Tremendous

An angel investor's take on life and business

  • Brazil’s Society is Collapsing as COVID Slams its Economy

    There is a huge increase in homelessness in Brazil, per Der Spiegel. Many have lost jobs due to the COVID pandemic, leading to a second humanitarian crisis, this one economic. I found this quote from a factory worker who recently lost his job particularly striking:

    “I never thought I would end up in this situation,” he says, “and suddenly …” He snaps his fingers and his eyes fill with tears. The worst, he says, is the hunger and the constant feeling of being dirty. “It is the most terrible experience I have ever had in my life, the biggest humiliation.”

    This is a man who worked…he was not lazy. But unfortunately, he has still lost everything. Financial relief from the government, on which one third (!) of society depends, is expiring:

    …the government in Brasília ceased paying out an emergency allowance for the poor struck by the crisis as of January. Fully 67 million Brazilians – almost a third of the population – had been relying on the 600 real (around 90 euros) each month. “It helped people in the favelas pay for rent or food,” says Kohara. And they have no savings, he adds. Their situations are now so tenuous that they could end up on the streets from one day to the next.

    This drives home the importance of stimulus measures in the US. In addition, perhaps an international poverty relief effort is needed.

    More here.

    Photo: “Slums in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” by World Resources is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

  • What I Learned From James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA

    We wish to suggest a structure for the salt deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

    So begins the famous Nature paper by James Watson and Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Their discovery revolutionized biology and won them both the Nobel Prize.

    I just finished reading Watson’s book The Double Helix, and as a layman I found the inside view of the process of scientific discovery intriguing. What struck me most was the importance of collaboration.

    We are used to thinking of scientists as lone geniuses hunched over a lab bench until they exclaim “Eureka!” But Watson’s book makes clear how important the many scientists surrounding him at the University of Cambridge were to his discovery. He repeatedly checks his findings with others more experienced than he in a particular area, like structural chemistry. And without the long conversations with Crick, the discovery would never have happened in the first place.

    Being in the right environment was so important to Watson that he left the University of Copenhagen, against the terms of his fellowship, when he realized he needed the expertise of the Cambridge circle to make a real breakthrough. He did what was necessary and asked for permission later. What would’ve happened had he sat around waiting for permission?

    The casual sexism with which Watson treats Rosalind Franklin, the expert in X-ray photography that wound up playing a major part in the discovery of the double helix, was striking to me reading the book in 2021. Watson tends to characterize her opinions and insights as obstinancy or rudeness. He doesn’t view his male colleagues the same way.

    If cooperation is so critical to science, I can’t help but wonder what Watson could’ve achieved with a more collaborative attitude toward Franklin. Would the breakthrough have come even sooner? Would they have been able to make even more discoveries together if Watson had been more open to her expertise?

    I loved getting a view of what is in a scientist’s mind as they make a major breakthrough. Watson was by no means certain he was right at first, but he worked methodically to prove what he suspected. That even such a genius has doubt in his ideas can cheer the rest of us!

    The great chemist Linus Pauling had suggested a different structure of DNA, which turned out to be incorrect. But when he saw the elegance of Watson and Crick’s double helix, he was in awe and thrilled, rather than upset at being proven wrong.

    I find that attitude to be one of the great things about science. There is both collaboration and competition, but in the end, everyone is working toward one goal: understanding.

    In all, I found Watson’s book interesting and instructive. Since it was written in 1968, I’m not sure how many people are still reading it, but it’s worth a look. Check it out!

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  • Numerous COVID Vaccines are 100% Effective at Preventing Death

    Of all the possible outcomes from COVID infection, clearly death is the one we want to prevent above all. We commonly see vaccine efficacy numbers from the 60’s to the 90’s, but that figure generally refers to how successful the vaccine is at preventing a COVID infection with any symptoms.

    How effective are the vaccines at preventing you from dying of COVID? Turns out, regardless of whether you look at trial data from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax or the Russian Sputnix V vaccine, you don’t see a single COVID death.

    I came across this information in fascinating Twitter thread today from the eminent Yale virologist Dr. Akiko Iwasaki:

    This is a simple and highly relevant message I’d like to see broadcasted far and wide…vaccinated people don’t die of COVID. Period.

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  • My Top 3 Exercises for Core Strength (The First One Will Make You Cry)

    Do them until the vein in your forehead bursts!

