Update: Today is the last day of the year and here’s what the data (latest) looks like today:

Some “surge”, eh?

Update #2 (January 7th): 12 days have passed. Let’s revisit the data from the official source.

Is this a surge?

Source

2022 will surely be even worse, seeing that yesterday we had an all-time high of nearly 80,000 confirmed cases in just one day

See: Mass infection is not an option: we must do more to protect our young

Source data: NHS (official)

Data source: NHS

My interpretation: The vaccines did lower the numbers, but not by much. Number patients in mechanical ventilation beds right now: 900+. Same time last year (before AZ mass vaccination): 1,200+.

It’s an improvement, but not a massive improvement. Considering we now know a lot more about how to treat COVID-19 patients.

I keep watching the excess deaths/mortality figures, which are summarised in a weekly report here (updated every Thursday).

It’s not about bashing anything, it’s about analysing the data to understand the science and reject dogmatic business marketing.

Comparing July to present in 2020 and in 2021:

Source chart and document:

o, I didn’t ask that, but sometimes people ask me that. You too may have come across people who ask that question. Here is my typical, respectable verbal response (I wrote the text below quickly in one pass), which is likely to spread reason into people who are more resistant to it. Being rude is counter-productive.

A hypothetical response would go like this. No, we did not come from monkeys. I don’t believe that and neither should you. You have definitely heard or read a deliberate misrepresentation of what Evolution is. Monkeys and us have common ancestors; in that sense, we have very, very distant cousins. Let us explain how scale reconciles the apparent complexity of this statement. The tree of life connects all forms of life, leading back to life’s origin (and going billions of years back in time). We’ll start at the micro level.

You and your siblings have two common ancestors, assuming a common family structure. You and your cousins share at least a grandparent, i.e. one common ancestor or more. You therefore are likely to have some similarities. Now, imagine going further back 4 generations or about 100 years. A lot of nearby humans share common ancestors with you (from around that time). You might not even know those common ancestors. Now, think of 1,000 years instead of 100 and probably everyone around you has common ancestors with you. Go back 10,000 and the complexity is vast, but almost everyone alive today is somehow connected to you. Going much further back, prior to the origin of what we call “humans” (over 100,000 years ago), one can find common ancestors with other apes, ones we call “monkeys”, which were fit enough to survive in their present form. They are actually very good at what they do, but we cannot grasp this because we are ego-centric in the species sense. We fail to see their unique skills like climbing tress, cooperating, using basic tools and even communicating. Evolution takes us much further back in time (billions of years, not a million or less), tying everything together. DNA evidence helps validate Darwin’s theory as fact, just like the theory of gravity. Believe it or not, all trees are your very, very distant cousins. That’s a beautiful fact, isn’t it?

have put a colleague’s code to use and explored the possibility of doubling the number of points given the vastly faster implementation. Surprisingly, however, with additional points there is somewhat of a struggle to find the correct macro-correspondence, even within real pairs of surfaces that are not so intrinsically different (and 15 levels in the multi-scale approach, coarse-to-fine).

I am running some more experiments that look at what can be refined for better recognition/classification performance. Shown below are segmentations (based on correspondence) of pairs of surfaces with 400 and 600 Voronoi cells.

Overnight I ran a GMDS-intensive experiment to see how good a signal — for discriminative purposes — one can get with a 40-step geodesic dilation iterative process — the type of process that previously gave very good discriminative power (mistake once in about 40 comparisons). It would be heartening to believe that given the right formula (black art of adjusting parameters) GMDS will provide a flawless test, or maybe make up one of a series of tests that achieve it. At the moment, all experiments measure 5 different things at the same time in order to reduce the need to rerun lengthy experiments.