Marvin

My sister's company is helping with the testing of these machines. The one caveat she gives is that many of these kinds of tests are not full tests (those usually take days), so they often have high false positive and/or false negative rates. There are ways around this, but with throughput being a major issue, I don't know what may be needed that I don't know about.

Just got word from my sisters that the materials for the study I had volunteered for were diverted to NYC. They obviously have more COVID-19 resistant people there and can get samples turned around locally faster. The concerning piece of information was the infection rate per capital was much larger than all but the worst estimates. They are more in line with Europe before any lockdowns, which implies that either: 1. The Communist Chinese have a greater resistance or tolerance to the virus for either environmental or genetic reasons; 2. The Communist Chinese have grossly understated their numbers across-the-board.

@Eleven I typically do number theory problems from old AMC, AIME, IMO, NYSML, ARML, and Putnam exams. The IMO problems are the hardest @Neo just saw that FIDE cancelled the Candidates Tournament.

Old Sabres games. Theory of several complex variables. Math contests, applied math techniques. FIDE Candidates Tournament System networking and administration for new job. Music analysis videos from different YouTube channels. History, cultural, etc. YouTube channels. Classic TV favourites. Classic movies that I haven't seen in aeons.

We have a winner.

True story: after this game, I snuck onto the ice via the penalty box. After the security guard scolded me with a big smile on his face, I went to where Seymour, Doug Moss, and I think Norty were signing autographs. When they signed my ticket, Seymour said, "have a safe trip home." I replied, "thanks; I need that more than you know." They all looked at me for a moment before Doug Moss's GF asked, "what do you mean?" I replied that I had driven in Friday night from East Lansing, Michigan and was driving back 6 hours overnight to teach a 9:10 class at MSU. After a stunned silence, one of the guys in line said, "are you saying that you are doing 12 hours of driving this weekend just for the game?" I said that it was true and that I had done the same thing for the retirement of Tim Horton's number earlier that season. I explained that I was a day 1 fan who threatened to flunk students who dared to bother me if I was watching a game at the bar. After a huge laugh, Doug Moss slapped me on the back while Seymour said, "stories like yours and fans like you are why I hope we can all celebrate a Cup victory together soon." Excuse me while I cry over the poignancy of the last thing I ever heard Seymour speak.

Yup, that's mild. I was still mostly functional, albeit suboptimally. I did not have any underlying respiratory problems before then -- at least none that could not have been cured by losing 20 pounds. The differences now are easy to spot and understand. I can't exert at as high a level, say, when I clean the kitty litters (we have 18 for 6 cats). I can't exert for as long when I need to be more physical. My symptoms of "male over 50" disease are more pronounced. I need more recovery time from exertion. My respiration is up. My blood pressure varies wildly. One thing that is a positive, though, is that everything has been very slowly improving. My stamina is heading in the right direction. My lung capacity and breathing have improved slightly, but definitely, the last couple weeks.

Yeah. No signings would be happening if he weren't coming back. Drat it.

If Ullmark improves again and we get someone in the average-plus starter (13-16), it should get close. Icing 4 real, honest-to-God NHL centres behind Eichel and 4 honest-to-God NHL lines behind Skinner-Eichel-Reinhart to boot would seal it. (1 extra centre and 1 extra line each for injuries.) The 5th line equivalent could be Asplund-Lazar-Vesey in this instance. My beef is that JBottom thinks that this could be the 4th line with Mittlestadt-Cozens-Okposo as the 3rd line with Malone, Thompson, and Simmonds being next.

I may have got lucky. The start-up has a subsidiary in Hubei province (WuHan is its capital). They came to Buffalo last April. I worked with their techies in June. Some of their families had the illness before they came here. We just treated it like the flu and made sure I had my shots. No one got sick, so we just let it go. In October and December, we sent teams to Hobei for a couple of weeks. After the December meeting, there were local quarantines instituted while were in the air returning. My first 2 exposures were before the mutation became really virulent. We who discussed it theorise that I had some mild resistance built up by the time I got exposed to the worse form. It is only when I saw the symptom list in mid-January that my problems made sense.

It could have been a lot worse. I kept fighting through it because I worked at a start-up and got paid on contingency (no sales = no pay) and perceived contribution by clients (pay in proportion to visibility in the direct product; not great for my hardware and software support work -- necessary though it be).

My sister (microbiologist) says that it is. I am naturally curious, so if you have questions you would like answered, I will prepare them.

Sure. In fact, I should have posted this earlier. Thank you, PA! Fever, 1-3 degrees C above normal: 1.5 weeks. Its persistence marks it as unusual. Cough: 3 weeks. The tell here was that my throat felt like it was burning and was being punctured like needles. Shortness of breath, trouble inhaling, non-cardiac chest pains: started after 1 week, got worse, still not back to normal after 3 months Extreme somnolence verging on narcolepsy: 5 weeks. We think that I have diminished lung capacity because of lung damage, probably exacerbated by hypertension. Still remnants after 3 months. Bouts of confusion: 2 months. Just recently pulled out of this. More aches and pains than usual for male over 50. Includes some problems with balance. Other symptoms were like terrible allergies.