    Yesterday, I was speaking with a relative who’s nearing 60. She’s been doing a ton of hard work to strengthen her legs after dealing with a knee issue. Now, she wanted to add some serious abdominal exercises for extra power and stability. I thought that if she needed this information, you guys might too!

    Many of us know how to do a push-up, but the best exercises to work your core aren’t as well known. The classic crunches have never given me the burn and strength increases that these do.

    See the video below for an introduction to all three!

    1. Flutter Kicks

    A mainstay of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUDS) training. If it’s hard enough to challenge aspiring Navy SEALs, it should challenge us too! Lay on your back and move your legs in a scissor pattern without putting them down. After 90 seconds of this, my abs are fried from top to bottom.

    1. Plank

    Until I started yoga, I had probably never done a plank properly in my life. The key is to get your shoulders above your wrists. When you do this, your core muscles will engage and you’re well on your way to serious strength gains.

    1. Boat Pose

    Just did this in yoga this morning! You sit down, holding your legs up and bent and your arms alongside them, and open and close your body in a V shape. I find this particularly challenging for the lower abs.

    Like all strength training exercises, I suggest doing them until failure. Keep going until your muscles give out. And if you’re hungry for more strength training resources, see this post.

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  • DraftKings and Robinhood Are Both Growing Like Crazy. Here’s Why.

    As Tom Brady bagged his seventh Super Bowl, I got to thinking about an interesting trend I was seeing. I was hearing more ads for DraftKings every day. At the same time, Robinhood is exploding in popularity and its army of small traders is moving markets. Were these two related?

    DraftKings, an online sports betting app, is exploding in popularity. It’s revenue doubled in the last year, and its stock is on a tear:

    The stock-trading app Robinhood is also growing at an incredible rate. It doubled its payment for order flow revenue, its main revenue source, in just a few months in 2020 as the lockdowns hit.

    Robinhood gamifies investing in a way that can mimic online gambling, and much of the trading on the platform, including in stocks like Gamestop and AMC, seems to be speculative.

    I think both trends come from a big increase in personal income due to stimulus and extra unemployment payments. Put that extra money into the hands of someone who is bored and has fewer other ways to spend, and you see big increases in gambling…err, “investing”.

    With another large stimulus planned, I expect to see more of this in the future. I also wonder where else this extra cash will show up.

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    Photo: “File:Tom Brady 2017.JPG” by Jeffrey Beall is licensed under CC BY 4.0

  • This One Trend is Driving Every Financial Market

    Regardless of which market we look at, we see a similar trend: skyrocketing prices since the beginning of the pandemic. You can see this in the S&P 500, a broad measure of stocks:

    In commodities:

    In the increase in real estate prices and the corresponding decrease in capitalization rates (this chart is from Dallas…see similar trends in other cities in the research papers linked in this post):

    And even in Treasury bonds (recall that the yield moves in the opposite direction from the price, so a lower yield means a higher price):

    Why are all these markets looking the same? The likeliest cause is a huge jump in the money supply. The Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money since the beginning of the pandemic, looking to counter the seismic economic shock. I think this is probably appropriate. In any case, the effect is unmistakable, however you measure money supply.

    Here’s how the “monetary base,” or “the sum of currency in circulation and reserve balances (deposits held by banks and other depository institutions in their accounts at the Federal Reserve),” has expanded:

    If you look at another definition of the money supply, M1 (“the sum of currency held by the public and transaction deposits at depository institutions”), it looks like this:

    And if you broaden your definition of money supply to M2 (“M1 plus savings deposits, small-denomination time deposits (those issued in amounts of less than $100,000), and retail money market mutual fund shares”), you see the same familiar pattern:

    Whichever way you slice it, there’s a lot more money out there than there used to be. That money can be used to bid up stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, bitcoin, Gamestop, or whatever you like.

    There is some debate in the literature about whether you can draw a correlation between the money supply and increasing stock prices. This study sounds a cautionary note:

    future profits may not change, if interest rates decline at the same time that demand for firms’ products, and thus their sales, decline.

    This could be relevant for companies that can’t deliver their products in a contactless manner. But companies that can have been thriving.

    In all, it appears that the massive increase in the money supply is driving financial markets of every stripe in one direction: up. Until the Fed changes policy, I suspect the bias is likely to be toward buoyant markets, especially with vaccines coming on line and the pandemic’s end in sight.

