Monthly Archives: April 2020
The Press Still Doesn’t Understand the Principles of Testing
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 29th April 2020Here’s an article about testing for COVID-19 which reveals the press, irrespective of political bias, is still in the dark about screening for this disease, or broadly any disease. The piece is written rather awkwardly, but what it’s trying to say is that the Abbott ID NOW test is 85% sensitive. This means that 85%…
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Corona Craziness – Why We Surrendered Without a Fight
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 27th April 2020Genghis Khan was the greatest administrator who ever lived. He always knew when to temper justice with brutality. Anonymous How did we reach a social point where most of the world would accept suicide as a remedy for a serious, but not unmanageable, contagious disease? We’ve endured plagues, famines, natural disasters, wars, and a Pandora’s…
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Opera Interludes
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 21st April 2020My subject is the instrumental music that occurs during a scene or between two. Excluded are overtures, preludes, and ballet music. Sometimes the distinction between an interlude or intermezzo and a prelude can be precious, but if the music below is called an interlude, an intermezzo, or in one case a meditation I accepted it…
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Lubbock Has More ICU Beds Than Either Brooklyn or Queens
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 19th April 2020There can be no greater evidence of the disparity of medical facilities and outcomes than the comparisons suggested by the above title. You can read the three charts below. Note that Queens has more than 38 thousand cases of COVID-19. The county has 146 ICU beds for a population of 2.273 million. Brooklyn (Kings County) has…
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Coronavirus – From Panic to Reality
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 18th April 2020It is slowly dawning on the world and the US in particular that we are suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. We’re on life support. Our economic survival is 50-50, probably worse. How did we get here and where is here? I’ll start with the newest information which should come as no…
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What We Don’t Know About COVID-19
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th April 2020The simple answer to what we don’t know about COVID-19 is just about everything. The Johns Hopkins Tracker that everyone is following presents a lot of data, most of which is uninterpretable. Let’s start with the number of cases. The Total Confirmed is not really that, rather it’s the number of patients with a positive…
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Why Walmart is Doomed
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 14th April 2020The title is hyperbole. I don’t think Walmart will go out of business, rather it will fall victim to what the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. In the mid 20th century General Motors was the exemplar of American industrial excellence. In the first decade of the next century it went bankrupt and was…
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Church Scenes
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th April 2020I recently wrote about the last few minutes of the first act of Tosca, which is set in a church – Sant’Andrea della Valle. There are other operas which have scenes in a church or houses of worship, five are presented below. Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German composer who tried to follow the style of…
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Dead Links Revived
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th April 2020You may have noticed that all the links to music going back several years were dead. They were the result of an error by me about 10 days ago. Fortunately, it was fixable. All the links have been brought back to life and should work as expected. I’m sorry for any bother that readers may…
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Haydn Piano Trios
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 7th April 2020No great composer wrote as much music as did Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). The quality of his music is as great as its amount. So vast is his output that it’s hard to count all his compositions. He is famed as the father of both the string quartet and the symphony. He wrote 68 of the…
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