Twelfth COVID-19 Vaccination & A Miscellany of Madness

Some miscellaneous things, and I also just got my 12th COVID-19 vaccination since March 2021.

Yes, I haven’t blogged in a bit. Mea maxima culpa! Here are a few items all glommed together into one post.

The Twelfth Vaccination

Yesterday I got my 12th COVID-19 vaccination (though not by the Twelfth Doctor).

Now I can hear some of you whining already: “Twelve?! Isn’t that a lot?” No, it is not a lot. It is, in fact, exactly the right number:

• In spring 2021: the initial shot & booster followed by a booster in the fall. So that’s 3 vaxes for 2021.
• In years 2022-2025: 2 boosters, separated by 6 months, as recommended for those over age 65. So that’s 2/year times 4 years = 8 vaxes.
• And now the first booster of 2026.

And all that adds up to 12, exactly the right number to comply faithfully with medical guidance for seniors. You should consider following that advice too. (Or the once a year version if you’re under 65, in which case the correct number now is 7 or 8, depending on what you did in 2021.)

It’s just like the flu vaccine: the virus changes annually, and broad immunity fades over time, so you get an annual flu shot. (You do get an annual flu shot, don’t you?)

In our exercise class – consisting mostly of middle aged Japanese women and me, the gaijin/yabanjin outlier – people were asking, “Do we really still have to do that?!” Yes, we really still have to do that. Every infection causes cumulative damage for the rest of your life.

The vaccination sequelae were pretty tame this time. Last fall, I had one moderately annoying night after mNEXSPIKE. But this time, not so much. Nothing much in the way of measurable fever, just tired and achy for a day or so (more than usual, anyway). Well worth it. Kind of disappointing, really: I was hoping for a strong innate immune reaction. Maybe my body’s seen this vaccine before and knows not to over-react, or maybe I’m just old now.

Either way, I’ve done my part to keep myself safe and to keep those around me safe.

The next project is persuading the Weekend Editrix to take her turn.

Now, on to other madness!

BlueSky Clustering

Somebody has decided to apply statistical cluster analysis to 3,137,131 social media accounts on BlueSky. The details on exactly what they did is pretty scant, but my guess is:

• Map each account to a frequency vector in the space of the union of words found in all of them.

  Typically, one would use a stopword list to avoid counting words that are more about syntax and less about meaning, like “the” in English.

• Then use dimensional reduction to 2 or so dimensions. (It looks like they then just made a plot, and looked for lumps.)

  The classic way would be multidimensional scaling, which I’ve used in the past to some good effect. Nowadays I’d prefer some kind of principal components method like SVD.

  It looks, just from the plot, that they used tSNE, which all the cool kids are doing nowadays. Yes, it’s popular, but I hate it. I once had a postdoc who wanted to understand how this works, so I had her generate some random data and then use tSNE. Of course, it found clusters: every single one was a false positive! (Verified by kernel density estimation in the original higher-dimension space.) While I don’t mind tSNE as a visualization of clusters obtained in a more respectable way, but it’s terrible practice just to look at the plot and say, “Ooh, what’s this lump here?”

• Then you’d like to cluster those vectors somehow, grouping those that are near in some metric you find interesting. I favor $k$-means with a variety of distance metrics, but there are many alternatives.

  It looks like they didn’t do that. Instead, they just did visual bump-hunting on the plot, sampled a few points in each bump, and took a guess at what to call it.

Ok, I’d have done it differently. But… they actually did it, whereas I did not! So let’s give them credit for action, and see what kind of results they dug up.

Here’s what 3,137,131 BlueSky accounts look like as of today, reduced to 2 dimensions. You can definitely see lumps in it (though if this is tSNE I’m suspicious). Looks sorta like colliding galaxies, doesn’t it?

If you click through to embiggen the image, you’ll see the BlueSky account for this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads (CLBTNR) is labeled in purple in the mid-lower left. It’s part of a large “cluster” labeled the Resistance Plateau. (They use geographic and map features as names.) And that’s fair enough: for all the venom I have against Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, “resistance” is not a bad description.

