Not The Last One

“From winter, plague and pestilence, good lord, deliver us!”
– From the play, “Songs from ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament” by Tom Nashe
Sooner or later, the world will gain control over the COVID-19 outbreak. It will be through containment, effective treatment, a vaccine, or a combination of the three. History teaches that. Even the Black Death ended. Even the incurable HIV/AIDS has been controlled.
History also tells us that sooner or later, human behavior will lead to another epidemic or even pandemic. How is that?
Disease outbreaks occur through uncleanliness, vectors, lack of prevention (Anti-Vaxxers, etc), and zoonotic spillovers.
There are areas of the world that still lack clean drinking water and these areas still have outbreaks of cholera and typhoid.
The mosquito still transmits yellow fever and other viral diseases that are endemic in areas in the Tropics and flare up into epidemics every now and then. Even the bubonic plague broke out not too long ago in Madagascar!
Then is the fact that viruses are spilling over from other mammals to humans causing events like the COVID-19 and SARS outbreaks.
Lastly, refusal by some to get vaccinated means that occasionally, we are going to see diseases like measles and polio break out.
Human behavior does not only lead to the direct breakout of diseases. What we do after these diseases break out will ensure that we will forever see epidemics or even pandemics.
Since time immemorial, the attitude of those in power towards the outbreak of diseases has worsened these events. One can almost predict these reactions and the Chinese authorities epitomized it wonderfully during the initial weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019. Instead of appreciating the observations of Li Wenliang and his colleagues that there was a new cluster of patients presenting with SARS-like pneumonia, they censored them.
When a disease breaks out, there are always those, often healthcare workers, who notice the initial cluster of cases and sound the alarm.
Those in power will often deny these reports. Then as the cases mount, they’ll seek to suppress the scientific or observational findings of those who are seeing this cluster swell.
When that does not work, they try to argue that things are not so bad.
By the time leaders realize things are bad, the initial outbreak is beyond containment.
We can forgive the lack of scientific knowledge for the reasons leaders in the Antiquity and Middle Ages gave for the epidemics that afflicted them. The Antonine plaque of 165 AD in the Roman Empire was blamed on an angry Jupiter. It was smallpox. The Church claimed The Black Death was due to bad miasma. Others said it was caused by the Jews and slaughtered them for that. It was bubonic plague.
(Looking at how Copernicus and Galileo were treated, I doubt the Church would have listened.)
However, to deny outbreaks, seek to suppress their reporting or make light of their severity has to be unforgivable in our present times. This is especially egregious since early action can contain disease outbreaks. And yet those in power do it.
We saw President Woodrow Wilson and other allied leaders do it during the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 leading to 50 million people dying worldwide. They suppressed information about the epidemic so as not to depress morale during the 1st World War.
It happened during the outbreaks of bubonic plague in San Francisco in the early 1900s. 190 people ended up dying.
We saw President Reagan avoid the issue of HIV/AIDs until 1985.
We saw several African Heads of States, like Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, refuse to accept the fact that HIV/AIDs was killing their people in the 1990s and 2000s.
We have seen the Chinese reactions to SARs and COVID-19.
It is not only leaders who misbehave when diseases break out. Among the general population, denial abounds too. That is often compounded by crazy conspiracy theories. This is followed by a period of panic and hysteria. When these reactions do not work, fear sets in. Deep crippling fear. Finally, people learn to accept the new reality and a rational response ensues.
In that regard, we of the present day are no different than the Flagellants in Europe of the 14th century, who whipped themselves bloody to get God to stop the plague during the Black Death.
Another factor that adds to the possibility is the unwillingness of governments to spend the money necessary to prevent these diseases from breaking out. Preventive programs in the hotspots of the world are often underfunded. Even developed nations are cutting back. The US recently axed its Pandemic Team as well as the PREDICT Program – a program made of scientists working around the world to hunt down the viruses, like COVID-19, that could lead to the next epidemic or pandemic.
So yes, human behavior being what it is plus economic policy that often short changes public health, we will continue to see epidemics and pandemics. Even in spite of all the scientific advancements, yes, we will continue to see these events.

