Book Reviews: How to lie with statistics & The Lives of a Cell

How to lie with statistics by Darrell Huff is an old classic that has been sitting on my reading list for quite a while. Finally bought a copy. Despite my extremely slow reading speed, I could finish this little book within a day as it was a delight to read. Extremely accessible prose combined with several cartoon like illustrations by Irving Geis makes it suitable even for high school kids. This was originally published in 1954 and so the illustrations date themselves with everyone, including a baby, shown with a lit cigarette hanging from their mouth! Guess that was considered the normal state of human existence in those days. Introduction starts off with how anecdotal evidence can significantly bias people's perception, such as newspaper headlines filled with crime stories, leaving an impression on the general public that the city or that year is quite crime ridden, though statistics may not show any noticeable increase. This item being one of my pet peeves, I was hooked right away.

First chapter talks about biases built into the sample that is being analyzed. While there are several examples related to US Presidential elections themselves, an early one Huff points out dates back to 1936. At that time a magazine called Literary Digest conducted a telephone survey using their subscriber base, and predicted that the Republican candidate Alfred Landon will win the election handily. But in reality, Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt won the election in 46 states while Landon won only 2. This survey fiasco was attributed to the fact that in 1936, only rich Republicans could afford magazine subscriptions and telephones! While they resoundingly supported Landon, a vast majority of the voting population preferred the alternative. Though this sounds obvious now, we often fail to check whether the sample selection truly represents the larger population. Thus, while all the classmates who show up in your school/college  reunion may appear to be doing better than yourself, it is probably because the majority who are not doing well simply don't show up to such reunions. 

Second chapter discusses how reports often talk about "average" but choose mean or median or even mode that support their argument without explicitly stating the choice. Subsequent one talks about how most reports & advertisements that throw a number at you to make a point, leave out several other important numbers that are needed to set the full context. An example is a toothpaste advertisement saying "XYZ toothpaste users report 23% less cavities". On the surface it sounds great and may encourage us to by XYZ toothpaste, until we ask, "Compared to what?". If we compare XYZ toothpaste users to a population that doesn't use any kind of dental hygiene product, the claim may turn out to be true, but is not a big deal. Or perhaps other toothpaste users report lot more reduction in cavities, in which case, XYZ toothpaste is not the best? Or perhaps it is comparison between same XYZ toothpaste users between two successive years where the cavity reduction is due to fluoride being added to water? There is also a good bit of discussion about the size of the sample. If you used only two people in your sample, one person not reporting cavities this year can be reported as 50% reduction in cavities. In addition experiments can be repeated multiple times until favorable set of results are obtained, and then one can report just that one result leaving out all the other results that were unfavorable.

Then comes the analysis of various types of graphs used in reports that zoom in (i.e. Y axis doesn’t start from zero) to focus on small variations to make them look really big. In addition to actual graphs, there are ways to use pictures to give you the wrong impressions as well. For example when grain production doubles in one year, if we simply show a bar graph that is twice the height of the bar graph representing previous year, it is legit. Instead if we want to make it look much bigger, we can use bags of grain in the illustration showing current year bag as twice the size of last year's. While it may be twice the size in the picture, since it is supposed to represent a three dimensional image, our brains will see it as eight times more (2x2x2=8). Author also points out as to how reporters intentionally or unintentionally leave too many decimal places in the figures quoted giving you an impression that the figure is extremely precise. For example, if you took the arithmetic average of the salary of 147 people and it comes out to $73,425.76321, the five decimal places is a result of the division and is not a reflection of the precision of the average salary in a population of 147 people. To give the right perception of precision, it would be better to report it as just $73,426. But it may not appear very precise to the reader! The fact that "Correlation doesn't imply causation" is well known in academic circle and your statistics prof will try hard to beat it into your head. Thus, though there is a clear correlation between drowning deaths and amount of ice cream being eaten, one doesn't cause the other, but both tend to go up in summer months when more people go swimming. But it is easy to miss this point in more complicated datasets as the author points out. The saying, "Lies, Damn lies and Statistics" clearly gets etched in our mind as we go through the book.

After a series of these chapters, each one equally enjoyable and accessible, author finishes off the book with a final chapter that provides suggestions on how to identify these shenanigans. First question we should always as is "Who says so?" that will tease out the biases that may exist that we should be aware of. Second question is to ask, "How do they know?" (I am changing "How does he know?" used in the book to make it more contemporary. ), a question that will bring out the methods used to gather the data allowing us to assess the data reliability. Third question to ask is "What is missing?" that will let us know if uncomfortable or context setting part of the data are being left out to nudge us in a direction that is not supported by the whole dataset. "Did somebody change the subject?" is the next question that may reveal if somewhere along the lines of analysis, one set of data is incorrectly being used to report something else. Finally ask "Does it make sense?" as it will help identify and discredit a lot of nonsense reports.

This will be a good little book that we should ask all undergrad students to read so that they can internalize these notions. They will certainly help them throughout their lives when statistics is used to pull wool over their eyes. 

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Usually when I combine two book reviews in one email, the books tend to be talking about the same topic. But in this case, the second book The Lives of a Cell - Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas has nothing to do with the contents of the first one. A thin connection could be the fact that this also happens to be a thin volume.

A friend of mine was putting together a short list of best papers/articles he had read over the years, that he felt gave a solid foundation for non-experts to gain a good grasp of the fundamentals in the area each article covered. He had listed the eponymous essay as one among that list. Since I had not read the article, looked it up, found it to be a book, ordered it online. When it landed, I realized it is actually a collection of essays generally related to biology. First article I read, which forms the title of the book, didn't really hook me. Subsequent few also appeared to be meandering around, set in 1974 popular science article tone. But with my OCD tendencies kicking in, I couldn't toss it aside and so read the remaining article to get closure. Glad I did as subsequent articles slowly clued me into the rhythm and the outlook of the author. Though I wouldn't say this is one of the best books, I certainly enjoyed several essays found in the book, each only 5, 6 pages long. The last paragraph of the first article, that forms the title of the book, sums up the tone/take away of the essays: I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell. Author thus, tries to make observations related to biology that we may not have had on our own. 

