Numerical Explorations

I am sure that the brilliant scientists at our national laboratories (Argonne, Los Alamos, Jet Propulsion, Oakridge, etc.) have numerous parameter-less models of our current pandemic, but I offer one more, a decision tree learner.

Attributes

1. Age
2. Assets (a measure of wealth and the ability to afford great healthcare)
3. City (or Urban or Rural)
4. Employment Status
5. Gender
6. Health (Likert Scale 1 [bad] – 10 [excellent])
7. State or territory
8. Wears a mask in shopping public (yes, no)
9. Workplace (home, office, outdoors)

Build an ID3 or C4 decision tree using data from 50 days past (training examples), different set of 25 examples as a test set.

Disclaimer: I ordered 10 N95 masks from I believe a U.S. vendor on Amazon. The masks are scheduled to be delivered from Chi-town (Chicago, Illinois) between May 28, 2020 and June 1, 2020. Therefore, I cannot go in store grocery shopping at Kroger or Publix in good conscience not wearing an N95 mask.

I ordered Publix groceries for curbside delivery twice this week at a cost of around $40 per virtual store visit. I only received about 20 items in total. Publix is awfully expensive due to worker ownership of the chain. I am willing to pay more to help the workers-owners. However, this is not a wise way to purchase food for a person living on the government dole like me (SSI < $800 per month). It is terribly sad there is no federal government employee niche I could weasel my way into fitting. Such is life or in French c’est la vie!

A female under the influence of a “date rape drug” cannot make an informed consent to have sex. I believe an insane person not properly medicated cannot make an informed consent to allow someone to pawn nearly all his worldly possessions. I think multiple felonies and misdemeanors were committed in the disappearance of my guitars and other items from my apartment. Either Cyndi(a) or my sister Susan are lying about the whereabouts of my worldly goods. I lost at least $7,000 or more in the theft of my three missing guitars. Somebody needs to pay a stiff penalty for that egregious act against a mentally ill individual. Deputy Webb needs to be questioned about why he allowed my car keys to be given to someone associated with Cyndi(a) and protected by evidently a bankrupt and/or corrupt local legal system.

The Battle of Jutland between the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy Grand Fleet and the German Kaiser’s German Imperial Navy’s High Seas Fleet occurred on May 31, 1916. The commanders were Admiral Sir John Jellicoe and Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer, respectively. The battle lasted until June 1, 1916 and was broken into three phases or actions: the battlecruisers engagement, the fleet action, and the night action. The Battle of Jutland is one of the largest naval battles in history. It was very bloody and gory.

For more information on this large-scale battleship and battlecruiser naval clash look at the following website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland

and Bing or Google “Battle of Jutland” for YouTube videos and other websites. I remember last year in the period June 12, 2019 and October 17, 2019, Merry Sue Bracken looked up the Battle of Jutland and Scapa Floe, Scotland base of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet for me numerous times. She expressed an interested in visiting the beautiful and desolate Scapa Floe (Flow in High English, not Scottish dialect of English). Once when I stated the great naval battle occurred in 1914 to Merry Sue Bracken and Matthew “Matt” Riding, Matt corrected the date to 1916.

I read a real or fake news online article also known as post claiming the United States may start above or more likely below ground testing of nuclear weapons. This is my two cents worth of advice to our Commander-in-Chief President Donald J. Trump.

Dear President Trump,

I wonder if we, the United States of North America, want to get into the actual nuclear testing quagmire anytime soon. I believe that the nuclear physicists and engineers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are able with the assistance of supercomputers to virtually test a nuclear warhead of standard design and implementation. These simulations are, I understand, very realistic, rigorous, and render factual results. However, if we have new and very novel designs and builds for low yield thermonuclear devices, we may need to do some sort of physical underground  testing. I do not think that our great chemist and a strong proponent of the 1965, 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Nobel Laureate twice Dr. Linus Pauling, PhD, would approve of the United States abrogating that long standing treaty.

Sincerely,

James Pate Williams, Jr.

The great socioeconomic levelers of all time are economic depression, famine, plague, revolution, and total war. Before delving into more ancient history, let us consider the United States in the era, 1929 to 1955. There was a lot of speculation and greed acting on Wall Street (the stock market) in 1929 and the ballooning stock prices could not be sustained so the market had a nearly fatal crash. That was early beginnings of our nearly a decade long economic depression. We were led out of the depression by the drums of war and our saber rattling in the East and West. Eventually, we entered World War II on December 8, 1941, which is twelve years before my birth coincidentally. We had a vast new middle class to come out of the war with GI Bill for education setting the standard for educating a lot of returning veterans of foreign wars. Unfortunately, that robust middle class no longer exists.

In recent time famine has led to our police actions in Africa especially in Somalia which is the ancestral home of the Barbary pirates and oil tanker pirates of today. On October 3, 1993, we had a bad setback in our attempts to render food aid to the Somali starving people. We entered Mogadishu the Somali capital to rescue downed helicopter with SEAL Team 6 members and Naval flight crew. Famine in Africa has been the driving force in some African revolutions.

