Trump medicine may be working if given in early stages

Long read Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale by Norman Doidge
“ The Henry Ford study also studied HCQ in combination with azithromycin to improve outcomes, and it did. It specified all doses, seemed to get them right, and gave them at the proper time, early, right after admission, which as we’ve seen, is crucial to precede the cytokine storm. The study followed the patient’s electrocardiograms (ECGs), and heart status throughout, checking for any of the alleged cardiac problems, to make sure the HCQ didn’t cause harm. It found that with early prescription of HCQ (82% within 24 hours of hospitalization, 91% within 48 hours), the patients had far fewer cardiac problems than are usually seen in later stages of COVID. Since this study, multiple studies have come out showing that HCQ, when properly monitored, is notassociated with increased cardiac fatalities. The authors made the very sensible point, that it is probably the case that we will have to work with several drugs to treat this disease, and the combinations will likely be different for different patients. Imagine.”
That is just one except. There is a lot more in the article. A shorter version is needed.
A shorter article on a much touted drug https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences/remdesivir-clinical-trial-jama-gilead-bad-science/

Some vegetables from scraps

Seven vegetables you can grow from scraps and cuttings

Jonathan Adrian on sleeping positions

Why You’ve Been Sleeping All Wrong
“ By removing the pillow, we naturally transition into a lateral position, as it renders other possible positions quite disagreeable. If you don’t believe me, try it at home tonight. Hide your pillows in the cupboard, and then try to sleep without them. You’ll probably end up turning your arm into a makeshift pillow, but that’s kind of what you want, because you end up on your side, sleeping your way into a more salubrious future.”

A debut novel by Megha Majumdar

A Début Novel’s Immersive Urgency from The NewYorker

Is it time for MMT?

Like It or Not, a Modern Monetary Theory Experiment Is Underway “ Robert Hormats, who has worked in senior economic and trade policy roles under five different U.S. presidents and spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., believes the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the government to embark on what could be considered an involuntary experiment with Modern Monetary Theory..... What could disrupt the markets and what could cause either the Treasury to run into trouble with its issues, or the Fed to feel uncomfortable underwriting those issues for the indefinite future? We don't know that. This is all terra incognita.”

About collapse of civilizations

“The only material technologies that routinely survive collapse are small-scale agriculture and small-scale metallurgy, likely because the social technologies needed to sustain such smaller communities can arise organically.” From an article by Samo Burja Why civilizations collapse.

More on Ilaiyaraja

There’s India in Ilaiyaraja's music “ The phenomenon Ilaiyaraja has to be located in his journey from communism to spirituality -- both of which aspire for the greater common good. Ilaiyaraja’s music presents an integrated idea of India. May he be blessed with creative eternity.”
In Telugu KiranPrabha on the Beginnings, says his name used to be Daniel Rajaiah.
His friendship with SPB, both started around the same time “ Ilayaraja mentioned his early days with SPB when they did a number of live concerts before he got opportunities to compose music for films. Both have risen from the ranks. SPB left Andhra Pradesh for Chennai despite acquiring an Engineering degree. He was the lead singer at Ilayaraja’s live music events, with Ilayaraja and his brothers providing orchestral support.”
An earlier post here. 

Dharavi model

Jayaprakash Muliyil, India’s leading epidemiologist, who is part of one of the Indian government’s sub-committees on COVID, said, “Two factors must have worked. One, whatever screening they did, it helped extract the virus out of the system. Two, herd immunity must have done the trick.” From Did Dharavi model work? Is it herd immunity or plain luck?
The Earlier article of the series “ Testing was to be on a gargantuan scale — virtually impossible. Instead, team started to screen people on a massive scale by visiting houses and setting up fever camps in localities. Temperatures were taken by infrared thermometers and blood oxygen levels were read by pulse oximeters.

Screening holds no parallel to testing. But by screening about 0.4 million people helped in taking out suspect cases — some 15,000 — from the system. Among those suspected to be carrying the SARS-CoV-2 virus, those with symptoms were quarantined and subsequently tested. The ones who tested positive, were sent to hospital isolation wards; those negative remained at the quarantine centres for 14 days.

While ‘test-test-test’ was the mantra of the experts, on ground in Dharavi it was ‘screen-test-screen-test’. This, local doctors and other epidemiologists said, is at the heart of the Dharavi model. It showed how smart testing could be a way out of shortages of resources and kits.”

50 books about india

The lounge guide to India in 50 books . I have read some of them.

Pandemic future

The World’s Best Hope for Enough Covid-19 Vaccine Comes from India

The rise of nationalism and oppression of minorities

Article by Patrick Cockburn

Against forgetting by Mukul Kesavan

Indian poor need smart phones

Netizens, NGOs donate smartphones to help marginalised students with online classes

Kamala Harris background

The progressive Indian grandfather who inspired Kamala Harris
The other side:
Who Is Kamala Harris's Dad Donald Harris, a Renowned Stanford Professor?

Early days of women in Bombay films

“Interestingly, it is Saraswati Devi herself who is credited with introducing the playback system in Indian cinema. According to legend, Chandraprabha nee Manek had to shoot a song sequence but had a sore throat. Himansu Rai suggested that Khorshed sing into the microphone instead while Manek moved her lips in a synchronized manner. And thus was the playback mode devised. The stories of women’s work in film, told through certain moments of irruption, also yield details of practice and innovation that tend to get obscured in the rush to glorify watershed transformative moments.” From

Notes on a Scandal: Writing Women’s Film History Against an Absent Archive
Debashree Mukherjee

A Canadian says the obvious

The unravelling of America by Wade Davis. India is not far behind.

