Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Why I’m not fully vaccinated (for Lyme disease)

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I’m not fully vaccinated for Lyme disease because there is no vaccine available and I have no choice in the matter. I remember the vaccine being available, but recently I was discussing this with a friend who looked at me as though I had grown two heads when I mentioned it. Anyway, this Slate article explains what happened:

We had one, once. The Food and Drug Administration approved LYMErix, manufactured by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), for use in 1998. LYMErix worked by inducing antibodies into human blood, which would then go into any ticks that attached to your body. There, they would neutralize the bacteria that cause Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, before the bacteria could go from the tick into you. In clinical trials, the shot showed about 78 percent effectiveness after the required three doses (hey, I’d take it). But some patients who got the shot after it went on the market testified that they developed arthritis after vaccination. The FDA investigated, but decided the evidence that the vaccine was linked to patients’ arthritis wasn’t strong enough to withdraw its approval for LYMErix. Sales fell nonetheless, and the company pulled the vaccine in 2002.

Slate

So if the vaccine was approved, isn’t it still approved? This would lead me to believe there is a working, approved vaccine, but it is not commercially available because there is not enough of a market for it for companies to make a profit. But to have a market, wouldn’t it be helpful if the general public were aware of its existence?

The article reaches some ridiculous conclusions about a Lyme vaccine mostly benefitting the affluent, and this sounds like nonsense to me. They don’t offer any evidence for this claim. Which sounds ridiculous to me, because the hunting/hiking/camping crowd most at risk is going to be a decidedly working- to middle-class one. Maybe the working class is more familiar with and therefore less afraid of this disease than the more affluent? There could be a grain of truth here.

I think everyone knows someone who has had a brush with this disease. I can think of a work colleague who was incorrectly diagnosed with early-onset arthritis and lived in pain for some time before Lyme disease was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated. Second, a cousin who was rushed to the hospital with a racing heart and difficulty breathing during the height of the Covid crisis in 2020 – in this case, it was correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated, and he is fine after going through a somewhat harrowing episode. So this is a serious disease. But beyond the pain and suffering it causes directly, it just really takes away a lot of peoples’ desire and excitement to be in the woods. And it keeps children of some risk-averse parents out of the woods, which is a shame but understandable. It’s also a shame if you’re a gardener in a tick infested area who wants to grow anything other than neatly-trimmed grass. Your neighbors can complain you are putting them at risk of Lyme disease, and they may have a point. So really, it would be nice to have a vaccine for this disease available so we can all weigh the evidence and make up our minds.

Incidentally, a Lyme disease vaccine for dogs is approved and commercially available. And the public charity and savior of humanity known as Pfizer is working on a new vaccine and hoping to have it on the market by 2025 (but really, if there is a 100% approved vaccine out there and Pfizer believes there is now a market, can’t somebody just buy the recipe and start making it right now?)

water recycling in the (U.S.) west

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Wired has an article on water recycling, also known as “toilet to tap”. A stat I didn’t know is that about 10% of California’s wastewater is currently recycled. As they point out, getting new membrane plants up and running requires a lot of lead time, so if we want them up and running in a decade now is the time to start.

Singapore has invested heavily in membranes, although the water scarcity situation there has an added geopolitical dimension that makes it somewhat of a no-brainer. Their recycled water is pure enough to be used for industrial purposes such as semi-conductor plants. For drinking water, they just divert the recycled water back into a reservoir, suck it out again and put it through the normal treatment process, which somewhat ironically makes it a bit dirtier. But as this article points out, you don’t really want to drink nothing but distilled water.

Thinking about the west though, agricultural is a big issue, and for agriculture you don’t need membranes. Plain old wastewater treatment will work just fine.

