Texas lottery controversy

In the US, lotteries are a big business, raising huge revenues for state governments. But recently, here has been a controversy over the Texas state lottery.

There are various versions of the lottery but the one that gives out the biggest prize is where you pick six numbers from 1 through 54, with no number being repeated. If the drawing throws up that particular combination, then you win. The odds of winning are easy to calculate. The number of permutations of six numbers with none repeated is 18,595,558,800 (=54x53x52x51x50x49). Since the order of the numbers does not matter, there are 720 combinations that are equivalent (=6x5x4x3x2x1). Hence the number of possible results is the first number divided by the second, which gives 25,827,165. Since it costs $1 to pick a set of six, in theory if you buy one ticket for every possible combination, thus spending $25,827,165, you are guaranteed to win.

The catch is that the prize is usually less than that amount. A second problem is that if more than one person picks the same combination, then the prize gets split between the winners. A third problem is the sheer logistics of buying so many tickets, because the tickets are printed out by machines at various locations like convenience stores.
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A theory of jerks and jerk behavior

Back in 2017, I had a post arguing that a good personal motto to live by is ‘Don’t Be a Jerk’. While it does not have the high-minded elegance of other axioms to live by like the Golden Rule that one should behave towards others as one would like them to behave towards you or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, those need to be unpacked more and it is not always clear how to apply them in specific situations. I did not even try to define who a jerk is. I assumed that all of us have an intuitive sense of what constitutes jerk behavior and and can recognize it when we see it, and that a jerk is someone who routinely exhibits such behavior.

But while my post was a superficial take on this topic, I was amused to find that Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy, has gone into this much more closely and published an essay A theory of jerks. He says that the older use of the term was to label a fool or a chump, like the naive Steve Martin character, seen here at the beginning of the 1979 film The Jerk.


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NIH scientists risk careers to stand up for the public good

Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have signed a declaration protesting the deep cuts in public health research and sent it to their boss Jay Bhattacharya, the head of the NIH, as well as to RFK, Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees the NIH.

Named for the agency’s headquarters location in Maryland, the Bethesda Declaration details upheaval in the world’s premier public health research institution over the course of mere months.

It addresses the termination of 2,100 research grants valued at more than $12 billion and some of the human costs that have resulted, such as cutting off medication regimens to participants in clinical trials or leaving them with unmonitored device implants.

In one case, an NIH-supported study of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Haiti had to be stopped, ceasing antibiotic treatment mid-course for patients.

In a number of cases, trials that were mostly completed were rendered useless without the money to finish and analyze the work, the letter says. “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million,” it says, “it wastes $4 million.”

Jenna Norton, who oversees health disparity research at the agency’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, recently appeared at a forum by Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., to talk about what’s happening at the NIH.

At the event, she masked to conceal her identity. Now the mask is off. She was a lead organizer of the declaration.

“I want people to know how bad things are at NIH,” Norton told The Associated Press.
…

Employees from all 27 NIH institutes and centers gave their support to the declaration. Most who signed are intimately involved with evaluating and overseeing extramural research grants.

The letter asserts “NIH trials are being halted without regard to participant safety” and the agency is shirking commitments to trial participants who “braved personal risk to give the incredible gift of biological samples, understanding that their generosity would fuel scientific discovery and improve health.”

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The double pendulum as a metaphor for the Trump administration

Trump seems to be careening ever-more erratically day by day. He started out by seeming to have some kind of plan, such as imposing tariffs, getting rid of anything that addressed the needs of marginalized groups such as DEI programs, deporting huge numbers of people for the flimsiest reasons, firing as many government employees as he could, and cutting research funding for science. While these measures were disastrous for the general well-being of the country, they were within the framework of the agenda of the extreme rightwing nutjobs who had his ear.

But then as the pushback came, as it surely would, with judges especially thwarting his efforts because of their blatant illegality, Trump seemed to go utterly berserk, responding to each and every setback with new executive orders that border on the farcical. His multiple reversals on tariffs are but one example. His war with Harvard University is not the most serious of his rampages but is emblematic. He seems to be furious with that university because they have stood up to his actions so he responds with even more absurd executive orders, such as forbidding visas for any foreign students hoping to enroll there. To issue an executive order targeting a single university is a sign of a deranged mind.
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The search for a non-opioid painkiller

When I was an undergraduate, while walking across a grassy field, I stepped into a hidden hole and fell forward. As I did so, I flung out my left arm to break the fall and that jerky motion was sufficient to dislocate my shoulder. I recall being in excruciating pain and was taken to the campus health center where the person who treated me was very familiar with sports injuries such as dislocation and he simply straightened my elbow, gave my arm a twist, and pushed it back into the socket. Like magic, the pain ceased immediately and its sudden disappearance made me feel euphoric. But now, although I recall the incident vividly, I cannot remember what the pain actually felt like. I remember that I was in great pain, but I cannot recall the feeling of pain.

