Fascine Mattresses: Basketry Gone Wild

A fascinating overview of a Dutch engineering practice dating back centuries. Large woven mats of willow twigs, called fascine mattresses, were sunk to the bottom of rivers or near dykes to prevent erosion. Fascine mattresses have been used for at least 400 years and experts expect that some of these original mattresses are still in use. Willow wood is highly resistant to decomposition in salt water. In the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of square metres of mattresses were added in the Wadden area and millions more in the rivers of the Netherlands. Much more at the link, including pictures and diagrams of fascine mattresses.

The Code That Controls Your Money

In the 1960’s, banks began using computers to process daily transactions. Most of these computer programs were written using COBOL, a human-readable programming language that was very popular at the time. In the decades since, many more programming languages have been developed that are preferred by software engineers. COBOL is no longer taught outside of some niche schools and classes. Yet, the original COBOL programs are still used by banks to this day. Over the years they have been debugged countless times and are now some of the most reliable computer programs that we use. The problem is that the people who wrote these programs are well into retirement or have passed away. There are not enough new COBOL programmers to replace them. Moving the codebase that runs the banks to a more modern language is an investment on the order of many years and billions of dollars for each bank, with the added risk of downtime and data corruption. A classic case of kicking the can down the road with potentially disastrous consequences.

Omicron: My Current Model

I’ve followed Zvi’s blogging on the COVID-19 pandemic periodically for the past two years. Now, with the rise of Omicron, it’s required reading. As a formal professional sports gambler, he has the phenomenal ability to distill a large set of data and information into understandable and actionable pieces. The linked article is his current understanding of Omicron (as of Dec 28) and some predictions for the coming weeks and months. A few highlights quoted below, do read the whole thing (italics are my comments/emphasis):

• You are probably going to get Omicron, if you haven’t had it already. The level of precaution necessary to change this assessment is very high, and you probably don’t want to pay that price (i.e. not leaving the home for any reason, unless you’re wearing a P100 respirator).
• There are a ton more cases out there than are being reported. Hard to tell exactly how many, but it’s a lot more. In addition to missing a lot of cases, being several days behind can mean you’re at several times more risk than it otherwise looks like at any given time, until things stabilize. So looking at current positive tests can be an order of magnitude or more too low.
• Vaccination with one or two doses of current vaccines is minimally protective against infection by Omicron. The data isn’t fully in, but this seems clear. If you haven’t been boosted, your protection is mostly against severe disease, hospitalization and death, rather than infection, although you’re somewhat less likely to spread the disease further because you’ll recover faster.
• Vaccination with three doses is protective against infection by Omicron, but less protective than vaccines were against Delta. As a rule of thumb I am currently acting as if a booster shot is something like 60%-70% protective against infection but I don’t have confidence in that number. The main protection is still against severe disease, hospitalization and death.
• The generation time (serial interval) of Omicron is lower than Delta. Someone who is infected today will often be highly contagious the day after tomorrow, and may be infectious tomorrow. Much of infectiousness proceeds symptoms. Omicron is probably substantially milder than Delta. My guess is something like 50% milder, so half the risks. How much comfort that provides is your call.
• Being young is still the best defense. Everyone please stop being terrified about what might happen to young children. Most deaths will still be among the old and unhealthy. Remember that these are orders of magnitude differences.
• Previous infection, including by Delta, is highly protective as well. It’s at least similar to being vaccinated normally. Unclear if it’s better than that. (By the end of this wave, we should be at a significantly higher level of herd immunity since most unvaccinated people will have contracted the virus)
• Taking action to ‘stop the spread’ mostly no longer makes sense. The spread isn’t going to be stopped, that ship has very much sailed. Slowing it down a bit has some value, but ‘pandemic ethics’ no longer apply.