2020-08-31
2020-08-30
COVID-19 Projections out to Election Day
I've just started projecting the US cases out to Election day, i.e., two months from now. We can see here how bad things were at the end of July. At that point we were looking at 15 million cases by November, and now it's dropped to 10 million. Maybe it will decrease more as we go forward, but probably not as the growth numbers are as good as they've been so far.
Meanwhile, again bad, November deaths were pointed to 300 thousand as of end July, and now they're just over 260 thousand.
So these are the number of dead Americans we can expect to see by Election Day, November 3, if things stay roughly as they are now. However, we still need to wait a couple of weeks or so to see the effects, if any, of all these students going back to school right around this time.
I will keep monitoring, and by the way I'm computing a five-day rolling average for everything to keep things bouncing around too much, which also tends to smooth out and blunt certain sudden changes.
2020-08-29
2020-08-28
2020-08-27
COVID-19 Growth Rates Past Two Months
Rates are trending downward from crazy bad to just really bad. Around the start of July, cases in Idaho and Texas were pushing past 4% toward 5% (doubling time of about two weeks). As you can see, the death rate growth in both States did the same thing 2-3 weeks later. That suggests that people who were getting sick 2-3 weeks before were dying proportionally later (in smaller numbers). It's interesting that these two spikes trailed one another in two States by the same three weeks, but I'm not sure how to interpret it.
Anyway, the deaths in Idaho and Texas have dropped from doubling every two weeks to more like every month. So for a couple of weeks there we were expecting twice as many Idahoans and Texans to die every two weeks, continuously, and now it's more like every month twice as many. This is shown more clearly on another graph.
You can see how we're back to where we were, more or less, at the middle of May, and a bunch of crazy crap happened in-between.
Meanwhile, I may post some projected growth rate graphs for the USA, Idaho, and Texas, for death tolls, and number of people getting sick. It's still steadily climbing, but it seems to be dropping in and out of exponential growth.
2020-08-26
2020-08-25
Mermaid MMMCCLXXXV
I need to do some of these Koi mermaids. Maybe I need to remake Umiko in that fashion, or make a friend for her. Umiko is a pelagic mermaid, not a Koi pond one....still...carp?
2020-08-24
模倣子 The Female Legitimization Effect
There is a thing which I call "The Female Legitimization Effect," for example, if women are also riding skateboards or playing D&D, not just watching, that makes it "a thing," and not just a bunch of idiot wanker guys throwing rocks at each others' heads and calling it a cool activity. Who is the Ladies' Man's audience? Certainly other men, if not others. Having women around telegraphs that whatever you're doing, it's a valid, good thing to be doing, and it telegraphs power. Tricking women in order to have this appearance seems rather pathetic, not just dishonest, since it seems like an addiction like many others, for example, addiction to gambling.
On the FLE, Gloria Steinem came to the U of Idaho for a talk, and we had a sort of chat during the Q&A for about ten minutes, and I mentioned that the Vichy French in Morocco mounted stiff resistance to Patton's landing for the better part of a couple of days before surrendering. Patton was mystified since there was no misunderstanding that he was at the head of a liberating force. He was told by his guide/interpreter that they had to make a show since their women had not made love to them for the previous two years for surrendering to and collaborating with the Nazis. Hence, in a Patton bio, as well as his journals, and no doubt in military communiqués we see men's need to get approval, permission from women for their actions. As appears in this video about minute seven, men cannot be free until women are free, and this might be kind of how it works.
If women cosign certain male attitudes and actions because they don't feel they have a choice, the power, the resources to do otherwise, then it's a problem. If men have the latitude to get this approval from women either by coërcion or trickery, then that's a problem.
Macromemetics Index
模倣子 Racism and Macromemetic Herd Immunity
Memetic Index
It occurs to me that racism in America is, obviously, a macromemetic phenomenon, and that there might be an analogue to "herd immunity" as in covid-19 or any other infection disease.
By the way, a buddy recently told me that blood donation centers will now test your blood for covid-19 antibodies and tell you the result. I think I may go for it.
