Alarms and Excursions

Via NYTimes.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model at the University of Pennsylvania issued a new tool for estimating the costs and benefits of "reopening" states from their different lockdowns against the Covid-19 on Friday—costs being in infections and deaths, benefits in "economic growth" (scare quotes a function of having listened to this, which I hope to come back to) and regaining of lost jobs. Reporting on the thing is kind of nuts, as exemplified by this from Yahoo Business—

According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), reopening states will result in an additional 233,000 deaths from the virus — even if states don’t reopen at all and with social distancing rules in place. This means that if the states were to reopen, 350,000 people in total would die from coronavirus by the end of June, the study found....

Annals of Derp: Silliest Headline Award

Café La Pallaresa, Barcelona, via Yelp.

Raw Story, picked up from Good News Network:

Drinking coffee might make you live 64% longer than those who don’t: study

So, suppose coffee drinkers generally make it to 82 before they die, those who abstain would be dead at 50?

Happily, no. You can feel sorry for those poor souls who don't drink coffee, but not that sorry. In a very large sample of Spanish university graduates who were an average of 37.7 years old in 1999, those who drank four or more cups of coffee a day were 64% less likely to die of all causes from ischemic heart disease to bathtub accidents over the period of a ten-year study, though an overwhelming majority did not die at all during that time (mortality was 337 out of 19,896, or 1.6% of the total; if I've got the arithmetic right, approximately 205 non–coffee drinkers in the sample and 132 indulgers died in those ten years, which is absolutely a significant difference, but not a big number). It doesn't even mean that the abstainers died younger. But if they did, it was definitely less than 32 years. That news story is a totally false and scientifically illiterate account of what the study said.

Incidentally, drawing on my extensive knowledge of Mediterranean cultures based on several months spent in a small town in central Italy a long time ago, people in Spain don't drink coffee at home, and don't drink it in their cubicles or at their factory stations. People who drink four or more cups of coffee per day in Spain are people who stay in the pavement café or bar-cafeteria before work longer than the 20 or 30 seconds it takes to swallow your first café solo or cortado to drink another one and get a bite of something sweet, and come back for more before lunch. They hang out. I'll bet this peculiar little effect has as much to do with that extremely low-intensity, low-risk socializing as it does with the biochemistry of the beverage.

The March of Science

Ted Cruz says in the year 1615 if you asked scientists, 97% of them would say the sun rotated around the Earth.

— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) December 8, 2015

Ben Jacobs is quoting accurately there. Cruz should of course have said "revolved", the asshole.

.@tedcruz When Svante Arrhenius proposed anthropogenic global warming hypothesis in 1896 https://t.co/AeTqVhbwkT 97% of scientists disagreed

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2015

I don't actually have any numbers for that, but I bet it was a lot.

.@tedcruz but as in Galileo's era, progress usually goes forward in time and now we know better.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2015

A very specific disgust

Statue of a crowned postman with rat, on the island of Nuncio, in the Sunless Sea video game. Via Gamepedia.

Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street Monsignor Ross Douthat, on the doctored tape falsely suggesting that the Planned Parenthood organization sells "baby parts" from aborted fetuses; false or not, the Monsignor still thinks it ought to be a "problem" for PP:

...the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

Dear Ross,

You certainly are a dick. For my part, I prefer to stay snarky and lighthearted on this page, and people like you aren't really invited, but the smugness of that reference to being "informed by reason and experience", the language of an unluckily stupid young parish priest (I know they're not all stupid!) laying down the law in spite of the fact that he's got only the reason they gave him in seminary and no experience at all, is more than I can bear. Aren't you getting a little long in the tooth to hold on to callow as your main shtik? Years away from the chunky Reese Witherspoons and a father yourself?

Note on centrism

VACCINATION against SMALL POX.  Mercenary & Merciless spreaders of Death & Destruction driven out of Society.

Cherub: The Preserver of the Human Race

Man in red: Aye, Aye. I always order them to be constantly out in the air, in order to spread the contagion.

Knife labels: The curse of human kind. (Royal Society)

Eula Biss (author of On Immunity: An Inoculation) on NPR:

There's a great blog, Science-Based Medicine — and one of the writers on that blog pointed out that when you split the difference between information and misinformation, you still end up with misinformation. So I think there are situations where a middle ground is not desirable. Though I'm the kind of thinker who's very drawn to compromises and to nuances...

Cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

Speaking of ethics

Image via The Guardian.

The New York Times medical correspondent Gina Kolata is terribly concerned about ethics, in this case the ethics of a woman carrying

the gene for Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease, or GSS, which would inevitably lead to her slow and terrible death.

Should she marry and undergo IVF treatments with her husband, test the embryos for the gene, and throw away those that have it? Or should she—what, exactly?

Insight

Dr. Turk writes:

No matter how much they want to say otherwise, it's pretty clear that that gay guy, John Maynard Keynes, was absolutely right in how important spending is to job growth.

That's what it's about, isn't it? The evidence shows he's right, so they have to find some other reason why he's wrong. E.g., Al Gore is fat.

Shortly after the discovery of the vacuum cleaner, ancient Egyptians learned that puppies weigh exactly the same as bowling balls.