    Have a great weekend, everyone!

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    Photo: “Governor Jerome Powell speaks at Brookings panel, ‘Are there structural issues in U.S. bond markets?’” by BrookingsInst is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

  • What If Homelessness Is Caused by Brain Injuries?

    A couple of months ago, a man approached me on the street near my home. He asked for a bit of money, and although I usually never do, for some reason I gave it to him. I later saw him on a regular basis near the neighborhood grocery. I found out his name was John* and he used to work in construction. Several times a week, I’d run into him and stop and chat for a few minutes.

    One day, I noticed he had large purple bruises on his forehead. He told me he had tripped over his shoelaces and gone down hard. Especially if someone is exhausted and cold, it’s easy to see how this could happen. He had been to the hospital, but they dismissed him quickly, perhaps because he was homeless.

    He had lived in our town for 48 of his 53 years, and only become homeless recently after losing his job, like so many others. It troubled me to think that after a lifetime of contribution, our town had cast him aside so readily.

    I was reminded of John yesterday when I heard that over half of homeless people may have brain injuries. Skeptical, I decided to do some digging. I found a metanalysis in The Lancet that confirmed this astounding figure:

    The lifetime prevalence of any severity of TBI [traumatic brain injury] in homeless and marginally housed individuals (18 studies, n=9702 individuals) was 53.1%

    This is much greater than the general population:

    The lifetime prevalence of TBI in homeless and marginally housed individuals is between 2.5-times and 4.0-times higher than estimates in the general population. Moreover, the lifetime prevalence of mo­derate or severe TBI in this population is nearly ten-times higher than estimates in the general population.

    It’s difficult to say whether the brain injuries are a cause or effect of homelessness. But, homeless people tended to have their first TBI at a young age. To me, this argues that brain injuries are a cause of homelessness:

    Age at first TBI ranged from 15 years to 19.9 years, and we calculated a weighted mean age of first TBI of 15.8 years.

    Perhaps the relationship works both ways:

    TBI could increase the risk for homelessness, and homelessness could increase the risk for incident TBI.

    It’s common for us to blame the homeless for their condition. After all, many are addicted to alcohol and drugs, aren’t they? But that too may be related to head trauma:

    several characteristics of homeless and marginally housed populations (eg, residential instability or substance use) were associated with sustaining TBI

    Another study from Canada found similar figures, and noted that the first TBI usually happened before they became homeless:

    The lifetime prevalence among homeless participants was 53% for any traumatic brain injury and 12% for moderate or severe traumatic brain injury. For 70% of respondents, their first traumatic brain injury occurred before the onset of homelessness.

    A British study found that homelessness was not a significant predictive factor for head injuries. However, it didn’t address the question of whether the homeless had a TBI before becoming homeless.

    Imagine two people, one with an stable and well-off family and one with a chaotic and impoverished family (or no family at all). They both hit their heads. One gets support and good medical care, but the other may wind up homeless.

    I sometimes wonder if that’s what happened to John. Did he get hurt, wind up homeless, and then find himself in a position to get hurt again?

    I haven’t seen him lately, despite looking for him over and over. I hope he found a nice place to stay this winter, and I hope to see him again.

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    *Not his real name

    Photo: “Thomas (Tomaso) is Homeless” by Franco Folini is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

  • Emergency Post: NYC Animals in Need of a Good Home!

    An employee getting COVID has forced the closure of an animal shelter in Manhattan. They are looking for foster families for the animals until the shelter can reopen.

    I just messaged them on Instagram here. If you can help, please contact them!

  • Could a New Class of Antibiotics Put an End to the Most Deadly Infections?

    When I worked in medical software, multidrug resistant bacteria were always a concern. But new research has created a class of antibiotics that may make even the most drug-resistant infections history:

    [They] focused on a metabolic pathway that is essential for most bacteria but absent in humans, making it an ideal target for antibiotic development. This pathway, called methyl-D-erythritol phosphate (MEP) or non-mevalonate pathway, is responsible for biosynthesis of isoprenoids — molecules required for cell survival in most pathogenic bacteria. The lab targeted the IspH enzyme, an essential enzyme in isoprenoid biosynthesis, as a way to block this pathway and kill the microbes. Given the broad presence of IspH in the bacterial world, this approach may target a wide range of bacteria.

