I have somehow tricked Emory into accepting me to their MPH program on top of the Johns Hopkins MHS. Global epidemiology and epidemiology respectively. Now only waiting for EuroPubHealth (will be notified by March 3) and Georgetown (no notification timeline).

Apartment lease ends at the end of March. I'll be moving in with my parents for a few months before shipping off to wherever I go come late summer/early fall. Parents still don't know I've applied. Waiting to hear back from EuroPubHealth before I tell them I applied so I can have some idea of whether or not I'm staying in these great United States.

Covid cases slowing down sharply which is great. It's allowing me to do a lot of data cleanup which was badly needed.

Ya I feel like this should be evidence that he likes to hang around situations and wait for his chance to fight while skirting the consequences because he “didn’t start it”. Like tall chick was trying to back away and this group of thugs kept following her. Then beat her up when she tried to defend herself from crazy short chick. But again, people will try to villainize the random tall chick.

I had to serve a Trump supporter the other day and we all wanted to ask if they were in the country legally but you can only really call on license plates. But then this guy went and tried to order butter chicken before actually ordering a burger. I was very confused until I was reminded that American’s sometimes think butter chicken is just chicken soaked in butter and THEN THEY ORDER IT. So suffice it to say, I don’t have a lot of faith in a positive outcome to this whole situation.

It's been a week since my procedure, and I already noticed an improvement: I don't get dizzy when I stand up.

I recently recalled this:

and in the prolonged absence of mk's data (sorry if this sounds like I'm passing blame, it's not that; I know everyone's busy and dealing with lots of things), started working on an explanation. It's a surprisingly tricky problem on both classical mechanics and the theory of elasticity, at least to someone who usually deals with electrons doing their thing. I don't yet know if/when it'll be ready to share with you, but I'm having heaps of fun and, oddly, get a lot of satisfaction from designing my own experiment to measure both mechanical properties of grapes and test their limits without a centrifuge.

I think you probably have a much different experience than a lot of people. I was raised a Christian, but an Episcopal, which is basically a forum for members of Daughters of the American Revolution to have coffee together without the danger of interference from minorities. It took me until I was in like middle school to find out that some people actually believe the fairy tales (or whatever you want to call them) in the Bible. So my perspective isn't one that comes from a place of evangelism, and I can't say how I would feel if it had, but I'd probably harbor some anger, too.

All that said, I do think there's plenty of space for religion and reason, so long as neither is stepping on the other's toes. Stephen Jay Gould called this the non-overlapping magisteria principle. Basically, we can coexist so long as religion stays in and studies the metaphysical space and leaves the physical world to the rest of us, and vice versa.

Who fucking cares? She's a democratic ex-fighter pilot running against Mitch McConnell.

Maybe dial the purity test back a bit.

But seriously, this is a neat update. Appreciate it.

gonna be a data scientist?

Got accepted to Lambda School! It's an intensive coding bootcamp I'll start in September: nine months of 40 hours a week online instruction, following instructors build applications and building our own under their supervision. I'm told that it's the same or more amount of coding as in a 4-year CS degree.

My acceptance is conditional on completing "precourse work" which I'm finding involves a steep learning curve. It dawned on me that this is their weeding out process. I'm not averse to the approach at all; instructional time is better spent on more complicated things than learning to define variables or importing libraries. But some of the later assignments which I haven't gotten to yet have names like linear algebra, pandas, training models with sklearn. Thankfully, there is a metric fuckton of resources online for learning the basics of python on your own.

I'll speak to my decision for the subspeciality--data science--at a later pubski.

summer 2019 curriculum

In addition to the coding I'm doing this summer, I'm training and coaching gymnastics. I'm basically living at the gym and a bagel place next to it. Had a really discouraging day today. I'm so old and stiff. Trying to remember that there are a lot of slow-going, sometimes deeply uncomfortable and miserable days that comprise the road to progress.

Saturday

Officiating my best friends' wedding this Saturday; been reading my speech every day in preparation. It brings me chills. "I now have the privilege to announce--for the very first time as husband and wife--Andrew and Grace."

I have no idea were to start. 2 years is a long time when you are 20.

But eh, yesterday I openly challenged the unofficial leader of the local county wing of my party. Well, my previous party. I did say that I would leave if the members approved the suggestion that he get a mandate to completely on his own negotiate with the other parties.

6-4 was the result. And that isn't bad for a first try. It was very clear it was him or me, and that it was almost even is something I am very proud of. I argued my position for one and a half hour. With no support.

I didn't win. But I did try.

And I was extremely cool.

Doing this kind of thing is literally a childhood dream of mine.