Chemicals are a concern for me. The membranes won’t necessarily remove all those cleaning chemicals, personal care chemicals, lawn and garden chemicals, pesticides and pharmaceuticals we use on a daily basis. Nor will regular old water and wastewater treatment. If we are serious about doing something about those, we need to tackle them at the source and find safe, effective substitutes.

sleep apps and gadgets

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Here’s a roundup of some sleep apps and gadgets from Wired. They sought an independent doctor’s opinion on each. And just a reminder there is nothing for sale on this blog, at least at the moment.

  • Withings Sleep Tracking Mat – technically more of a medical monitoring device, it “goes under your mattress and tracks your sleep cycles, heart rate, and snoring through the night to give you a detailed breakdown of how well you slept, all summed up with an overall sleep score.”
  • Bose Sleepbuds II – ear buds that block external sound and play noises to help you sleep. I can attest this works because I use my $10 Sony earbuds this way. Sometimes I just use them to block external sound, with no sound playing. Occasionally I use the Mynoise app (not mentioned in this article). Other times I play the Audible app or podcasts (I’m currently trying Overcast because Apple podcasts seems to be f—ed up). This makes insomnia entertaining and informative whether it actually helps me fall asleep or not. But I think it does, because 15 minutes of listening to a book quiets my mind from whatever was troubling it, unless the book itself is troubling. Doctor endorsed: yes
  • Calm meditation app (doctor recommended: no)
  • Somtryst, Sleepio, Headspace apps (doctor recommended: yes, and the article says the first is FDA approved as a medical treatment for chronic insomnia)
  • Somnox – a pillow that you “spoon” as it breathes. Weird, but no sex dolls were reviewed in the article. If you are lonely and want to try a sex doll, I say go for it. Think of all those jokes about guys rolling over and snoring within seconds of completing their objective. (Ladies, not so much if the jokes are medically accurate.) Doctor endorsed: neutral
  • Muse S – a headband that “tracks electrical activity in your brain” and translates it into “something like weather”, so you listen and try to make the weather calm down. Doctor endorsed: yes, at least for meditation if not necessarily for sleep. The author of the article didn’t like it however.
  • Moona – a chilled pillow and Chilipad, which cools your whole body. Doctor endorsed: yes, at least the Chilipad. I find this interesting having sweated out some hot nights in the tropics. Could you set the air conditioning warmer or forego it entirely? This could allow different people with different temperature preferences (not husbands and wives though, because they never disagree on this one…) get a good night’s sleep in the same room. This could also be nice on long-haul flights. Or if this really works, why not build it into clothes so people can be comfortable wherever they are. Maybe this could actually be a big energy saver compared to mechanical heating and air conditioning. Maybe you could incorporate more outside air in buildings and focus more on air flow rather than just temperature.

Summer Reading 2021, and Donald Rumsfeld’s parallel universe

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Warning, I will mostly try to limit spoilers to things you could learn from reading the book descriptions below on Amazon, but if you are really interested in experiencing the Merchant Princes series, the Dark Tower series, or Star Trek Discovery with no prior inkling of what they are about, maybe avoid this post.

I haven’t made a summer reading post yet in 2021. And Donald Rumsfeld passed away this week. How are these two things related? Well, it seems that my summer reading theme for this year has settled on parallel universes. This happened somewhat by accident. A year or more ago, I ran out of books in Charlie Stross’s Laundry Files series and turned to his Merchant Princes series without really knowing what it was about. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, so let’s just say it involves parallel universes along with stealth lessons on economics and the history of technological progress. It’s also about a Game of Thrones-esque medieval succession crisis, nuclear terrorism, and how the United States government might (over)react to an incident of nuclear terrorism. Which is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. And I’ll leave it at that, having already said too much. I never get quite into the characters or plots in this series as much as I did the Laundry Files, but I’m still enjoying.