If it Walks Like A Duck

There is a saying that goes, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it is a duck!!! “
It is not a camel, it is not a cat…it is a duck!
We have a novel respiratory virus breaking out in a part of a country where the people are known for capturing, trafficking in, and eating all manner of wild animals, a country with a huge bat population and responsible for two other recent breakouts of respiratory viruses. The previous epidemics were found to be caused by viruses that spilled over from bats, were incubated in rodents, and then jumped over to humans.
Would it not be smart to suspect that this recent outbreak may have followed the same path since the behaviors in that population have not changed?
Walk like a duck, quack like duck!!!
And thus scientists who know and understand the phenomenon of zoonotic spillovers have sequenced the genome of this virus and found it to have 96% similarity to a coronavirus from a bat. 96%!
To the men reading this, if a DNA test had that level of similarity, that child whose paternity you refute would be yours!!!
Yet, in spite of all the evidence, some insist on calling it a zebra instead of a duck. Instead of looking at the science, some insist on wallowing in mind-boggling conspiracy theories.
Look, the COVD-19 is not a lab construct. It spilled over from a bat, going first through another mammal and the earlier we accept that, the sooner we start finding ways to prevent more zoonotic spillovers.
Learn the term: ZOONOTIC SPILLOVER!!!
A team of researchers has taken an intellectual shot at rumors that COVID-19 was engineered. In a paper posted on Monday on the scientific online forum Virological, the scientists – who include top epidemiologists like W. Ian Lipkin from Columbia University; Edward Holmes from the University of Sydney; and Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research – said very important genetic clues indicate that COVID-19 was not created in a laboratory.
The paper states:
“It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for human ACE2 receptor binding with an efficient binding solution different from that which would have been predicted. Further, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one would expect that one of the several reverse genetic systems available for beta coronaviruses would have been used. However, this is not the case as the genetic data shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.”
In other words, the researchers found that the way the virus binds to humans cells is way more efficient than any computer program would have produced.
Also, the “spikes” the virus uses to attach to human cells is based on a structure yet unseen in any lab. If the virus had been engineered, the makers would have used an available backbone used by scientists.
This means that there are two possibilities for COVD-19 origin:
– natural selection in a non-human animal host prior to zoonotic transfer, or
– natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.
So in short, COVID-19 IS HIGHLY LIKELY THE RESULT OF A ZOONOTIC SPILLOVER NOT A LAB-MANUFACTURED ORGANISM!!!
No amount of conspiracy theorizing will change that. No novels written in 1981 with predictive passages about Chinese scientists will change that. No statements by irresponsible politicians, nefarious state agents, and clueless media members will change that.
Thus, instead of wasting our time on hollow theories, the world should bring pressure to bear on China to get its people to change their ways.
Historically, the areas around the world’s rainforests have been seen as the hotspots for zoonotic spillovers and two of the deadliest – Ebola and Marburg – came from Africa. Yet, when a group of people actively hunt and capture wild animals from an area of the world with huge bat populations, traffic, sell, and slaughter them on open markets without any control, is the risk in this area not much greater than round the areas around rainforests?
In fact, all of humanity needs to be wary about encroaching on the habitats of these bats and/or hunting and eating all manner of wild animals nilly-willy.
Imagine the COVID-19 virus had not been a respiratory virus but one that causes hemorrhagic fever like Ebola? Just imagine!
Don’t think it can happen?
Well, we have had SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, Hendra spillover in just the last 50 years from bats and they have 60+ other viruses they are willing to share!!!
Let’s wise up!!!