This book was first published in 1974. With the advantage of an additional 46 years of time being on my side, some of the observations the author makes, sounding very smug as one who is presenting a brilliant insight that the readers would have never thought of on their own, didn't sound that brilliant to me. I hope I am not sounding too snobbish/smug myself making this remark. For example, there is one essay titled Your Very Good Health that discusses the introduction of HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) coming into vogue in the 70's. Author says that we are spending about $90B a year on healthcare in US (that is in the mid 70's while the figure is nearing $4T per year now!) and despite that much money being spent, HMOs can't deliver all they promise/expected to deliver while simultaneously reducing the cost, because we spend so much money to treat things that don’t require any treatment. May be  it was a great insight then. Now it doesn't sound like one. Even the 1970's prose that reads, "The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists' wives but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves." sounds anachronistic to me since my wife is a physician and I am not one!  There is a chapter titled Computers that talks about how computers can never become equal to human beings. Author talks about how computers gaining more and more power are able to compute more but are still too far away from mimicking one human brain. He says, perhaps through a highly improbable development, one day if all the computers in the world can be interconnected to harness their combined power, they may get smart enough to think like a human being. He then argues that them equaling what all human beings (that already communicate with each other forming their own network) in the planet are able to think/achieve, is an order of magnitude bigger in its complexity that will always remain elusive to computers. 

Certainly not all the essays in the book get caught in such pitfalls due to book's age. Many of the essays in second half are interesting as they talk about notions like the extremely complicated cities termites build together without any central control (see this link to read about a very recent discovery), conversion of basic science discoveries into medicine, characteristics of mythological creatures such as Chimera, Griffon, Sphinx, Ch'i-lin and even Ganesha that always tend to have biological features of different species that are mingled together but hardly ever sport features never seen on any biological creatures. Each essay being an independent one from the rest and lasting only half a dozen pages, makes it a fun read once you get into the groove.

Corona Vaccine

[This is a translation of an article I published in Tamil on the Solvanam.com magazine. Used Google translation to get the first cut and did minor clean up. Thus, it may not be highly polished but may help get the main points across.]

It is a well-known fact that the incidence of corona is the highest in the United States among all the countries in the world. Whether it is due to the public that do not listen to reason or the government that is in disarray is a topic with enough fodder for endless debates. Globally, Covid-19 has infected 71 million people so far out of which 1.6 million people have died. The United States alone has contributed 16 million cases and 300 thousand deaths! When you consider the fact that the US population is only 5% of the world population and still there are more than 3,000 Covid related deaths occurring in this country each day these days, the seriousness of these numbers become terrifyingly apparent.

Despite the dire situation, many people, not only in the United States but also in India, have said that they will not get vaccinated for various reasons related to politics, policy, boredom, apathy and skepticism. Is such reluctance appropriate or reflects irresponsibility? There is an urgent need to analyze what kind of myths and rumors skeptics are listening to that are flowing in via the various media, including FB and  WA forwards. It goes without saying that if the concerns are appropriate, they should be addressed correctly.

There can be no doubt that the quality of our lives has improved significantly thanks to vaccinations over the past one hundred years. The progress made by the industry is one of the main reasons why we now encounter diseases such as polio and smallpox only on the history books. Most of the vaccines we know carry small amounts of dead or inactivated pathogens into the human body. They do not bring the disease into our body because the specific pathogen is killed or inactivated during the preparation of the vaccine. But the genomic signature, which is like the face of the parasite found in the vaccine, awakens our body's immune system and prepares the body to fight the disease. Because of this immune response, when we are vaccinated against the flu for example, it is natural for us to have a body ache and fever, as if we had a mild case of flu itself. Because what came in was a inactivated virus, the body returns to normalcy in a day or two without the inconvenience becoming anything bigger. But since the body has thus been trained to recognize the invading pathogen on sight, if the real pathogen ever comes in, it quickly fights back destroying it while saving us from the disease. We can see the vaccines that work in this way as law enforcement personnel who bring the "Wanted" poster of a criminal or terrorist and stick it inside us. Since what was brought in is just a poster and not the real terrorist, we just get to familiarize ourselves with the terrorist's face. The mild fever that lasts for couple of days, can be equated to the town’s people looking at the wanted poster getting excited shouting out, “Ah.. Is this the terrorist? If he ever shows up in this town, we will promptly get rid of him!” as they go through preparatory exercises to get ready for the fight.

Manufacturing and distributing vaccines of this kind around the world is tantamount to printing millions of Wanted posters of the terrorist and distributing them around the world. While this is a well-known process, it takes a lot of time to physically print and distribute millions of posters, pasting them on town squares and ensuring the localites familiarize themselves with the face and remain vigilant. For example, it is still necessary to run virus farms in chicken eggs for about six months to produce the required amount of flu vaccine each year using this biological manufacturing process. What if instead you could just send an e-mail to every town with a note on how to print the image of the terrorist and tell them to print it out locally and hang it up in the town square? This is the model followed in the new mRNA (Messenger Ribonucleic Acid) vaccine development process. Although this mRNA method was introduced ten to twenty years ago, the corona vaccine is the first attempt to implement it on a large scale.

