Grigory Lukin.com

Saturday night.

I just got eaten by zombies. To be more specific, my avatar in the 7 Days to Die game took one wrong step, fell off the roof during the seventh-day feeding frenzy, and got devoured by zombies after the famous last stand. (Alas, zombies respawn faster than I can reload.) I play the game by my own rules, and even though the main character gets resurrected, for me one death is final and the game is effectively over. (Can you tell that I’m training for a real-world zombocalypse? Heh.) That was 31.5 hours well spent, eh.

I’m going to try something new tomorrow: zero social media and zero gaming. Those are fine ways to waste time, but they’re like fast-food: technically food, but the least nutritious kind. I feel like after discovering a low-key announcement about a vaccine trial on Reddit (it doesn’t seem to be advertised elsewhere online), I’ve officially reached the highest level of social media addiction. Who knows, I might finally catch up on my reading or other stuff.

Lessons in laziness: I found out the hard way that doing a dumbbell chest press while lying down on a very soft mattress will just make sink deeper into the mattress, and won’t result in a very efficient workout. (It must have looked hilarious, though.) Or, to spin this the other way, I’ve conducted a brilliantly simple science experiment that showed how the fabric of time and space (and/or my mattress) gets affected by increased gravity. Yeah. It was definitely a science experiment and not a case of laziness gone hilariously wrong.

In covid news, after a great deal of confusion about Canada’s unilateral and unique decision to extend the gap between two vaccine shots to four months, there’s a PR piece in the news. To summarize, a maverick scientist (Dr. Danuta Skowronski) claims that she could “correct” Pfizer’s raw data where no one else in the world could. She claims she deduced the effectiveness of just a single dose (92%, not 52% as Pfizer claims), and that’s now being touted as the newest explanation for this weird, weird decision. I would’ve been a lot more comfortable with (and accepting of) this explanation had Dr. Skowronski not used the word “art” when describing her allegedly scientific approach. In her response to Dr. Mona Nemer (who called this a “population level experiment”), Skowronski said “The comment from the chief science adviser was most unfortunate,” said Skowronski. “It did not reflect the careful risk-benefit analysis that went into this decision, and frankly, that is a science and an art to be able to do that.” 

Call me old-fashioned, or cynical, or too bitter to live, but when you a) claim that you alone saw something that literally every other scientist in the world missed, and b) say there’s “a science and an art” to your methodology, that seems like a bit of a red flag. It’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong and Dr. Skowronski is completely right – but when the entire country’s vaccination strategy hinges on this… It’s a bit lie the uncomfortable sensation you might get if your pilot starts saying flat-earth gibberish over the intercom in the middle of a flight: maybe it’ll have zero effect on his plane-flying (and more importantly, landing) expertise, or maybe that’s a sign of something pretty damn bad.

In other Canadian news, this article explains why Toronto still hasn’t vaccinated everyone over the age of 80. (If you recall, my mom, who is 67 years old and lives near Seattle, got her first shot a couple of weeks ago.) In a nutshell, there was some really bad distribution modeling: vaccines got spread evenly across the province, even though some regions had far lower covid cases, and some places (such as Toronto) have a much higher concentration of elderly and other high-risk groups. That attempt at perfectly fair distribution may have made sense on paper but it didn’t account for reality. (See also: Robert McNamara and his disastrous planning during the Vietnam War.) Toronto has over 120,000 folks who are over 80: we’re six days into March, and that cohort is still not fully vaccinated… I really, really want to believe that this is a small hiccup, an exception in the long series of other, completely unrelated exceptions, and that the rest of the vaccine rollout will go without a hitch. Time will tell.

Have a good second half of your weekend, y’all.

Friday night, for what it’s worth.

Today was incredibly hectic, work-wise, but at least I managed to find some time to call the covid vaccine trial people. I’m in! This will be a phase-1 trial for an eVLP-based (enveloped virus-like particles) vaccine. The trial will run for a year, and there’s a 66% chance I will get the real deal and not the placebo. (Then there’s a 50-50 chance that I get two shots of the experimental vaccine, or one shot of the vaccine and one placebo.) They’ll actually pay me for participation, too, which is something I hadn’t even considered. I passed the phone screening: the initial screening at their office will be at 7am on Tuesday. (The best way to make that align with my work schedule.) This is exciting!

I won’t know whether I got the real deal or the placebo until much later on, and there’ll be no way to find out exactly how efficient this thing is until maybe a year from now. Still, though: I spent 10 years of my life in Nevada, and I know all about stacking the odds in my favour. There’ll be a 66% chance that I’ll receive some protection against covid, if only minimal. That beats the 0% protection I have here and now.

