ARE CRYPTO AND THE METAVERSE THE NEXT BREAKTHROUGH WAVE?

 I looked closer at the Worldometer and Our World in Data for COVID-19 this morning, and can make several observations:

• The World is approaching 300 million cases and 5.5 million deaths, a mortality rate just under 2% and 0.75 deaths/1000.  On the last number, picture a thousand people.  Less than one death.
• The USA has 56 million cases and will soon reach one million deaths, a mortality rate of 1.5% and 2.5 deaths/thousand.  For a thousand people, 2.5 deaths.  In a two-year period (to be about equal to the time frame of these COVID-19 deaths), there would be 3.6 cancer deaths in the U.S.
• Japan has 1.7 million cases, 18,393 deaths, mortality rate of 1% and 0.15 deaths/capita.
• Denmark has a tests/capita rate of 18.5, with #2 Austria at 13.7, and the UK at 5.9.  The U.S. has a tests/capita of 2.4.
• Fully vaccinated % (not including booster)
• UAE  91%
• Portugal 90%
• Singapore  87%
• Cuba  85%
• China  84%
• Japan  78%
• UK  70%
• European Union  69%
• U.S. 62%
• Asia  57%
• India  44%
• Egypt  20%
• Africa  9%
• Low Income  4%
• Nigeria  2%

Transmissibility comparison:

• Original SARS-CoV-2 virus in China = 1
• Alpha variant = twice as contagious as the original
• Delta variant = 50% more transmissible as Alpha = 3 times more than original
• Omicron variant = 70 times more transmissible than Delta = 210 times more than original

I suspect that this factor of 70 will be adjusted over time.  In any case, the Omicron variant is a lot more contagious than the Delta variant

Again, this number will be refined as more data arrive, but, relative to Delta:

• Omicron patients have a 40% to 75% reduced risk of hospitalization.
• Omicron infections were 70% less likely to bring severe disease.

About vaccinated people being infected by Omicron:

• While two dosages of the Pfizer vaccine show definite weakening in preventing contraction of Omicron, a booster increased by 25-fold a body's virus-fighting antibodies.
• The Moderna booster appears to provide protection against the Omicron variant.  However:
• A 50 microgram booster increased effectiveness 37-fold.
• A 100 microgram booster gave an 83-fold increase in neutralizing antibody levels.
• Johnson & Johnson's booster provides high levels of protection against the omicron variant.  
• A booster improved protection against hospitalization from 63% to 85%.
• There however is a growing sense that anyone who got an initial J&J dosage should use Pfizer or Moderna for the booster.
• Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work better than J&Js, but even the latter well protects against hospitalization and death.
• Those who have been vaccinated and boosted, but still get infected by Delta or Omicron seem, if showing any symptoms at all, have only a sore throat, some fatigue and muscle pain.  No difficulty breathing and no shortness of breath.  In summary, a little uncomfortable, but fine.  However, if vaccinated but not boosted, you also get a milder form of illness, but slightly more intense.
• If you are one of those who got fully vaccinated and boosted, and still got infected with Omicron or Delta, the Oregon Health and Science University found that these individuals acquired a SUPER IMMUNITY to this virus in the future.
• In any case, hospitals around the world say those most ailing from COVID-19 in hospitals today are those who have not been vaccinated.
• IN SHORT, IF YOU WANT TO LIVE LONGER, GET VACCINATED AND BOOSTED.

My speculation is that if Omicron was the first variant to infect the world, because there was no vaccine, there would have been, very quickly, a much higher rate of COVID-19 cases, and more deaths than we have today.  By striking humanity when we were already mostly vaccinated, it is more and more appearing that Omicron will in time become just another virus to worry about for the seasonal flu. Fortunately, the mRNA vaccines developed for COVID-19 can easily be adjusted for this purpose.  If Omicron is anything close to 70 times more contagious than Delta, the odds are very low that a new variant of COVID-19 will replace Omicron.  Still, it would be wise to invest in a full court press to vaccinate Africa and other developing parts of the world.