We are in dire economic straits due the SARS Coronavirus-19, 20 and the sickness it causes, Covid-19, which is currently plaguing our country. We also have lost a lot of our Constitutional rights because of the near marshal law we are now under.

The United States Revolutionary War which began in earnest with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, changed our socioeconomic hierarchy. After the war there were a lot of shopkeepers in business who formed a basis of our middle class. The French Revolution was a blood and gore affair also. The royalty and other aristocrats were executed. That revolution was ended when Napoleon Bonaparte stole the show and declared war on all of Europe. The October Revolution (Bolshevik Coup) of November 3-4, 1917, installed Lenin as a supreme power and was the beginning of several pogroms and the ending of Tsarists epoch in Mother Russia. Most of the dictators that followed Lenin turned out to be mass murderers and purveyors of terror.

The United States was changed dramatically by our participation in World War I and World War II. After World War II we helped rebuild Europe and Japan with our Marshall Plan. We entered an era where a large and robust middle class was a direct product of World War II.

Why do the U. S. citizenry and residents’ worship and so generously reimburse celebrities, professional entertainers and sports stars, and the U. K. royal family? It is sickening to me to see vast wealth being accumulated by those that have no claim to fame other than initial family wealth and good genetics. Many worship ephemeral traits such as female and male aesthetics (beauty), artistic and sports abilities, or the ability to write a spellbinding novel or movie.

The real heroes are those individuals who volunteer to fight and quite possibly die upholding our national interests, principles, and values (about 1 – 2% of the population currently in the military). Another even larger set of heroic people are our healthcare providers. Also let us not forget the instructors, parents and other family members, professors, teachers, and other mentors that helped to mold us into who we are today.

I have many heroes in my extended family tree. My kin volunteered for military duty and other forms of service such as being medical doctors. My great-grandfather Jordan was trained in medicine after the Civil War in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Jordan like many country doctors of his day performed practically the whole spectrum of medical arts and sciences of the times. He especially was known in Clay and Randolph counties in Eastern Central Alabama as an excellent doctor to deliver babies. My niece on my deceased sister (died recently of ALS) is a medical doctor in Georgia and was a general surgeon until just a while ago. While in medical school at the Medical College of Georgia, she volunteered with Doctors Without Borders and was on an assignment to Honduras.

I wonder if Alexandra Bracken is on Merry Sue Bracken’s family tree:

http://www.alexandrabracken.com/

The age differential is only fourteen years so Merry could be an aunt or even a sister of Alexandra. Another wilder theory is that Merry was the young teenage mother of Alexandra, although Merry told me she had two sons: one twenty years old and the other twenty-five.

I recall that Merry told me “You cannot help who you love”. Well our culture and society set artificial and legitimate boundaries on who you can love. One sane relationship fence is the  age of consent. I believe nowadays the age of consent should be federally set at twenty-one for all U.S. citizens and residents. That way women can get educated before worrying about their biological clocks and having children. The same principle and restrictions should apply to males also. Of course, another smart restriction has to do with fraternization in the military, public, and perhaps private sectors of our democratic republic. A superior should not have sexual relationships with someone under her/his command.

There are quite a few distinguished individuals on my maternal side (Jordan) of my extended family, but their names are not in history books nor the tabloids.

My sister wants me to have a DNA analysis performed to check my paternal side (Williams). According to my theory or paranoia the federal or state government has already secretly done a partial genome mapping of me.

I think that Dr. Yvonne Marie or Maria (no time to check) Greene, MD is perhaps 51 years and probably still married to a distinguished and brilliant medical doctor who also holds a doctor of philosophy degree. As far as I know she is on leave or retired from the Veterans Administration and hospital therapy work in Clayton County and now works for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. In my research the nearest match for her maiden last name is Dudac (? spelling).

This may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the states and the federal government could be amassing a large DNA database disguised as Covid-19 antibody testing. There is a stigma attached to having a positive or false positive test for the virus SARS Conronavirus-19, 20. A few weeks ago a moratorium was placed on positive qualitative Covid-19 test takers trying to voluntarily enter the military. We need an inexpensive quantitative test for virus genome and the viral load. Vaccines are genotype (strain) specific. Remember that the SARS Conronavirus-19, 20 is a single strand positive sense messenger RNA type of virus. Last I read the virus had mutated to include at least seven genotypes. It is a rapidly evolving in humans RNA virus so there could be more genotypes around now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_virus

One my almost lifelong friends is a world class art collector specializing in African American works on paper. He owns and operates the Cochran Gallery downtown on the Marquis de La Fayette Square. It is opposite the Courtyard by Marriott. His Facebook page is:

https://www.facebook.com/TheCochranGallery/

His webpage which I did most of the creation along with Ray Sullivan’s wonderful high-resolution digital photographs is:

http://thecochrancollection.com/

Anyway, Wes and Missy Cochran are going to soon host a new exhibit of photographs by Bruce Checefsky. Bruce is a world-renowned photographer using digital devices, such as printer scanners.

https://www.mocp.org/collection/mpp/past/checefsky__bruce.php