When We Encroach

He is seen as the first patient who got sick but some researchers believe the virus had already started raging earlier than that December 1st when he was admitted to a hospital in Wuhan, China with pneumonia. By December 10, there were 3 more patients and by the end of the month, there were 40 cases.
Soon the world would hear of a virus that was making people sick in Wuhan, China, and was going to spread even beyond China.
Initial work by Chinese virologists soon showed what the causative agent was – a coronavirus not found in humans. Now there are several strains of the coronavirus. Four types are found in humans and they usually cause the common cold. The ones found in other mammals are the ones that cause severe disease in humans. The two known ones are severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). Whereas the coronavirus that caused SARS was isolated from a civet, the source of MERS is thought to be a camel.
The strain causing the people of Wuhan to get cases of pneumonia was named 2019-nCoV (novel coronavirus). Further work showed it shared 79.5% percent of the structure of another non-human coronavirus that had caused an epidemic in 2002-2003 – the SARS-CoV – and was 96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus.
So a virus found in bats is causing disease in humans.
Now this phenomenon is not new. Pathogens from vertebrate animals that cause disease in humans are called “Zoonoses”. The process whereby the pathogen (bacteria, prions, protozoa, fungi, worms, viruses) springs over from the animal to the human is termed a “Spillover”.
Roughly 80% of viruses, 50% of bacteria, 40% of fungi, 70% of protozoa, and 95% of worms that infect human beings are zoonotic. Most of the identified reservoirs are mammalian in nature (roughly 80%). More than 60% of the roughly 400 emerging infectious diseases that have been identified since 1940 are zoonotic. Thus zoonoses are of particular public health interests.
We all know the famous ones like HIV-AIDS, Ebola, the flu, SARS, and even rabies. We get these diseases through direct contact with the body fluids of an infected animal, exposure to their habitats, through vectors like mosquitoes, and from eating contaminated meat.
Of all the pathogens, viruses seem to be the most lethal. They are simple creatures that mutate easily and are unaffected by antibiotics.
These diseases that reside in animals and have the ability to infect humans can be the cause of serious epidemics and even pandemics as seen with the Spanish Flu and HIV. They are also more difficult to eradicate than those pathogens whose final reservoir is the human, like smallpox and polio. One mammal that seems to get implicated in all this is the bat. It has been implicated in the spillovers of several zoonoses like Ebola, SARS, Nipah, and the ongoing 2019-nCoV outbreak. With an immune system that makes them able to harbor a lot of viruses without getting sick, they are the reservoirs of about 60 zoonotic viruses. It is estimated that each bat species harbors 1.79 zoonotic viruses. (The coronaviruses that caused both SARS and MERS are thought to have originated from bats, then infected the civet and camel respectively, and then humans).
Although it is impossible to predict when the next zoonoses spillover or what even allows certain pathogens to spill over, there are characteristics of these phenomena that allow epidemiologists to predict the areas on the planet which are hot spots for zoonotic spillovers.
In a 2012 paper by Morse et al in the Lancet, they teased out several hallmarks of zoonotic spillovers.
First, the frequency of emergence of new pathogens is on the increase. This increase seems to correlate strongly with increasing population density. Thus the expansion of human habitation, agriculture, travel routes, trade, and general changes in land use may be leading to humans getting exposed to more pathogens. We are encroaching on the habitats of these animals. This also means that areas with more biodiversity will see more of these zoonotic spillovers. So areas in the world with high population densities and biodiversity are more prone to see these events.
Based on these hallmarks of zoonotic spillovers, a few models have been created to depict how a new disease emerges. The 3-stage one by Morse et al really simplifies it. The first stage sees humans encroaching into the habitat of these wild animals through changes in land use or even caving (bats). Through contact, the pathogen spills over causing disease locally. This can range from small clusters of human cases to large outbreaks, some with the limited person-to-person transmission (eg, Ebola virus) and some without (eg, Hendra virus in Australia). The third stage is the large spread leading to a pandemic.
Also based on these same hallmarks, certain areas of the world are seen as hotspots. These are areas around the world’s rain forests – Latin America, West, and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. This is quite understandable due to the biodiversity of these forests and the fact that they are being encroached on actively for commercial purposes as well as due to population growth. Thus we first saw Zika come from Brazil and Ebola from Sudan and the Congo simultaneously in 1976.
Another important hotspot has spawned the present 2019-nCoV epidemic and also gave us SARS – Southern China.
The area has a huge population of bats. Moreover, it is also famous for the culinary culture of “Yewei” or “Wild Flavor” Cuisine. This involves “such exotic fare as camel hump, dried tiger penises, and bear bladders”.
Like Karl Taro Greenfeld writes in the book “The China Syndrome”, “Yewei” has become the perfect symbol of China’s newfound wealth; the Chinese would even call the period of the economic boom in the South “the Era of Wild Flavor.”
Some also attribute the attainment of sexual prowess and therapeutic effects from eating these exotic meats.
Thus in provinces like Guangdong, where SARS developed and, Hubei, where Wuhan is, there are thousands of wild animal markets or “wet markets” where one can buy all manner of animals including chickens, snakes, raccoons, dogs, civets, cats, monkeys, otters donkeys, sheep, pigs, foxes, badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs, and pangolins.
So inasmuch as these “wet markets’ have become symbols of China’s growing affluence, they may also be a vulnerability. They may be breeding grounds for zoonotic spillovers.
Between 2000 and 2003, Lee, Lau, and Chan, researchers from Hong Kong surveyed these markets in Guangdong and Shenzhen. This is an excerpt from their report:
“The animals are packed in tiny spaces and often in close contact with other wild and/or domesticated animals such as dogs and cats.”
Animals are stacked vertically so waste rains from one species to the other and since they are often slaughtered in the markets, blood joins in the fray.
The team further wrote, “The markets also provide a conducive environment for animal diseases to jump hosts and spread to humans”.
Interestingly, it was during this period that SARS broke out. This makes southern China a potent hotspot for zoonotic spillovers. The situation is further complicated by a political system that discourages sharing information and reporting such incidences.
Even as I write, the 2019-nCoV zoonotic spillover is looking more and more like it has the hallmarks of a pandemic. It has spread to 23 countries, sickened over 14,000 people, and killed 299 in China and one person in the Philippines.
It has been shown to be transmitted from human-to-human, even in cases where there are no symptoms, and even may survive on inanimate objects. A vaccine is at least a year away but with all the efforts being made worldwide, there is hope that the outbreak can be brought under control.
It will not be the last zoonotic spillover the world will see. Not as long as we keep encroaching on the habitats of wild animals and keep enjoying wild and exotic meats.

The Report of the Ghana National Reconciliation Commission

The Generals He Executed Without Trial

Thanks to the help of an amazing young Ghanaian activist, the Silent Years Group has gotten hold of a digital copy of the complete NRC report. We are going to start serializing that report so all Ghanaians can read and learn from the past so we do not allow our nation to be hijacked again.

For those who want to read it, the link to download it is below.

GHA_National_Reconciliation_Commission_FinRepDownload

Lamentations from the Womb

Mother, dearest mother,
Here I sit in your womb.
Mother, dearest mother,
Yet I wish it was my tomb.
He raped you that night,
And planted his seed.
I am a product of your plight,
Forever a sign of that deed.
Will I not forever be a marker,
Of how he destroyed your soul?
A memento of times darker,
That left you forever un-whole?
That’s why I’d rather not be born,
Into a life unloved, dark and torn.