The Mastani Mystery

The Mastani Mystery by Mitali Parekh. See also the Wikipedia page Mastani.

Virtue signaling

I met him about 7-8 years ago when I was visiting a village to help with Dalits with micro loans and such. He just finished his IT degree and gave me a ride of about 100 kilometres around the villages and to Pedavadlapudi. We got talking. He just finished his IT degree but was working as a labourer in his village since he could not get a job. At that time there were some short courses in Hyderabad which specialised in training graduates to jobs. I had 20,000 rupees left. I gave to him and asked him to go for some training in Hyderabad and try his luck. He did but fell sick since he was trying to save on food. During our journey he took me to  the college where he studied and reminisced about his happy days in college. Some time later, he told me of a girl he met in college. She came to him at the end of his college days and told him that she liked his ways and would like to marry him. He said that he had to look after his family first. Moreover he is a Dalit Christian and she is a Hindu possibly from one of the upper castes. He struggled. His father came down with paralysis, his mother with a serious snake bite. He got a small IT job in Bangalore in which he had to travel. He fell in a ditch during one of those trips and broke his leg. He stayed in a room with three others where the room rent and food was 5,000 rupees a month and helped with his brother’s education and parents health problems. Meanwhile the long distance love affair continued, she has been working in Madras. She refused to marry anybody else. Her parents did not agree. He built house for his father and the parents are well settled now. I kept meeting him off and on and tried through internet friends to help him. I think Avineni Bhaskar agreed but could not establish contact. Once he had to spend six months in Delhi and was like a fish out of water. I wrote to math ph.d student there, a UP Brahmin and he met him and tried to make him feel at home. Recently the girl picked up enough courage to go home and tell her parents. Her father threw her out but her mother was sympathetic. I kept telling him that it is hard to find good girls and he may regret for the rest of his life if he let her go. They married yesterday. He phoned me at midnight to tell me and I cannot sleep now.

Tributes to C.S.Seshadri

Many in one place Check David Mumford’swhose early work parallel that of Seshadri.

Physics and biology

Read of the day for me:Does new physics lurk inside living matter?
“ The informational basis of life has led some scientists to pronounce the informal dictum, Life = Matter + Information. For that linking equation to acquire real explanatory and predictive power, however, a formal theoretical framework is necessary that couples information to matter. The first hint of such a link came in 1867. In a letter to a friend, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined a tiny being that could perceive individual molecules in a box of gas as they rushed around.....
To resolve the paradox, information must be quantified and formally incorporated into the laws of thermodynamics.“

The spread of the virus in Melbourne

A city divided: COVID-19 finds a weakness in Melbourne's social fault lines
“ Now, new analysis by The Sunday Age and The Sun-Herald that matches geography with demography and the disease burden shows clearly that COVID-19 is not affecting us all the same.
Melbourne is a city divided. Of its five most disadvantaged municipalities, four of them have the most active COVID-19 cases.“

Namit Arora reviews a book on caste

Social Structure by Namit Arora
Raj Reddy briefly discusses meritocracy (from around 9:00-11:30) Here.

Ed Yong on immunology

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
That was in relation to coronavirus. See also A vaccine reality check by Sarah Zhang linked by Ed Yong in the above article.

Ed Yong on how the pandemic defeated America

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/coronavirus-american-failure/614191/

A blog post from 2016 by Art Caplan

The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump

https://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2016/03/15/the-end-of-civilization-and-the-real-donald-trump/

Ramanan on Seshadri

CS Seshadri (1932-2020): World-class algebraic geometer, institution-builder and music lover
The author S. Ramanan was big influence on me when I joined TIFR in 1964. He (and M.S. Raghunathan) taught me several topics informally, sometimes during nights, and started an year long seminar for my benefit. He knew lot of mathematics in which he did not work and was a treasure to people around. I remember his insistence on canonical or natural thinking about mathematics. He is also one of those people who does not seem to have aged at all.
P.S. Raghunathan-Ramanan style: Once in a while, they would barge in to my office and ask something like ‘Do you know Peter-Weyl Theorem’. If I said no, they would say that everybody should know, start from scratch, develop the theory and prove the theorem.
Once I and Raghunathan were struggling to construct an inverse object in some K-group of projective modules with nilPotent endomorohisms. Ramanan came along ( this was around 1966-67) and suggested to look at the natural such object and map it on to our object in the obvious way.  The kernel was the inverse. The construction also led to a proof that any object representing the trivial element can be made trivial by elementary operations which can be easily imitated topologically.

Letters and numbers

The mysterious case of man who can read letters—but not numbers—exposes roots of consciousness
Ellen Contini-Morava comments:
This is fascinating, but too bad the story doesn't talk about the orthographic difference between a letter and a number.  A number is a "semasiographic" symbol, representing an idea rather than a word (so someone can "read" the symbol 8 in lots of different, unrelated languages).  A letter is a "phonographic" symbol, representing a sound.  So it's not that surprising that they might be processed differently in the brain.

The great migrant exodus in india

I die every day on such a long journey home by Sonjoy Hazarika. It may be soon forgotten except for a few articles like this.

Pandemics and politics in Victoria, Australia

One case where it seems possible to trace how it happened in Victoria but not the rest of Australia
Not happy, Dan: Victoria's Premier cops a pandemic pounding
Another As the enemy advances, who's in charge of Victoria's defences?

Covidization of research

Covidization of research: what are the risks? By Madhukar Pai