From the New York Times this morning:

From the top graphic, while cases are zooming up because of the Omicron variant, deaths are not.  The second?  Again, if you want to live longer, get vaccinated and boosted.

My topic of the day looks at how our world has changed from the internet, smart phones and coming metaverse.  The evolution of this technology has come in three waves:

• Web 1.0 was the era of decentralized and open protocols.
• Web 2.0, social media, which we're now in, is centralized, shared and regulated by governments.

• 
  Web 3.0 or web3, again is decentralizing, in that there will not be any central gatekeeper, and instead, users will earn ownership by helping to develop and maintain those services.  While computers will still be useful, a simple smartphone might well be the ideal device for this next phase.  This is the ultimate metaverse espoused by libertarians.

If you want to, you can go back to the 1920's to link the history of the internet to information theory.

• The transistor was invented in 1947 and IBM dominated the early days of computers.
• Telecommunications began to develop in World War II and became computer science in the 1950's.
• I vaguely remember using Sperry Rand and Burroughs computers in my college years.
• Distributed networks gained interest and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense in 1969 began ARPANET.
• 
  Norm Abramson at that time designed ALOHAnet, the foundation of wireless communication, connecting the four islands of Hawaii with ARPANET.
• He earned his PhD in electrical engineering in 1958 from Stanford when I entered in chemical engineering.
• We later worked in the University of Hawaii College of Engineering.
• He passed away two years ago.
• Internetworking advanced in the 1970's joining a network of networks.
• I taught computer programming in this period and dabbled in graphics.  The campus computer was an IBM mainframe, and I used a million cards in my days.
• Apple was founded in 1976, and has driven the home computer market.
• 
  IBM, which incorporated in 1911, attempted to compete with Apply in personal computers, but sold this business to Lenovo of China in 2005.  

• 
  The National Science Foundation funded national supercomputing centers to build the NSFNET, providing access to research and academic organizations in the U.S. from the 80's.
• 
  The notion of a World Wide Web came from CERN in Switzerland around 1990 to access the internet.
• This  is when I first got involved in electronic mail.
• Search engines/directories began in 1993 with Lycos and Yahoo in 1994.

• 
  I use Hotmail, which was founded in 1996 and acquired by Microsoft in 1997.  It was renamed to Outlook in 2012.
• The first mobile phone with internet connectivity was Nokia from Finland in 1996, followed by NTT CoCoMo from Japan in 1999.
• Blackberry was launched from the U.S. in 2001.

• 
  Google was founded in 1998, bringing relevancy ranking to the field.
• Napster in 1999 shared files.
• Dropbox was released in 2007 to hold files.
• Microsoft and Yahoo partnered in 2009 with Yahoo? Search.
• By the mid-90's social networking systems began, sometimes referred to as Web 2.0.

• 
  Facebook was launched in 2004, paving the way for social media.
• MEGA came in 2013 from New Zealand as a FREE cloud storage site.
• The internet now as 4.66 billion users.

So when did the internet start?  Well, let's say thirty years ago when in 1992 the Internet Society formed.

• Mosaic came in 1991.
• Netscape Navigator arrived in 1994 and took over.
• Only the following year Internet Explorer overwhelmed them all.
• Then in 2012 Google overtook Explorer to become the most popular web browser.  Today?

Is crypto the NEXT BREAKTHROUGH WAVE?

• Well, not web3 itself, but definitely one of the key features.
• Investors have advanced $28 billion into global crypto and blockchain start-ups, with $3 billion into nonfungible tokens.

• 
  Good minds from Google, Amazon and Apple are leaving their companies to start or help run crypto companies:
• Sandy Carter left Amazon to start Unstoppable Domains.
• Surojit Chatterjee became chief product officer for Coinbase.  In 14 months his value soared to $600 million.