Mother, dearest mother,
Here I sit in your womb,
And wish I would smother,
Than be born with fake aplomb.
You smoke, sniff and inject,
Poisons day and night.
You are but a reject,
The streets your only right.
What awaits me is an ordeal,
Of cold homes with no love.
A terrible fate with a tight seal,
One that fits like a glove.
That’s why I’d rather not be born,
Into a life unloved, dark and torn.

Mother, dearest mother,
Here I sit in your womb and wait,
Mother, dearest mother,
Do you feel the burden and weight?
Are you really ready,
Ready for me in your life?
Will your love be steady,
Or will I see only rancor and strife?
I sense the unwillingness,
Then you are just fourteen.
I feel the uncertainness,
I was totally unforeseen.
That’s why I’d rather not be born,
Into a life unloved, dark and torn.

Does anybody ever ask us,
Find out if we are so inclined?
We never get to discuss,
The lives into which we are assigned.
We often do not care for this world,
Full of so much strife and hate,
Into which we are hurled,
After that nine-month date.
If you say this life is a gift,
Why fill it with so much pain,
And set us in it adrift,
With no cover for the rain?
That’s why we’d rather not be born,
Into a life unloved, dark and torn.

©️Nana Dadzie Ghansah – May 20, 2019

Into Loneliness and Despondency

I made an observation growing up that has stayed with me till now. I noted how men who had worked their whole lives would go into retirement and suffer precipitous declines in health, that in some cases, led to death. I filed that away.
Working as a physician, I have also made another observation that somehow ties into the first. I have noticed that older patients, being those 70 and older, who were still in relatively good health and looked physically fit, had something in common. They were active. Not just physical activity but most of them still worked regularly. The most impressive are the old farmers.
These physically fit seniors always stand in stark contrast to their compatriots who were not active.

These observations and other anecdotes have always made me wonder about the wisdom behind retirement. Why do we retire?
We spend years keeping a schedule that keeps us regimented only to one day give that all up for one that may not be as controlled and full. Somehow, that dramatic change has effects that are profound.

We did not always have retirement. The concept is actually just a bit over a century old. It is noteworthy that even in the 19th century, the older generation may have been seen as a burden. In his 1882 novel titled “The Fixed Period”, the then 67-year-old Anthony Trollope wrote about a fictitious country called “Britannula” where large numbers of old men were retired to a place where they would be encouraged to enjoy a year of relaxation, followed by a peaceful death – euthanasia – with chlorofom.
It was the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who in 1883, introduced the concept of paying senior citizens a wage to stay home and not work. He did that to take the wind out of the sail of the Marxists. The set age was 70 and with the life expectancy then, very few took advantage of that age.

In the US, the famous physician, William Osler, in his farewell speech as he left Johns Hopkins for Oxford, made remarks that earned him the ire of the nation. His speech centered on the theme of the energy of youth and the uselessness of old age. Osler, who was 55 at the time, claimed that men were virtually useless after age 40 years and should retire after age 60 years. He then jokingly referred to the Trollope book and wondered if the old should be chloroformed.
By the 1930s, with the Great Depression underway, dwindling job prospects for the youth made it necessary to “get rid” of the elderly workers. Roosevelt would introduce the Social Security Act and the retirement age would be pegged at 65…arbitrarily.

So what do the studies say about retirement? A rash of studies paint a rather grim picture of health after retirement and yet, there have been a few that have shown the opposite. One of the latter was a 2017 Dutch study that showed that men who retired in their 50s were less likely to die in the next 5 years than those who continued to work. Yet noteworthy is not the retirement itself but what the men were able to do in retirement. They were able to lead healthier lifestyles. Similar results have been seen in studies from Israel, England, Germany and other European countries. 
However, the studies that show negative health effects of retirement greatly surpass those that show a benefit to health. Retirement allows one more free time to live healthier, why are there so many studies showing negative health results? 
Boyle et al showed in 2010 that the loss of purpose contributed significantly to the development of Alzheimer’s in the elderly. Hill and his group have shown that the loss of that purpose leads to an increase in all-round mortality. Holt-Lunstad and her group see a correlation between loneliness and death in the elderly and Behncke showed an increase in the incidence of strokes and cancers in retirees. The US Health and Retirement Study showed an increase of 40% of strokes and heart attacks in retirees.

In spite of all these negative findings, the studies that show a benefit may give us a clue why retirement can be so bad for so many. The two big culprits may be loneliness and lack of purpose. Of course, family and friends can help one deal with that but what if one’s work was where one found companionship?
Loneliness can be so crushing that it induces a certain despondency that takes away even the motivation to be active. This lack of activity worsens one’s health. The loneliness in itself is also dangerous. Coupled with the lack of purpose, is it any wonder so many retirees do not do well.
It is important to note that in those studies where retirement led to health benefits, most of those retirees were not lonely, had a sense of purpose and stayed active.
Depending on one’s job, retirement might be finally a time to find some rest or it could be the beginning of a slow decline, physically and cognitively. It is even worse now that life expectancy is much higher than in the 1930s. 
In all, these studies help explain my observations.