And the local wing of the party that is next most ideologically similar to mine has accepted me with open arms. Especially as I say that I am a very ideological person.

So doing something even cooler than I thought possible at 14 is a very, very nice feeling.

Is there another way to report on mass murder that doesn't seem like glorifying to you?

Maybe we just shouldn't be reporting on this in the national media. These are always given multiple days of wall-to-wall coverage on cable news. This is known to encourage copycats and attract others to outdo the carnage in previous incidents.

The central challenge for Democrats in taking back the White House will hinge on the party’s ability to persuade a majority of Americans to support a more progressive agenda going forward.

Apparently, Mr. Sosnik isn't familiar with how the Electoral College works. A plurality of Americans already vote democratic, and have so in all but one presidential election since 1992. Democrats' problem isn't one of majorities; it's one of geographics. That is unlikely to change anytime soon, and moving further leftward will accelerate, not decelerate this phenomenon.

The leftward lurch has some real perils in it. The numbers cited above I think don't paint the whole picture. Immigration, e.g., wasn't much of a partisan fight until like 2015 when the Muslim Ban was first proposed. Immigration reform was the darling of W and the Kochs and was opposed by Bernie Sanders as recently as the beginning of the primary season. That dramatic 52 point shift has seen a lot of its movement only in the last couple years. Similarly, we're seeing a dramatic increase in "single payer" devotees in just the last half year. Democrats and liberals should be wary of getting caught in the "against Trump" vortex, and not let it color their chances of ever winning another presidential election.

Speaking of, NYT published an OpEd today calling for Al Franken's resignation. That's the level of crazy liberals are going to rise to in service of all things "against Trump". Of all the moronic OpEds NYT has published over the years, this one got me particularly pissed off (because when Erik Prince or John Bolton publish one they're easy to laugh off), because it represents the worst of the left mob: letting a staff writer (as opposed to a one off partisan) call for the head of one of America's finest senators because, well, Roy Moore is a child molester and Donald Trump is a rapist and we don't like them so everyone gets a trophy.

People need to keep their heads. America and the Democrats don't need a leftward push, especially one that's driven by "against Trump". We need a push toward sensible regulatory and tax reform, driven by a shared sense of community and compassion. That's not a leftist agenda, even though it sounds like one in today's world. It's a humanist agenda that the left has the best mandate to push. It will only happen, however, if we move past the identity driven leftism that's currently en vogue.

He makes that point by the end of the essay.

Pronoia: the belief that the universe is conspiring in your favour.

Hey dude,

I'm just going to interject here that KB calorie tracks daily and has been for years. I know this because I'm his stalker, duh. Not to mention that it's quite possible for an eating disorder to have long-term side effects on the human body. And let's not even consider what all else he might have wrong with him. I mean, dude's a little grungy. He's got that ponytail going...could have worms, maybe, you know, even?

Of course, you don't know KB as well as I do, or his eating habits, or exercise habits, or past history with food, or any of those things.

But I can assure you he already knows about CICO and that there are 3500 calories in a pound of fat.

Your comment would be totally in place if it was on r/loseit, and honestly, if you'd said it there, I'd probably have upvoted and moved on. It's just...KB's not a dumbass or a dilettante when it comes to cal counts, weight loss, exercise, etc. So I'm just gonna raise up and try to let you know as politely as possible, your comment here is coming across condescending as all hell.

And maaaybe I just saved you a verbal whipping by doing this. (But not if you get defensive about what all I've just said. Cuz I'm trying to be nice here, I really am, and it's not something I even try very often.)

There's a famous piece of journalism on the causes of the ~2008 financial crisis, specifically the housing bubble, called The Giant Pool of Money. There's one part that always stuck out to me, and seems incredibly relevant here, so I'll highlight it [emphasis mine, at the end]:

Adam Davidson

Right, the global pool of money, that's where our story begins. Most people don't think about it, but there's this huge pool of money out there, which is basically all the money the world is saving now-- insurance companies saving for a catastrophe, pension funds saving money for retirement, the Central Bank of England saving for whatever central banks save for, all the world's savings.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

A lot of money, it's about 70 trillion.

Adam Davidson

That's the head of capital market research at the International Monetary Fund, the place to go if you want to figure out how much money is in the world.

[...]

Adam Davidson

And by the way, before you finance enthusiasts start writing any letters, we do know that $70 trillion technically refers to that subset of global savings called fixed income securities. Everyone else can just ignore what I just said. Let's put $70 trillion in perspective. Do this. Think about all the money that people spend everywhere in the world, everything you bought in the last year, all of it. Then add everything Bill Gates bought, and all the rice sold in China, and that fleet of planes Boeing just sold to South Korea, all the money spent in every country on Earth in a year. That is less than $70 trillion, less than the global pool of money.

