I’ve seen many articles on the mortality rate of Covid-19, either nationally or globally, but what I haven’t been able to find is the mortality rate of the Omicron variant for the county I live in, which is a much more relevant piece of information. Now before we get into what I found, here are some caveats: I am not a doctor. I am not a virologist. I am not a statistician.

Polarization I pretty much nailed all my predictions for 2021, in particular I wrote about right-wing extremism: I fully expect Trump, unconstrained by the people that surround him in the White House today, to become even more unhinged and try to inspire even more violent acts of terrorism." I wrote that two weeks before Jan 6th. I also wrote about the roots of that violence as a loss of power:

Perfetto and the SQL processing built into trace_processor are both fantastic, but two of the most important parts of that SQL processing are not well documented, at least for my simple brain. The first feature is SPAN_JOIN which is described as: Span join is a custom operator table which computes the intersection of spans of time from two tables or views. There is a nice diagram showing how the spans are combined:

I want to generate a random integer valued \( n \times n \) matrix \( A \) whose inverse is also an integer valued matrix, i.e. how can I generate Unimodular matrices? The key is starting with an \( n \times n \) identity matrix \( I \), which has a determinant of 1. Then you can apply row operations to \( I \) that keep the determinant 1, i.e. by picking row operations that are expressible as multiplication by a matrix that also has a determinant of 1 with integer components.

Remember that nauseous feeling you had on waking up on Nov 5, 2016 to a Trump presidency? For me, the root of that nausea was the dawning realization that a majority of my fellow Americans were deeply racist, or at least there was enough of them to propel Trump to the highest office in the land. I’m not naive, I always knew there were racist people, but I presumed they weren’t a majority, they were a minority, and a shrinking minority at that.