Decades back when we were growing up, Tamil magazines that used to get delivered on a weekly cadence used to carry serials that will deliver a long story in installments spanning a whole year. There were famous artists like Jayaraj and Maniyam Selvam who will pick up the details of the story characters or scenes from the author’s descriptions and create very nice looking illustrations to go with the published stories. In an analogous scenario, instructions for how to build our body parts like an ear or a nose are delivered to our body via these mRNA instructions derived from the long strands of DNA. Our bodies, like those artists, can read these instructions and create the needed parts. Scientists explore the Covid-19 horoscope (i.e. the genome of the virus), to determine which segment should be used as its signature (i.e. mug shot in the wanted poster). They then make that sliver into something like a jpg computer file that is equivalent to mRNA instructions. Similar to emailing the jpg file to individual towns and asking them to print and hang the posters using local printing presses, these mRNA instructions are placed in the vaccine and injected into human beings. Once the mRNA instructions are in hand, just like the illustrators that create the drawings, our body will get to work to produce the virus inside our body. But since the mRNA messages do not give the details needed to fully create the virus, but only the details of the face, the construction stops with the mug shot found in the Wanted poster in place of the real-life three-dimensional virus. After a mild round of rabble rousing (i.e. light fever, body aches), the villagers get ready to chase the extremist whenever he actually shows up in the town. Like traditional vaccines, this type of vaccine is usually given twice, with an interval of a few weeks in between. This is equivalent to the sheriff deputy returning to the town a month after posting the poster in the town square to update the poster/mugshot and reminding the town folk yelling, “Don't forget this extremist. Is everyone ready?” If you don’t do that, people may become busy with their daily lives and forget the importance of fighting the terrorist altogether.

As we can easily see, there is no need to incubate the chicken eggs for six months to grow the virus in this mRNA vaccine manufacturing process. Because the vaccine we send into the body is only for the preparation of the face of the virus within our body, the chemical compounds containing those instructions can be easily and quickly produced in abundance. The problem is that these mRNA instructions remain very fragile and are very easily destroyed after being made. You can casually wrap paper posters into a bundle, carry them on the back of a bicycle and stick them anywhere with simple glue. But when you are handling computer files, you are forced show some respect. Right? Otherwise file may get corrupted making it completely useless. Similarly, these mRNA vaccines have to be kept in deep freezing temperatures as they are transported. If not, it promised to break up quickly becoming a bucket of useless water within hours.

The Covid-19 vaccine, which is now in its final stages of mass distribution getting loaded on trucks and aircrafts for transportation, has been introduced by three companies. Pfizer's version of the drug should be kept at -70 degrees Celsius and Moderna's at -20 degrees Celsius. We can say the -20 degrees Celsius is not that far off from our home refrigerator’s freezer. But -70 degrees Celsius is less than the temperature of the Antarctic ice sheet. The big puzzle that needs to be resolved is whether machines that maintain that low temperature could be made readily available around the world. On the other hand, they are now looking for answers to questions such as how quickly the drug should be loaded into the hands of people when the fridge is opened and taken out, and whether it can be taken out of the freezer and kept in the refrigerator for few days. The current understanding is that the drug will remain intact for up to six months in the freezer and once taken out of the freezer it will remain effecive for about five days, if it is refridgerated properly. Since these vaccines cannot be relied upon to be dispensed at regular drug stores, Pfizer plans to pack the vaccine into boxes that hold about one thousand vials, make freezers to maintain the required ultralow temperature, pour tons of dry ice on its head and load it onto planes to ensure the  cold chain is never broken. If you start digging into details, you will come across other logistics related issues. For example, if we set the home A/C at 72 F degrees at home, the room temperature will not be exactly 72 degrees. The system starts to run when the temperature touches a 75 degrees and stops when the temperature reaches 69 degrees. When the systems runs this way repeatedly, we know that the room temperature will be 72 degrees on average. That 69 - 75 degree difference is called Hysteresis. This is how everything from our refrigerator to the freezers in most hospitals work. Since this delicate mRNA vaccine has to be treated like a VIP, it can increase the need for freezers that do not do this periodic cycling but maintain exactly the same temperature without any oscillation. This freezer demand will add to the cost of distribution until we develop enough expertise in managing this supply chain smoothly. On another logistics front, medical institutions need to train physicians and nurses who are goin to deliver the vaccine on precise equillibration procedures, so that the drug is taken out of the fridge/freezer at the right time to bring it up to room temperature before it is injected into someone’s arm. This time will be different for different company vaccines. If the vaccine is injected a little too soon not paying attention to these procedures, the cold drug may cause a lot of muscle pain and cramping unnecessarily. There are quite a few logistical issues involved in getting these vaccines delivered into people’s arms, particularly on the last mile. Hopefully the entire world will stand up to meet the challenge.

The vaccine, developed by Astra-Zeneca with the help of Oxford University, is a slightly different version of the old model we saw earlier. In this method, a virus found in a chimpanzees called the adenovirus is used as the vehicle to carry the face of the Covid-19.  As the figure above shows, the Covid genetic code is implanted on the inactivated adenovirus, which is then injected into the body as the new vaccine. That original adenovirus is a harmless one that only gives mild colds to chimpanzees. It does not bother human beings at all. Therefore, it can be considered as the equivalent of an inactivated virus. As we implant the Covid-19 (called SARS-CoV-2) face in it, our body gets to recognize the Covid mugshot brought in. As in other cases, this helps our body develop immuno response that may still result in mild fever/body ache but then provides the needed corona resistance in case if we encounter the virus in future. Since it uses an inactivated virus without depending on mRNA method, no deep freezing is required. Regular refrigeration will do. Russia has announced with a lot of chest thumping that it has developed a vaccine of this kind called Sputnik-V. The vaccine developed by China follows this well-oiled adenovirus groove as well. Since they eliminate the deep freeze temp requirements, these vaccines are likely to be far cheaper and less complex when it comes to distribution worldwide using regular refrigerator that are more easily available. Of these variations, test data on the Sputnik-V vaccine are not widely available, creating skepticism in the medical community that wonders if Putin is trying to pull a fast one for national pride related reasons. There have also been news articles saying due to unexpected side effects, anyone taking Sputnik-V vaccine is required not to consume any type of alcohol for two months, Putin is reluctant to take the vaccine himself, etc. Hopefully all that is not true so that cheaper vaccines can be made available worldwide.

