Moore’s Law is the observation by Gordon Moore that the number of circuits on a microchip was doubling every two years while their costs were declining. It has fueled the rapid rise of technology in our daily lives. Many of the advances in so-called “artificial intelligence” are actually byproducts of the increasing power and declining price of hardware rather than improvements in the algorithms that comprise the field of artificial intelligence. Moore’s law is over.

From an article at MIT Technology Review:

“It’s over. This year that became really clear,” says Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT and a pioneer of parallel computing, in which multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous generation of chips with 14-nanometer features. Moore’s Law, Leiserson says, was always about the rate of progress, and “we’re no longer on that rate.” Numerous other prominent computer scientists have also declared Moore’s Law dead in recent years. In early 2019, the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed.

In truth, it’s been more a gradual decline than a sudden death. Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors. In 1999, an Intel researcher worried that the industry’s goal of making transistors smaller than 100 nanometers by 2005 faced fundamental physical problems with “no known solutions,” like the quantum effects of electrons wandering where they shouldn’t be.

For years the chip industry managed to evade these physical roadblocks. New transistor designs were introduced to better corral the electrons. New lithography methods using extreme ultraviolet radiation were invented when the wavelengths of visible light were too thick to precisely carve out silicon features of only a few tens of nanometers. But progress grew ever more expensive. Economists at Stanford and MIT have calculated that the research effort going into upholding Moore’s Law has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971.

Likewise, the fabs that make the most advanced chips are becoming prohibitively pricey. The cost of a fab is rising at around 13% a year, and is expected to reach $16 billion or more by 2022. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in 2010 and 25 in 2002.

If we are to see improvements in technology like those we have seen over the last 40 years, it will need to come from more efficient software. That in turn means that a transition from the present emphasis on producing software at the lowest possible cost to producing the best possible software.

This article by Gideon Rachman at Financial Times makes it clear that annexation has returned to the foreign policy scene:

A recent opinion poll for the Pew Research Center reveals that startling numbers of Europeans are not satisfied with their nation’s borders. Asked whether there are “parts of neighbouring countries that really belong to us”, 67 per cent of Hungarians replied in the affirmative, as did 60 per cent of Greeks, 58 per cent of both Bulgarians and Turks, 53 per cent of Russians and 48 per cent of Poles. Such sentiments even lurk in western Europe — 37 per cent of Spaniards, 36 per cent of Italians and 30 per cent of Germans also agree with the statement.

In normal times, these kinds of ideas would not matter much. Hungarians, for example, can bemoan the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which, as they see it, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of Hungarian land, without believing regaining that territory is a practical idea. The danger is that these are not normal times. The idea of annexation — long taboo in international politics — is creeping back into the global political discussion.

China’s annexation of islands in the South China Sea, Russian seizure of Crimea, Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank, there are dozens of other plans, threats, and initiatives already under way.

IMO what all of this indicates is the end of the Pax Americana. A little less than 30 years ago the U. S. denied Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait. Since then a series of feckless trade and foreign policy decisions have resulted in, at least, a relative decline in American power which is allowing long-festering resentments and nationalistic plans to bubble to the surface all over the world.

When Kara and I were taking our walk on Saturday morning, we came across these yard signs. Something about the names of these candidates running for judges’ seats caught my eye. I just can’t quite put my finger on it.

Roll Call reports that the members of Congress actually agree on something:

A record-setting 403 lawmakers — 75 percent of Capitol Hill — sent companion letters from the Senate and House to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services expressing strong support for Medicare Advantage, the public-private partnership through which more than a third of Medicare beneficiaries receive coverage today.

Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and Mike Kelly, R-Pa., led the letters. The hundreds of co-signers are as ideologically and geographically diverse as the lead authors and were split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans.

This showing of congressional unity amid a polarizing election year should not be missed by the media or the public. At a time when health care policy is increasingly partisan, the supermajority of support behind Medicare Advantage offers us a lesson on the future of health care and where lawmakers can find common ground.

At the Better Medicare Alliance, where I serve as president and CEO, we have long said that Medicare Advantage offers a framework on which to build future health care reforms. It is working for consumers who like the quality coverage and care at an affordable cost, and give it a 94 percent satisfaction rating.

Democratic members of Congress like the security of Medicare Advantage’s coverage, accountability for quality care and its leadership in caring for those individuals with chronic conditions. Enrollees are guaranteed the same benefits as those in traditional Medicare and often receive additional ones such as vision, dental, hearing and wellness programs. Ninety-seven percent of plans provide some combination of these benefits and nearly 6 in 10 offer all four. Most recently, Medicare Advantage has offered services that address social risk factors such as meal delivery, transportation to medical appointments or home care.

Likewise, Republicans on Capitol Hill appreciate the choice that Medicare Advantage offers to consumers, seeing this as an alternative to traditional Medicare’s one-size-fits-all coverage. Private plans can modify their offerings to compete based on quality and cost, enabling beneficiaries to choose the plan that works best for them. Virtually all beneficiaries have access to a Medicare Advantage plan and, for the 2020 open enrollment season, the average beneficiary had 28 plans to choose from based on their unique needs.