At work, there’s an email thread where folks describe the things they’ve learned and done during the pandemic. A couple of guys made some wooden furniture. Someone else turned the basement in his new house into a maker-space, 3D printers and all. Someone else learned to make amazing pies. Someone else taught himself all about glazing and started creating beautiful glazed vases in his furnace. (Most of Amazon’s tech employees can afford a hobby if they get really into it. Heh.) Someone else ran through almost every street in West Seattle. The winner of that informal contest is the guy who fulfilled his old dream and got his Bachelor of Science degree by taking a ton of online courses over the course of six months. That right there is impressive. That email thread was filled with self-reported examples, and chances are the other 95% watched it but didn’t contribute. (I don’t have much to add aside from my broken Spanish and French, as well as buckets of minerals I collected.) I’m trying to convince myself that I haven’t wasted this almost-year of lockdown, since the main objective was to stay alive and not spread the virus. That self-mantra is mostly working.

In covid news, today was filled with some remarkably great news for Canada, eh. Canada has approved its fourth vaccine, the one-shot Johnson&Johnson, adding it to Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. On top of that, Trudeau announced that Pfizer will move up its delivery of 3.5 million doses: they were originally scheduled for this summer, but they’ll get here within three months. An extra 1.5 million of Pfizer doses will get here in March.

With all this happening at once, the official timeline has improved: now the promise is to get every Canadian their first shot by June 20th. The announcement rollout got a bit waffled, and it’s not altogether clear if that’ll be for absolutely everyone or just for every high-risk individual out there. (BIPOC folks, the elderly, those who are immunocompromised, etc.) Hopefully it’s the former. The real question now is whether provinces will be able to distribute all these doses quickly and efficiently. Ontario is still 10 days away from launching a site to sign up for vaccinations… I’m trying to adjust to this burst of optimistic news after a remarkably sad February. (You’ve probably noticed the change in tone over the past few weeks as bad news kept coming.) I’m trying not to get too hopeful because Ontario’s government, led by the college dropout Doug Ford, has shown remarkable tendency to sabotage itself. But if the June 20th promise holds… Huh. On top of the 66% likelihood of some kind of immunity from the vaccine trial, I might also get my first shot in just over 100 days. That’s still so very, very far, and yet much closer than September.

In the US, another state has decided to throw caution to the wind and open up everything: this time it’s Arizona. It’s following Texas and Mississippi in their bizarre mission to trade their own people’s health for extra revenue. I recently saw a great analogy: this is a real-life large-scale marshmallow experiment. They can reopen now and get some fun and entertainment, but if they wait just a few more months and reopen once enough people have been vaccinated, they’ll get to have so much more fun – and far fewer covid deaths. I’m well aware that not everyone thinks like me or shares my priorities, but still… It’s baffling, absolutely baffling that governors of three large states, with all the doctors and scientists to advise them, would do something so catastrophically stupid. I think other states will join them soon, if only because their people will demand it. And the neighbouring states might see spikes in infections as folks cross the state lines to fill their need for maskless entertainment. Not for the first time and certainly not the last – WTF, USA?

Enjoy your weekend, y’all.

Tuesday night.

This is the kind of busy, work-jammed week where you have to stop and check to see what day this is. It is, in fact, Tuesday.

…it will never cease to amaze me that if you want to buy a six-pack of cider after a particularly stressful day here in Canada, you have to get to the nearest government-run alcohol distribution centre (closed at night and on holidays) instead of, say, just walking up to the nearest convenience store. Heh.

I might have discovered a fun new hobby. Last night, I saw someone on social media mention a US consulate, and it hit me. I’m a US citizen, I still pay my US taxes, so maybe the consulate can help me, right? (Spoiler alert: wrong.) The good news is that they replied to my email (“covid-19 vaccinations for US citizens in Toronto?”) in record time: I emailed them at night and got the reply at 8am. The bad news is that they told me to get lost. Officially, what they told me was “The United States Government does not plan to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to private U.S. citizens overseas. Please follow Canadian developments and guidelines for COVID-19 vaccination.” Unofficially, they may as well have told me to stop bothering them.

According to this federal report, as of 2018 there were over 860,000 Americans living in Canada. That’s more than the population of Wyoming. And because America is such an odd animal, all American expats must pay US taxes forevermore unless they surrender their citizenship. Can you imagine the sheer outrage if the White House told Wyoming that it wouldn’t get any vaccines? Yeah, me neither.

So, righteously pissed off and all, I decided to do something I’ve never, ever done before: contact my elected representatives. I sent out requests for help to my congresswoman, to both of my senators (I still pay property taxes on my condo near Seattle, damn it), and tweeted at the US embassy in Canada. (The US is currently in between ambassadors.) The embassy itself doesn’t stay open 24/7, apparently, so I’ll call them again tomorrow. I really, really don’t want to turn into a male version of Karen (albeit one with a poli-sci degree), but I’m not proud, and I’ll take any option I can think of when the main stratagem fails. And once those options fail, I’ll think of some more. To be fair, I think there’s a low chance of this working out – but this chance is greater than zero. I don’t want to have to wait until September to get my first dose, followed by four more months for the second dose in goddamn January – and that’s assuming their logistical desperation doesn’t spawn any more brilliant ideas. I can just imagine them trying to keep a straight face while telling the cameras that actually, one year between two shots is the optimal way to go.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe Canada will get it together and get everyone vaccinated by June, just barely behind the US. So far, though, there hasn’t been a single logistical success. All the current official timelines say either September or “don’t you worry your pretty little head about that” when folks ask general Hillier when Ontarians under 60 might get vaccinated. I’m tired of complacency.