In my mind, the real Rumsfeld in our universe gets a lot of credit for the Iraq weapons of mass destruction lie, the Iraq invasion, and Guantanamo Bay, and more generally civilian deaths and mistreatment of prisoners of war. And almost all of it was by choice rather than necessity. What I didn’t remember, but was reminded of by this Intercept article, was his central role in the “Plan B” assessment in the 70s that produced alternative facts (aka lies) about Soviet nuclear capability and led to the huge arms buildup of the 1980s. So in my book he had a lot of blood on his hands, and took foolish risks that could have led to unimaginable consequences. I find it hard to mourn his passing.

Anyway back to happier topics in bloodless fictional universes like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Ha ha, did I say bloodless? This is Stephen King we’re talking about. I read The Stand during the 2020 Covid-19 shut down, then moved on to this for this summer. In a forward to The Stand, Stephen King talks about how he originally intended The Stand to be a sort of Lord of the Rings set in the American west. The Stand turned out to be something different, and this turns out to be more like what The Stand was meant to be early on. There’s a tower and an eye, for chrissakes. It’s pretty awesome – a wild mashup of Lord of the Rings, Clint Eastwood movies (I’m listening to the audiobook and the narrator uses a spot-on Clint Eastwood impression throughout), King Arthur, Roger Zelasny’s Amber series (which is also evident in the Merchant Princes series, but I would say more evident here), Brothers Grimm (and/or its Disney variants), the Wizard of Oz, King’s own work, and I am sure thousands of other things I am not picking up on. Like at one point, we meet a crouching tiger and a hidden dragon just a few pages apart. It might not hold together if it was written by someone other than Stephen King, but hey…

Did I mention Star Trek Discovery above? I like Star Trek – it’s a little nerdy, a little campy, the acting is not always excellent, and it’s just relaxing and fun and you don’t have to think too hard. Well, this turned out to be less campy, better acted, and more fun than I expected. There’s some martial arts action from Michelle Yeoh, who starred in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in 2000, and is now 58 years old. And there is a parallel universe angle, which I wasn’t expecting, and just slotted it right into place with my summer theme.

I’m going to run out of Merchant Princes most likely, so I might read another Amber novel. I don’t love Amber actually, but it’s just canonical so I plan to work my way through it little by little. After Labor Day, I’ll return to my usual alternating of fiction and non-fiction, and generally slower reading pace.

western U.S. mega-drought

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blog.weather.us has a nice three-part article on the hydrometeorology behind the severe and likely long-term drought affecting the western U.S. I’ll admit I haven’t had time to read every word, but it looks to be well worth the read. It’s complicated if you want to get into the details, but it pretty much boils down to less rain and more evaporation.

I remember going to an American Water Resources Association specialty conference on climate change around 2011 or 2012, and listening to a speaker from Australia. The person showed data clearly showing that annual rainfall had slowly declined over the course of a decade or more and settled at a new normal. It took the political system there about a decade to accept the situation and begin to address it. The U.S. may be about where Australia was 10-15 years ago, but that is in a context of global trends that have been going downhill during that time.

I figure the west will turn to conservation and, if necessary, desalination to supply drinking water to large urban populations. Fires will just have to be accepted and dealt with. It seems to me that the long-term viability of agriculture in California and maybe across the Great Plains is in doubt, as the loss of rainfall and increased evaporation happen alongside loss of mountain ice and snowpack, and alongside a century of groundwater mining. Maybe we can move more agricultural indoors, maybe to coastal areas served by desalination plants, but we’ll have to harden those coastlines against sea level rise and increasingly severe storms. If all this comes to pass, it will cost a lot more than growing food outside in the sun, soil, and water and nature has provided mostly for free up until now. There is the question of where the energy required will come from. Food prices will go up, and unless our incomes go up along with them we will have less resources to spend on other things, making us poorer. Preservation of natural habitats will not be a priority if such a world comes to pass. And of course, in the United States and many other countries, we do not share the wealth we do have, so the poor and working class will suffer the most. Eventually this will lead to migration pressure and further strain our political system.