    I found it fascinating that the scientists used computer modeling to winnow down millions of possible drug candidates to a few compounds most likely to work, then tested them for real. This reminds me of the CAD/CAM software that has revolutionized manufacturing.

    These drugs could be used for a wide variety of stubborn infections, per the original paper in Nature:

    they kill clinical isolates of several multidrug-resistant bacteria—including those from the genera Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas, Klebsiella, Enterobacter, Vibrio, Shigella, Salmonella, Yersinia, Mycobacterium and Bacillus—yet are relatively non-toxic to mammalian cells.

    This research is in its early stages in mice, but the early results are promising. I can only imagine the many more incredible drugs that may come from using this type of computer modeling for drug discovery.

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    Photo: “Salmonella species on X.L.D. agar.” by Nathan Reading is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

  • What It’s Like to Be on Law & Order: SVU

    It was barely dawn when I walked into the squat brick building in Manhattan’s Little Italy. I wasn’t even sure it was the right place. I went through the heavy swinging doors to find a hive of hundreds, preparing to make one of the best known television shows on earth.

    In December 2019, I got the amazing opportunity to be a background actor on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. My part was tiny, but the process of producing an episode of one of the longest running scripted shows on television was fascinating.

    From the moment I walked in, I noticed everything ran like clockwork. The sign-in process, which could be time consuming on other shows, was over in a flash and we were off to wardrobe. Clothes were an issue: the scene was supposed to be occurring in the fall, so we couldn’t wear heavy coats. But it was near Christmas and the temperature was barely 30. Wool and long underwear saved the day!

    As the sun rose, we left the staging area and headed to a real New York subway station, which had been shut down completely for filming. In the scene, the Special Victims Unit catches a notorious subway groper. The preparation was elaborate: production had even scored an actual NYC subway train!

    A Production Assistant told us where to sit in the car, and I found the scene’s main actress next to me. The groper touches her, unaware she is an undercover cop, and the actress jumps and cries out “What the…?” Then, I had to react.

    I thought to myself, how would I really react if this happened on the train? Because I know it does. I’d love to say I’d become Batman, clean up Gotham, and pound the worm that attacked her. But in reality, it would probably be unclear to me what had happened and I wouldn’t really want to get involved anyhow. So, I just looked up briefly and returned to looking at my phone.

    It occurred to me that we were playing out a common scenario and putting it in the face of a massive audience: look at this! For the women these things actually happen to, I wanted to play it accurately and well, however small my part may have been. My wife has told me countless stories of things like this happening to her friends, so I knew it was real.

    On a lighter note, I had no idea how hard it was to film an action scene! Every element has to be timed correctly. The police chased the groper on a moving train, and the crook was supposed to escape the moment the train stopped and the doors opened. But the doors kept opening too late, leading to him actually being caught! So the MTA driver hired for the show had to move the train back one station and we took it from the top, over and over. We must’ve done two dozen takes just to film this one scene lasting perhaps a minute.

    Every detail mattered. The Production Assistant told us to play around on our phones before the attack occurred. I turned my phone completely off and then pretended to tap around on the screen. I had just gotten the phone and I was sure it would erupt in a cacophony of beeps at the most inopportune moment, forcing dozens of people to re-do the scene yet again.

    I was amazed that the director could see the entire episode before it had even happened. As we were about to begin shooting, a cameraman exclaimed that he was “seeing red.” His camera was picking up the color red somewhere in the shot, which would mess up the footage. The director said “Your frame is from here to here,” gesturing with his hands. I found it incredible that he knew exactly where the camera should be pointing and what the scene would look like, despite never touching a camera.

    At one point, Ice-T plopped down in the train with a bunch of background actors who were waiting to do their next scene. He chatted amiably with everyone. I had heard he was a very friendly man, and it’s true! He also looked much younger than his 61 years. I was in the middle of another scene, so I didn’t have a chance to speak to him, but I hope to be back on the show when things return to normal!

    As we stood outside the subway station with the snowing coming down at the end of a long day, I felt a sense of accomplishment. We had filmed a complex scene. We had had a fascinating experience. And hopefully we had done justice to the difficult experiences many women have.

    P.S. If you’re interested in more about what it’s like behind the scenes of a TV show, check out this post about working on the show New Amsterdam.

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