2022-12-08

Covid Conspiracy

This post argues that gain-of-function research played a role in the origins of Covid-19. It’s by Dan Sirotkin, who might or might not have attended Harvard, but who did spend time in prison, but is a join author of some serious-looking academic papers (e.g. this one).

Arthur C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. My corollary is that any sufficiently advanced scientific paper is indistinguishable from mumbo jumbo. The Sokal Hoax is a data point that supports this version, in a very strong form.

Anyway, I read the Covid paper, and it read as though it was based on solid science and some evidence, but the limits of my knowledge and willingness to do follow-up research means that it could equally well be a complete hoax. To believe it, you have to swallow something close to a conspiracy theory. Harold Wilson believed that he was being monitored by MI5, something that most right-thinking folk believe was a fantasy, but it seems that there might have been something to it. OK, linking Harold with Covid seems a stretch!

I stole the title for today’s post from Sirotkin’s post heading. I didn’t actually know where it came from, but Google showed me:

“It killed humans, therefore it was a weapon. But radiation killed humans, and a medical X-ray machine wasn’t intended as a weapon. Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it’s a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it’s a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it’s a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito.”  
― James S.A. Corey, [Abaddon's Gate](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/17606564)

Wrap

Today was mildly risk-on, with big swings in commodities, especially oil. Yields were mostly up, global stock markets mostly drifting down still, although US markets were up, probably helped by the dollar weakening at bit. Long-dated bonds, and credit (AGG) have continued their bull market, dating back may be six weeks. The traditional “Santa rally” seems to be missing in action this year, unless it’s very late. China seems so inept, corrupt and generally evil, it’s hard to see things returning fully to normal. Without China’s flood of cheap labour pushing up the price of the complementary capital it’s hard to see things ever returning to zero nominal interest rates again.

Gilts were weak, but the pound rallied a bit (just the dollar going down because of weak new claims figures). Generally, more vicious bear curve flattening in US rates. Ugh.

Tech corner

I installed Fedora 37 on an old Dell workstation. It’s great. There is the odd glitch, though, affecting mounting samba shares (Windows fileservers). Basically, the problem is that you must specific vers=2.0 on the mount line in your /etc/fstab:

//winserve/sharename       /mnt/sharename      cifs    username=steve,password=********,gid=1000,uid=1000,vers=2.0      0       0

I should put this on stackexchange or something, but I don’t have enough kudos to post in those places, which is a pity.

What’s confusing is that nautilus will happily let you browse the share, but when you try to use a command line mount command, it fails, and worse, you get a warning that you may need to specify vers=1.0. It seems that in fact the default is to use version 1.0, but that Windows rejects this protocol, because it’s unsafe, (but with a confusing error message). You get something like ‘the server abruptly terminated the connection’.

The mount line in fstab must specify a gid and uid, because otherwise the files in the share will be owned by root, which is not good. There are plenty of articles on this.

I normally hit some barrier when using linux on my desktop, which may be very minor but which ultimately forces me back to Windows. This time, I feel, is actually different.

I use a lot of linux utilities, such as hledger (an accounting program). These have been ported to Windows, but the just don’t work as well, probably because the developers port them as a chore and shoot back to their preferred linux environment.