scenes 1241pm - As you will see, Epidyne2 is pretty much brute force, and therefore very practical. Most of the professional models mess with 50Kft level theory which consist of a set of linear differential eqns that succumb to analytical solutions having eigenvalues and such - very impractical. The real world is highly non-linear with input functions and time-series which require numerical solutions through iterative approaches like Epidyne2. I look forward to your comments. BTW, my current report on aerosol transmission is not an epiphany, it confirms that which I reported days ago in a manner that I, and apparently everyone else, have not witnessed in such a profound expression. Exhaled C19 viruses wafting for hours (not minutes) in infectable concentrations is disturbing news indeed.

Do people like 'Bertie' even understand data tables like the one I posted in 'Junk Journalism ...' (the kind Bertie consumes)? There the comparative stats of how the US performs relative to other developed countries are shown, apparently the ken of Bertie and his ilk. And his kind scream that Trump was somehow late in responding to C19. Well if so, how come we dumb laggards in a big a well-traveled country are doing so well after all those others who are smarter than we, have better healthcare systems, and got an early start?? All this is beyond the Blue Mob which has only one item on their agenda list.

It continues to amaze me that some people still believe the stats coming out of China. According to my lights, the only verifiable fact about the C19 virus is that it started in Wuhan sometime last Nov or Dec. The rest of the reports coming out of CCP-sanctioned media are definitely various shades of bullshit. To cite such stats with those of other countries is a step or two below sophomoric or cynical, depending on your agenda (or if you're bright enough to have one).

sini 235pm - Any of the published numbers are only "meaningful" to the extent that they are reliable. Here I not commenting on the reliability of the numbers, only on their display formatting given that they are reliable. But if we expand this discussion to reliability of published numbers, AND they are found to be arguably unreliable, then we need to take our leaders to task for continuing to daily cite those numbers as if they actually conveyed useful information.

scenes 1241pm - Agreed; of course the public is at fault. They've had their critical thinking skills purged through the last fifty years of unionized public education delivered by socialist educated teachers. Innumeracy is just the tip of their deficits iceberg. We know that the critically thinking public discriminates in the news/commentary they consume. That is one reason why FN's soaring audience numbers also contain Democrats whose luck is not all that bad when they attempt to think.

scenes 1050am - Agreed. And the prominent ones you fire still have a large enough of a constituency to prompt them to come back at you through another door - McClellan ran, albeit unsuccessfully, against Lincoln in 1864.

Now why would PaulE grace us with his presence when that would bring nothing but grief and accusations of hypocrisy? It'll never happen. He's waiting for the winds to again blow from a more favorable quarter.

scenes 1125am - Sweatpants indeed; that has been part of my uniform-of-the-day since HD1, I am wearing them now. ;-)

Bertie 548pm - You really ought to watch something more than MSNBC. Besides, bitching about playing catch up on test kits which 1) would not have stopped the progress of the disease in the last month, and 2) should be contributed under 'Hunker Down ...' where I talk about what wasn't done by the feds during the last couple of decades.

wanna 535pm - You got that one wrong also; the 2009 swine flu originated from a pig farm in Veracruz, Mexico. I guess calling it Veracruz flu in 2009 was a bit too cumbersome or politically incorrect under Obama. And where do you guys get this "racist" crap for those who continue to name the epidemic after the location of its source (a long practiced convention)? Does someone send you people an email telling you that you all must now start singing the "racist" chorus when the current coronavirus pandemic is called the Wuhan virus after the city where it started?

Now that we've established that a significant number of us are devotees of a wee drop before (and after? during?) dinner, I'd like to share something that has started among our friends - call it FaceTime bourbon (or your brand of poison). It's a congenial little get together to catch up on the news and enjoy a sip or two. I'm wondering whether outfits like Zoom will market a consumer version of their app for group gatherings.

EstF 141pm - Good pick-up; excellent points. Let's see if any of the feds respond.