Schoenfeld, Smehlik, B. Sauve.

Maybe good news: There is an experimental treatment that was put on hold from the H1N1 days and is being adapted for COVID-19. For various reasons, we are almost certain that I had a mild case of COVID-19 in December. I have volunteered for a blood draw which, assuming we are correct, should produce 5-10 shots for treatment or, if we get very lucky, up to 20 shots including prevention. (Should be next week.) If my theory is correct, everyone else on that floor (about 50 people) will be volunteering by the end of April. Nothing like this has ever been tried with humans, but it is being accelerated in this emergency. Updates if it goes through.

Unravel a wire hanger, wrap one end around your antenna, the other end around a wire music stand, and point the base at the transmitter. It's how I got HNIC out of London, Ont. when I was in Cleveland.

Mark it 8, Dude.

(Deleted original) I compared the Philly series with Sabres games from the 1997-2001 and 2010-1 playoffs plus random series since The Terrible Lockout. I am going to make a bold, unpopular statement: in any playoffs after 2007, that 2005-6 team would have a hard time getting past the first round unless Miller had stood on his head because of they were small and because of the clutch-and-grab. Don Cherry, Bob Clarke, et al. hated them and had the pull of CBC and Comcast to rescind enforcement of the rules. (Remember the week where every article on major hockey sites run by their fellow ardipithicenes decried, "the eventual destruction of hockey" by "Buffalo's Pond Hockey Pansies"? Spector's Hockey got so obnoxious that I stopped going in early 2006.) Their inability to fight through "normal skiing", "good, legal holds", "honest, legal interference", and "strong, legal obstruction" would make winning any series difficult. It worked: these guys convinced the NHL that this kind of hockey was inferior entertainment to the Dead Puck Era, which is closer to current hockey than 2005-6 is.

I don't think anyone in the league has been fired since the shutdown. This may be a coincidence, may have come from on high, or may just be a gentleman's agreement not to can anybody until the season is cancelled or ends.

I watched parts of Game 7 against Carolina a few months ago. A few things of note. 1. Buffalo Sabres fans were about 40% of the attendees. They were so loud that it sounded like the Carolina PA people accidentally blew their goal horn or something when the Sabres scored. They were also louder than Caniacs. 2. After Janik's goal, Doc Emrick said that the fans were chanting "Let's Go Hurricanes." I had forgotten how much this lying pissed me off. 3. Carolina sleepwalked through the first 2 periods, as if they figured the Sabres would just collapse under the weight of the moment without Connolly, Kalinin, Tallinder, Numminen, and McKee. It was like Hecht's goal woke them up because they played with far more urgency in the 3rd period. 4. Memories of Rod Brind'Amour and Peter Laviolette getting bent out of shape by Lindy Ruff's press conferences after McKee's injury was revealed made me smile. He was awesome at this. 5. Had the NHL not gone with the ultra-divisional game distribution and seeding, the Sabres would have played Carolina in round 2 at full strength. Based on what actually happened, I think the Sabres would have won in 6. What happens in round 3 then?

There was unquestionable cross-over marketing afterward and the colour palette matched perfectly. Coincidences like the identical colours and shades never strike me as random -- probably from too many stories from the production staffs of Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Blake's 7. (I went to a lot of conventions from 1976-89, so your questions of my brain functions are well-founded.) Because of this, I and many others around me firmly believed that the Rigases were "consulted" by Doug Moss's GF and the marketing staff about changing the colour scheme (IIRC, John Rigas was on the Board of Directors by then). If there were differences in the colours RGB values, my Netscape 4.7 could not detect them. Note 1: I am not calling this a conspiracy; I am calling it competence. If I had been the Rigases and if I were unattached to Ye Olde Blue 'n' Gold, I would have said that the colour palette chosen would affect my purchase offer. If my corporate colours had been black, teal green, candy apple red, electric blue, canary yellow, pumpkin orange, and eggplant, I would have based my price in part on how close the team's colour combination and weighted percentage of all the colours matched my company's. Note 2: I am jaded by, among other things, Sir Michael Grade confirming some of what I thought were the most asinine rumours about how BBC executives worked to destroy Doctor Who after season 22 and by what friends of mine who worked at Adelphia at the time thought. We could all be wrong.

For numerous reasons, I can rationalize paying them to have LOG making 3A line money for 1-2 years and as 3B money for 1-2 more after that until we are a real contender (3 years max). There is a lot here to disagree with, so YMMV. 1. Larry and Z were both projected to be solid middle-six centres. Disco Dan Abysmal was THE worst thing to happen to them. In Pittsburgh, Abysmal was notorious for impeding development of young, moderately skilled players in favour of less-talented JAG's; he virtually killed these two. I wonder how much better they and the team would be if they had been handled better. 2. There was a lot to dislike about Housley's coaching, but rehabilitating these two and helping Okposo re-invent himself to create the LOG line was genius. During the worst season since The Bad Big Tank, they were the only line in the league to go plus against Pastrnak-Bergeron-Marchand and Krejci's line the entire season. Even Anyone-O'Reilly-Reinhart were inferior to them against top lines that season. That's not trivial. (I keep track of these things.) 3. Yes, the LOG line ideally is a 4th line. But since their creation, they have been the Sabres' #2 line over long stretches by both ice time and performance. That can be used to allow Cozens, Mittlestadt, Thompson, Asplund, Kahun, and the rest of the youth to be developed properly -- for a change. The line's role can be varied and eventually replaced as the youth improves. If they are still a checking line that drives the opposing top lines nuts for the next 3 years, that is more than passable to me at $12M -- especially if the coaches can fix the PK.

