What's in a name? When Omicron isn't Omicron

Tracking and Communicating About Variants

Say the words “Alpha”, “Delta”, or “Omicron” today and virtually the whole world knows what you are talking about: a variant of the virus that causes COVID-19.

This universal awareness is the result of a phenomenally successful choice by the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide Greek letter names to the major variants of the virus that have evolved over the course of the pandemic (WHO variants page). Providing these names avoided a choice between the inaccessible and confusing Pango nomenclature (e.g. “B.1.1.7”, "B.1.351", "B.1.617.2"), and inaccurate and stigmatizing place names (“e.g. “UK variant,” “South African variant,” “Indian variant,”).

Between mid-2020 and the end of 2021, 10 major variants had been named.

No new major variants have been named since Omicron was named in November 2021.

However, this lack of new names is not because no new major variants have emerged. Rather, they’re all lumped into “Omicron” now. And this mistake can be traced back to the initial naming of Omicron.

If You Absolutely Have to Run Linux...

When you are in the world of science, every now and then you will run across a piece of code that only runs on Linux. If you don’t know what Linux is or ever have to use it, be grateful. The only good thing about Linux, as far as end-users are concerned, is that there are versions of it that are free and works fairly well in general. Beyond that, it is an overcomplicated, confusing, and poorly documented system where anything beyond the basic usage requires intimate knowledge of command lines, configuration files, and environment variables. Further, I think it encourages those who write Linux-specific code to also adopt these non-intuitive practices, which can bleed into Windows ports of these programs.

This post is dedicated to those like me who would like to be able to run Linux programs when we need to, but otherwise to shove it in a dark corner of our computers where we never need to see it again. I will introduce the basics of Linux and describe how to install it inside a virtual machine on Windows 7.

The Value and Danger of Anecdotal Experiences

Why anecdotes shouldn't be trusted. (xkcd #842: Mark)

I would like to share with you an anecdote.

For a long time, I kept my cell phone in my left pants pocket. After some time, I began noticing that the muscle just underneath it would occasionally twitch.

Feeling curious, I moved my phone to my right pocket. After a while, I noticed that the twitches in the left muscle weren’t happening anymore. And just recently (about 6 months later) I noticed some twitches occurring under my right pocket.

Ah-ha! you might think. Long-term exposure to cell phone radiation has some effect on muscles!

Well… no. It’s a curious correlation at best, but there are a number of problems with making any sort of conclusion from this single experience:

Rethinking Choice: Human Personhood and the Abortion Debate

Update: It has come to my attention that the timeline I'm describing has an error by a week or two. I don't have time to fix it, but the underlying idea is sound.

One of the most politically important questions of our day is defining the bounds of a human life, and who has control over it. This is in large part because it is so divisive, a treacherous landscape governed mainly by religious and political motivations, rather than by empirical truths, and serves as a distraction from the truly critical issues facing our country. It is therefore imperative that we formulate and proactively support a definition of human life that accounts for both fetal development and the fact that the mother and fetus are a single, integrated system.

The World is Safe For Now: 2012, Harold Camping, and Why the Biblical End of the World Won’t Happen

How worlds ended in Star Wars.

Doomsday. It’s a frightening and captivating idea which has held firm in the imaginations of humans for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories. Indeed, one only needs to look to the big summer movies which routinely threaten humanity/the earth/the universe with every imaginable form of destruction.

Talk of the real end of the world has heightened in the last few years, first with the idea that the Maya supposedly predicted 2012 as the end, and most recently with Harold Camping’s extraordinarily well-publicized biblical ‘calculation’ that the rapture would occur this year. Both of these ideas were ludicrous, and I’ll briefly explain before discussing the biblical end of the world in general.

Scientific Astrology

You may have heard about a story circulating around the internet about astrology being wrong. In short, an astronomer named Parke Kunkle talked to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Star-Tribune about how astrology’s dates bear little relation to actual positions of the constellations and that there is a 13th constellation that isn't included. It doesn’t seem like he intended it to be big news, but it made quite an impact on the internet all the same; doing a Google News search for "astrology" turns up hundreds of articles on the topic.

If you are like me and don’t pay any attention to astrology, this did come as a revelation: why wouldn’t a system with the prefix “astro-“ and using the names of constellations have to do with the positions of the stars?

Free Energy of Salvation

This piece was inspired by a typo from a talk at the 11^th International Workshop on Radiation Damage to DNA in Atlanta last May which converted “solvation free energy” to “salvation free energy.” I couldn't resist bringing to life the imagery that phrase conjured.