So should we retire? Should we put men and women to pasture, who may still live another 20 years and risk having them spend those years alone and without purpose?
I think the institution of retirement is here to stay and so each of us should have a plan on how to deal with it. If possible, one should maybe delay it for as long as possible. One should also try to develop other interests that could fill one’s time in retirement. Retirement communities are sources of companionship. Consideration could also be given to another career, even a part-time job or a volunteer position.

In a recent book titled “Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement”, Rich Karlgaard discusses the ability of the human brain and our capabilities to still keep developing deep into adulthood. If we are ever developing and possess the ability to attain new capabilities, why retire onto loneliness, despondency, and lack of purpose. Maybe the ultimate antidote to the ills of retirement is to never stop learning. Like the writer T. H. White wrote in the novel, “The Once and Future King”:
“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake in the middle of the night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

Of Collapsing Bodies, Event Horizons, and Singularity

It is rather interesting that in the very year my interest in astronomy was really awakened, the world saw the image of a black hole for the first time. Even though others had postulated about the possible presence of black holes in the 18th century, it was really the work of Einstein that set the ball rolling. It all started with Newton, Einstein, and gravity.

Now Isaac Newton saw gravity as the result of the force between masses. Einstein saw it as the result of the curvature of spacetime.

To help understand the Einstein position without using the really hard-to-understand tensor calculus, let us do an exercise:

Imagine the universe is a large sheet of Spandex stretched and attached to several poles to keep it taut. Now imagine dropping a bowling ball into the sheet. It will dent or warp it, right? Good! Now drop a marble into the sheet with the bowling ball still on it. The marble will roll towards the bowling ball, wouldn’t it? If you drop smaller and lighter balls with different sizes and weights on the sheet, they will all follow the curvature induced by the bowling bowl and rotate around it before finally sinking into the depression it creates.

The curvature induced by the bowling bowl in the sheet of spandex is what causes the smaller bowls to rotate around it. (If one paid attention, one would notice that the path charted by the rotating balls is not a perfect circle but an ellipse).

In the same way, all the other balls will warp the sheet to a degree and cause their own curves. The biggest ball will cause the other balls to rotate around it – in this case, the bowling ball. The phenomenon whereby a body warps the sheet and thus induces other bodies to move along the created curve is what is similar to what happens in the universe. That is what we call gravity.

Whereas Newton saw the universe as being static, with everything having its place, Einstein saw the universe as being more dynamic. In Einstein’s view, space combined with time to form a universal “sheet” called spacetime with three spatial dimensions – backwards-forwards, left-right and up-down – and one-time dimension. Celestial bodies travel through spacetime and in the process, bend, warp or even curve it. The more massive an object is, the greater the warping. The planets orbiting the sun do so not because of a force exerted by the Sun but because they are following its induced curve in the spacetime fabric. 

These bends and curves can even affect the path that light takes as it travels from a star. Newton saw light as a corpuscle with mass. Thus he thought that a star could affect its path through gravitational force. By the time Einstein came around, we knew light was a wave. Its path is bent because of gravity alright but not the Newtonian version but rather the Einstein relativity one – through the curves induced by celestial bodies. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing and was proven elegantly by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse in 1919. 

Thus gravity is not a force but the curvature induced in the spacetime fabric by celestial bodies causing them to move and rotate.

Einstein discussed his concept of gravity under what he termed “the Theory of General Relativity”, in four seminal papers that he published in November of 1915. A year later, a German theoretical physicist named Karl Schwarzschild published a paper that drew on Einstein’s work and made postulations that were at the time even more esoteric than Einstein’s. It would be years before the import of Schwarzschild’s work would be appreciated.

The paper was titled “Über das Gravitationsfeld eines Massenpunktes nach der Einstein’schen Theorie” (On the Field of Gravity of a Point Mass in the Theory of Einstein). In it, he delved into escape velocity – that is the velocity a smaller object needs to have to pull away from the gravitational curvature of a bigger body. This escape velocity is directly proportional to the mass but inversely proportional to the radius of the bigger body. So a rocket headed to the moon from the earth needs an escape velocity of 11.2 km/s.

Now imagine a scenario where a celestial body got smaller but kept its mass. The escape velocity from that body would increase. If the body kept getting smaller, it would reach a point where the escape velocity became equal to the speed of light – 300,000 km/s or 186,000 miles/s. At that point, nothing – matter, radiation, light, nothing – can escape from that body. It also becomes impossible for the body to stay intact and thus it disintegrates into a minuscule point whose only presence in the universe is a dark bottomless, infinitesimal entity called a “singularity”. Since no light escapes this point, it is invisible. However, this “singularity” induces a boundary called the “event horizon”. If another body goes over the event horizon, it vanishes into oblivion. Schwarzschild even presented a formula to calculate the size of an event horizon (the Schwarzschild radius).

