Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Second shot update

 

Twelve hours into it. I seem to be a little bit cranky as shown in this selfie.

Twelve hour report: Soreness at the injection site. I did not expect soreness in lats and pectorals. Mrs ERJ was in the most distress twelve hours after her shot. If this is the worst that happens I will be good-to-go.

I couldn't sleep. Questions spun around in my mind.

How do Vampires get enough Vitamin D? What do Vegans do if they inhale a bug? Is there Vegan confession? Why don't professors worried about carbon footprint teach students how to repair buttons and zippers?

Home improvements

We tried to get our house re-roofed last summer. We got stiffed by the contractor.

We tried again this year with different contractors and the roof is scheduled for this week. Unfortunately, it is when I am scheduled to be at Mom's. This would not have been a problem except Mrs ERJ is at her Sister's and I should be here while the guys are on the roof.

I was given a list of other projects to keep me busy and out-of-trouble while Mrs ERJ was gone.  I got a heck of a deal on ceiling fans on-line. What color is "Puce"? Does it go with earth-tones?

"Experimental"

One of the formative events in my professional life was to attend a seminar put on by Shainin Consulting.

Shainin Consulting specialized in industrial problem solving. Their approach emphasized data collected on the plant floor and did not rely solely on science done in labs.

They taught by telling stories. One story involved a factory that made electrical wire. The technician who ran the equipment that extruded the insulation over the bare, copper wires made money in the lunchroom by placing bets on the scrap rate.

Management suspected he was sabotaging the operation so they moved him to another job on the other side of the plant.

He continued to win bets.

When asked, he pointed out the window. "We have high scrap rates when it is raining"

Management called HQ. HQ put their best scientist on the problem. He built a room around a smaller version of the equipment and controlled the humidity. He ran from bone dry to dripping wet and there was no change in the insulation. The scientist declared "This process is impervious to moisture. It must be something else."

The company called Shainin. Shainin walked out into the plant and talked with the operator who was back on his job.

Shainin verified that the scrap rate tracked closely with relative humidity.

The bottom line was that the manufacturer of the powder that was used to produce the plastisol slurry directed the users to mix for thirty minutes before extruding. Since this was a PRODUCTION factory, they mixed for ten minutes (and that is what they had mixing capacity for) and extruded away. That worked fine when the weather was dry.

But when the bags had been sitting in high humidity, the powder got lumpy and needed to be mixed for the full, thirty minutes, just like the supplier specified. Incidentally, the lab scientist mixed for thirty minutes because he could not be bothered to travel to the plant and see what the actual process it used was. He just used the directions that were printed on the bag.

When presented with the data, plant management decided that slightly reduced throughput on rainy days was preferable to high scrap rate. So, on the days when the humidity was over 80% they ran the mixer for thirty minutes before extruding.

"Cool story, Joe. But what is the point?"

Look through the cast-of-characters. Who is most likely to become the regulator who determines if something is still "experimental"?

Not the guy running the equipment in the un-airconditioned plant. Not Shainin or the plant management. It is the scientist in the lab.

The guy who whiffed at solving the problem because of a variable he did not consider. 

How do you suppose that scientist will respond to the next process he is asked to evaluate? 

My guess is that he will double or quadruple the number of repetitions of the same failed method. He will justify his existence by flogging that horse that-much-longer and add another decimal-point of precision to a number that isn't in play.

Regulators are all about minimizing risk to their reputation and never being wrong. They are also into milking projects for as long as possible to justify their existence. Given their mind-set, they would prefer that all drugs and vaccines remained experimental long enough for them to retire...say in twenty years.

There comes a point where in-lab testing hits the wall.

Life is an experiment. We only know the endpoint. We do not know when. We do not know what happens in between. The word "experimental" does not freak me out.

Scientists tend to hyper-focus

I listened to a doctor talk about the incredible safety of Ivermectin.

He said that four billion people have been treated with it and "only two or four died and that was because of some, extremely rare genetic anomaly."