There are a lot of protocols and procedures in place to ensure vaccines work properly and there are no serious side effects. The first, second, and third stages of clinical trials require, respectively, few, many, and several thousands of injections to be given and the receivers monitored closely for several weeks. In the Western clinical trials, double blind studies for the gold standard to assess efficacy of new drugs. Assume that one thousand people participate in a drug test. Half of them (five hundred participants) will be given the drug to be tested and the other five hundred will be given a placebo that looks like the medicine. No one among the participants would know know who is being given the drug and who is just receiving the placebo. Even the physicians or nurses that deliver the drug wouldn’t know who is getting what. The data collected in this way will naturally be pure and unbiased. A separate team of researchers who receive the tables of data without any individual identified, then analyze the numbers to see if the people who got the real medicine actually survived the disease better compared to those who got the placebo.

If it is a new drug is a therapeutic meant to treat cancer, drug trial conductors will select many of the patients suffering from that particular type of cancer, test the effectiveness of the new drug by giving the new drug to one half and placebo to the other half. Everyone who participates in the study will definitely have the disease. But when we are testing a vaccine, it is not possible to catch and test patients who are already suffering from the disease. So, in the third phase clinical trials, a really large number of civilians are selected and half are vaccinated while the other half are given a placebo. Then all the participants are monitored for several weeks to compute the rate of infection. More than ninety-nine percent of those participants are not going to get infected anyway, since Corona infection rate in the general population tends to be less than 1%. Testing them by trying to infect them will be inhumane and a human right violation. So, the efficacy need to be assessed based on the less than 1% of the population that may normally get infected as they go about their lives. This is how the effectiveness of the vaccine can be measured. Thus, for example, 44,000 people took part in the third stage clinical trials conducted by Pfizer. In a few weeks of giving 22,000 people real vaccine and 22,000 participants a placebo injection, a total of 94 people were found to have been infected. When the data was analyzed by another team not involved in the trial giving away the vaccine, they estimated that the effectiveness of the vaccine was over 90 percent. It can be understood as follows. If 47 of those 94 people had been in the real vaccine group and the remaining 47 on the placebo group, it would have been concluded that the drug was of no use. Instead if no one in the group that received the real vaccine became ill, the drug would have been concluded to be 100% effective for the sample population participating in this study. In reality about 91 people who were infected had received the placebo while only about 3 that received the vaccine got infected. So, the efficacy is computed to be north of 90 percent. It should be interesting to note that due to this nature of vaccine testing, even though 44,000 participants were involved in the study, 10 more cases falling one side or  the other will swing the efficacy rate considerably.

The questions or confusions posed by skeptics of these vaccines can be categorized into about eight different kinds. Answers based on our current understanding that addresses these points are listed in parenthesis:

1. This is a new type of vaccine meddles with our DNA. It can modify the core of who we are and can affect all of our descendants. [As discussed at length above, the idea that this new vaccine could modify our DNA, transforming us and our descendants into some other being is highly imaginary. So far there are no rational reasons to be afraid. We saw that common vaccines usually send inactivated pathogens into our body to trigger an immune response. This mRNA method may be considered even safer over time, as these vaccines inject only the instructions to create the signature of the pathogen. The polio vaccine introduced in the 1960s, had a horrible incidence where accidentally live polio virus (instead of the inactivated version) was included in a batch of the vaccine that got shipped out. This manufacturing blunder resulted in many vaccine recipients getting the disease instead of getting protected against it. Though it occurred decades back when the whole vaccine technology was fairly new, it was certainly a horrible mistake. But since mRNA vaccines don’t contain pathogens but only instructions to create their signature, such mistakes can’t happen in this model. ]

2. Because the economy is collapsing, just people are being tested to declare the vaccine safe to allow the businesses to reopen. They say it usually takes six years to develop a vaccine. But the corona vaccine was made in just six months? [It is true that this vaccine is coming to the market very quickly compared to other traditional vaccines. But when data collected from experiments are published to be readily available to everyone, we need not worry unnecessarily. How is it fair to say that vaccine production should not be accelerated while the entire world is in a semi shutdown state for close to an year? If it takes 5, 10 years to complete the process, do we want the world to be on hold for that long? Since that is not practical, Governments and drug companies have come up with a number of steps (at a huge cost) to speed up the process. Thus, companies started large scale manufacturing of the vaccines still being tested in the hope that testing will go well and the governments will grant permission soon. If permissions are not issued, or if the drug is finally found to be ineffective, multibillion dollars worth of medicine will have to be dumped in the trash. Doing so at other times will result in the entire loss falling on the head of the pharmaceutical company and the company going bankrupt. Therefore, companies will not start production until permission is obtained. Since governments have offered to accept losses this time around, production could start in parallel.]

3. Should we not ask any questions about these new vaccines? Is everything clear already? If making vaccines is so easy, how come we don’t have a vaccine yet for AIDS?! [Questions like how long will the vaccine immunity last, and whether the drug will protect us from it if Covid-19 mutates into new Covid-20 next, are all valid. Answers to these questions are still a few years away. There is nothing wrong with that. Compared to Covid-19, the AIDS virus is even more vicious and effective. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has morphed into many incarnations due to genetic mutations. With almost a hundred different versions of it in circulation, we are struggling to develop a vaccine. It is also capable of hiding inside human cells, making itself impervious to vaccines. So, while scientists are at it, it is not as easy as reading just one virus genome and creating a vaccine as in the case of Covid-19. We better pray that Covid-19 doesn’t keep morphing into newer avatars like HIV in the forthcoming years!]