At that time, physicists found Schwarzschild’s postulations quite arcane then most did not look beyond our planet. Yet if one considered the stars as the bodies being escaped from, his work made a lot of sense. Remember a star is really a collection of really hot gases or plasma and hot gases can get smaller as they burn out.

It would be years before the scientific community would understand it’s importance. His work joins that of Einstein and others in becoming the buttress for the concept and now the reality of black holes, a name coined disdainfully by the American physicist, John A. Wheeler, in 1967. Earlier this week, the world was treated to the first picture of the event horizon a black hole in M87.

According to theory, there might be three types of black holes: stellar, supermassive, and miniature black holes – depending on their mass. These black holes formed in different ways.

Stellar black holes form when a massive star collapses. 

Supermassive black holes, which can have a mass equivalent to billions of suns, are found in the centers of most galaxies and are likely the byproduct of galaxy formation. 

Miniature black holes could have formed shortly after the “Big Bang,” which is thought to have started the universe 13.7 billion years ago. They may be the result of faster moving matter causing slower ones to contract into black holes.

As noted above black holes may have been instrumental in how our universe formed billions of years ago. As mentioned earlier, stars are just a collection of hot gases fueled by intense radiation. As the universe formed, these massive initial stars burnt out creating massive black holes and pulling in other stars. They also emitted jets of high-velocity radiation that led to the formation of other stellar bodies. In a way, they are like the volcanoes of the universe – creators as well as destroyers. One massive one lies in the center of every galaxy. Like volcanoes, they are dormant most of the time. When they do get active, it is disastrous.

Schwarzschild was not the first person to think of the concept of a back hole.

Interestingly, back in 1783, an English priest, philosopher and scientist called John Michell, a man once described as “a little short man, of black complexion, and fat” would touch on this same claim in a presentation to the Royal Society. A few years later, in 1796, the French scientist, Laplace would make the same claim in his book, “Exposition du Système du Monde.”

In a letter to Einstein from November of 1924, the Austrian physicist wrote:

“Einstein, my upset stomach hates your theory of General Relativity—it almost hates you yourself! How am I to provide for my students? What am I to answer to the philosophers?!!”

I guess for us laymen, trying to understand the theories of Einstein and all it has spawned can lead to upset stomachs and even headaches. However, they definitely help us better understand our universe and our place in it. Moreover, they show how brilliant we humans can be. 

On the other hand, the presence of these black holes points out the fallibility of the universe we live in and by extension the fallibility of us humans. Scattered around us are places where we can vanish into oblivion. Places where the laws we think control our universe and our lives do not work. Maybe the time has come to probe into these black holes and with that, face our very fallibility. How excitingly scary is that!

Should There Really Be an App for That?

“Conversations in Port Townsend,” interview with Tim O’Reilly, 1983

On June 29, 2007, Apple Inc released a device that has revolutionized how we live, communicate, shop or even read – the iPhone. Two years later, it released the iPhone 3GS, opened the App store and came up with the catchphrase, “There is an app for that”. Later that year, the company would patent the phrase.

Ever since those days, apps have literally become a very important part of our digital lives. As of the end of the 3rd quarter of 2018, Android users had 2.1 million apps to chose from whereas the Apple AppStore had about 2 million.

Apps have come to epitomize the role of technology in human lives and this is not new. Innovation got Homo Sapiens out of caves, away from a culture of hunter-gathering into large settlements all the way to the metropolises some of us live in now. Technology has led to longer life-spans and in some regards, higher standards of living. On the flip-side, it has also helped us destroy our environment and made it easier to kill each other. 

However is the fact that we now want an app for all activities and pursuits, is the fact that we want technology to make life easier always a good thing?

In 2010, Airbus announced its new A320 class of engines. These were supposed to be more fuel-efficient and more cost-effective. Boeing rushed to get out its own version. The strategy depended heavily on building a plane that worked essentially the same as the previous generation. Out of the highly successful 737 came the 737 Max. This time around, Boeing put the engines on the 737 Max at the back making it back heavy and changing the center of gravity of the planes. This led to a situation where on take-off, the back sank and the nose pointed up, a condition that could lead to the plane stalling.

At this point, Boeing engineers had 2 options – place sensors in the plane to detect the impending stall and fix it through a computer program that forced the nose down or let the pilots take care of it at a time when the plane was being flown manually.

Well, in a world where there is an app for everything, guess what the engineers did?

They installed the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) to sense and correct this. Now it is possible that malfunctioning sensors may have caused the MCAS to also malfunction and contributed to two plane crashes in 5 months that have claimed 346 lives!

Presently, there are very few hospitals in the US that do not boast of an electronic medical record system (EMRS). Pushed by former President Obama as part of the ACA, they have largely replaced paper records and the illegible writing of doctors. Yet, like a recent piece in Fortune magazine titled “Death by a Thousand Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong” shows, this technology may have just birthed a whole new set of very bad problems. 

