Our RV Adventures

Yesterday I talked about the the forecast from the Imperial College of London, and Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College London virus modeler and government scientific adviser, that 2.2 to 2.7 million people were going to die in the U.S that seems to have started all the panic here in the U.S. However British experts who have finally got a look at the computer code, say that it is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.”

And it seems to have been going in Minnesota as well. In this case three college students were recruited to put together a model over a weekend to predict WuFlu deaths so the state’s governor could decide the state’s response to the WuFlu.

And after completing their model, they came up with two different predictions. One, with no mitigation, said that over 70,000 people would die in Minnesota. But with strict mitigation policies, maybe only 55,000 would die in the state.

So based on these predictions, the governor locked down the state under very strict guidelines.

So far, Minnesota has had 709 deaths and the rate of infections is slowly down greatly.

One thing everyone seems to skip in all these ‘modeling’ systems is using them to predict the ‘present’. If your model really works, you should be able to enter last month’s data and have it ‘predict’ what’s happening right now.

In other words, if your model can’t start with the past and predict the present, why would anyone think you could start with the present and correctly predict the future.

And by the way, this is also a problem with all those climate prediction models. They can’t predict the present, either.

There’s been a lot of discussion back and forth about the necessity of wearing a mask, and if it really does any good. Here’s an interesting (and somewhat scary) article about masks.

Face Masks Pose Serious Risks To The Healthy

I’ve already talked about hypercapnia, the buildup of CO₂ due to repeatedly rebeathing your own breath, which can make you dizzy, light-headed, and even pass out. Jan can only wear her mask for 10 minutes or so before she has to take it off. It’s also why we saw so many people in WalMart this afternoon wearing their masks under their chin.

But now if you wear a mask while you have the WuFlu, or apparently, any respiratory virus, you also have to worry about ‘brain flu’.

There is another danger to wearing these masks on a daily basis, especially if worn for several hours. When a person is infected with a respiratory virus, they will expel some of the virus with each breath. If they are wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask or other tightly fitting mask, they will be constantly rebreathing the viruses, raising the concentration of the virus in the lungs and the nasal passages. We know that people who have the worst reactions to the coronavirus have the highest concentrations of the virus early on. And this leads to the deadly cytokine storm in a selected number.

It gets even more frightening. Newer evidence suggests that in some cases the virus can enter the brain.^11,12 In most instances it enters the brain by way of the olfactory nerves (smell nerves), which connect directly with the area of the brain dealing with recent memory and memory consolidation. By wearing a mask, the exhaled viruses will not be able to escape and will concentrate in the nasal passages, enter the olfactory nerves and travel into the brain.¹³

Just what we need, something else to worry about.

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Another Day on our European Vacation

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A Lay-About, Do Nothing Day . . . 5/21/19

That turned out to be a little expensive.

When we extended our London stay an extra 3 days and added some extra excursions, we left today open for anything interesting that we came across that we might want to do.

However, what we ended up wanting to do was pretty much nothing. At least in the morning so we could sleep late. We did go down for breakfast about 9am since it wraps up at 10. Didn’t want to miss out on our free meal.

While we were there I went online and bought us two 24 hour tickets on one of the several Hop On – Hop Off double-decker open top buses. Looking at the brochure, it showed 4 lines, Red, Green, Blue, and Orange, that covered the major tourist attraction parts of the city. So we thought we just spend a relaxing afternoon riding around the city, checking out some of the places we hadn’t already visited, and maybe getting a better look at some we already had.

We also wanted to check out Oxford St, a high-end shopping area, and also home to Hamley’s, billed as the world’s largest toy story, a toy store that opened in 1760, making it 259 years old!

Kind of makes F.A.O. Schwarz, which opened in 1862, look like the new kid on the block.

F.A.O. Schwarz even went out of business for 3 years, from 2015 to 2018, when their owner, Toy’s R Us, went under and dragged Schwarz down with them.

But the whole hop-on hop-off thing wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. At least with the company we chose.