4. Heard that someone in India has become so ill after taking this vaccine and has sued the drug company in court. [According to biological theories, every human being is unique. No drug works the same way in everyone's body in the world. When 40,000 people are vaccinated in the third round of clinical trials, it is possible that one or two will experience moderate to severe side effects. It is the job of pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and governments to take this into account and revise the vaccine or modify the dosage. Although Aspirin, a common headache pill, has been used billions of times a day worldwide for 40 years, its side effects can still be fatal to a new user. If we completely ban the use of Aspirin because of statistically insignificant instances of bad side effects, we will lose all the positive effects as well. Similarly, even in the case of these new vaccines, it is appropriate to work on improving the medicine and not give this vaccine to people with specific disorders where it is found to be harmful. For example, after the initial roll out, UK noticed that people with extreme allergies experienced a lot of bad side effects. Though with proper treatment, they all had gotten better, UK has advised people with extreme allergies not to take the vaccine at this time. This is appropriate. But it is certainly not the right approach to say that no one should be vaccinated because of a negligible number of bad side effects, no matter how many people die.]

5. This is a conspiracy by China/Trump/Bill Gates/Putin/pharmaceutical companies to bring the world under their control or to make money. [Analyzing them one by one, none of these accusations seem real. Many governments are preparing to make the vaccine available to the public free of charge. Many governments and NGOs have warned drug companies not to indulge in any form of price gouging. People like Trump/Bill Gates do not seem to have benefited from these vaccines. China does not seem to be making big money selling drugs to the world, as it seems to be busy protecting its ownpeople. It is noteworthy that all of the soon-to-be-released vaccines are based on the Covid-19 genetic code published by Chinese scientists circa January 2020.]

6. OK, with all that said, will you dare to get vaccinated once you have access to it? [My wife, kids and I are all going to get vaccinated as soon as it is offered to us in the right order of priority.]

7. OK, now I am convinced. Which vaccine is the best? How do I jump to the front of the queue? [If the clinical trial data clearly shows that the vaccine is more than 90% effective and doesn’t show objectionable side effects, each vaccine can be considered effective and safe. Since the normal flu vaccine is only about 60% effective, the effectiveness of these vaccines may eventually drop slightly when given to billions of people. That is to be expected. However, a community-wide immunity called Herd Immunity can be reached only if more than 70% of the population is vaccinated against a particular disease and becomes immune. Because Covid-19 is extremely contagious and so spreads so easily, it is incumbent upon us, as good citizens, to get vaccinated when it is our turn, after correct priorities have been accorded to healthcare workers, elderly and other special category of people.]

8. Well, I get the idea. What should I do to help dispel the confusion in my community? [Do not forward the unverified social media posts and claims to everyone in your WA groups or email lists. Adding a disclaimer like “Forwarded as Received” does not absolve you of your responsibility. Please do your own research to verify the authenticity of any incoming story/message. In this age of social media, where shocking/threatening negative news speeds around the world several times faster than well researched, boring, good news clips, it is our civic duty to be the firewall that blocks and filters out garbage stories. Take the time/effort to point out and explain to your friends/relatives facts based on science that is free of any political or monetary biases.]

 

The latest television news is that former US presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton have announced that they will be getting vaccinated in front of television cameras for all to see, when it is made available to them as per correct priority. When people were afraid to get vaccinated against polio in the 1960s, Elvis Presley's getting the shot on a television show helped allay public fears.

If you know when Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan are getting their vaccine on Indian TV, let your friends know. It doesn't matter if you forward it as a WA message. Only then the Tamil TV channel debates during 2022 January Pongal season can switch from “Who is to blame for this pandemic?” type titles to “Who conquered Corona in 2021?” type topics. The world will applaud you for you doing your part.

-o0o-

Book reviews: White Fragility & Stamped

Picked up White Fragility - Why it is so hard for white people to talk about racism by Robin Diangelo and Stamped - Racism, Antiracism, and you by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Both books shot up in popularity earlier this year due to the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement. They both focus on Black Vs. White racism mainly in the US. Since I am neither white nor black and spent the first 23 years of my life in another country, I could read them with an outsider perspective without any emotional baggage or sensitivity black/white Americans born and brought up here may feel. Both books are worth a read and are very accessible written in simple prose with nothing too abstract or complicated to grasp. But both do have their handicaps as well.

During and after reading the White Fragility book, I saw several interviews of Robin Diangelo, who is white. She has been a consultant and corporate trainer on race related issues for decades and so has the right background to write the book. It is a short book (160 pages) with brief chapters. I liked her direct unflinching approach to "racism in the society" discussion that usually makes most Americans uncomfortable. She argues that despite whatever the media or your family may say, we live in a very racist society and all of us are racists. There is no point denying it. Only thing we can do is to be aware of this reality and then work on reducing/eliminating biases everywhere possible. 

In the initial chapters she explains as to how most whites think of racism in the US as something that evil doers of the bygone era practiced. The general US historical narrative talks about slavery that was abolished with Lincoln's emancipation proclamation, civil rights era of the 60's that resolved ongoing racism of that time dovetailing to the election of Barack Obama that has culminated in the total elimination of racism from the society. Since these are problems already taken up and resolved years back, whites tend to think we live in a post racial society and so blacks have nothing to complain about. She repeatedly argues that this perception of good/bad binary is not the reality since white privileges and prejudices against blacks continue to exist at various levels throughout the society. There are amusing examples as to why whites claim they are not racists like, I don't see color, I have been to Costa Rica, I have a black relative, I voted for Obama, I am a vegetarian, etc. She has a lot of anecdotal examples from her training sessions. Instances where whites feel that whatever they say is thrown back at them and there is no way for them to defend themselves. Similarly the only black woman in an office meeting, who listens to her peers discussion for an hour and then asks couple of questions only to be told by her supervisor later that the others in the room felt attacked by her. Many whites feel discriminated against by the society that is trying to coddle blacks. 

