Mike Lee, US Senator from Utah tweeted the following on Oct 7, 2020: “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” Subsequent tweets included “We’re not a democracy”, Government is the official use of coercive force-nothing more and nothing less. The Constitution protects us by limiting the use of government force" and “The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy.

I like grapefruit. The real kind, not the pink sweet kind. However, I have just read an article https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and-drug-interactions indicating that you need to be careful when drinking it and taking prescription medicine. Drug manufacturers determine dosage based on how much of the drug your body will actually ingest. Grapefruit knocks out several of the enzymes that would otherwise be reducing the drugs to an inactive form. Net result, your body actually absorbs a lot more of the drug than the dosage assumes and you overdose.

I can’t possibly express the anger I feel at the irresponsibility of a tweet saying don’t fear COVID. As of Oct 6, there have been 1,038,534 COVID deaths globally and 208,433 COVID deaths in the US. https://covid19.who.int/ There have been 35 million globally confirmed cases, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people who survived, but have respiratory and other problems caused by COVID. There is a reason to fear COVID but as I have expressed before - I can’t make people care about other people.

When all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the most recent case, the UK managed to drop almost 16,000 COVID-19 cases from their result compilation because they were using Excel in the data gathering process. Excel has a limit on the number of rows or columns and apparently the amount of data exceeded one or the other of those limits. A BBC Report claims that the row limit was breached because someone chose to use a very old file format.

New Caledonia voted no today on its second of three votes on independence from France. The first vote was in 2018 and the no votes came in at 56.7%. This time, as expected, the no votes came in narrower at 53.26%. Turnout was 85.64%, which was four points higher than the 2018 vote, evidently showing that people felt their votes would count given the expected tight vote. Polling stations were kept open after the scheduled closing time so long as there were people in line to vote.

Happy Reunification Day to Germany. I’ve been in Berlin both before and after the wall fell. Its nicer to be able to just walk across the street. Maybe we can all work towards reducing the polarizing behavior that is acting like a psychic Berlin wall in so many countries. By the way, can anyone tell me why east and west Berlin still use different street lamp bulbs? Nightime aerial photos clearly show a color difference.

This post will likely get deleted as things progress, but my innate cynicism is too strong to keep quiet right now. So, I just saw the news that President Trump tweeted that he had tested positive for COVID-19. It is interesting that it happened the same day that a Cornell study claimed the President was the single greatest source of covid disinformation. This also has national security implications. See a twitter thread from Sam Vinograd, a national security expert, written before the news but after a White House Staffer tested positive.

Suppose you are a business that has been hacked and discover that all your files are locked and you will need to pay some unknown X to get them unlocked. Not Fun. Paying ransoms just make it more enticing to criminals and fund future attacks, but not paying may cause your business to fail. The US Treasury now says if you pay and the unknown person is subject to US sanctions, then you and everyone involved in the payments may be committing a crime.

Most of us are the main character in the plays running through our heads. As those scenes happen and as we review them later, all the other people are either focused on us or are NPCs (non-playing characters). And that’s fine so long as we remember that while our play is happening, every other person is the center of their own play and we are not the main character in their plays.

There have been lots of discussions about whether employees are more or less efficient working from home. I certainly see lots of comments from people who are happier left alone to work from home. I also see occasional comments from parents trying to juggle working from home, helping their kids learning from home and how all the distractions at home get in the way of being efficient. What I have not seen is the impact on new young workers of not having informal face time training.

Someone asked if I was going to try to make it in the music business. Obviously not someone who knows me. The answer is, of course not. Its a hobby. [insert obligatory hobby loss joke that only tax lawyers and accountants will understand]. A hobby is something that you do primarily for yourself. I write the occasional song for me, or someone going through a rough time. Sometimes they get played for friends or family, sometimes at a funeral or wedding.

I’m an infovore. I take in a lot of information (or in the words of my sister-in-law - “more useless crap”) and occasionally it makes new patterns that I can learn from. Its not just written information. I can learn watching two carpenters do things differently. I can learn from listening to different conversations about practically anything (maybe not sports because I really don’t care). It doesn’t matter the socioeconomic level, intelligence level or age level.

So we know that life has existed on Earth for billions of years (think bacteria, not dinosaurs) but we also know that bacterial life existed for 1.5 billion years before there was free oxygen present. Life as we generally know it requires oxygen serve as a vehicle for electrons gained and lost through various metabolic processes. How did it all work pre-oxygen? There have been various theories posited, including life processes using hydrogen or sulfur or iron.