Like with disease, the actual disease moving through a population is part of it, but also the "average vulnerability" of a population. Americans are all racist in that we all have been inculcated with racist memes to the extent that even if we struggle to not deploy those memes all the time or without thinking, we still have no other set of memes that aren't racist. Obviously, otherwise racism would just disappear by itself.
I need to come up with a rigorous formulation of that statement, i.e., what does it mean to be a "non-practicing racist" as opposed to a "real racist"?
One odd phenomenon (if you don't know about macromemetics) is that scene in I think season 6 of The Sopranos where a Somanian guy on a bike crashes into the open door of one of AJ's hoodlum buddies on campus, they call him a racial slur, he protests that it doesn't apply to him, and they beat the crap out of him. I think that was not realistic, since the guy is Somali, he doesn't have the same American racist meme load, and so cannot resonate with those racist memes. I've seen this a lot -- the victim has to be able to resonate in order for it to be (memetic) oppression, otherwise it's simply memetic desolation.
Something of a digression, perhaps.
When does a meme cease to reliably produce a resonant response? In other words, the deployer (of a racist meme) opens a memetic loop which he/she hopes or anticipates will be closed by the deployment of some response meme from another individual assumed to be inurred of the same memetic inventory and so is capable of enacting such a response. Nota bene: the response may simply be to do nothing, e.g., tacit approval, which is common in the case of racist memes -- you don't have to agree; it is enough simply not to actively disapprove.
If an American racist knows a possible victim is from Africa and not the USA, they in principle know that this person may not understand the memetic inventory, and so will not respond as expected, say, with fear, shame, or, importantly, to receive sympathy or even defense from the surrounding people, since they either remain silent (whether they support the attacker or not), or they join in, or they stand ready to do so.
Back to the idea of herd immunity.
Okay, if we think of everybody in America as basically being "infected" (or inurred) with a large and complex system of memes to do with maintaining racism, it may be less interesting to think of them as "sick with a disease" and more along the lines of "vulnerable to infection."
The "spread of infection" concept, i.e., a memetic infection spreading out across a population to be newly infected (or injected), is a useful one in areas like sales and marketing, and possibly political consulting, political science, or economics. We want to sell a new kind of mousetrap that nobody's ever heard of, we want to inject this novel memetic system into a virgin population, how do we do it?
When you think about it, this process was done centuries ago in terms of racism, and refined over those centuries, in terms of the deliberate engineering and also the immunomemetically driven evolution of the system. Immunomemes work to prevent change to a memetic system, so that as many of the existing memes possible may continue to function.
So it's not so interesting to think of racism itself as a disease which is spreading, or which hundreds of millions of people need to be "cured from." I think herd immunity might be a more interesting way to look at it, and individual memetic deployments. This may also be an exercise in quantitative memetic analysis, which is exciting. I need to look at the maths behind herd immunity, and how that could be applied to memetic deployments (as opposed to injection).
If an "active racist" (I need to formulate some terms here) deploys a meme, and encounters an immunomemetic response instead of a resonant response, he's going to begin to face memetic starvation. If there are no agents to resonate with his racist memes, then his racist memes cannot be relied on for resonance, and he has to begin to consider not deploying them, or he needs to find a population which is willing to resonate with his racist memes. Unfortunately, (anti)social media provides a haven. If an active racist finds his IRL fellow racist agents drying up, he can turn to the 'net.
The quantity and geologic dispersity of racist agents on social media could be an index of the degree to which active racism is being strangled across the overall population, which may be a very interesting quantitative memetic index.
One point I wanted to raise, notwithstanding, is at what point does an "active racist" become unable or unwilling to deploy racist memes because he's likely to get no resonance or even immunomemetic response?,
It's probably a question of formulating the question. I wonder about Political Correctness. It's caused a lot of harm, for obvious reasons, but has it made it harder to eradicate racism? The rhetoric and hate speech around things like BLM (which racists refer to as "Bacon, Lettuce, and Mayonnaise"), kneeling at sporting events. It's turned from employing racial epithets and slurs to more passive-aggressive tactics like attacking the right to free speech and protest on flimsy and very unfairly applied pretenses (unarmed people of color go to jail or are murdered, while heavily armed white people who forcibly take over government wildlife preserves for no clear reason get off scot-free, and so on).