If you go to their site and zoom in, you’ll find this CLBTNR’s BlueSky account is next to other groups, much more sketchy in their cluster boundaries, labeled:

• Democracy Journalism Network,
• Public Interest Media Corridor,
• Legal Scholar Faculty,
• Boston Media Hub,
• Tech Policy Forum,
• Accountability Journalism Ridge,
• Progressive Journalism Corridor, and
• American Political Journalism Corridor.

While I’m being a cranky old statistician about the lack of equations describing their methods and the more or less heuristic way clusters appear to be labeled… that’s not a terribly bad description of the company I keep.

Of course, it misses out on a lot of the math and statistics stuff I do here. So maybe I need to do more of that, and write about it on BlueSky. (See, I drew a useful conclusion from their data already!).

Donald Trump Meets 16th Century Polyphony

From Siderea at Sibylla Bostoniensis comes some interesting musical and political news.

Jonasquin at YouTube has written and performed a motet, shown here, in the style of Josquin Desprez (~1450 – 1521) based on Ps 10:2,3,7-11 with a minor flourish at the end applying it all to Donald Trump. (You might have to click through to YouTube to see it. They’ve been getting regrettably anal about sign-in for embedded videos on CLBTNR’s like this.) If you listen carefully, when the singing heads show up at the top of the video, you might find a message which is as applicable as it is extra-canonical.

Siderea’s summary: “Dum superbit imperius”. This is a phrase from the Vulgate Ps 9:32 (note Vulgate verse numbering is not exactly the same as modern versions, so you may have to hunt): “Dum superbit impius, incenditur pauper”. The approximate Weekend Translation is “While the wicked are proud, the poor are set afire.” Which is… regrettably apt for the world situation, but particularly apt for the US.

Line labels in the English (except the last line) translation below are timecodes into the video:

0:00 In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak  
0:43   who are caught in the schemes he thinks up.  
1:12 For the sinner boasts of the desires of his soul  
1:33   and the wicked blesses himself.  
1:47 His mouth is full of foul language and bitterness and deceit,  
2:10   under his tongue are mischief and pain.  
2:49 He sits waiting to ambush with his wealth in secret  
3:03   to murder the innocent.  
3:32 His eyes watch in secret for the poor,  
3:41   he lurks in cover, like a lion in his thicket.  
4:02 He lurks to catch the poor,  
4:10   to catch the poor and drag him in his net.  
4:32 Trapped, the victim is crushed and collapses  
4:49   as soon as he has him in his might.  
5:07 For he says to himself:  
5:13 "God has forgotten,  
5:20   he turns away his face so that he never will see."  
5:32 Donald Trump est in Epstein documentis.  

Codex Epsteiniana divulganda est, indeed!

A Clever Way to Get Past Mines in the Strait of Hormuz

Speaking of the evils of Republicans, Trump has (of course) started a war in the Middle East. (NB: If you were born after about 1980, then every Republican president in your lifetime has crashed the economy into recession and started a war. Learn from the pattern!)

This time, Iran has ‘closed’ the Strait of Hormuz, choking off a large portion of the world’s oil supply. Interestingly, this also chokes off about 1/3 of the world’s helium supply. Helium is essential for supercooling equipment used in chip making, the pressurized gas inside hard disks, and super-cooling medical instruments like MRI machines. So if later this year you can’t get an MRI required, say, to set a broken bone… just remember: Trump Did That.

So everybody’s interested in the problem of how to get shipping, especially tankers, past probable mines. Here’s a picture from a somewhat unrelated, but equally stupid, New York Times article showing an optical illusion of a tanker flying over the top of the sea. (Basically there’s a trick with sea & sky color matching, and light being bent in humid air.)

It would be nice if one could fly a tanker over the mines. Although, if one could fly a tanker, why not fly it overland and avoid the Strait altogether? And what’s the theory for avoiding drones, missiles, ‘mosquito fleets’, and so on?

Oh, right: as an illusion, this is somewhat reality-impaired… not actually existing, as such.

The world is so awful, and so driven by deeply evil people, that even an illusion is comforting.

On Reading Old Books

Meanwhile… on BlueSky, a report on the barbarians and their attitudes on books:

Really?! Nothing more than 50 years old can penetrate her skull?

