December 6, 2020  In the ongoing conversation about how to defeat the coronavirus, experts have made reference to the “Swiss cheese model” of pandemic defense.  The metaphor is easy enough to grasp:  Multiple layers of protection, imagined as cheese slices, block the spread of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.  No one layer is perfect; each has holes, and when the holes align, the risk of infection increases.  But several layers combined—social distancing, plus masks, plus hand-washing, plus testing and tracing, plus ventilation, plus government messaging—significantly reduce the overall risk.  Vaccination will add one more protective layer.  “Pretty soon you’ve created an impenetrable barrier, and you really can quench the transmission of the virus,” said Dr. Julie Gerberding, executive vice president and chief patient officer at Merck, who recently referenced the Swiss cheese model when speaking at a virtual gala fundraiser for MoMath, the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan.  “But it requires all of those things, not just one of those things,” she added.  “I think that’s what our population is having trouble getting their head around.  We want to believe that there is going to come this magic day when suddenly 300 million doses of vaccine will be available, and we can go back to work, and things will return to normal.  That is absolutely not going to happen fast.”  Siobhan Roberts  https://news.yahoo.com/swiss-cheese-model-pandemic-defense-171534763.html 

Alan Turing was a prodigy, a mathematician and logician who played a central role in breaking the Nazi ciphers in World War Two and who went on to be widely hailed as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.  During the dark days of 1940, when a German invasion of Britain was a legitimate threat, Turing set his lateral thinking ability to working out how he might protect and grow his modest capital, as related in Andrew Hodges’ biography “Alan Turing:  The Enigma”.  After first rejecting his own idea of converting his savings into a suitcase full of razor blades, presumably on the idea that they would later be hard to get and rise in value, Turing was taken with the thinking of his fellow mathematician David Champernowne, who had observed that silver bullion was one of the few assets to do well during and after the chaos of World War One.  Turing seized on this idea as being correct and joined Champernowne in buying silver, in his case converting, for him, a substantial 250 pounds sterling (perhaps 15,000 pounds stg today) into two shining ingots.  Yet, perhaps fearful of confiscation by a successful enemy or a government tax on capital, a plan that was mooted in Britain in 1920, Turing did not, like Champernowne, put his silver in the bank.  Instead, Turing opted to take the somewhat extreme step of burying his ingots separately.  Using a baby-buggy to transport, Turing secreted the ingots in the woods around Bletchley Park, the top-secret code-breaking installation where he was based during the war.  Turing even went so far as to devise a cipher explaining exactly where the ingots were buried, to help find them when the time came.  Turing’s analysis of financial markets was exactly right.  By March of 1946 silver was up 80 percent at the London fixing price from its early 1940 levels.  This allowed Champernowne to turn a healthy profit.  But when Turing went hunting for his bars he found that the landmarks of the countryside had changed and he was unable to find them, even when he eventually employed a metal detector.  He searched repeatedly, in 1944, 1946 and 1952 (by which point his putative returns were fattened by a 30 percent devaluation of the pound against the dollar).  Turing never found his sterling, and like so many investors with lesser minds before or since, he was undone, not by the main thrust of this thinking, but by ham-handed and overly complicated execution.  James Saft  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-markets-saft/saft-on-wealth-learning-from-turings-silver-hoard-idUSKCN0UY2OC 

The great seal of the state of Delaware was first adopted on January 17, 1777, with the current version being adopted April 29, 2004.  It contains the state coat of arms surrounded by an inscription.  At the center of the coat of arms is a shield of horizontal red, blue and white stripes.  On the red stripe is hay and a cob of corn.  On the white stripe is an ox standing on grass.  Above the shield is a sailing ship.  Supporting the shield are a farmer on the left and a militiaman on the right.  Underneath the shield is the state motto.  The sheaf of wheat is taken from the Sussex County seal and signifies the agricultural vitality of the state.  The ear of corn was taken from the Kent County seal and symbolizes the agricultural basis of the state's economy.  The blue stripe, above the ox, represents the Delaware River, the main stay of the state's commerce and transportation.  The ship is a symbol of New Castle County's ship building industry and the state's extensive coastal commerce.  The farmer with the hoe represents the central role of farming to the state.  The motto "Liberty and Independence" was provided by the Order of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of American Revolutionary War officers, formed in 1783.  See image at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Delaware 

Delaware designated "The First State" as the official state nickname on May 23, 2002, following a request by Mrs. Anabelle O'Malley's first grade class at Mt. Pleasant Elementary School.  Delaware was the first of the 13 original states to ratify the United States Constitution on December 7, 1787.  (Delaware Day is celebrated each December 7 as a holiday in the state).  Other nicknames for Delaware are Small Wonder and Diamond State.  https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/delaware/state-nickname/first-state

StoryCorps is collecting oral histories of 2020 through StoryCorps Connect.  The New York Public Library has launched History Now: The Pandemic Diaries Project.  And universities from Princeton to Arizona State to the University of Wisconsin are building COVID-19 oral history archives.  So many projects are underway, in fact, that a number of organizations have offered guidance on how to take an oral history.  Americans have turned to oral testimony in a time of crisis before.  The American Life Histories and Ex-Slave Narratives Projects undertaken by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) between 1936 and 1940 stand out as extraordinary precedents for the coast-to-coast collection of oral testimony in the midst of a national catastrophe.  They offer prescient lessons for the present.  The Federal Writers’ Project was established in 1935 as a part of the WPA Federal Project Number One, which offered government jobs to unemployed culture workers during the Depression.  Lucie Levine  https://daily.jstor.org/how-to-gather-the-oral-histories-of-covid-19/   

Larry LaPrise is the man credited with writing perhaps America's best-known novelty dance song ever, "The Hokey Pokey," although the extent to which he actually invented the dance remains in dispute.  He was born Roland Lawrence LaPrise on November 11, 1912, in Detroit, and served in France during World War II as an Army musician.  After the war, he settled in Idaho and played with a local group called the Ram Trio, which performed often at a ski lodge in Sun Valley.  It was there that LaPrise debuted "The Hokey Pokey," supposedly an original creation loosely based on a French-Canadian song he learned from his father.  The Ram Trio recorded the song in 1949, with LaPrise and his bandmates Charles Macak and Taft Baker were granted the copyright the following year.  The song didn't break nationally until bandleader Ray Anthony purchased the rights and recorded it as the B-side of another national dance craze, "The Bunny Hop," in 1953; naturally, the more people flipped the record over, the more "The Hokey Pokey" caught on.  In 1956, LaPrise was sued by a songwriter named Bob Degen, who owned the copyright of a similar song from 1944 called "The Hokey Pokey Dance"; the suit was settled out of court and the royalties split.  Degen also claimed to have invented the dance.  Some World War II GIs were confirmed to have partaken in a highly similar English dance craze called the Okey Cokey during the war; what was more, the strict Shaker sect of Kentucky--which normally banned dancing--was also documented to have sung a similar song called "The Hinkum Booby."  The rights to "The Hokey Pokey" were eventually acquired by the Acuff-Rose publishing company.  https://www.allmusic.com/artist/larry-la-prise-mn0001294554   

THOUGHT FOR DECEMBER 7  Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above.  They come out of struggles from below. - Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor and political activist (b. 7 Dec 1928)   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2294  December 7, 2020