Runner’s High
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Attentively Waiting

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.  This way of looking is, in the first place, attentive.  The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive the human being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
—    Simone Weil
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2016	The Expected Cure
2015	Of Two Minds
2014	Pride And Remembrance
2013	Repeating Bad Memories
2012	No Sooner
2011	Just Cheesy!
	Are You Illin’?

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Natural Selection

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
—     John Locke
[You can make the vaccine free, but you can’t make them take it.  I’m sure there’s a “horse & water” metaphor in here somewhere…    —    KMAB]
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2017	Being Nice
2016	Zero To Some = Most
2015	Born More Obligated
2014	Rage And Fury
2013	Successful Children
2012	For God So Loved The World
2011	Go Cheeseheads!!
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A Happy Realization

Happiness is the realization of God in the heart.  Happiness is the result of praise and thanksgiving, of faith and acceptance;  a quiet, tranquil realization of the love of God.
—     Chief White Eagle
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On This Day In:
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2019	Your Own Blog Posts
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2017	Developing Translations
2016	Think Like A Hero
2015	Reductionism
2014	Gravitation, n.
2013	Ups And Downs
2012	Nerd Heard – And Good-Bye
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2011	Career Tips (Part 2)

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Republican Ambling

Science is … a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.  If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.
—    Carl Sagan
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On This Day In:
2021	I’d Argue Wealth, Then Income
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2020	Steppin’…
2019	Every Vote Counts
2018	Or A President
2017	Pleasures
2016	Why Not?
2015	Je Suis Charlie
2014	To The Nines
2013	Higher And Truer
2012	Life’s Last Question
2011	A Single Heartbeat
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