Let's do a quick reality check. If you had a sample of four BILLION people with an even distribution of age and an average lifespan of 70 years (2.21 billion seconds), you would have about two of them (1.8 by my calculations) die every second. *

That would be 156 thousand deaths in the twenty-four hours after administering Ivermectin from random, natural causes.

How, pray tell, are you going to find "two or four" anomalous deaths under that pile numbers? You could probably hide ten thousand deaths in there if the symptoms mimicked a heart attack or stroke.

Big numbers. Darned big numbers. They act differently.

*Thanks to BOB, aka, Best Of the Best for catching that error.

9 comments:

  1. Occlusion Conclusion

    That should be "2.21 billion seconds." /nitpick.

    Lessee....according to the gummint, 2,839,205 deaths occurred in 2018 (no data yet for more recent years); a year has 31,536,000 seconds, so....carry the one.....about 5.5 per minute. Which is 327/hr, 7855/day, 1% = 79. I'd think there would be ways to occlude .25% in that. What could be accomplished in a year with such a methodology, assuming intelligent selectivity?

    In a small community, such as the one Jarrell and Dar live in, .25% would be noticed but perhaps .1% would not, and that .1%, with sufficient selectivity, might over a reasonable time period make a substantial difference in living and operating conditions for those "not so afflicted."

    A Civilizational Enhancement Tool, perhaps?

    In a larger community probably the full .25% would work.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Would that be 2.8m deaths in the US? The four billion has to be a global number.

      Delete
    2. Yeah, my bad for not identifying it - that is U.S. data.

      The 4B has to be worldwide.

      Sorry about that.

      Delete
  2. Some interesting data analysis:

    http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=242128

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  3. The problem I have with the vaccine and pandemic is that we have been lied to from beginning to end, with flip flopping along the way. The pandemic is survived by well over 99% (99.97% if I remember correctly) of those without underlying problems or older age. The vaccine is a brand new, experimental, unapproved type that nobody knows what the long term consequences will be. (Emergency approval is not the same as full approval.) I think a better analogy would be "How many drops of sewage does it take to contaminate a 55 gallon barrel of pure water? One." I don't wish to be a part of the out of lab testing. As a side note, my wife and I are in our early 60's, and my parents, who live with us, are in their early 80's. We're all healthy and in agreement about the vaccine. No thanks.

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  4. Where do Vampires get their vitamin D? Same place that liberals get their money. They suck it out of those that have made it. And dragonslayer, I totally agree with you.---ken

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  5. Reminds me of the story of an emulsion polymer recipe that included a certain chemical additive ... discovered by trial and error when they scaled the reaction vessel up to 10,000 gallons. Turns out the smaller scale reactors were all steel. The 10,000 gallon Pfaudlers were glass lined. The reaction worked fine in steel reactors, but needed the extra component when they switched to glass-lined, and the reaction could no longer get the needed catalyst from the steel walls of the reactors.

    In certain industries, these kind of things are discovered through painful, expensive, and sometimes fatal industrial accidents.

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  6. Yep, gotta get them OUT of the lab once in a while... I made my scientists come on the sea tests... LOL

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  7. another example was in one of my structural engineering classes, WRT the holdback piece used by the USN for catapult launches. They re-engineered the old part to save money and started getting low-pressure failures. The old piece was a double flanged fitting,large diameter with a hollow machined-out center, that held the catapult back until the steam pressure had built to a certain pressure, at which point the hold-back would break and the aircraft would launch.
    The re-engineered part had the same cross sectional area, same steel, but was a lot cheaper to make since it was smaller diameter. After they lost several aircraft (fortunately no crew), they figured out that the old part, which had been in service for many years, was designed to not only take the direct stress of the catapult, but also the imposed torque induced when the heavy wire rope holding each end was placed in tension. The new, smaller diameter unit could not take the tension AND the torque and failed too soon.

    ReplyDelete

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