They have a neat app that I downloaded onto my phone that lets you track the buses so you know when the next one is coming along to your stop. BUT they don’t tell you that that bus will be full, and so will the next two, and the empty one that finally shows up wont even appear on the app at all.

And when we got to the stop where we’re supposed to change over to another route, we found that the pickup point for the new route was about 200 yards away from the the drop off point.

And then when we got ready to come back to our hotel from the Oxford St. area, the buses in use must have been those new ‘stealth buses’, the ones you can’t see, because the app would show a bus stopping in front of us, but we couldn’t see any bus stopped or coming by. Turned out to be a big waste of £70.

So we Ubered home. But more about Uber later.

Jan and I have both been suffering from colds since we were in Paris, and have been taking DayQuil as a decongestant. So while we were out shopping yesterday she told me how tired and sleepy she was, even though she’d taken DayQuil and not the NyQuil that makes you drowsy.

Later getting back to the hotel, she discovered the problem. She had accidently taken a couple of non-prescription over-the-counter sleeping tablets instead of the DayQuil.

I guess they really work.

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Thought For The Day:

Seems like college is a lot different now than when I went. We got discounts on notebook paper and textbooks.

fgsfdg

Here’s another article about the Hong Kong Flu epidemic.

Why American life went on as normal during the killer pandemic of 1969

According to the CDC’s figures, over 100,000 people died from this flu, an H3N2 strain that was descended from the H2N2 strain that caused the 1957-58 Pandemic. And adjusted for the differences in population, that’s the equivalent of about 165,000 deaths today. And with no shutdowns, imagine that.

And the Asian Flu version in ‘57-‘58 which killed around 116,000 people in the U.S., would be about 217,000 deaths today. And with no shutdowns, imagine that.

Note that both the H2N2 and H3N2 strains still exist today, as the Influenza A variant that’s part of the yearly flu shot that you’re supposed to get.

But note, there’s still no VACCINE for it, even after 63 years, just a shot that may or may not be very effective, and usually isn’t.

Remember what started all this, shutdowns, the huddling-at-home, the loss of jobs? If it’s gotten a little fuzzy in the last few months, probably from rebreathing your own CO2 over and over again behind that mask, here’s a reminder.

It was the forecast from the Imperial College of London, and Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College London virus modeler and government scientific adviser, that 2.2 to 2.7 million people were going to die in the U.S. However British experts who have finally got a look at the computer code, say that it is a “buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.”

Coders here in the States aren’t that fancy. We call it Spaghetti Code.

But even messy code can still work. But apparently this code won’t even do that.

“Scientists from the University of Edinburgh have further claimed that it is impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data using the model. The team got different results when they used different machines, and even different results from the same machines.”

“There appears to be a bug in either the creation or re-use of the network file. If we attempt two completely identical runs, only varying in that the second should use the network file produced by the first, the results are quite different,” the Edinburgh researchers wrote on the Github file.”

Note that what they’re saying is that if you run the program twice, using the same starting data each time, you won’t get the same answer.

Kind of like using a calculator to add 5 + 5, and you get 11 one time and 121,042 the next time.

I guess you just keeping run the code until you get an answer that will get your name in the news.

So tell me again why we’re doing all this?

And now it seems like Ferguson doesn’t really believe his own models, since he recently had to resign his government position, because rather than quarantining at home like he told all us to do, he was caught slipping out to visit his mistress.

Or maybe he was just especially . . . well, you know.

And remember that recently Governor Cuomo released a study showing that 66% of the new WuFlu cases in New York were sheltering at home, not traveling or working. So much for self-quarantining, I guess.

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Here’s another day on our European vacation.

Total London Tour 5/20/19

Today was our first full day in London and we did it up right by taking the Total London Tour, a whirlwind, 9 hour extravaganza hitting the major tourist highlights of the city.

