The Sun & the Rain

First day of work in the US back in 2004, the receptionist greeted me with 'Good Morning, looks like you brought the sun with you!' and all my confused self could think was 'That doesn't sound good, but she definitely does not look upset either'!! 

Lots of songs still remind me of that day and confusion. 

While an English song goes 'You are my sunshine....' 

a Tamil song goes 'Un azhagaale en veyil kaalam ini mazhai kaalam...' (rough translation: thanks to your beauty my sunny days are now rainy ones...)

😅

The Phone Stress

My older one in 6th grade - they had a small class project. Design something, get it made, and then come up with an advertising for it and present in class. 4 kids  in the team. They designed it, got it 3d printed at school and had a skit ready for the advertisement before heading home for the weekend. 

Three of the girls have phones. The three are texting each other during the weekend about this project. By Saturday afternoon, they realize that none of them have the printed artefact. Is it with the 4th person? How do we contact her?  .....

By Sunday morning we are in panic mode. What is our backup? Plans discussed...alternate plans made...there was a Plan C and even a Plan D.....I had to cut some wood and make something that looked roughly like a bottle. Had to take the kid to a craft store and get some wood paint.....Am guessing the other two parents were also helping out with their backup plans...

Next update was Monday evening...'oh...we found it in the classroom...we will use it tomorrow for our skit...!' 

The girl without the phone and her folks had a pretty peaceful weekend am guessing....

:) 

Minding their Business

News reports on business channels are always very focused on their business. 

Mainstream: "Russia has a 100 THOUSAND troops ready to go!!!" 

Business: "should we be more worried about inflation or Russia today?"

So are kids. Back when USA gave that submarine deal to Australia, and France was PISSED at the USA for torpedoing their deal with Australia:

Mainstream: "France recalls US ambassador, this is the MOST SIGNIFICANT peacetime warning a country can give another!!"

Our kids: "does this mean there won't be any more Macarons at Costco?" 

Electric Gas Stations

 Another day, another TV reporter talking about electric cars. It’s usually the same pattern. Go in a couple cars, marvel at the technology, exclaim how smooth the ride is or how fast it accelerates and then go to a charging station and lament how slow it fills up. Then compare the number of gas stations to the charging network. 

They usually skip the one crucial factor: everyone who has a house essentially has a ‘gas station’ at home and are leaving the house with a full tank every morning! So we don’t need an equivalent network of charging stations!

Open or Close

 

(Personal opinion - have not cross checked this with actual data)

The last school year started after the first wave. 

Some places started with schools open with a virtual option, some started with a virtual only option. 

Places with schools that started virtual saw a lot of debates on the best time to open, teacher and kid vaccinations etc. Then the second wave hit and most decided to wait it out. Most ended the year with majority of kids in virtual classes. 

Places with schools that started open saw more kids return to in person classes throughout the school year, even through the second wave, and ended the year with most kids attending school. 

Clotty matters!

Through all the AstraZeneca vaccine clot pauses and mess, I heard the numbers being compared to lightning strikes and shark attacks to show how rare it was. Covid is known to cause blood clots. Never saw numbers being compared to covid clot count. Was searching for data and it is hard to come by. While vaccine side effects are rigorously monitored, actual disease stats do not seem to be. The only study I could find was this from UC San Diego (https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-11-23-study-covid-19-infection-combined-with-blood-clots-worsen-patient-outcomes.aspx) which was on 8000 patients. This is miniscule compared to the millions of points of data we have on the vaccine. 

Anyway, listing all the data points I could find to compare numbers here. Please do message back with criticism / comments / more data. 

From UC San Diego Study: 

Blood clot in Covid patients: 1 in 5

Blood clot in severe Covid cases: 1 in 3

From UK Astra Zeneca Numbers (https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/medicine/covid-19-vaccination-and-blood-clots-by-the-numbers/): 

Blood clots reported- 79 in 20 million: 1 in 253,000

Deaths reported - 19 in 20 million: 1 in 1,052,631

How do we compare those numbers now? 

From CDC website: Deaths from blood clots annually in the USA: 60,000 to 100,000

Taking 80,000, this is approximately 1 in 4,375 people die every year due to blood clots (irrespective of COVID or vaccines)

Now if you take the covid death rate of 1 in 100 (before vaccinations started)

and use that with 1 in 3 severe cases have clots from UCSD study, 

Chance of death from Clot in Covid of around 1 in 300. 

So final numbers from above: 

Chance of dying from blood clots for a normal human: 1 in 4,375

Chance of dying from blood clots due to covid: 1 in 300

Chance of dying from blood clots after getting AZ Vaccine: 1 in 1,052,631

Navigating Fox News

Did a lot of nyt.com and foxnews.com during the elections. NYT’s deceptions are subtle, usually with the data. Sometimes the chart timeline is specifically cut to prove their point, sometimes Y axis is exaggerated to show the inflection points. 

Foxnews.com on the other hand is the opposite. Typically the main page will have an explosive headline, featuring AOC, Pelosi or anyone to catch the reader. (one example that got me to click before inauguration was - 'Pelosi made national guard sleep on the Capitol floor'), then you click in and read the actual (and very factual I must say here) article (this will have the details of NG sleeping on the floor, had nothing to do with Pelosi) and if required at the very end a kind of legal captcha. 

This video (https://youtu.be/nA-10vPcA-4) is a screengrab taken on November 19. 

1. Main page headline - Giuliani detailing election fraud.

2. Click through and article headline is different - Trump campaign is dropping the lawsuit - that was what Giuliani said in that press conference

3. Read through what was said in that conference (and a lot of hook ads) and get to last two paragraphs where they put the legal captcha - ‘Trump lost MI by 155k votes & nobody has found any evidence of election fraud’

🙂