The Angry Bear

The humans always observe back: why I am rooting for NY to “crush the curve” So, in addition to a bunch of States in the Confederacy and a few in the high plains deciding that May 1 was the Day of Virus Jubilee, yesterday saw further discouraging news that not one but two epidemiological models drastically increased their estimates of deaths, while there was another revelation that Trump and the White House were relying on a “cubic” model devised by Kevin...

RIP John Horton Conway I am late to issue this RIP as John Horton Conway died on April 11, 2020, having been born in England, Dec. 26, 1937. He died of coovid-19.  I was aware of his death when it happened, but have since become aware of things he did that I did not know about that have pushed me to post this. Conway was one of the world’s best known mathematicians, most famous for creating the Game of Life a half century ago in 1970, which was...

I don’t know what to do about the widespread complete ignorance about the concepts of null hypothesis, rejection, failure to reject, p-levels. I will rant after the jump A glossary is urgently needed. 1. Size — the size of the test is the probability that a true null hypothesis will be rejected. For purely historical reasons the size 0.05 is often discussed. This is basically because the smallest 95% interval of a normal is roughly an even 4 standard...

April jobs report: disastrous, but not as cataclysmic as feared; lower paid part time workers take the biggest hit HEADLINES: -20.5 million jobs lost. Between March and April this is a loss of 14.0% of all jobs since February. U3 unemployment rate up 10.3% from 4.4% to 14.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 14.1% from 8.7% to 22.8% February and March were both revised downward, by -45,000 and -169,000 respectively, for a net decline of -214,000 jobs from...

Infections in US States by population density Since COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it should hardly be a surprise that the most densely populated States have the most cases per capita, and conversely the least densely States have the least cases.  But since that basic point is lost in a lot of the analysis, let’s take a look. Below are two charts consisting of the 12 most and least densely populated States, their respective population densities,...

A Very Grey Swan Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncertainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a “black swan.”  Taleb defined white swans as situations describable by Gaussian normal distributions.  For situations not full uncertainty or white swans Taleb coined the idea of “grey swans,”...

by Ken Melvin Are capitalism and democracy compatible?  Both Capitalism and Democracy are complicated, complex concepts with varying interpretations. Beginning with a working definition of democracy: Democracy — A government formed of representatives popularly elected by the enfranchised citizenry of the governed entity. Webster’s : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a...

There is a severe Remdesivir shortage On March 2 2020, I warned you that this was going to happen. I did not warn about the opaque and arbitrary Trump administration policy, because the Trump administration is always “worse than you imagine possible even taking into account the fact that it is worse than you imagine possible” Brad DeLong 2003 or so referring to the last Republican presidency. When are Americans going to notice the pattern ?...

Comparing the US’s coronavirus response with its Western European peer group Western Europe is a reasonable peer group of countries against which to compare the US response to coronavirus. The 5 largest countries in Western Europe in particular – in order, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain – together have a population of about 324 million, vs. 332 million for the US. So let’s take a look at this peer group of European States vs. the United States...