When the parasitic worm pokes his head out of the vein in your calf, you grab him and gradually pull him out by wrapping him with a stick, you don't just yank his head off and let the rest of him slip back inside you and carry on about his business. I wonder if that's what the PC movement has done, or if racist memes would've retreated as they appear to have done no matter what the course of treatment we undertook. It was reckless, self-important, and stupid, but we may have ended up where we are now any road.
Do we need to ban hate speech on social media? It's considered free speech now, and is going like wildfire on Facebook and elsewhere. The whole thrust is criticizing (read: "attacking") the BLM movement and other protests.
Anyway, is it possible to numerically model a memetic cohort, a memetic fabric where a memetic system like racism can be seen to be starved out like a disease like covid-19 when enough people become immune, even while a lot of people remain vulnerable to infection, or in this memetic perspective I'm proposing, remain susceptible to resonance, to deploying resonant memes?
2020-08-23
2020-08-22
模倣子 Out Running Women
It seems that these responses, i.e., is it safe for women to be out walking or running alone, are similar to black people's descriptions of feeling unsafe. Our racist, sexist society has been built from the ground up to send a strong message, from everywhere, that you (women, black people) ought not to be there, not doing that, and that a violent response is permissible. That needs to be REPLACED, not so much stopped. Yes, all men need to be "nice" but if all they can do is stand by when a Bad Actor is acting up, then we haven't stopped anything. We need to develop a script for not doing this, and for interrupting those who haven't gotten the memo.
This is a time for memetic analysis, like how does society work to automatically attack women and black people? As sexist and racist society is structured to produce acts of targeted violence towards certain people, by their race and gender, once those things and the circumstances are established. Then anybody, then men in the area, are "green-lighted" to deploy violent action memes.
Memetic systems are conservative in nature, and we have old ideas of women aren't supposed to be outside the home, and they aren't supposed to go out unescorted. The violence directed at women who step outside these confines is all part of the system, and in many countries (including the USA) it takes the form of yelling at women, calling them whores, and even rape (1).
Is there more to this? Why does such a system evolve? Women are oppressed, often in exactly the same ways, all over the world, but by no means everywhere, especially if you look at behaviors throughout history.
Interesting contrast with Soviet Russia and the famous WWII sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who came and toured the USA, during and after WWII and the Battle of Stalingrad, and instead of being praised and recognized for her skill and bravery and astounding contribution to the war effort, American women criticized her for not wearing makeup.
The point being that women in the Soviet Union were fighting alongside men (though in lesser numbers) to save their country. American, Canadian, and British women, for their own part, were building munitions and weapons, vitally supporting the war effort, while Nazi German women stayed home, since Nazi ideology framed German women as being wives and mothers and nothing else.
Of course, Anglo women are kept in the same frame by their societies, too, but there was obviously some flexibility which Americans and the allies were able to capitalize on. Germans were stuck until "total war" (totaler Krieg) was adopted, whereupon women entered the workforce to produce munitions, but very late in the game.
Once Americans came back from the war, American women were bamboozled into believing that they were incapably of doing anything than being barefoot and pregnant in the newly built kitchens of the New Suburbia. Of course, many women were keen to carry on working in factories and elsewhere.
It seems that something similar, i.e., a reworking of the role of women in society, to what was done in WWII is called for now. Also examining the role of women earlier in our country's history might shed light. Was calling women whores or harassing them when they were out and about when they were working in factories during WWII? Did this ever happen? Was this nipped in the bud, and if so, how?
____________________________
(1) How rape figures in to the support of the system, I guess it's not so unclear. Is it a "reward" to the men (and others) participating for supporting the oppressive memes? The question is whether memetic systems support themselves that way, i.e., if you take part in the system, you get some kind of reward, e.g., food, sexual access to some unwilling victim, as opposed to just getting the rewards of support by the cohort, i.e., supporting memetic deployments or lack of immunomemetic deployments which one would otherwise expect when committing an antisocial act, e.g., assaulting somebody.
2020-08-21
2020-08-20
2020-08-19
漫画 Doodles and Drawings
Manga Index
Simple, cute rabbit design (also made other animals and characters, maybe expand this later...?)
Possible new Porcadis character -- female snerd.
2020-08-18
2020-08-17
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