She has an interesting chapter titled White Women's Tears. Here she discusses as to how in most corporate or social environments when racism is under discussion, white women that are supportive starts crying to show their level of sympathy for blacks and to express how they are hurt by what the society is doing. This then results in everyone there running to console the crying white women, who then becomes the center of attraction, while the actual discussion or progress that need to be made falls by the wayside. In my personal life I don't encounter a lot of people who are emotionally upset and crying on a daily basis. So, I can see how I might be tempted to help pacify an adult crying, without realizing how the main purpose of the meeting is getting derailed. Such distractions can be occurring at several points in life that could potentially frustrate the blacks in the room. While these are all good debate points to discuss and make people realize the absurdity, my mind trained as an engineer always looking for solutions, didn't find much in this book that talks about how to solve the problem. The author says the number one question white people ask her during her training sessions is "How do I tell another white person that they are being racist without triggering their white fragility?". Her response is "How would I tell you that you are being a racist without triggering your white fragility?". This response is to point out to them that by the mere question, the questioner has separated themselves from the issue, indicating that the problem is outside of them. She has few more of such clever ripostes. But when it comes to solutions, she says if you ask, "So, what should I do to address these issues?" or "Can I ask black people for guidance?", they are all wrong questions since you should know yourself the answers. This will be confusing for whites even when they sincerely want to improve, since current norm is to provide simple clear answer/take away to people so that they can go implement. There is indeed one page of write up right at the end titled "Few strategies for working together". But it doesn't really have much in the way of strategies. While  being woke first may be important as she repeatedly points out, in a book that is this accusatory and preachy, shying away from clear takeaways and action plans seems odd, particularly since she is a corporate trainer! There is not a lot of discussion as to how blacks are empowering themselves either. Not clear if telling all the white people they are the problem and they should feel ashamed alone is enough. 

Stamped - Racism, Antiracism, and you seems to be mostly written by Jason Reynold is based on Kendi's previous work titled Stamped from the beginning. It is listed on the cover as a remix and is aimed at young (i.e. undergrad students) readers. While proclaiming "This is not a history book", written in simple prose, book's chapters re-narrates the US national history from black perspective in a very chronological order. Thus, Section 1 covers years 1415 to 1728, section 2 covers 1743 to 1826 and so on with Section 5 covering civil rights era (the 1960s) to Obama/Trump years. Writing is playful and sarcastic. Here is a sample: About Jefferson. You know how I said Gomes Eanes de Zurara was the world’s first racist? Well, Thomas Jefferson might’ve been the world’s first White person to say, “I have Black friends.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m willing to make the bet. As a young man, he didn’t think of them as less or consider slavery much at all. It wasn’t until he was older, when his African “friends” started telling him about the horrors of slavery — including the terror in his own home — that he realized their lives were more different than he’d even known. I don’t know about you all, but I don’t own my friends. 

Book argues that a lot of shenanigans have gone into writing US history and teaching them in schools in a way that is comfortable to the white population. For example, some school books in the Southern states of US describe slavery (without using that term) as a practice of bringing people from Africa to do chores. I myself have noticed similar air brushing or modified portrayals in various parts of the US. For example, couple of decades back when we went to Smokey Mountains in Tennessee, saw a show featuring two teams of equestrians competing in events. They were portrayed as and carried flags of Union and Confederate armies from the era of US Civil Wars in the mid 1800's. Though the Southern Confederate army (that supported slavery) was defeated by the Union army (which initially supported slavery but in the end made abolishing slavery its main platform), this show continues to show confederate army as a set of jolly good fellows, equal to and competing with Union army even now! While that show was a bit confusing for me decades back, this book points out as to how in so many other ways history got distorted to take away the shame. The notion that this reorientation extends to Tarzan, developed as a white character who lives in the jungle and still has all the virtues of a civilized white man, was new to me. Book even argues that the series of Rocky and Rambo movies starring Sylvester Stallone is a thinly disguised attempt to make the white man look like hero. Could be true but I didn't see it from that angle till now. But the effect of the old racist movie Birth of a Nation, once shown in the Whitehouse, to dog whistles Presidents Nixon and Reagan used were all discussed concluding with Obama described as assimilationist and Trump, not even bothering much with dog whistles. There are discussions of many other racially significant events and developments, like The Bell Curve book published in the early 90's to argue how blacks are genetically inferior as indicated by IQ tests, rise of the Black Panthers, assassinations of black leaders like M.L.K and Malcom X. But there is hardly any discussion of how native Americans suffered through their own persecution along the same historical time lines. The flippant tone may make some assertions appear as pushing the envelope. Since the book is aimed at young readers, presumably it is all intentional. Thus, though neither book can be described as perfect, they both are worth the easy read. In a way, they remind me of Oliver Stone's The Untold History of the United States documentary series that discussed world history from first world war onwards describing the role of US not as the shining star that it is usually portrayed as, but more of a powerful nation that still commits a lot of errors, misses lot of good opportunities to set the world in better directions and just bumbles its way through. While I understand how making citizens believe in the manifested destiny of US helps its cause, air brushing history too much to make ourselves feel good can't be good in the long run. Thus such works are warranted in open societies. If you have read them, PLMK what your thoughts were. Though this is an uncomfortable topic, it deserves unbiased civil & cerebral discussions that are not too emotional.

Diwali from a bygone era..!

