by David Brooks | Aug 5, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
One of my favorite mathematical thingamajigs is Benford’s Law, the weirdly counter-intuitive finding about which digits are most likely to appear in most data sets. Basically, it says that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, no matter how random...
by David Brooks | Aug 5, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
If you’ve had a PCR test for COVID-19 you know that collecting the tissue sample takes a few minutes and involves a minor snootful of irritation. But that’s collecting a sample from one person. How about collecting samples from hundreds of people? Oddly enough, it can...
by David Brooks | Aug 4, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
A new species of bacteria has been discovered living on solar panels atop the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, which is interesting unless it starts to eat the panels or do something like that. I don’t want my solar panels eaten. The article about the...
by David Brooks | Aug 4, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
A story in today’s Monitor about the rise in telemedicine (read it here) contains this sentence: In the first month and a half of the pandemic, there was a 11,718% increase in the number of Medicare beneficiaries using telehealth. I always stumble over...
by David Brooks | Aug 4, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
To be honest, back in March, I thought COVID-19 would be calming down by now. I knew the disease wouldn’t be gone – that will take effective vaccines – but I figured warm weather and months of experience would reduce its impact on our lives. Instead, the coronavirus...
by David Brooks | Aug 3, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
A Seacoast Online story about tensions about crowding on the state’s ocean beaches starts with the line “New Hampshire’s Atlantic coastline, the smallest in New England, is just 13 miles long, or 18.5 miles if you include inlets,” which made me sit...
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