Gregory 1058am - That is indeed a sad commentary, and confirms again and again the Left's inability to differentiate and reason in their quest to make public policy - the graves of millions attest to their failure. And today, as our local-left thought leaders again demonstrate, they can't tell the difference between the death committees of nationalized health care systems, selecting who lives and dies, from the willingness of our older generation to voluntarily assume a heightened risk of death during an emergency so that we can leave an America with a sound economy to our progeny. The leftists' argument sees no difference in how our seniors may go to their reward, no understanding whatsoever; to them it's all the same body count.

So this is why some lamestream outlets are saying the Trump is putting out false information in his daily briefings. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/19/chloroquine-known-as-effective-against-coronavirus-since-2005/

scenes 441pm - Amen! America founded by geniuses, run by idiots.

Eesti Rebane 133pm - Thanks for the heads up on that significant tome. I'm happy to hear that 'govt is guilty until proven innocent' has such an impressive imprimatur. Did that august author also advise how we could convince collectivists of that great truth?

California's $20B "budget reserve" is nothing but kool-aid for the liberals. Owing hundreds of billions in unfunded liabilities, the state's Big Liars are like someone with a $1,000 mortgage payment due that he can't pay while waving a $20 bill bragging that he's flush. The only amazing part is that most of today's Californians believe that bullshit line.

scenes 1226pm - of starships and such. I don't think our ancestors will be worrying much about such contagious epidemics. From my perch this is 'the last great century of Man', bio-life is a transitory phase in the rise and development of intelligent civilizations. We're about at the end of that phase with the coming Singularity - soon trans-humans will rule, and their bio-progenitors will die out and their replicable DNA will be digitally preserved on some storage device. Or else, we'll simply destroy ourselves.

scenes 1226pm - total ignorance of alternatives or of futures is always represented by a flat pdf - everything is equally un/likely. Knowledge is always represented by structured pdfs, the more bunched here than there, the better. For a great (and I do mean great) text from which to learn probability, I strongly recommend to my students 'The Probability Tutoring Book' by Carol Ash - it could not be more clearly written. It's hefty price testifies to its acknowledged utility among professionals; but the used copies are just as good ;-) (It's also published by IEEE, which itself is an impressive imprimatur. I have had my copy for years.) For an equivalent book on calculus, again look for Carol Ash co-authored by her hubby. https://smile.amazon.com/Probability-Tutoring-Book-Revised-Printing/dp/0780310519/

scenes 921am - This version of the now obvious is an excellent reprise and reminder to our chorus of informed readers. Now if you could only fashion the message in a form that can nail its landing between the ears of our liberal readers.

scenes 907am - Your good points take the discussion well beyond quantifying the reliability of tests and testing. The devising of public policies that satisfice a given utility function is both a very interesting and complex undertaking, way beyond the ken of your run-of-mill politician (that's why we mostly get crappy policies). And your point about the impact of asymptomatic testing and impact of pre-symptomatic virus spreaders I have covered elsewhere, but no doubt can be examined in more detail. About your '0.5 question' - information theory deals heavily in probability and teaches us that information content is represented with probability distribution functions, pdfs (discrete and continuous) of the variables of interest. The highest measure of information calculates from a distribution that is peaked at the correct value of the variable (the Dirac-delta spike of a discrete distribution being the limiting case). The lowest measure of information derives from the most featureless pdf which, of course, is the flat distribution that reflects total ignorance as to the variable's value, assigning equal probability to all possibilities/alternatives. In the case of the prior pdf for a suspect patient - who either is or is not infected - our pre-test ignorance over those two alternatives are represented by equal probabilities that sum to one - i.e. 0.5 and 0.5. This why we model our knowledge of a fair coin toss that way, and also assign 1/6 to the probability connected with each the numbers on a die. Since I understand you to be technically astute, I'll share a little insight on how to generate the optimal search policy for anything the location of which initially is known to within a prior pdf. The optimal strategy is the one that flattens the pdf the most and the quickest. That is the equivalent of sucking out the prior pdf's information content the fastest way possible (using Bayes of course). Competing strategies are therefore easy to compare by just computing the time history of the posterior pdf's information content as the search proceeds. Hope this helps.