[English Translation of a Tamil article I published on the Solvanam.com site.]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
                                                                                – Arthur C. Clarke

Around the time of Diwali (written as Deepavali in Southern India), we usually end up receiving a message or an essay, nostalgically recalling how we used to celebrate it in the years past. What is being described as the bygone era will be about 40 to 50 years back. One forwarded message I received last year went along these lines: 

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Please don't think I am going to talk about some 1000 year old history. This post is about celebrations just about 40 years back. In those days even small families used to have four kids. With extended family members that include grandpa, grandma, uncles, and aunties thrown in, typical joint families hadabout a dozen members. Dad was the only one working in a government position. Mom, who grew up in Chennai, had relocated to a small town (Dharapuram) after her marriage to Dad and had gotten used to that living bringing us up in the same small town mode. 

We used to have a 20 liter boiler made of copper, which was the sole hot water making equipment in the house. It used to be fueled by coal, fire wood and coconut shells. As the eldest son, it used to be my duty to get the boiler going to generate enough hot water for the dozen family members to take baths on the day of Diwali as early as 4 or 5 am in the morning. In parallel, it used to be my elder sister's responsibility to get the dough ready for idlis, get chutney prepared to go with it. My sisters used to have long hair that will flow down to their knees. Since taking oil bath (i.e. applying oil to hair and body and then washing it off with herbs and hot water) is a major part of this festival, getting the Seekakkaai powder mixed in with fragrant herbs ready (to wash off the oil, as if it is powder version of shampoo) is also her responsibility. By the time my sisters get to the bathroom and go through this oil bath process, our younger brothers/cousins would have gone far ahead, finishing up their bath in a jiffy, eating a small portion of a weird tasting herbal medicine and running away to fire firecrackers in the street, wearing brand new clothes. Young boys always had a lot of advantages, with many elders hanging around to spoil them. Next event with be the big brunch around 10am, that will have mom serving rice, sambar, two vegetables, badam kheer, vada, papad, sweets and what not. With kids continuing to fire away small crackers for hours on end, throughout the day, things will start to slow down a bit around 3pm. Taking breaks in the late afternoon, we will gather around to enjoy snacks like mixture, sweets and coffee. By the time 90% of the fire crackers are done, it will be late evening, after which there will be a temple visit, many relatives visiting us and so on. In those middle class Diwali celebrations, there weren't a lot of expenses or showing off involved. But happiness and satisfaction remained plenty. People were affectionate. Neighbors hung out together without keeping up with the Jones comparisons or pressure. Will we ever return to those golden days?

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Posts of this kind and Ananda Vikatan (popular Tamil magazine) cartoon jokes like the one seen here (à la Norman Rockwell) were in circulation that day. Around the same time I was reading an article by Tim Urban on his waitbutwhy.com website. It was talking about artificial intelligence, singularity and so on. As per Tim, human brain is incapable of understanding the notion of exponential rise. We were not required to handle such notions in the millenniums past to survive and till date we have not mastered that idea intuitively. We only comprehend the idea of linear rise, as that was adequate for us to survive through evolution. If we are asked how will life be in another 40 years, we will think back as to how our life was 40 years back, assess the advancements that had taken place over the last four decades and then extrapolate a similar amount of advancements over the next 40 years, imagine how life will be at that point, and provide that assessment as our expectation of life 40 years in the future. But in reality the amount of changes could potentially be a lot more than that. If you ask why, we can answer it this way.

Let's presume by some miracle we have invented a time machine. Using that time machine we travel back to 1750 to study the way life was in the 18th century. Looking at their primitive lifestyle, we take pity on the 18^th century citizens and decide to bring just one scientist from that time to 2020. This scientist Sam is even sporting a French beard as all the scientists in Indian movies do. So there is no doubt that he was the biggest scientist around in the 18th century.

We can debate whether our intention for bringing him to 2020 is to educate him about our technological advancements and send him back to his time so that he can help them live better or for us to just show off and make him jealous is debatable.Since Sam lived in an era where even electricity was not in use and horses provided all the transportation possible, people traveling around in metal boxes called cars and flying in metal tubes call airplanes, everyone walking around with a small box like thing called Smartphone using which they are able to reach and talk to anyone anywhere on the planet, people being able to watch a cricket match taking place 1000 km away instantly, and even kids using a magic wand called remote control changing the television channels, fans able to listen to the great singer SPB's songs recorded decades back whenever they want despite the fact that he passed away couple of months back, everyone able to take and share pictures instantaneously, will all be stunning developments to him. These changes will look like shocking witchcraft and magic that is hard to believe. He might start wondering what is going on around him and whether his mind is playing tricks on him or were these some sort of God's gift to these people. If you then show him MRI machine, internet, international space station and so on, he might actually get a heart attack and die.

What is even more interesting is actually something else. After we show our world and the scientific developments to Sam, let's say we put him back in the time machine, bid him goodbye and send him back to his own time. Sam, when he lands back in 1750, wonders why should only the 21st century people enjoy this ability to show off and why can't he have the same type of fun. After thinking about it a while, using the same time machine he travels back another 250 years to A.D. 1500. He picks up the biggest scientist John from that time and brings him back to 1750 to give him a similar shock.

 

But it turns out to be quite disappointing to Sam. John, who traveled from 1500 to 1750, will certainly encounter several new developments that will surprise him. The world map would have changed a lot, Europe would be ruling most of the globe using a lot of force that might terrify and surprise him at the same time. But beyond that, the daily life he encounters in 1750 would be pretty much similar to what he was used to in 1500. John will not encounter anything that will give him a heart attack. Sam will slowly realize that if he wants to bring a John from the past to 1750 to impress him enough resulting in a heart attack, he has to actually travel back about 14,000 years and bring a John from 12,000 BC. Someone coming to 1750 AD from 12,000 BC would have belonged to an age where language communication through verbal and written skills would have been unknown and people would have been mostly practicing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Only for a John of that era, life in 1750, with large buildings, ocean going ships and well developed languages will all be a set of development to shock and stun. As long as the time machine can potentially travel through 14,000 years and return back, well and good. Sam may have a chance to impress someone. If it can span only 300 years, Sam could never find someone who would be surprised to see the living style of 1750.