how to tape an air filter to a box fan

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Yes, you can tape a furnace air filter to a box fan and use it as an air purifier. Here’s a long article with many links and videos on the options. You have to be careful – my own family has burned out fan motors trying to put seemingly light weight nets over them to keep childrens’ fingers out (no smoke, no fire, they just quit working, but still a good idea to switch fans off when you are away from home as a general principle). You can in fact just tape the filter to the back of the fan and be done. More elaborate setups build a cube out of the filters with the fan inside, increasing the surface area and putting less stress on the motor. Some approaches use cardboard cutouts to channel the air flow (which seems harder on the motor to me). People are Covid-focused these days, but seasonal allergies will be around long after Covid is gone. This seems like it could be a particularly cheap and effective intervention in offices and schools.

Modern, cheap plastic fan blades won’t cut off or even break your fingers by the way, in my experience, and I do have experience. As a relatively tall man, I also have experience being whacked in the head by a ceiling fan blade a time or two. Both these things cause significant pain, but I am still here with all my body parts and no long-term damage.

What’s new with “cliodynamics”?

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Cliodynamics is an attempt to collect and organize data on human history in a structured way that can be subjected to scientific testing. The link I just posted is to Peter Turchin’s blog, and the actual data set(s?) are available here.

There’s also a recently published book on comparative history called Figuring out the Past, which sounds interesting. My formal education in history, which did not extend past grade school, often focused on the history of individual countries (most obviously, the U.S.). Other offerings, which I didn’t have time to take in the course of my oh-so-practical engineering education, often seemed to focus on specific topics. I often wonder if it would be possible to teach kids world history more or less chronologically over the course of several years, and really delve into what was happening simultaneously in different parts of the world at various times. The other way I learn about history informally as an adult is to read or hear about a current event, then dig deeper into the history of a particular geographic area or human group to try to understand the context for the current event. I’m almost always surprised at how little context I actually had to understand the current event before I started digging, and I never have time to do as much digging as I might like.

Data is another way to look at/teach/learn about history. I’m often interested in how many people were alive at a given time, how much energy they used and what their energy sources were, and (somewhat morbidly) what they died of. But I don’t really know where to begin to look for most of that data.

the UFO report

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Here is one place to access the official UFO report. It says next to nothing, and is almost not worth the time. It was clearly typed out in a few hours by a summer intern. Like any good research report that concludes nothing, the authors would like to collect more data, they would like to do further studies, and they would like someone to pay for that.

Anyway, here are the possible explanations they give for UFOs:

  • airborne clutter: birds, balloons, “recreational unmanned vehicles”, and plastic bags
  • natural atmospheric phenomena: ice crystals, moisture, thermal fluctuations (because these things can show up on sensors)
  • “USG or Industry Development Programs”: they don’t bother to define USG, but I am thinking United States Government. “We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
  • Foreign Adversary Systems: “China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity”, such as a Bond villain. Okay, I added that last one.

Conspicuously missing from the list is aliens, a previously undiscovered deep-sea civilization exploring our atmosphere (see Charles Stross’ Laundry Files series), or entities operating in parallel universes (see Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series). I have no evidence for any of these theories, which is to say I have exactly the same amount of evidence presented in this report in support of the theories above. My recommendation is to spend your time reading science fiction/fantasy series by Charles Stross rather than this report. You will be much more entertained, and no less informed.

June 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

yes, the Dutch are good at water…

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It’s actually true that the Dutch are good water engineers. It’s just slightly annoying that the Dutch themselves are fond of telling us that, and then like to remind us frequently of that fact. Nonetheless, here’s a roundup of Dutch water engineering stuff. A lot of it is just using data analysis and computer simulations to predict what is going to happen and then designing clever interventions to nudge it one way or another. That is good basic engineering using modern tools, and not always done in other countries where political priorities lie elsewhere. Some of it is just a willingness and ability to pay for the aesthetic side of design, even if it costs a lot and takes a long time. The Dutch are patient, science- and logic-driven, and rational. I suppose they have earned the right to be just a tiny bit smug about it.