COVID-19: A Different Reality

From Worldometer, I extracted data to look closely at new deaths from yesterday:

DAY     China   Italy   USA   Spain   Germany   S. Korea  WORLD

Apr  15         1    578   1558      324            97               3        6351

        16         ?    525   1796      318          139               4        6239
        17   1290    575   1338      298          151               1        6857

        18         ?    482   1090        41            74               2        4888
        19         ?    433   1117      410            10               2        4344
        20         ?    454   1202      399            64               2        4307
        21         ?    534   1481      430            86               1        5362
        22         ?    437     931      435          125               1        5008
        23         ?    464   1435      440            54               2        5033
        24         0?  420     718      367            78               0?      4200
        25         0?  415   1073      378            59               0?      4650

Summary:

• New deaths increased for the World and USA.
• The population of South/Central America is almost double that of the USA.  This area seems to be increasing in catching COVID-19:
• Brazil  2229
• Peru  3683
• Ecuador doubled just from yesterday
• Mexico  1239
• Total cases/million is a deceptive statistic, for it all depends on the availability of test kits.  However:
• World  372
• Spain  4786
• Italy 3231
• Qatar  3248
• USA  2857
• China 58???
• Deaths/million, however, is a meaningful impact:
• Spain  4786
• Belgium  3911
• Switzerland  3339
• Italy  3231
• USA  2857
• Portugal  2294

• World  372
• China  58??
• South Korea  5
• Japan  3
• Singapore  2
• Pakistan  1?
• South Africa  1
• Afghanistan  1?
• Thailand 0.7 (when I visited this country in February, it was #2 in cases, next to China at #1)
• India  0.6?

Switching to the subject for this Saturday, I've always been fascinated with colors.  My favorite course in college was Color.  Thus I felt particularly sorry for  a classmate on my floor of Wilbur Hall who could only see black, white and shades of gray. 

Maybe that's why I dress too colorfully.  I have travelled just to visit cherry blossoms and tulips. On one of my around the world trips in the Spring of 2012 I only stopped in two foreign countries:  Japan and the Netherlands.

Of course, I love looking at rainbows. Thus, color mysteries intrigue me.

Ever wonder if your pet sees the same color as you?  The answer is they don't.  Their eyes see two colors and they are more pastel.  Jumping spiders see ultraviolet and green; bees--ultraviolet, blue and yellow; crustaceans--blue and red; snakes--some color and infrared.  But all apes see exactly the same as us humans, and so do African monkeys...but not South American monkeys, who don't really see red.  You can thus deduct something evolutionary just from colors.  Here is just one example, humans versus a butterfly:

A rattlesnake can see through the black bag:

When my wife looked at a flower, what she called blue was usually a shade towards purple or maroon, and not exactly blue.  Perhaps I am too much a purist, and she was a generalist.  Not an uncommon difference.  This is a Blue Climbing Rose, and you can get it from Amazon.com.  But it's not blue.

There is a further refinement about what we see.  The color depends on how you grew up.  Your brain on birth was mostly a blank slate similar to humans and apes, to which personal experience was added, leading to the fact that we all have different perception capabilities.  If your brain can't correctly figure out what it sees based on what it knows, it makes up a logical conclusion. 

On the internet a couple of years ago was a dress that some viewed as gold and white, while others saw it as black and royal blue, or something else.  This amorphous outcome, it turned out, just reinforced the fact that our minds are all different.

The following from Current Biology.  First of all, the actual dress was brown and a light blue, but more people said they saw either black and blue or gold and white:

• gold/white by older people and women, and these personally favored a cool illuminant like a blue sky
• blue/black by those who envisioned a warm illuminant, like incandescent light
• blue/brown by subjects who assumed a neutral illuminant

Why am I showing you those above images?  Mostly to indicate that the study was quite thorough.  (If I were you, I'd stop reading here and go to the end for the usual joke or entertainment special, for it gets complicated.)  Selecting just the graph (click on it to see a larger version):

• 57% saw black/blue
• 30%        gold/white
• 11%        blue/brown (which is the correct answer)
•   2%        other combinations
• females saw more gold/white than males
• the older you were, the more you would say you saw gold/white
• if the dress image was made blurry, the gold/white percentage dropped

The scientific explanation?  

• A color percept is the visual system’s best guess given available sense data and an internal model of the world [6]. 
• Visual cortex shows a bias for colors associated with daylight [7, 8]; this bias may represent the brain’s internal model. 
• We hypothesize that some brains interpret the surprising chromatic distribution (Figure 1B) as evidence that a portion of the spectral radiance is caused by a color bias of the illuminant [1] (see Supplemental Information for further discussion). 
• Some people may expect a cool illuminant, discount short wavelengths, and perceive white/gold; others may favor a warm illuminant, discount longer wavelengths, and see blue/black. 
• The remaining people may assume a neutral illuminant and see blue/brown. But what causes the individual differences? People experience different illuminants and adapt [9]. 
• If exposure informs one’s prior, we might predict that older subjects and women are more likely to assume sky-blue illumination because they are more likely than younger subjects and men to have a daytime chronotype [10]. 
• Consistent with this prediction, women and older people were more likely to see white/gold. Conversely, night owls may be more likely to assume a warmer illuminant [2] common for artificial light, and see blue/black. 
• Alternatively, all people may have a similar prior on the illuminant, but different priors on other aspects of the scene that interact to produce different percepts of the dress.

This concept of perceived reality explains why some believe in God, while others think that the whole concept is merely a mash of folk tales.  It also partially elucidates on why we almost all  as we mature figure out that Santa Claus is phony, but that God is real.  In the U.S., this God belief rate is between 80-90%.  Even higher in Muslim countries.  Perhaps on Sunday I'll further delve into this conundrum.

That was my lesson for the day.  Moving on, one tends to form favorite songs in time of life transitions.  In 1962 I graduated from Stanford and took a job with a sugar company in Naalehu, which had no TV nor radio.  Even my classmates who went to Africa and the Philippines had radio stations.  I also suffered through the toughest job I ever had (that was good, for it built character), met someone who less than four months later became my wife, until she passed away.   Here are the top songs of 1962.

Of course, your favorites many times are not in the top 30, or 100.  For example, high on my personal list was Johnny Get Angry by Joanie Sommers (right).  But not because of my wife.  My sugar company placed me in a trainee cottage which I shared with someone from Sudan.  He was called Johnny and this was his favorite song.  We worked out a system where he cooked one night, me the next and a restaurant the third.  The problem is that he tended to prepare brains and parts of animals I never knew existed.  He returned home and I fully expected Johnny to become a national leader in something.  Totally lost track of him,

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