Football Epilogue

When the stay-at-home orders were beginning to be announced and the grocery stores more resembled those in Venezuela compared to our usual over-abundance and toilet paper was in short supply there was serious concern about price gouging. As I have my own little place on eBay , I have adjusted prices to meet demand; often threading the needle between being competitive and having a viable business.  This made, and admittedly, still makes me wonder, "What the line is between operating in a "free market" and price gouging?" In the idealized free market, at least what I recall from microeconomics, the price of widgets will settle where the supply v. price and demand v. price curves intersect. If there's excess supply, prices should drop; particularly with commodities (products made by a number of firms and are largely indistinguishable in form, fit and function) like toilet paper. If supply is limited, or as what I often do at work, design somethi...

Drew saw a Lego Tensegrity online and thought he'd give making one a shot. Side view Top View

The new one gallon keg. Okay, more like 4 bottles and a one gallon keg. Alas, it was time to bottle my latest brew. I again went to Mr. Beer for a two gallon extract kit. I was able to get a lager and an Oktoberfest refill for rather cheap. This was my first time doing a lager. I stuck almost strictly to the kit except I added a little extra corn syrup for what is hopefully some extra fermentation/alcohol content. Bottling was a little more exciting this time as I picked up a one gallon keg with a small regulator and some food grade CO 2 charges . This means I'm able to enjoy some suds with some suds right away. Typical bottling requires a secondary fermentation with "priming" sugar to produce the CO 2 . This takes three-ish weeks after bottling to achieve decent tongue tinglyness. Cleaning and prepping the keg took a little extra research as I wanted to get any leftover oils, etc. from the manufacturing process off the keg; not to mention I'm intere...

Here's a beat to start your week with Nirvana/Foo Fighters musician Dave Grohl.

There's this senior pic in support of high school seniors who are graduating in the midst of this Covid19 stuff. If I recall, that last semester is an interesting one. You find yourself less tied to the day-to-day at school and the academic rigors, instead preferring to look ahead to whats next and enjoy time with friends before moving off in your own separate ways. Here's my pic in support of you 2020ers. Times are interesting, I say enjoy and get in just enough trouble to remember this year :)

UPDATE: I found a severe issue in this original calculation. I neglected to normalize to the number of tests being administered. Please disregard the crossed-out below graph. Here is an updated version showing the peak of infection rates as being at June 2nd. Likewise deaths are increased to around 2,500 and total cases is also revised up ~10x. What follows here is the old data/report. Conditions can change, especially if social distancing restrictions are relaxed, but here is some fitting on the cumulative covid19 positive test cases.  A logistic fit yields excellent agreement over the whole curve. If the fit is to be believed, doing a little calculus and differentiating the fit curve shows that we are just passed the peak (i.e. inflection point) in number of new cases per day. Keeping up with some social distancing shows things really slowing down in early may. Note that the curve is asymmetric, so the way down is longer than the way up. According to...

So, my company's marketing/application videos are notoriously campy, but also a little fun. Here is a recent one using our sensors to make a "smart" chess board.  It's almost as cool as Wizard's chess .