• 
  Swidhar Ramaswamy of Google created Neeva.
• Brian Roberts of Lyft joined OpenSea.
• Jack Dorsey of Twitter jumped to Square, now called Block.

• 
  David Marcus at Meta went to pursue two cryptocurrency projects.
• Evan Cheng of Facebook skipped out to start Mysten Labs and invested in Parsiq.

• 
  Bitcoin has jumped 60% in the past year and Ethereum more than five-fold.  Will Ethereum replace Bitcoin?
• Web 3.0 is a term used to describe a metaverse that uses the internet as its substrate, utilizing crypto activity as one of the applications.

As for what will happen next within metaverses themselves; they’re likely going to become more popular with time because people are naturally drawn towards them. As mentioned earlier, they allow us not only to socialize with others but also to take up new hobbies and build communities. A functioning metaverse is still a long way away, but Facebook and Epic both want to take the lead in developing it.

• 
  Some say that crypto will bust monopolies like Google and Facebook (owned by Meta).
• Then again, cryptocurrency could well be a house of cards and crash.
• While the metaverse will be a key part of education, business and the like, nothing wrong with having fun and enjoying life.  So this will become the playground of the future.

It's a new year.  First, the Dow Jones Industrials broke, again, their all-time big, rising 247 to 36,585.  Heck, good time to hug and enjoy life:

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THINGS TO COME IN 2022

Around this time of the year I in the past proved to the world that I'm a terrible prognosticator of things to come in the next year.  So much so that two years ago, as a joke, I only predicted what was sure to happen.  I still missed three, for the Summer Olympics were delayed to the following year, the cricket version of the World Cup was not held in Australia and the Dubai World Expo was moved into 2021.  

So a  year ago I tried to pull off the same stunt, and here is what happened:

• 2021 will be better than 2020.  
• I think I was more right than wrong.  
• Sure, more people died from this present pandemic in 2021 than 2020.  However, vaccines and the Omicron variant are indicators that the pandemic will end at some point later this year.  Omicron is good?  Yes, for it's very contagious, but the death rate (with vaccinations) is not much worse than the seasonal flu.  Those anti-vaxxers will still suffer, but stupidity shouldn't be rewarded.

• 
  The January 6 coup attempt of Donald Trump FAILED!!!  Democracy survived. 
• Joe Biden is doing fine enough.  I just about stopped watching CNN and MSNBC because politics became boring, which is a whole lot better than those stunts of Trump. 

• 
  The UK will actually leave the European Union.  This did occur on January 31.  2-0 (I think 2021 was better than 2020, and I'm doing the scoring.)

• 
  All three Mars expeditions will get to Mars in February.
• I was right.  Score:  3-0.
• The UAE's Hope Mission made it to a Mars orbit on February 9.
• China's Tianwen 1 also did the same, on February 10.
• NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover touched down at Jezero Crater on Mars on February 17.
• There have been more than 50 Mars missions, and more than half failed.
• 
  The Tokyo Olympics will be held.  Yup, so I am now 4-0.
• The World Cricket Cup would be held in India.  Wrong.   The Pandemic struck again.  It was held, but in the UAE and Oman, with Australia winning for the first time.  Record 4-1.

• 
  The Dubai World Expo will begin later this year.  Correct, for it began on October  1 and will run through March of this year.  5 right to 1 wrong.
• Donald Trump will not win the Nobel Prize.  Correct:  6-1.

• 
  Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.  7-1.
• The USA will rejoin the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  Did so on February 19.  8-1.
• The Sun will rise on January 1, 2022.  Yes, it did.  9-1.

I'm getting better at this, but won't try for perfection in 2022.  Instead, I'll just point out some coming highlights:

• Venus will be at Inferior Conjunction (at 12:36 PM Hawaii time) on January 8.  Never saw this term before?  On this day Venus is between the Sun and Earth, but not perfectly in line, for Venus is 5 degrees above the sun at conjunction time.  However if you want to watch:

Warning, never point an optical instrument directly at the sun without proper solar filters.  The intense sunlight can melt the internal optics, coatings, and glues that hold the components together, let alone damage the human eye.