Lawmakers of both parties appreciate Medicare Advantage’s cost savings for lower- and modest-income beneficiaries — enrollees save an average of $1,276 a year compared to traditional Medicare — and the ability of plans and providers to innovate new models of care and service delivery, all without adding new costs to the government.

If you are dismayed at the lack of bipartisanship in the Congress, you may find this encouraging. If you think more radical solutions than Medicare Advantage are necessary, you could find it disheartening. It all depends.

If you want to heighten your concern about the coronavirus outbreak, a good place to start would be with Risk Management Systems’s two blog posts on the subject:

The Coronavirus Outbreak: Part One – Modeling “Spotting”
The Coronavirus Outbreak: Part Two – Self-Isolation and Quarantine

If anyone has access to an unfirewalled copy of the company’s report on this topic, I’d be very interested in reading it. I don’t know whether the professional catstrophists at RMS are just acting from an abundance of foresight or overreacting but it’s certainly interesting.

To me they’re bringing up a question. Based on the admittedly unreliable information at hand, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 is doubling every couple of weeks. Let’s not talk about mortality. Let’s just talk about cases. How many cases would it take before it overwhelms our health care system?

At CNN Joe Lockhart makes an urgent plea—help us Obiwan Kenobi Mike Bloomberg! You’re our only hope:

In any political campaign, candidates need to know what they stand for, and who — or what — they’re up against. At this stage in the game for Bloomberg, that enemy is not Trump. It’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and the election calendar.

If Bloomberg wants to make it past the Democratic National Convention in July, his strategy needs to change –quickly. His first objective is to nab the nomination, and to do that, he needs to direct his resources to take down Sanders before he even has a chance at Trump.

As it stands, Sanders has a chance to run the table as the rest of the field fights each other for the honor of coming in second. Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner, and his support stands at 25% among Democrats and independents who lean Democratic, according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll.

But that’s not enough to win the general election. I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump. In a general election battle between two divisive figures who both preach the politics of grievance, I believe Trump will win the battle to the bottom and remain the last man standing.

or, said another way, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party. That’s what Rahm Emanuel has been warning about for over a month.

Or, said yet another way, we have a choice between orange and red.

Today marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo which began on February 23, 1836. The event is an important part of the foundation myth of the Republic of Texas so, consequently, of the State of Texas which succeeded it. I’m sure that much of what I’m about to write would be considered rank heresy by good Texans.

There were actually three different groups involved in the Texas Revolution of which the Battle of the Alamo was one of the signal incidents: Texians, Tejanos, and Mexicans. “Texians” were Americans who had moved west, many promoting the cotton culture. Tejanos were people of Spanish descent, indigenous descent, and mestizos who had lived in Texas for generations. The Tejanos were not well-treated by the Mexican military, whose officers were mostly Spanish or French aristocrats, and so joined with the Texians in revolution against the Mexican government which was rapidly centralizing its own authority.

Most modern-day Americans know little of the cotton culture other than slavery or what they saw in Gone With the Wind but slavery was not its only malignant feature. Cotton, due to the considerable water requirements for its cultivation, is very hard on the environment. A few decades of cotton monoculture exhausts the soil. That’s why cotton cultivation was continually on the move, first from George to Alabama and Mississippi, then to Texas, New Mexico, and California. They had to move to find land capable of supporting cotton cultivation after wrecking the old fields. The environmental problems of cotton cultivation are as much a problem in Egypt and India of today as they were in the Alabama and Mississippi of 150 years ago.

So slavery, despoiling the land, an aristocracy, and continually expansionist. There is a lot not to like about the culture being promoted by the Texians.

The Mexicans were worse, if anything. They represented the far away government in Mexico City, they were royalists and aristocrats, they treated the Tejanos quite harshly following the first revolution twenty years previously, but they opposed slavery which was something.

Consequently, the way I see the Battle of the Alamo is that the Texians defending the Alamo gave their lives bravely for a cause which was at the best questionable. That’s what’s being commemorated.

That’s largely the way I see history. Not a story of inexorable improvement and the victory of good over evil with white-hatted heroes and evil, mustache-twirling black-hatted villains but events in which there are no obvious heroes or villains, merely people. Not much of a rallying cry but that’s what I remember when I remember the Alamo.

I found this article in Scientific American, a sort of status report on the War on Cancer, interesting:

Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected).

Research funding has also surged. The budget of the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency founded in 1937, now totals over $6 billion/year. That is a fraction of the total spent on research by nonprofit foundations ($6 billion a year, according to 2019 study), private firms and other government agencies. Total research spending since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971 exceeds a quarter trillion dollars, according to a 2016 estimate.