So we were up at 5:45, downstairs at the restaurant for breakfast when it opened at 6:30, jumping into our booked last night Uber ride at 7:00, and at the Victoria Coach Station by 7:20am. As it turns out, Coach Station is just the fancy British term for Bus Terminal.

Our tour bus pulled out right on time at 7:45am, and James, our tour guide, launched into his detailed description of pretty much every building we passed.

Our first stop was at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but something was going on inside the prevented us from touring it. Designed by Christopher Wren, this present building was began in 1675 after the previous one was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. But there has been a church on this site since 603 A.D.

The tallest building in London until 1967, it has been the location of the Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilee services for Queen Elizabeth II, and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.

After passing by many other locations, like both the Old and New Scotland Yard buildings, and the Houses of Parliament, our next stop was Westminster Abbey, the coronation site of every British Monarch since 1066 A.D. And here we did get to tour the inside.

Like St. Paul’s, there has been a church on this site since the 7th century, but unlike St. Paul’s, there are over 3000 people buried here, including, not only people like Mary, Queen of Scots, and a bunch of Edwards, Williams, Charles, Henrys, and James, but scientists like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and more recently, Stephen Hawking. And even actors like Sir Lawrence Olivier.

And supposedly there is another relationship between Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. When it was under construction, St. Paul’s ran out of money to finished up the building. So other churches in the area were dunned to contribute to their ‘building fund’.

And since Westminster Abbey, officially titled “The Collegiate Church of St. Peter at Westminster”, was a major ‘contributor’, this gave rise to the old saw, “Robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

At least that’s the way the story goes.

Unfortunately they don’t allow any photos or videos inside, so no pictures for the blog. However I must say that this was the second abbey, the other one being the one in Melk, Austria, that we’ve visited that was so ‘sacrosanct’ as to not allow even ‘non-flash’ photography inside, but not so ‘sacrosanct’ as to have you exit the church on your tour through a ‘GIFT SHOP’. Just sayin’.

Next up was a stop at Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard.

After a short walk from where our bus was parked outside the palace gates, we lined up just in time to see the Coldstream Guards leave their post and their replacement regiment march by on the way to take up their positions.

Then it was all back on the bus for a drive across the Tower Bridge,

to our next stop, The Tower of London. But first up, we were given an hour for lunch, so Jan and I chose the nearby Wagamama location, an Asian-styled fusion place, that turned out to be excellent.

First up was an appetizer order of Bang Bang Cauliflower,

crispy wok-fried in firecracker sauce with red and green onions, and topped off with ginger and coriander.

DELICIOUS!

Jan got the Chili Chicken Ramen,

while I got the Chili Steak Ramen.

After our break we met up with our guide who passed out our Tower tickets and we were left to explore the area for several hours.

This is the White Tower, the first building in the fortress.

Constructed between 1078 and 1100 by William the Conqueror, it was very considered very formidable for its time.

Next up was the building that holds the Crown Jewels,

but again no photos were allowed.

So I just took a photo of MY Crown Jewel.

Jan was also interested to see the memorial placed at the site of the execution of Anne Boleyn.

A historical group keeps fresh flowers on the site.

As we were leaving, I took this shot contrasting one of the oldest sites in London, and one of the most modern.

The 1000 foot tall building, called The Shard for its broken glass-like top, is now probably the most recognizable things on the London skyline. Here’s a better shot of it.

Then after a 45 minute cruise along the Thames, we finished up our day with a ride on the Millennium Eye.

At 443 feet, the Eye is the 2nd tallest Ferris Wheel in the world. The tallest one, at 550 feet, is the High Roller in Las Vegas, and we’ve been lucky enough to ride both of them.

And of course the obligatory selfie.

Then it was an Uber ride back to our hotel, where we collapsed without even getting dinner, just had some snacks in the room.

Tomorrow, thank goodness, is pretty much a do-nothing day, before we start again on Wednesday with a day-trip out to Stonehenge.

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Thought For The Day:

Dear Plexiglass,

Thank you for protecting me from the cashier that just touched every single item that I took home with me.