In covid news, a fun two-fer development from the US. First, Dr Fauci very politely said that there’s no way the US is jumping aboard the crazy train with the four-month vaccine gap suggestion. He politely but strongly rebuked that suggestion and said, “What we have right now, and what we must go with, is the scientific data that we’ve accumulated. And it’s really solid.” Meanwhile, Biden announced that the US would have enough Covid-19 vaccine doses for every adult American by the end of May. (That’s just the supply, though. It’ll take longer to distribute them.) He also said that Merck would help manufacture Johnson&Johnson’s vaccine to help make as many doses as possible. I don’t know much about pharmaceutical companies, but that sounds like a very rare kind of partnership. Good for them, eh.

And almost forgot – Texas keeps fighting Florida for the title of the stupidest state in the union. Texas governor Greg Abbott signed an executive order that would do away with masks entirely (can’t penalize anti-maskers, so it’s basically free for all) and would open up all businesses. The sole tiny concession to sanity is that local authorities can still limit business capacity if their county has a lot of covid hospitalizations, but even then they can’t limit a business’s capacity by more than 50%. This is madness. All of this is because Texas has managed to vaccinate 20% of its population. A karaoke bar that’s half-full can still generate new covid clusters. People will almost certainly die because of this, because he couldn’t wait just a couple more months. Abbott’s reelection will be next November, which is no time at all in political terms. Does he really think people will remember his so-called leadership positively? Hell, maybe he’s right. Maybe they’ll only remember that he let them out to party months ahead of schedule (woo, spring break!) while also ignoring the fact that their grandma died two weeks later.

Stay safe and out of Texas, y’all, eh?

Sunday night.

I have achieved either peak efficiency or peak laziness. (It can be really hard to tell them apart.) Instead of driving to the grocery store two miles away, I’ve decided to start driving to the store that’s literally three blocks away. It keeps the car battery mildly active, and there’s less risk of getting hit in the crazy Toronto traffic. Besides, there’s only so much food I can carry myself, eh. Ahhh, the adventurous quarantine life…

I’ve dipped into my emergency video game reserves and reinstalled CS:GO (Counter Strike: Global Offensive.) This game was released in 2000, and it’s changed a fair bit since I last played it three years ago. It features the perpetually fighting groups of terrorists and counter-terrorists: there’s essentially zero backstory, no chance to sit down and talk it out, and if you get killed, you’ll just respawn to try again next round. It’s a modern-day Valhalla simulator, just without any feasting or drinking. (You can kill chickens if you’re so inclined.) I remember playing that game in Russian cyber-cafes as a 14-year-old teen… It’s been 20 years now. So much has changed, so much has stayed the same. I wonder if I’ll still dip my toes into those highly addictive CS:GO waters in 2041, in 2061, in 2081… How different will the world be then? Either way, this game alone should help fill many weeks: it was designed to be engaging and addicting, and the occasional headset chatter of fellow players is a nice, if tiny, connection to humanity.

My favourite astronomer, Dr. Katie Mack, has replied to one of my tweets and retweeted me. Today has been worthwhile. (Well, that, and an investing-related post I made on Reddit got so many virtual awards that it’s basically a Christmas tree now. Yay social media.

In covid news, a lot of press has been about western Europe and North America, with very little coverage for other countries. That seems to be changing somewhat. This report on Tanzania paints a disturbing picture: they haven’t published covid statistics since May, there’s no testing, and their president (John Magufuli, who just won a sketchy reelection) claims the vaccines are dangerous and that prayer can cure covid. There’s much more to dig into there, but purely anecdotally, there sure is a lot of pneumonia deaths in Tanzania… Situations like this one are really skewing Africa’s true covid death toll. Earlier in the pandemic, it was a bit of a mystery why covid largely avoided African countries. Now we know it was most likely just severe under-reporting.

And meanwhile, there’s an unfolding disaster in the Czech Republic, where the covid death rate is among the highest in the world. It looks like their government followed the US closely (intentionally or otherwise): there was no mask mandate, businesses were reopened prematurely, and reactive rather than proactive measures. Their hospitals are overflowing now, and things don’t look that great. I’m not posting these things as some sort of macabre death porn: I’m doing this because it’s important to remember that even as some countries are vaccinating millions of people and aiming to end their pandemic by the end of the year, many others are still struggling to survive and don’t have much to look forward to…

Here is to a whole new month, y’all.