Top Ten Posts Of 2022

The day after Christmas is traditionally a slow one at the blog, so instead of posting something new that might get lost, lets review this past year. Well also this week look at how good we did in our 2022 predictions.

This was another year, he wrote with a sigh, in which the coronadoom played a large role. Though there were other important topics. The number one post surprised me

The Top Ten posts of 2022 (in reverse order):

10 24 January: How Much Longer Until The Woke Take Over?

The trends accelerated for those in Gen Z. They are Woke. Millennials are semi-Woke, semi-Reality. Gen Z’s were birthed by late Gen Xers, but also by a lot of semi-Woke Millennials. The oddly named Generation Alpha—which Howe and Strauss call “Homeland”, as if they are the new generation—born starting around 2005-2010, are in schools now. And those schools are staffed almost wholly by the Woke, or those who fear resisting the Woke….

All this together says that if nothing else happens—a huge enormous monstrous assumption!—then the Woke gain the prize around 2040, just after the bulk of Generation Alpha attains their majority.

Perhaps that prediction was slow, and that something closer to 2030 is better. We’ll see!

9 18 February: Great News: Army Will Now Allow Men To Wear Lipstick, Nail Polish

The day we have all been waiting for has finally arrived. The famed United States Army will allow men to wear lipstick and nail polish.

But only if they also wear a dress.

Or have a butcher saw off their pertinents. Or a quack prescribe them a set of powerful delusion-confirming pills.

Small prices to pay, you might say, in order to match shade of lip to weapon of the day. Or to find a paint that won’t chip during Grenade Throwing Hour.

Not much a price, either, since Uncle Sam will pay the bill for these services. And pay gladly.

8 12 September: How I Became A Renegade Scientist

Anyway, once it became known I was a “climate denier”, I suddenly had fewer friends. I had a job lined up at Livermore lab in California, to run the stats group. When I got out there, I was met with “Briggs? Briggs who?” Seems I angered one of the true believers.

Pat Michaels, may he rest in peace, lined up a job for me at Cato. But I was fired, once again right before starting. Turns out I angered another true believer there. One of the VPs was not happy with my stance against “gay marriage”.

I had another job lined up with a prestigious consulting firm. A VP there said “I’m not going to work with a climate denier.”

Then, after connections got me back in academia part time, I was fired from Cornell. And then—

But you have the idea.

7 12 January: What Could Feminist Physics Possibly Mean?

Saying “(Baby) Steps Toward Feminist Physics”, as did Barbara L. Whitten in her peer-reviewed paper of the same name in the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering—an honest-to-God actual academic publication, I swear—is like saying “Toward Yak Mathematics” or “Approaching Bittersweet Electrical Engineering.” Beginning with a non sequitur is a poor start, which is why Whitten has to spend the bulk of her article explaining just what “feminist physics” must mean.

6 22 December: Three New Hilarious Papers On The Coronadoom Vaccine

Try this fun experiment. Send this (and the others below) paper to your favorite college administrator and say, “See? You should drop the mandates.”

Wear something plastic or discardable if you’re doing this in person.

And, say, remember when myocarditis was a conspiracy theory?

5 16 June: How To Generate Massive Scientific Over-Certainty With These Four Simple Tricks

1. Replace Your Data With A Model.

The red line is not the data. The red line is not real. The red line did not happen. The red line is not being used to make a prediction for (as of this writing, since the graph is automatically redrawn yearly) 2021. So why is it there?

To cover up what happened in an attempt to make changes in what happened seem more certain than they really are. This was certainly not done for any nefarious reasons: they are not trying to trick you. This is just what scientists do. They are inveterate modelers. Models, to them, are realer than Reality in some essential sense.

Notice what happened in your mind when you first saw the picture: “Looks like their theory about global warming is true. That red line goes up.” Lacking any other theory of temperature change, the certainty you put into scientific pronouncements is therefore stronger than it would have been absent the red line.

4 18 January: CDC Data: Up To 90% Or More Of Americans Already Infected

What it really meant was that a good many infections were never officially reported. That was the conclusion of the CDC. They said that only “1 in 4.0 (95% UI 3.4 — 4.7) COVID–19 infections were reported”.

The interval is the result of a statistical model. Which can be critiqued in various ways, none of which, however, are of interest to us today. Except to mention the interval is almost certainly too narrow, because it is parametric and not predictive. But let that pass, too. Let’s take the CDC’s word for it. They are Experts. And we’re supposed to love our Experts unconditionally.

The point is that back in September 2021, the CDC said there were already “146.6 Million Estimated Total Infections”, of which there were “124.0 Million Estimated Symptomatic Illnesses”. That makes for a 15% asymptomatic rate, incidentally.

Which I’ll emphasize: 15% of those infected never knew it.

3 20 July: A People’s History of COVID-19

Listen to The Science!

Here is what The Science said:

Stay inside for two weeks and we’ll flatten the curve. Lock down for a month or two, and the whole thing will blow over.

Install two-foot by two-foot Science Shields between cashiers and customers. Viruses won’t be able to figure how to go around them. Go to the store to buy groceries but don’t touch non-essential items. The virus will get you if you have over 12 items.

Follow the arrows on the floor, because the virus knows which direction you go.

Install Science Stickers on floors spaced precisely six feet apart—1.5 meters outside the USA. The virus tires after this distance. Install glory holes and avoid face-to-face sex, for that is how viruses breed.

2 22 November: Vax Has Slight But Waning Edge In Old But Harms The Young

The data is richer than Berenson shows, and is presented by ONS in four age buckets (“10-59” “60-69” “70-79” “80+”) and four vax status buckets (“Unvaccinated”, “Within 21 days of first dose”, “21 days or more after first dose”, “Second dose”). It’s most unfortunate they don’t break the young out separately.

The data runs from January through the end of September 2021 (October and November are missing). The data are weekly number of all cause deaths and the population size of the age and vax group for that week.

Let’s look at Berenson’s plot reimagined, but we’ll use all the data and present each age and vax bucket. Since having all in one plot would be too busy, I produce separate ones for each age bucket. The y-axis is in “scientific notation”, wherein e.g. “2e+07” = 20,000,000 (7 zeros), and “6e-05” = 0.00006 (5 decimal points), etc. Note carefully the range changes for each plot.

1 6 July: Protesting The Non-Crisis Nitrogen “Crisis” In The Netherlands

This was all in protest of the government’s declaration that nitrogen is a “crisis“, and so threatening to confiscate farms to “solve” the “crisis.” Prediction: Later, it will be said to be a coincidence when the government eventually disposes of the confiscated farms by selling them to rich people.

What makes it all funny is that—sit down for this—there is no nitrogen “crisis” in the Netherlands.

“Briggs, how do you know there is no nitrogen crisis in the Netherlands, when Experts there have declared that one exists?”

Thank you for that question. Here’s how.

1. Nitrogen Critical Loads: Critical Reflections on Past Experiments, Ecological Endpoints, and Uncertainties, a peer-reviewed review paper by (chemist) Jaap Hanekamp and Yours Truly.

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