Musings on the Human Condition

The Denominator Problem There was an interesting op-ed in the WSJ a couple of days ago (see link below) by Eran Bendavid and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford. They ask if the cost of a lockdown is perhaps higher than the cost of no lockdown. The op-ed is behind a pay wall, so I'll provide a summary of their argument. The authors claim that the commonly assumed coronavirus (CV) death rate of ~1% is inaccurate (i.e. too high) due to the lack of antibody testing to determine the true denominator for the ratio. (The death rate is calculated by dividing the number of deaths, i.e. the numerator , by the number of infected, i.e. the denominator .) In other words, we don't have an accurate count of everyone who has the virus until we do antibody testing of everyone. That's because many people who have the virus develop antibodies and very mild symptoms and never get tested and never get counted as part of the denominator. I suspect when the they calculate the death rate ...

There's a lot of confusion out there about the terms virtualization, containerization, etc. and the related products such as Vagrant, Docker, VirtualBox, etc. When do I use what? I like to think of it this way. The physical machine could be a Mac or a Windows PC or laptop. VirtualBox is an Oracle product that provides the virtualization layer, thereby allowing you (for example) to run Linux on a Windows machine. You can configure the resources (disk, CPU, RAM) you want to allocate to each virtual machine (VM). Vagrant is for consistent environment management paradigms across all platforms/OSs. You can use it to install base software for you application, e.g. the Apache web server. Docker is for containerization and only runs on Linux because it uses Linux's container facility to do its thing. So, it used to be that if you're using Windows, you had to run VirtualBox or some virtualization software to stand up a Linux machine first before you could install D...

I've recently run into several posts critiquing Adobe for their licensing practices as well as their product suites, which often consist of products with overlapping functionality wherein the products are inconsistent with each other in terms of the UX, thereby making it look more like a hodgepodge than a suite. For example, the Adobe Create Cloud (CC) suite reminds me of Bloomberg, the financial trading platform. The Bloomberg platform has multiple ways of doing the same trade (e.g. let's say you want to go an FX trade) and it can be impossible to figure out the pros/cons of each way of doing it and pick one way to do it. I know this because I worked in the wealth and asset management sector for a long time in a previous life. In Adobe's case, this is the result of growing by way of acquisitions (as opposed to growing organically). Adobe's digital marketing suite, aka Marketing Cloud, is starting to suffer from similar issues, e.g. there are multiple ways to manage...