Now imagine a person who came from 12,000 BC, takes the same time machine goes back to their time and then tries to go back another 14,000 years to 26,000 BC. Their idea was to bring someone to 12,000 BC to do a similar show off. Again, it won't work because the lifestyle would not have changed that much in those 14,000 years. To show a heart attack inducing amount of development you then have to go about hundred thousand years and bring someone from that era.

Thus, societal developments accelerating over time has been noticed by many. Futurist Ray Kurzweil calls it the Law of Accelerating Returns. Since this acceleration continues even in our lifetime, how will life really be in another 40 years? It won't be surprising if a blog post similar to the one below circulates around Diwali in the year 2060.

Diwali from a bygone era - A post from 2060 AD

Please don't think I'm going to talk about how Diwali was celebrated in the 20th century. This is only about life as we knew it just 40 years back around the year 2020 and how we celebrated Diwali then.

In those days each home used to have one or two children. We used to think that is the right size for a family. Child free families, as we know them now, used to be called childless in those days as if they had a flaw and people used to look down upon them. There was a general understanding that Diwali is mainly a celebration for kids.

Ever since nuclear fusion and quantum computing became a reality in the 2040s, these two things together had changed the world upside down. Since anyone is able to get any amount of power whenever they want now and since through quantum computing we are able to get anything we want created instantaneously, nowadays every home has a universal oven that generate whatever food we want in a minute for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn't have such facilities in those days. Mostly women at home used to plan for days and prepare food soaking rice and lentil in water, kneading dough in machines, baking stuff for days to make all the food items and snacks that we used to eat. There was no notion of entering the rejuvenation chamber just for few seconds to get all of our cells renewed at that time. Those are all biological sciences related technologies that have come up only in that last 10, 15 years. Instead of that, in those days, we used to have an electrical appliance called Geyser, using which we used to generate hot water, use the hot water to take a shower which was a big part of the Diwali festivities. Based on the historical notion of taking a bath in the river Ganges, we used to greet each other asking, “Did you have your Ganges bath yet?”

Since every home has a communication deck these days, we are able to see anyone, anytime we want around the world using VR technology. Since everyone has 3D transporters now, traveling to different locations in the planet has become easy and uninteresting. Forty years back, the best we could do was use a smartphone app called WhatsApp. Using that app we used to exchange Diwali greetings with our friends and relatives around the world. Using the three or four inch rectangular screens in our smartphones, we were able to see each other through video calls on WhatsApp. That made us feel that we have come so far in our lives, since simple phones were a rarity in the 20^th century.

Nowadays using NeuroSync we are able to learn any new information or a language in few seconds, directly uploading it into our brain. Since we didn't have such technology in 2020, each human being used to know only one or two languages. Since learning new languages used to take years, anyone who could speak three or four languages or those who had traveled to multiple countries where all looked up as highly intelligent, well exposed, worldly individuals. Since we did not understand the language, places or religions of other people in those days, there were a lot of wars that went on between different parts of the world, with each side claiming their language, religion or country is better than others. But because of that level of misunderstanding and lack of communication, every part of the planet had its own festivals and celebrations. How they were celebrated, what food we made and ate all used to differ dramatically from place to place. We were not able to presume that we can get those experiences by going to the simulation deck whenever we want. At the most kids used to say, I will learn how to do something when I need using YouTube. That was the level of sophistication when it came to simulations. For each festival are a celebration, we had to put in a lot of effort and physically conduct the event in the real world that gave so much of personal satisfaction. The work that we had to do yielded a sense of pride.

Using NeuroSync these days we are able to download our memories and back them up. There were no such capabilities in those days. So, as they got older, people used to forget a lot of things, losing their memory. Though it was very inconvenient in most of the situations, at times like Diwali, it helped bring families together, with elders forgetting old tiffs and enmities. This helped a lot in renewing your relationships and kept them longlasting. Since we are able to get back our memories perfectly now, without losing even a tiny teeny detail, we are also carrying a lot of bad memories that would be better discarded. Even though one could delete bad memories from the backup, nobody seems to be using that technology much. Instead we all carry old enmities and tiffs forever, brooding over them endlessly, which is indeed a sad situation. Even in the 20th century a Tamil poet wrote, “I asked God for two minds. To remember and feel sad I need a mind while I need another to forget and forgive and live.”Even in 2060, those lines remaining suitable and resonating to human life, is strange.

Carrying thousands of songs in pocket size smartphones had become commonplace even in 2020. But if you go another 20 to 30 years back towards the end of the 20th century, to listen to your favorite songs, you had to wait for the Chennai radio stations broadcast that came up Sunday evening at 4:00 p.m. for one hour. Fans used to diligently wait for that hour each week. The radio station used to broadcast special programs for Diwali type festivals. Now you can listen to,or rather feel, any song anytime using NeuroSync. But that advancement itself has reduced the value of the experience, decreasing the amount of time people listen to music or the enjoyment they derived from it. There is a type of fun in waiting and there is a kind of pleasure in making one wait were all song lyrics in those days. How do you explain such notions in this day and age? Perhaps you can say one can go to the simulation deck and experience the 2019 practice of doing a pilgrimage to see AththiVaradhar, standing in a line for so many hours. As you may know, that statue gets pulled out once every 40 years for a special month long festivities. It did come out last year in 2059. You may also know how the festivities and pilgrimages took place this time around!

When I explain these things, talk about 2020 Diwali fondly to my grandchildren they are all scratching their head giving me blank stares. Though poverty has been eliminated from the world, allowing everyone to live a comfortable life, since we grew up during the first decades of this century, the Diwali celebration we had 40 years back in the year 2020 is still so pleasant to recall and reminisce. Life in those simpler days indeed makes you feel nostalgic. 

Sundar Vedantham 

November 14, 2060.