Thursday Throughput: Brooding Cicadas Edition

An adult Brood X cicada, ready to deafen the population of the mid-Atlantic.

[ThTh1]I’m not much of an entomologist, but one species I find endlessly fascinating are 17-year cicadas. These creatures go underground as nymphs and then spend 17 years drinking fluid from plant roots. At some point, their little wristwatches go off and they emerge from the ground in unbelievable numbers. They mature to adulthood, fly around, make a hell of a lot of noise and have an astonishing amount of bug sex. Within about two to four weeks, the mass orgy ends, the cicadas all die, and their progeny fall to the ground to emerge 17 years later.

Why this happens is not exactly clear. It is thought that the mass emergence is a survival adaptation. By emerging in such enormous number at once, predators simply cannot keep up. It ensures that they will mate in massive numbers and reproduce in massive numbers. It’s also notable that cicadas go in 13- and 17-year cycles — prime numbers that mean it’s rare for two broods to emerge in the same year.

This year is supposed to be especially dramatic as Brood X — the largest of the broods — emerges from the mid-Atlantic to the mid-West. In fact, the first few members have already been spotted. I’m somewhat disappointed since I’m just at the edge of the brood’s range. And although I lived in Maryland in 2004, I was out of the country when they emerged. Friends told me that it was like a biblical plague. They were everywhere. They were incredibly loud. The dead husks clogged drains. And, perhaps proving the predator theory right, one friend’s dog ate so many of them, she got sick and wouldn’t touch them again.

So maybe I’ll take a road-trip down. After all, it will be 2038 before we see this brood again.

[ThTH2] One of the things I’ve tended to push back against is the phrase “believe the science”. Because science is not a set of known facts; it is a way of discovering the universe.

Nowhere has this been more on display than in our response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year. In the early going, we made recommendations based on our best knowledge. And it’s not that this information was necessarily wrong, although some of it was. It was that the information was not necessarily complete. For example, our understanding of how the virus spread was mistaken: it turned out aerosol transmission was far more important than droplet transmission.

This also applies to mitigation. The WSJ, this week said that “lockdowns didn’t work”. But the headline has nothing to do with the science. Lockdowns absolutely did work as attested by the early heavy waves receding after lockdowns. What the WSJ has done — which is not uncommon — is confounded “lockdowns” with “restrictions”. And in this particular case, they have confounded “lockdowns” with “work from home” efforts.

With the WSJ’s misdirection cleared up, the actual paper itself is quite interesting. What it argues is that workplaces that initiated containment procedures — barriers, masks, better ventilation, etc. — had lower rates of COVID-19 infection among its work force than places that pushed work-from-home. The reason is that people in broader communities aren’t as strict about masking, testing and isolation as workplaces were. So, by sending people to work from home, we may have put them in greater danger.

We can predict — reliably — that if people stay in their homes, the virus won’t spread. What we cannot predict is human behavior. People simply won’t stay in their homes. In fact, I think it’s likely that denying people the social aspect of work may have created a rebound effect in making them more likely to pursue more risky social interactions in their private lives. By failing to account for that — by pretending zero spread, rather than limited spread, was a realistic goal — we may have made the pandemic worse.

It will be years before we really knew what went right and went wrong during the pandemic. And we must be careful not to confound rules and regulation with actual behavior. See, e.g., this thread, which points out that areas with mask mandates didn’t see much more spread than places without and attributes this to…well, people making decisions about masks independent of mandates.

But it’s important we continue to look into this. Because this won’t be the last pandemic we see. And knowing what we got wrong and how we got it wrong will be critical to doing a better job next time.

[ThTh3] There is one thing that is becoming clearer and clearer, amidst the debates and discussion: the vaccines work. It is now becoming normal for the only COVID patients in the hospital to be the unvaccinated. Even those who catch the disease post-vaccination are getting mild cases. And no, you cannot “shed” the spike protein if you’ve been vaccinated. Also of note on the vaccine: the Biden’s Administration loosening of IP rules is unlikely to help the worldwide situation. We’d be better off just throwing even more money at Big Pharma.

[ThTh4] Exploring the depths of the ocean.

[ThTh5] I will never not be fascinated by giant squids.

[ThTh6] The Voyagers continue to deliver new science: this time a background radio hum from the material between the stars.

[ThTh7] An interesting look at the science — or rather, lack thereof — when it comes to the female orgasm.

[ThTh8] Apparently, sharks come close to humans way more often than we think. They just rarely attack.

[ThTh9] Here’s a great rundown of what we know and don’t know about Dark Matter.