Cancer-industry boosters claim that investments in research, testing and treatment have led to “incredible progress” and millions of “cancer deaths averted,” as the homepage of the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit that receives money from biomedical firms, puts it. A 2016 study found that cancer experts and the media often describe new treatments with terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” “miracle,” “cure,” “home run,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” “life saver,” “groundbreaking” and “marvel.”

There are more than 1,200 accredited cancer centers in the U.S. They spent $173 million on television and magazine ads directed at the public in 2014, according to a 2018 study, and 43 of the 48 top spenders “deceptively promot[ed] atypical patient experiences through the use of powerful testimonials.” A 2014 study concluded that cancer centers “frequently promote cancer therapy with emotional appeals that evoke hope and fear while rarely providing information about risks, benefits, costs, or insurance availability.”

Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected).

Research funding has also surged. The budget of the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency founded in 1937, now totals over $6 billion/year. That is a fraction of the total spent on research by nonprofit foundations ($6 billion a year, according to 2019 study), private firms and other government agencies. Total research spending since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971 exceeds a quarter trillion dollars, according to a 2016 estimate.

Cancer-industry boosters claim that investments in research, testing and treatment have led to “incredible progress” and millions of “cancer deaths averted,” as the homepage of the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit that receives money from biomedical firms, puts it. A 2016 study found that cancer experts and the media often describe new treatments with terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” “miracle,” “cure,” “home run,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” “life saver,” “groundbreaking” and “marvel.”

There are more than 1,200 accredited cancer centers in the U.S. They spent $173 million on television and magazine ads directed at the public in 2014, according to a 2018 study, and 43 of the 48 top spenders “deceptively promot[ed] atypical patient experiences through the use of powerful testimonials.” A 2014 study concluded that cancer centers “frequently promote cancer therapy with emotional appeals that evoke hope and fear while rarely providing information about risks, benefits, costs, or insurance availability.”

Cancer has spawned a huge industrial complex involving government agencies, pharmaceutical and biomedical firms, hospitals and clinics, universities, professional societies, nonprofit foundations and media. The costs of cancer care have surged 40 percent in the last decade, from $125 billion in 2010 to $175 billion in 2020 (projected).

Research funding has also surged. The budget of the National Cancer Institute, a federal agency founded in 1937, now totals over $6 billion/year. That is a fraction of the total spent on research by nonprofit foundations ($6 billion a year, according to 2019 study), private firms and other government agencies. Total research spending since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” in 1971 exceeds a quarter trillion dollars, according to a 2016 estimate.

Cancer-industry boosters claim that investments in research, testing and treatment have led to “incredible progress” and millions of “cancer deaths averted,” as the homepage of the American Cancer Society, a nonprofit that receives money from biomedical firms, puts it. A 2016 study found that cancer experts and the media often describe new treatments with terms such as “breakthrough,” “game changer,” “miracle,” “cure,” “home run,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” “life saver,” “groundbreaking” and “marvel.”

What’s the reality behind the hype? “No one is winning the war on cancer,” Azra Raza, an oncologist at Columbia, asserts in her 2019 book The First Cell: And the Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last. Claims of progress are “mostly hype, the same rhetoric from the same self-important voices for the past half century.” Trials have yielded improved treatments for childhood cancers and specific cancers of the blood, bone-marrow and lymph systems, Raza notes. But these successes, which involve uncommon cancers, are exceptions among a “litany of failures.”

The article continues with a discussion of mortality rates. IMO a fair report would say that the results are mixed. Some effective treatments have been developed for some cancers. The progress on other cancers is negligible.

I guess what you think of the results of the “war on cancer” depends on your own experiences. If you, your child, your spouse, or your parent are alive today because of it, you probably think it was worth every penny. The answer is likely the same if you’re a medical professional.

As a pathologist buddy of mine puts it, everybody dies of something. The older you get, the more likely it is to be cancer. I think there should be more consideration of what constitutes a good death rather than in simply prolonging life. There are hard deaths and easy deaths and cancer can be a very hard death. Maybe that’s just me.

I wasn’t really sure what the purpose of the piece was. There are all sorts of possibilities including battlespace preparation for a prospective national debate over “Medicare for All”.

Okay, it’s time for a quiz. Which of the following do you believe will happen?

1. Sanders will go into the Democratic Convention with a majority of delegates, become the nominee, and go on to win the presidency.
2. Sanders will go into the Democratic Convention with a plurality of delegates, become the nominee, and go on to win the presidency.
3. Sanders will go into the Democratic Convention with a plurality of delegates, become the nominee, and lose the election to Trump.
4. Sanders will go into the Democratic Convention with a plurality of delegates, some other individual will become the nominee, and whoever that is will go on to win the election.
5. Sanders will go into the Democratic Convention with a plurality of delegates, some other individual will become the nominee, and whoever that is will go on to lose the election.
6. Sanders will drop dead before the Democratic Convention.
7. Sanders will drop dead after the Democratic Convention but before the general election.
8. Other

I think the greatest likelihood is C but E, F, and G are all distinct possibilities.