• 
  The year of the Water Tiger begins on February 1.
• The Beijing Winter Olympics will be held from February 4 to 20.  This becomes the first time one city has held both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

• 
  February 6:  Queen Elizabeth II will celebrate her Platinum Jubilee, 70 years on the throne, continuing as longest reigning British monarch.  Queen Victoria almost made 64 years.
• Also on February 6 is the Super Bowl in Los Angeles.
• Watch for the end of the world in March, for the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Switzerland will be more powerful.  

• 
  It discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012.
• Since 2010, scientists have published more than 1000 papers.

• Walter Wagner of Hawaii sued in 2008 to stop the experiment because the device could produce a black hole and destroy our planet.  Two court judgements dismissed the suit.  Well, what can you expect.  He graduated from Cal-Berkeley.

• 
  Turns out he was partially right, in that a tiny quantum black hole can be formed.  But it would be too small to cause any harm.

• 
  But could this experiment lead to quantum wormholes, tiny doors leading to the rest of Universe, allowing for time travel?  Again, the surprising answer is maybe.  But that was surmised almost two decades ago.  Here is a more recent explanation.

• 
  So far CERN has spent almost $5 billion, and is thinking about spending an additional $23 billion to build another accelerator almost four times the length of the Large Hadron Collider.

• 
  Should we be worried about the end of life in March?  No.  Perhaps miniscule black holes, wormholes and strangelets, but if those appear, the physics world would go bonkers and produce 10,000 more papers.
• The Oscars will be bestowed on March 27.

• 
  Floriade 2022 will open in the Netherlands on April 14, and end on October 9.  If  you go in April, lots of tulips.  Held every decade, the site this year is Almere.  I went to Floriade 2012.
• Kentucky Derby will be raced on May 7.
• From May 10-14 is the Eurovision Song Contest, emanating from Turin, Italy.
• The U.S. mid-term election date is November 8.  The party out of power alway wins, but I don't think this will happen this year because of the Trump effect.

• 
  The FIFA World Cup will be held in Qatar from November 21 to December 18.
• At my last check, 13 teams of the 32 have already qualified.
• Will the USA win this tournament?  Well, we never have, and a year ago the odds were +6600, which means if you bet $10, you will win $670 total.  At +550, Brazil was favored.  In November, France was favored at +600 to Brazil's +650. The USA improved to +6500.

• 
  We missed  even qualifying for the previous World Cup in 2018.  This year we are in good position to make it to Qatar.  However, it all depends on how we play for eight more matches, and this might not be known until our final playoff match against Costa Rica on March 30.

• 
  The USA automatically will have a team in 2026 because we are co-hosting with Mexico and Canada.  The total teams go up from 32 to 48.
• 
  A few interesting events to watch for  in 2020 include:
• Will Germany phase out their three remaining nuclear powerplants?
• When will the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia be completed?

• 

  Will Pluto be raised to planet status again?  What about the other 150 planets in our solar system?  In any case, the answer to those questions will almost surely not come in 2022, for you think the Senate dallies?   This field takes a long time to make decisions.

• 
  Will this be the year when insects, slime (algae) and lab foods be commercialized?
• Will the next God of War come in 2022?  Will cost $50.
• And the biggest question of all:  WHEN WILL THE PANDEMIC END?

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HAPPY NEW YEAR 2022

 

Happy Holidays from 15 Craigside featuring a pre-New Year vegetable ozoni with soba on December 31, followed by a second enhanced ozoni for New Year 2022 brunch with assorted sashimi:

My ozoni this year featured abalone, clams, scallops, shiitake and button mushrooms, water chestnuts, various konbu (macroalgae), wagyu beef fat, Chinese and mustard cabbage and roasted mochi. There were five alcoholic drinks, the four above and some Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch in the ozoni.

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