The report cites examples of bad software that has dropped orders for important tests leading to patient mortality. In my own experience, I think EMRS take from the very essence of patience care – observing the patient! Walk into any hospital or doctor’s practice these days. Providers are not observing patients! They are starring at screens!

This is not to say the idea of EMRS is bad or that trying to prevent the 737 max is out of line. Not at all. The question I am trying to ask is, “Should there really be an app for all that?” Should technology always be harnessed? Can we leave certain processes and procedures to human judgment or are we too fallible to be trusted?

Social media has really flattened the world. The whole place has morphed into a global village of “likes” and “hashtags”. Yet, there are dark sides to this technology. The spread of fake news, the unauthorized sale of personal data, issues of validation, comparison, bitterness, and even isolation. It decreases attention span and makes us care about the wrong things. Zuckerberg et al got us an app that brought the world nearer. Did we really need an app for that?

Technology is at the verge of giants strides in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Soon, several professions will be obsolete because machines will take over the intellectual aspect of these pursuits – lawyers, accountants, radiologists, to name a few. Is this really the world we want to live in?

When most people think of the movie “The Terminator”, the picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “I’ll be back” comes to mind. However, the movie is much more. Like Adrian McCullen wrote on “Medium”: “The real theme of ‘The Terminator’ is about Skynet, a powerful AI that becomes self-aware. The film centers around the dangers of AI dominance, where AI (in the form of robots) rejects human authority and realizes that to be fully in control, humans need to be terminated, much like the realization of the AI, HAL in the phenomenal 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.”

At the risk of sounding anti-science, which I am definitely not, maybe the world needs to sit back and consider when to let technology take a back seat and allow humans to take control.

Steve Jobs, in a 1994 Rolling Stone Interview said: “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”

If we could really look at technology as a tool, then we would know when to use one and when not to. Then we’ll realize that the fact that we have hammers does not mean everything is a nail. Then maybe we’ll accept the truth that there should not always be an app for that!

Those Who Cry “Wolf!”

We all know the Aesop fable about the shepherd boy who took his master’s sheep to a pasture near a dark forest and not too far from a village. One day, feeling bored, he cried “Wolf”. This drew forth the men from the village who rushed out to chase the wolf away. They found the boy doubled over in laughter but no wolf. He would repeat this prank a few days later and again, the men from the village rushed out to find him laughing and no wolf. When a real wolf appeared a few days later, he cried for help but no one showed up and he ended up losing a great deal of his master’s sheep. The men from the village did not believe his cry for help anymore. His cry of “Wolf” had become a symbol of attention-seeking behavior and they were not going to honor that anymore.


Which brings me to the story of Tawana Brawley. In 1987, Brawley, an African-American from Wappinger Falls, NY, claimed that six white men had abducted her, raped her, and left her in the woods covered with feces. They had scrawled racial epithets across her body. The story turned out to be untrue, leading to black eyes for many in the black community who sprang to her support. Reportedly, Brawley lied to escape the wrath of her mother’s boyfriend after she ran away from home for four days to visit her boyfriend. Did Tawana Brawley cry “Wolf”?


Three weeks ago, the black actor and singer, Jussie Smollett, claimed he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack by two white men who beat him up, hung a noose around his neck and doused him with a liquid. The men also shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him. After days of intense investigations, the Chicago Police Department alleges that Mr. Smollett planned the attack and paid two Nigerian brothers to act it out for $3500. His motives were publicity and a better deal for his role on the series “Empire” on Fox. If the accusations are proven to be true, can one say Jussie Smollett cried “Wolf” too?


In both instances, we see an exploitation of racial animus. Though it may seem so, it is not only blacks who seem to exploit this phenomenon. Let’s take the case of Susan Smith, a white woman, from 1994. She claimed that she’d been carjacked in South Carolina by a black man who drove away with her two young sons (ages 3 years old and 14 months). For nine days, she made dramatic pleas on national television for their rescue only to finally break down and confess that she had drowned the kids herself by leaving them in her car and letting the car roll into John D. Long Lake in Union, S.C.Or the 1989 case of Charles Stuart who shot and killed his pregnant wife, Carol, as they drove home from a childbirth class in Boston. Mr. Stuart as you may guess was white. He blamed the shooting on a black man. Several black men were searched and questioned by the police. One named Willie Bennett, was finally arrested and charged in the killing before Mr. Stuart’s story began to unravel and Mr. Stuart jumped to his death into the Boston Harbor just before he was charged.

Heck, the whole Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, a strategy made popular by Nixon’s political strategist Kevin Phillips is based on crying “Wolf” – appealing to southern white voters by stoking fear for and animosity towards African-Americans.

Even currently, the President has declared a State of Emergency at the southern border based on fear of brown people overrunning the country! “Wolf!”