Sometimes the stupidity is so venomous and the ignorance is flaunted with such concentrated pride that… well, one barely knows where to start.

I mean, you can take it as read that since I’m a member of a religious community, we are always reading texts that are centuries to multiple millennia old, and interpreting them in ways to maximize compassion and caring. Just a couple weeks ago, I was in a conversation where the phrase “I hope all is well enough” sparked memories of:

• Carl Rogers, the humanistic psychologist. He embraced the fact that he was not perfect, and not a total solution for his patients. But enough for now. From On Becoming a Person (1961), or maybe from Client-Centered Therapy (1951) (I forget which was the source in my quotes file, but both are more than 50 years old):

  Before every session, I take a moment to remember my humanity. There is no experience that this man has that I cannot share with him, no fear that I cannot understand, no suffering that I cannot care about, because I too am human.

  No matter how deep his wound, he does not need to be ashamed in front of me. I too am vulnerable. And because of this, I am enough. Whatever his story, he no longer needs to be alone with it. This is what will allow his healing to begin.

• Julian of Norwich, a famous 14th century English mystic (using “famous” in the broadest possible sense): “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.

  To give you a sense of how radically optimistic that was, she was both an anchorite (locked up in a cell by her own choice), and writing during the Black Death. Her theological position was not to deny the reality of pain, but to deny that it could be the last word. For her, divine mercy & divine love were the last word on human existence.

Or never mind the relevance to the BS firehoses of modern AI in the old oracle myths. The oracles are always ambiguous, you’ll always misinterpret, it will always go badly, and it will always be your fault. “Just check the AI answers” is not instruction; it’s a threat of legal liability. The Ibis/Redibis story of the oracle at Dodona is frightening enough that it’s occasionally used in law schools to illustrate the crucial nature of clear writing (and punctuation, in this case).

Or never mind Dante’s Purgatorio, one of the best books on repentance and taking a bend toward the light that I’ve ever read. (Though, admittedly, you have to get past the pain metaphors of a 14th century European Catholic!)

I suddenly have a theory: maybe the OP thinks Shakespeare’s Tempest was cribbed from Forbidden Planet, and has no idea how funny that is? (Obviously, it was some of Leslie Nielsen’s earliest comedic work…)

Some wag (tell me if it was you, so I can cite you!) showed me this 4-way Venn diagram of dystopian novels, describing the current day as the intersection of all the bad ideas we’ve resurrected from our past. Maybe if we’d read some of these books, we could take the counterexamples to heart?

Also, as a card-carrying data analysis nerd, I have to point out the Venn diagram is done wrong. It shows only 13 non-empty intersections, whereas for 4 sets there are $2^4 - 1 = 15$ non-empty intersections. An example is shown here, for inspiration.

Anybody want to add a couple more dystopian novels? Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, maybe? I’m pretty sure Trump would like the obvious starring role in the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, no?

A friend once bemoaned the fact that his students at university cared nothing for history or literature, had no idea when they were in time, or whether their era was the best (it was not). He said we’re not turning out educated adults, we’re turning out “skilled barbarians”.

Oh, and I Also Just Voted

As long as we’re speaking of barbarians, it’s important to keep our voting registration in order so we can turn out the current crop of Fans of Tamburlaine The Great.

So I just did my part, voting in a purely local election (though those are important in their own way, too). I voted by mail, and a couple days later checked with the office of the secretary of state. As you can see here, my ballot was received, validated, and accepted for counting.

It’s important to vote every time you can, keeping your registration current to avoid the inevitable shenanigans of voter suppression this fall!

The Weekend Conclusion

We live in dark times. Humor is essential, especially derisive humor directed at the fascist lesions on the body politic.

Alas, the American media is largely useless, mired in both-sides-ing, or outright capitulation to the régime. European media is, sometimes, a bit better. Here is the French cartoonist Guffo, in Le Monde, reminding us a few evil people are the source of a lot of our woes. Yes, we have systemic problems that will have to be fixed once we rid ourselves of the current problem, but those causing the current problems are painful.

Seeing the signature Trump tie hanging out of the Epstein files reminds us: Codex Epsteiniana divulganda est!

As always: Ceterum censeo, Trump incarceranda est.

Notes & References

Nope.