Alex Blumberg

Wow.

Adam Davidson

We're talking about a lot of money.

Alex Blumberg

That is a lot of money.

Adam Davidson

And that money comes along with armies of very nervous men and women watching over the pool of money. Investment managers, they don't want to lose a penny of that. They don't want to lose any of that money, and, even more so, they want to make it grow bigger. But to make it grow, they have to find something to invest in.

So, most of modern history, what they did was they bought really safe and, frankly, really boring investments like treasuries and municipal bonds, boring things. But then, right before our story starts, something changed, something happened to that global pool of money.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

This number doubled since 2000. In 2000 this was about $36 trillion.

Adam Davidson

So it took several hundred years for the world to get to $36 trillion. And then it took six years to get another $36 trillion.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu

Yeah, there has been a very sharp increase.

Adam Davidson

How does the world get twice as much money to invest? There are lots of things that happen. But the main headline is that all sorts of poor countries became kind of rich, making things like TVs and selling us oil. China, India, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia made a lot of money and banked it.

China, for example, has over a $1 trillion in its central bank. And there are office buildings in Beijing filled with math geniuses, real math geniuses, looking for a place to invest it. And the world was not ready for all this new money. There is twice as much money looking for investments, but there are not twice as many good investments.

Sorry this took a bit to respond to, but I've had trouble typing this out. This isn't stuff I like to think about and it seems like kleinbl00 has explained some of it. Here's what I typed out though, partially stemming from personal experience. . .

The thing is though, $8,900 is a lot of money for a large number of people. For paying back student loans, that's about $100 to $150 a month, something a lot of people can't afford. Let me break it down for you a bit, so you can see where I'm coming from because I found myself in this trap. Here we go . . .

Let's take a person, like me, college drop out working 2 jobs to make ends meet. Only, unlike when I was working 2 jobs, now thanks to Obamacare, the number of full time jobs out there is much lower. Now, people are working 2 part time jobs, max hours, with no benefits. That's two jobs, maybe above minimum wage, at roughly $8 an hour for 50 hours a week. That breaks down to . . .

$400 a week or about $300 after taxes. $1600 a month or about $1200 after taxes. That's about $20,000 a year or $16,000 after taxes. Money is fucking TIGHT. Here's the wild ride we're going down, and trust me, it's painful . . .

You take home $1,600 a month. Take away $500 dollars for rent. Congrats, You're down to $1,100. Now take away an additional $300, because you have to pay for utilities and your phone on your shitty plan. Now you're down to $800. Now take away another $300, because that's your money for your car insurance and gas. Heaven forbid you still owe money on that car because that's even more coming out of your pay. Now you're down to $500. Take away another $150 for food and another $150 for health insurance and you have yourself at the end of the month, $200. That's $200 dollars flex room, before student loans even come in.

Here's where things get shitty. Your car? It's a 15 year old GM J Body. Something breaks on it once every three months. There goes some of that money. What's that? You got a minor cold that somehow became an ear infection so bad that you have to go to the doctor because you woke up to literal puss oozing out your ear? That'll be an $80 copay for the clinic plus another $20 for antibiotics. In reality though, you spent half the day getting that taken care of so you're actually out more money, because you're not spending time working. After you get home from a long, half day at work because you work a shitty retail job, you find out that one of your roommates blew part of his money on a $25 dollar pizza delivery, instead of real food like rice and eggs. That's not the worse of it though, he bought that pizza to soften the blow of him getting fucking fired from his shitty ass job so now you have to cover his part of the rent until he can find something else. Now your rent just went from $500 a month to $750 a month and now you're hemorrhaging money every single month until he finds something new because you just can't kick him out, he's like family. Congratulations. You're now in a massive downwards spiral and you haven't even touched your student loans yet. Your debt is getting worse by the week and even when your roommate finally finds work again, climbing out of the debt will be that much harder, because you not only dug your hole deeper, but possibly wider. To make matters worse, if debt wasn't bad enough, the psychological pain of the inevitable collection calls and knocks on your door from the landlord will make things worse. Six years later, you're still afraid to pick up the phone whenever an unknown number calls you.

So many things go wrong when you're poor and everything that goes wrong ends up costing you money, making things worse and worse. There's a reason why savings are called "safety nets." Being able to afford to take care of problems when they first show up, keeps them from getting worse down the road, literally saving you money in the long run. You have to have that money to begin with though, to make things work.