Though the examples cited may be few, they are but the tip of an iceberg. An iceberg made of racial fears and hostilities that hearken back to the birth of this nation and seem to dog our every step. Racism seems to be a cancer that continually eats at this country’s fabric and gets expressed in many ugly ways. It also gets exploited by the Jussie Smollets, Tawana Brawleys, Susan Smith and Charles Stuarts of this world for selfish and sometimes really evil purposes.
The fear of the other has replaced the fear of the wolf and the danger is, if exploited like in the examples listed above, like the men in the village, we as a society may become even more immune to the true accounts of hate crimes. It is already a fact that many citizens do not believe that there are Americans who are treated differently because of their skin color. The disregard of the attacks on those who are different may go up exponentially, exactly at a time when hate crimes are up.

Like the Chicago Police Superintendent, Eddie Johnson said, “Why would anyone, especially an African-American man, use the symbolism of a noose to make false accusations? How could someone look at the hatred and suffering associated with that symbol and see an opportunity to manipulate that symbol to further his own public profile?”Such a ruse, if indeed that is what Mr. Smollett did, cheapens the daily struggles of many African-Americans and people of the LGBT community and shows a privilege he seems unaware of. It also takes away the goodwill of many people of different races who try each day to do the right thing and treat everyone equally. In the Smollett case, for example, it is disheartening and unfair to many white and straight Americans who strive daily to be color and sexual-orientation-blind.


That is why is important that this country strives to overcome its burden of racism. Until that day where one is “… judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, until the day that some leaders do not try to divide us by stoking fear of one group for the other, our modern versions of the Aesop’s shepherd boy will keep crying “Wolf”, when there is none in sight.

Reflections In the Shadow of an Eclipse

Progression of the Progression of the Super Blood Wolf Moon lunar eclipse

A week ago, I stepped out into the bitter January cold about an hour before midnight with my daughter. We wanted to watch the Earth cast its shadow over the moon and create a most wonderful Blood Moon eclipse. I also wanted to photograph the whole event.
It really was a most wonderful experience. We not only watched the interplay of two celestial bodies but being a very cloudless night, we could also see a ton of stars and even hints of the planet Jupiter.

An even cursory immersion into the realm of astronomy makes one realize how insignificant we humans are in the grand scheme of things. We are but dots in this wide, ever-expanding universe and staring into the heavens that night, as the Earth’s shadow marched across the Moon’s surface, our smallness did not escape me.

Thus, it was not only a night of infinite beauty, a beauty that helped to chase away a heaviness brought on by a difficult weekend at work but also one of life lessons. 

The first lesson had to do with adversity.
The word “eclipse” may come from the Greek word “ekleipein” meaning “to omit, to fail” or from the amalgamation of the words “ex” and “leipein” meaning “ to leave”.
So an “eclipse” is not only “the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another” but the word can also be used to describe the “falling into obscurity or decline”.
The event was in a way a metaphor for when adversity threatens to force us into obscurity and decline.

The eclipse started by the shadow of the Earth steadily creeping across and over the moon. During this phase, the moon appeared to be composed of a dark and a light side. Though it made it look incomplete and imperfect, it gave it a certain beauty and uniqueness that reminded me of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism, but I digress.
The shadow of the Earth creeping steadily across the moon reminded me of the times in our lives when adversity creeps in. Like the shadow of the Earth, adversity sometimes steadfastly moves into and then over our lives until it totally envelops our total existence; until it eclipses us and shuts out the joy and light that filled our day.
Whether we like it or not, adversity and problems are part of life. They are as part of life as the air we breathe. They show up in our lives not to make us just suffer but like M. Scott Peck wrote in his wonderful book, “The Road Less Travelled”, “It is only because of problems we grow mentally and spiritually”. 
Problems force us to rise to the occasion, tapping into wells of unknown courage, creativity, and resourcefulness to survive. At the height of adversity, when our lives are totally eclipsed by problems, if we tap into our inner well of strength, we are changed for the better. 
When the Moon was finally covered by the shadow of the Earth, it changed color. It gained a beautiful red color due to scattering of sunlight trying to reach it.
It is in the same way that we change when we stand up to adversity. We become stronger, wiser and smarter. We glow in our own version of “redness”.

The experience also reinforced a fact I have always known – that nothing good comes easy. The only way I could capture the images I got was because I ventured out into the bitter cold around midnight. If I had preferred the comfort of my bed and stayed indoors, there was no way I would have been able to observe and capture the images I got.
Nothing in life comes easy! The best things in life may be free but they do not come without toil. Life never gives anything great away for free. She always asks for sweat equity. There is no way around it.

On a night where the beauty of our universe impressed upon me our smallness as humans, lightened the heavy load on my heart, afforded me quality time with my daughter and amazing images of a beautiful eclipse, nature also reenforced important lessons. 
In a way, the two lessons are tied together. Adversity helps to bring out the excellent in us whereas our search for the good often has to go through adversity, which if we surmount, not only leads us to the good but also bring out the excellent in us.
Like Benjamin Franklin said, “That which hurts, also instructs.”