The Executive Edition (11/7/21)

On Tanzania:

Sometimes it is worth looking back to check some of the topics we have covered in WITI, and how the stories have developed. I wrote about Tanzania when I got back from a trip in August, centered around their COVID turnaround and the difficulties of re-working public perception on the issue.

The WSJ did a very deep dive into what is now being called the world’s most blatant COVID cover-up and the piece has a lot more color on what people have long suspected: the government at the time wasn’t accounting for COVID deaths, and more sensationally, that President John Magufuli (who declared the virus a “satanic myth”) actually died of the virus.

According to the reporting:

While his neighbors sealed borders and locked down, his country of 58 million stayed open. His government barred doctors from registering coronavirus as the cause of death and labeled those who wore masks unpatriotic.
Seeking to keep the economy open and rally nationalist sentiment ahead of elections, he blocked foreign journalists from entering the country, rejected vaccines and refused to provide data to the World Health Organization. News organizations reporting on Covid-19 were shut down for “scaremongering,” and reporters threatened with jail.
By this spring, the president was dead, along with six other senior politicians and several of the country’s generals. The official cause of Mr. Magufuli’s death was heart failure. The details remain secret. Diplomats, analysts and opposition leaders say he had Covid-19.

And what is particularly interesting is the extreme variance in terms of COVID-reported deaths in many African countries. Some observers have been chalking up the lower rates to young populations and outdoor ventilated areas, but the numbers aren’t truly telling the tale of the tape:

Even if Africa has fared better than hard-hit nations in the West, graveyards and mortuaries tell of a mortality rate far higher than the official numbers. In Uganda’s capital, Kampala, workers at the main Bukasa cemetery said the average number of daily burials has jumped from six to 30 since last year. Workers said relatives told them the extra deaths are from Covid-19. In the central morgue of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, Covid-19 was present in 87% of all bodies in June, Boston University scientists found in a recent study.
The official death numbers are “epidemiologically impossible. The only sense that it makes is that we are not counting,” said Ayoade Alakija, co-chair of the African Union’s African Vaccine Delivery Alliance. “And of course we’re not counting—it’s glaring.”

The entire piece is worth your time. (CJN)

Airline Lounge of the day:

The Qatar Airways Al Safwa lounge in Doha. (CJN)

Looking Back on 2020 links:

For the last decade or so I’ve done a pretty good job capturing my favorite links of the year (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019). It’s been a cathartic annual ritual. Unfortunately last December/January there were too many other things going on to get through. With that said, I did get a few sections done including math and science. Here were my picks for favorite math and science articles of 2020 (thankfully the good stuff is usually pretty evergreen, so these should hold up well). If you all like this and are interested, let me know and I’ll throw the full list of links into next week’s Exec Edition. - Noah

Michael M. Phillips’ September Wall Street Journal story on how the Rand Corporation’s book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates wasn’t actually random is exactly the kind of story I needed more of in 2020. It was a fun exploration of an inconsequential rabbit hole. When every other article I read forced me to reassess my risk matrix, bits like this were like a vacation. Plus it’s short! Here’s the gist:

In a group of 50,000 random digits, mathematicians would expect 4,050 sequences of two identical digits in a row—77, for instance. They would predict 405 spots with three identical digits in a row, such as 555. There would be about 40 cases of four identical digits in a row. And four or five places with five identical digits together.
His results were “soul crushing,” Mr. Briggs says. The book contains 48 runs of four digits instead of 40, an astoundingly wide divergence in statistical terms that eluded any explanation he could conjure.

Next up is “An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience,” which managed to combine two hot topics for me: neuroscience skepticism with ideas about the relationship between language and understanding:

Language itself is a fundamentally linear process, where one idea leads to the next. But if the thing you’re trying to describe has a million things happening simultaneously, language is not the right tool. It’s like understanding the stock market. The best way to make money on the stock market is probably not by understanding the fundamental concepts of economy. It’s by understanding how to utilize this data to know what to buy and when to buy it. That may have nothing to do with economics but with data and how data is used.

Finally, we turn to The Santa Fe Institute. If you’re not familiar, it’s a place filled with brilliant folks studying the effects of complexity on the world. When COVID hit, David Krakauer and the rest of the Santa Fe Institute sprung to action in an attempt to help us understand what was happening. Their Transmission series was a set of 35 essays and accompanying podcasts that were ostensibly about COVID, but had implications that extended far outside this moment in time.

I referred to many of the podcasts, especially those with Santa Fe Institute President David Krakauer, throughout the year. I wrote about the core theme of the series for WITI, building off Krakauer’s opening essay:

Unlike with these other diseases, in the case of COVID-19 there is a rather unique convergence of causes that re establishes a kind of simple causality, and these causes are transmission networks. The virus is transmitted initially from animal hosts to humans, typically through diet. Humans then transmit the virus to other humans by contact. These contacts are then transmitted through our transport systems and professional and social lives. This is perhaps the principal reason why the markets and society have been so volatile; the shared factor of transmission is so integral to modern life, it is to such a great extent the foundation of the modern world, that it touches nearly every factor of production. Just as monocultures can generate lethal simplicity in agriculture, transmission has generated lethal simplicity across the globe.

At the very least listen to the seven podcast episodes, which are all amazing. I would also suggest reading as many of the essays as possible, though, as I’m not sure where you can find a better education on the world’s modern complexities. (NRB)

Department of Simultaneity:

I’ve had this quote from William Gibson about simultaneous discovery rattling around my brain for the last week or two. It’s from a 2011 Paris Review interview he did:

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.

ICYMI:

Here’s the week:

What Noah watched on Youtube this week:

Slow YouTube week for me. Here are the highlights.

Design Engineer Tests $600 & $25 Blenders.

Even if you’re not a Chicago Bears fan (or a football fan) you should experience the wonder that was Devin Hester returning kicks.

Continuing in the world of sports: How the 3-point line is breaking basketball.

Stuff Made Here is a favorite channel. He does crazy builds like auto-aiming bows, unpickable locks, and pumpkin-carving robots. He’s got a new build of a wall-painting robot that’s fun.

I kept BeamNG videos going. Cars Ramp Angle Test and Cars Climbing Steps.

Finally, this video of Google DeepMind training an AI to play soccer is amazing.

Odd and ends:

A legendary NYC doorman

The real story behind a logistics founder’s Tweetstorm

Remarks complete. Nothing Follows.

Colin and Noah

The Executive Edition (11/7/21)

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