This is not uncommon. Sufferers of pain find it hard to communicate to others what they are actually experiencing, however acute it might feel to them. This unfortunately means that pain sufferers might get less sympathy and consideration from those around them. This feature also makes treatment of pain difficult because we have no pain-o-meters to measure it and see how effective any treatment might be. Despite that limitation, there have been tremendous strides in the categorization and treatment of pain in the last century, depending on the type of pain being experienced, such as inflammatory and chronic pain from things like rheumatoid arthritis that is caused by nerve damage, acute pain from things like broken bones, and pain from cancers.
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Film review Oppenheimer (2023), runaway fusion, and runaway AI

In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, during the Manhattan project to develop the nuclear bomb, one of the concerns was whether the nuclear explosion created during a test might create such high temperatures that it leads to the nuclei of nitrogen atoms in the atmosphere fusing together and triggering a chain reaction that essentially sets the atmosphere on fire, frying the entire planet. Oppenheimer tells general Leslie Groves, the director of the project, that the calculations of Arthur Compton showed that the chance of such a thing happening was less that three in a million, and thus acceptable. When Groves said that he was hoping that the answer would be zero, Oppenheimer replied that you could not expect such an answer from theory alone..

While the idea that theory can never give you absolute certainty about anything is correct, the actual story is more complicated. It turns out that the Oppenheimer-Compton story is based on an article written by Pearl S. Buck, based on an interview she had with Compton, and some of the details are apocryphal. Hans Bethe, head of the theoretical program at Los Alamos, who had shown how fusion reactions lay behind the energy production of stars, had concluded early on that the chance of a runaway fusion reaction igniting the air was so small as to not be worth worrying about.
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Orthosomnia or sleep obsession

Smart phones and smart watches now enable people to monitor and quantify all manner of information about their daily habits that were not possible before. Ever since I was gifted an Apple watch by my daughter, I now know how many steps I have taken, how many calories I have burned, how much exercise I have done, as well as my heart rate, respiratory rate, and so forth. While I find all that information mildly interesting, I can see how for people who are worriers or outright hypochondriacs, this can feed their anxieties.

One such item that is measured is sleep. My phone that is synced to my watch tells me each morning the quality of my sleep during the night, such as when I fell asleep, when I woke up, how many hours I slept, how many times I woke up, how many hours were spent is REM sleep, core sleep and deep sleep, and so on. In general, I have no problem falling asleep or getting a lot of sleep each night and my watch is clearly proud of my achievements in this area because it keeps congratulating me on what a great job I am doing.
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A story that will make your blood boil

Price gouging of US consumers by drug companies so that they can make enormous profits off patients so that they can pay their executive massive salaries and inflate their stock prices is a well-known scandal. Yet another example involves a drug known as Revlimid, marketed by a company Celgene to treat the bone cancer known as multiple myeloma.

When David Armstrong was diagnosed in 2023 with this disease, he began a quest to find out why a drug capsule taken daily that costs just 25 cents to make is sold for nearly $1,000. What he found is a tale of disgusting greed and cynicism by the people who run these companies, who kept raising the price over and over again, 26 times in all over the years, just because they can, uncaring about what it did to people desperately trying to live.

That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.

They also bought off doctors.
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RFK Jr. is going to cause the death of us all

It should be no surprise that placing an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy nut in charge of the department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet office that oversees almost all the science and public health agencies in the US, was going to do serious harm. And sure enough, he is wreaking havoc.

One of the more disturbing things he has done is cancel a long-running diabetes study that was looking at the effectiveness of a medication known as metformin. The group that got this medication was compared with another group that got a placebo and a third group that made lifestyle changes to meet health goals, such as to exercise more and lose weight.

The study found that, in people with prediabetes, metformin lowered the risk of diabetes by roughly a third; the life-style intervention cut the risk by more than half. Both components were so successful that the trial was stopped early.

But the The Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study had planned to continue the study to explore other important questions, using the participants that had been enrolled in the earlier phase.

How long do the health benefits last? How do blood-sugar levels affect the body and the brain over time? For more than a quarter of a century, Nathan and his colleagues tracked thousands of patients—which was itself a feat of logistical and scientific endurance.(Many doctors struggle to get their patients to attend annual physicals, let alone engage them for a study of this duration.)

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Aircraft carriers can swerve?

It is much harder to steer a boat than it is a land vehicle. The presence of ground-based friction enables rapid changes in direction on land but that is absent in water. The bigger the boat is, the harder it is to change its direction of motion. I have sometimes compared large institutions to aircraft carriers, using that as a metaphor for how some of them change direction very slowly.

So I was surprised to read this report of an aircraft carrier engaging in zig-zag motion to escape hostile fire, with the resulting swerving being sufficient to result in a jet fighter falling into the sea.

US sailors had to leap for their lives when a fighter jet fell off a navy aircraft carrier that was reportedly making evasive maneuvers to avoid Houthi militant fire in the Red Sea on Monday.

The F/A-18 fighter Super Hornet jet, along with the vehicle towing it into place on the deck of the USS Harry S Truman, rolled right out of the hangar and into the water, the navy said.

Unnamed US officials indicated to CNN that the ship was swerving to avoid incoming fire from Yemen’s Houthi rebel force. Carriers make a zigzag maneuver when attempting to evade missile fire, causing them to list to one side.

It looks like I will need to find a new metaphor for large, slowly changing institutions.

The article seems to suggest that this type of swerving of aircraft carriers is not uncommon, which makes me wonder why there was no system in place to avoid this kind of catastrophe. It is likely because those responsible for making sure the plane was secured properly were DEI hires or transgender, because members of those two groups are the cause of all the ills that beset this country.