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Survey

I really appreciate the survey responses so far. I will let the survey run for another week or two. If you did not take it yet, it only takes a couple of minutes. You can find it here. I will share the results later.

Ukraine

Every day Telegram tells exactly what is going on. I also follow President Zelensky’s personal channel on Telegram. He reminds me of Reagan. Communicate communicate communicate. He is really great at it. A leader. Today, he said, “Russia’s strategic defeat is already obvious to everyone in the world and even to those who still continue to communicate with them. Russia simply lacks courage to admit it so far. They are cowards. And they are trying to hide the truth behind missile, air and artillery strikes. Therefore, our task is to fight until we achieve our goals in this war. Free our land, our people and reliably ensure our security.”

Covid

The CDC has been collaborating with global public health and industry partners to understand Omicron. They are learning how easily it spreads, the severity of illness it causes, and how well available vaccines and medications work against it. 

The three most common lineages of Omicron currently are BA.1, BA.1.1 and BA.2. The variants spread more easily than earlier variants. They have learned anyone with Omicron infection, regardless of vaccination status or whether or not they have symptoms, can spread the virus to others. Persons infected with an Omicron variant can have symptoms similar to previous variants. The severity of symptoms can be affected by COVID-19 vaccination status, the presence of other health conditions, age, and history of prior infection. It appears to be less severe but people are dying from it. We should still be cautious and get vaxxed to the max. 

Space

The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth at 250 miles above sea level in the part of space known as Low Earth Orbit (LEO). In order to maintain its orbit it travels around the planet at 17,500 MPH. How does it go that fast? Imagine if you’re standing on the ground and you throw a ball in the air. It follows a parabolic trajectory and Earth’s gravity pulls it down by 9.8M/s. However, if you stood on a high enough hill and threw the ball fast enough it would go into orbit. That’s what rockets do.

Launch vehicles like the Space Shuttle, which was the primary launch vehicle used to build ISS, use huge amounts of chemical energy to accelerate out of the atmosphere and deliver payloads into orbit. ISS is not totally free of Earth’s influence though because there is a small amount of atmospheric drag exerted on it, so it periodically needs to be “boosted” to a higher orbit. The energy for such a maneuver is typically provided by a visiting Russian Progress freighter’s engines. ISS and everyone on board are traveling at the same rate of speed, and the boost adds just a little bit more velocity and altitude. When the boost occurs the station accelerates but the astronauts do not. This video shows the effect in action, sped up 8x.

– Aaron J. Patrick

 

Reflection Attitude

A lot of progress on Reflection Attitude this week. Starting to line up reviewers and blurbers. Edited the Preface and introduction.

Wall Street

The first part of it was another really terrible week, but things turned around a bit on Friday. Nobody knows if this is the bottom. It feels good for now to see all my spreadsheet models shows green instead of red. All the big techs and other techs were up. To keep perspective, all of them are much closer to their 52-week lows than their 52-week highs. The six GAMMAT stocks were $8.3 trillion. I remain bullish on tech, large and small but it is going to be a long wait. Tempting to average down.

Crypto

As of Friday, there are 19,430 cryptocurrencies. It is really easy for anyone to create a new one. Total market cap of all the crypto is $1.3 trillion. Bitcoin represents 45% of the total and Ethereum 20%. The rest are 35%. There are a lot of great ideas among the rest, but many are fraudulent or what I would call over-creative. Terra and its LUNA coin tanked so badly they had to shut it down. That doesn’t help develop trust. My crypto consists of 25 different cryptocurrencies but 95% of the total value is BTC and, if you throw in ETH, it is 96%. The other 23 took a beating. I expect at least a few of them will bounce back. Looking at the big picture, there are billions of dollars invested in crypto-related ideas. I believe some of them will be highly successful. As of 1 pm Friday, Coinbase was up 23%.