The Rigases? Really? My 2000 yearbook says they are. Regardless, in my mind, the red, black, silver, and white are inextricably linked to Adelphia, the bankruptcy, and almost losing the team.

It's my perception based on the evidence I accumulated when I had partial or full seasons from 1996-2004 and Adelphia cable from 1996 until it folded. They wore the Sabres black uniforms with Adelphia "A's" on them instead of the Demonic Goat and the B-Sabre patch at the games. They had variations for the red and white uniforms as well. All the Adelphia propaganda papers were in Sabres colours -- even stuff that was outside WNY. Thus, IMHO, the choice of colours was specifically for Adelphia's promotion. ("Brand Synergy" was the jargon of the time.) I was tolerant of it because hey, the Rigases owned the team. However, once Adelphia began to collapse and the Sabres went into bankruptcy, you could not have got rid of the colour combination fast enough for me because it was forever tainted. (Still looked better than the Slug and that hideous yellow turd, erm, third, mind you.) If this strikes you as being in my head, you might be onto something.

The problem with the demonic goats from my POV (aside from the pyramids, the crest, the Adelphia colours, and the lack of connection to the great Sabres teams of my youth) is that I associate them with the Rigases, the Adelphia bankruptcy, and almost losing the team. Part of me thinks that people assume the early Sabres were softer than melted butter because they were so skilled, lost to the Flyers, could not get out of the 2nd round for years, could not beat the Islanders, and could not get past Boston for aeons. The following are excuses or reasons, depending on how you view them. The Sabres often had at least one fundamental flaw that held them back and seemed to hit unbelievably bad luck when they were the most complete. Variously, coaching, goaltending, lack of forward depth, lack of defencive depth, or the GM's inability to move with league-wide officiating trends explain them. Moreover, the first half of the Sabres' existence was an era of dynasties, where great teams could stay together for years and the league often bent the rules to help them. From 1973-93, the only Cup winners were Calgary (1), Edmonton (5), Montreal (7), New York Islanders (4), Philadelphia (2), Pittsburgh (2). In the early years, the New York Rangers and Chicago Black Hawks were contenders that the young Sabres displaced by 1975. Boston and Philadelphia were perennial pretenders or better. The only non-dynastic Cups in that run were 1973 (Montreal -- and even this is dubious), 1989 (Calgary), and 1993 (Montreal). Even so, there was a statistical analysis done for all NHL teams in the expansion era through 1986 that had the Buffalo Sabres as the only non-Cup winners at the top of the statistics that correlated with Cup Winners. ("Alone among the all the Cup Winners are the ever-close, but always-disappointing Sabres in 5th place.") Similar stats were run in 2001 by eras of the NHL and, what do you know, the Sabres are the only non-Cup winner in each era at the top of these lists. And, according to my old Sabres Yearbook in 2001, the list of teams that the Buffalo Sabres had played a statistically significant number of games against and had a losing record was the Edmonton Oilers and the Philadelphia Flyers. At least it was fun, if not ultimately satisfying. I understand that I look at those Sabres with mistier eyes than I should. I look at the early teams through the prism of the Cold War, especially the Summit Series, the Arab Oil Embargo, the wage and price freeze, Watergate, Southeast Asia, the Super Series, stagflation, the Iran hostages, the invasion of Afghanistan, and our emotional needs to play the Nuclear War / Nuclear Escalation games: politics and sports were inextricably tied back then with the threat of nuclear holocaust greater than anyone's perceptions of the 2016 and 2020 elections could ever be -- which is what made The Miracle on Ice even sweeter. The Sabres were gutsy enough to invite the CCCP Olympic team to a challenge at the Aud on 1 January 1974. As the Courier-Express put it, "Soviets Said 'Nyet'". That's the original Winter Classic and Challenge Cup rolled into one. They were the first team to beat the Soviets. They also beat CSKA in the Aud with a Soviet ref and as the "visitors" 6-1. (The Flyers declined the same conditions.) And people treat it as an accident because CSKA looked bad, as if the Sabres had nothing to do with it. I don't care what a Dope with a Mike said to me on WGR - I am gamete-laden-biome-transfer-ing proud of those teams for, forgive my Cold War jargon, "killing the Commies" (quoting Punch Imlach). I wanted those wins more than I wanted the Stanley Cup those years. I can not explain how important they were not just for the fans, but for the US and Canada at the time. The Flyers' goon show and the Miracle on Ice eclipsed them nationally, but not for me.