Fauci and the Lab Leak and Pandemic Handling

This is difficult to write about and think about because the politics around it are completely warped.  But I will try.

Republicans hate Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted COVID-19 was a serious emergency that demanded serious measures including lockdowns and masking.  And sometimes Republicans believe that not only were mRNA vaccines ineffective against the the virus, they caused all the excess deaths from a virus that otherwise would merely have been a mild flu.  Republicans are wrong about these things.  

2) Some Republicans think Fauci was responsible for the creation of the very deadly COVID-19 pandemic (which contradicts the first part, so many Republicans don't get this far).  There may be some truth here because it is quite possible that Fauci helped set the ball in motion which ultimately led to COVID-19.

Democrats love Fauci because:

1) Fauci insisted that COVID-19 was serious (it was, of course) and demanded serious measures like masking and lockdowns (it did).  Democrats are entirely correct about this but often fail to see the issues in points 2 and 3.

2) Fauci epitomizes "Science" (but "science" is also people with self-interests and blind spots, and science is sometimes wrong).  That Democrats often reflexively side with Science, Medicine, and Law arises from a bias towards the PMC.  All these things are best understood critically.  (But this does not mean falling in line with cranks and charlatans either, we must be even more critical of them.)

3) The belief that there is no "scientific" reason to believe the Lab Leak Hypothesis (but the Lab Leak Hypothesis has not been disproven either, despite great efforts to do so, and many serious people believe it.  Fauci himself initially believed that the Wuhan Meat Market was only an "amplifier" of the pandemic which originated elsewhere, and Fauci this day continues to admit that that it is not impossible that the pandemic originated from a "lab leak"...which meant that someone in a lab first caught the disease from GOF boosted specimens they were working on).

Given that we just had a Senate Hearing in which Fauci refused to answer 100 questions about COVID-19 it might be interesting to see what all of those questions were.  But instead, the media and every source I can find is more interested in the politics of Fauci invoking the Fifth Ammendment when he was pardoned by Biden for activities starting in 2014.  I have not even found (yet) the questions asked in official Senate documents released to the public.

COVID-19 ORIGINS

Gain of Function (GOF) research on several risky viruses was banned in 2014, but the ban was lifted in 2017 because of "stricter oversight."

But starting in 2014, the NIH funded the EcoHealth alliance to study viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).  This appears to have been to evade the ban on GOF.  The research in Wuhan continued despite the ban up to the origins of COVID-19 and possibly beyond.

Because this research was being done in China, it was not affected by the ban on doing this research in the US, and also the later "stricter oversight" applied to doing it in the US.

It is known that WIV was doing research on Coronaviruses that could be characterized as GOF research (though perhaps not by certain definitions of that) in a BSL-2 laboratory (inadequate for the task and outside US oversight) at the time COVID-19 was released.  Therefore, a lab leak from WIV remains a highly plausible origin of COVID-19, and several US intelligence agencies (FBI, DOE, and CIA) concluded as early as 2021 (with low to medium confidence) that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak and they maintain these conclusions to this day.  The Lab Leak Hypothesis is not a crazy "Conspiracy Theory" believed only by kooks no matter how much some media and scientists say that it is.

We don't actually have enough detail to prove the Lab Leak Hypothesis because China has never allowed anyone else to see critical information about what WIV was doing in 2019, which itself is suspicious, because if this information were not incriminating they would have no reason to hide anything.  It is also known that several people involved in this research at WIV got seriously ill around the time in question.

Some, typically MAGA, believe that COVID-19 was a Chinese plot, but US involvement in funding similar research in Wuhan somewhat weakens that idea, as well as the fact that China itself was the first to have to deal with COVID-19 and lost lives and considerable resources because of it.  There have been others suggesting it was a US plot, and COVID-19 was simply "planted" in Wuhan to disrupt China, but once again the US suffered even more from COVID-19 so if it was a plot it was surely very inept.  These ideas that COVID-19 was a plot are examples of crazy conspiracy theories, but they should not be confused with the Lab Leak Hypothesis.

There have been panels of scientists (mostly virologists with vested interests at hand) who concluded the COVID-19 origin was not likely lab leak based on technical details about the virus and the Wuhan Meat Market, but those conclusions are not air tight, so a lab leak still remains plausible.  It should be noted that no "smoking gun" was ever found at the Meat Market or elsewhere.  No evidence of COVID-19 has ever been found in the wild, as has sometimes been done before with other pandemics.  All we know is that people in Wuhan were apparently the first to get it (though we can't be entirely sure of that either).  And, perhaps not coincidentally, Wuhan had the WIV which had been doing GOF research on coronaviruses.  That is a remarkable fact, actually.  Meanwhile, the animals alleged (but never found) to be part of a zoonotic transfer were a considerable distance away.  Why did COVID-19 not start there, among the people living near or capturing these animals?

Early on in the investigation of the origins of COVID-19, some scientists claimed that the structure of the virus could not have developed naturally, it clearly looked like a result of GOF genetic splicing.  Much of the research claiming zoonotic origin of COVID debunks that notion.  But it does not prove that COVID could not have been created by GOF research.

Fauci denies that this particular Coronavirus research being done at WIV in 2019 was funded by NIH, and he is correct.  However, previous research of that nature WAS funded by NIH through EcoHealth Alliance.  What WIV was likely doing in 2019 (and this is what Jeffrey Sachs, who led one task force investigating COVID origins said in 2021) was unfunded research in the anticipation of funding.  Like Dr Sachs, I have worked in science and I know this is how labs operate.  A cynic could even believe the real research is the "unfunded research," and when the funding finally arrives that research is now virtually complete, and the funding is then mainly used to start research seeking the next funding opportunity, in effect being the "unfunded research" for that.  Sachs himself, after leading a panel of scientists investigating COVID origins, came to believe in the Lab Leak hypothesis and has said so in papers and interviews.   He looks primarily to the fact that China has refused to give the details on the research being done at WIV in 2019 as evidence of a coverup.  Those who believe in Zoonotic Transfer have the sort of racist view that the Chinese are always this way.

Funded or not, the research which may have originated COVID-19 was done in a lab that had previously received NIH funding for doing very similar research, and they might have anticipated funding getting funding for that research too eventually.  If it hadn't been for the initial NIH funding, they might not have been doing that kind of research.

Because of the risks, and the ban on GOF research in the US, the NIH should not have been funding EcoHealth alliance to do the GOF research in China.  Fauci was head of the Infectious Diseases Institute of NIH, and he also reportedly had direct personal involvement in getting EcoHealth funded to do this research in contravention of the US ban.  Therefore Fauci himself helped initiate the research program which may have ultimately produced and leaked COVID-19.  Because Biden pardoned Fauci for all his activities going back to 2014 Fauci cannot be prosecuted for this.  He may have violated US laws, and, if the Lab Leak Hypothesis is true, he might bear considerable moral responsibility for COVID-19.

If I may, let me add one more personal observation.  People who are paranoid about germs do not go into research in Virology.  People who are paranoid about germs avoid going near Virology Departments.  Virologists tend to downplay the risks of the research they are sometimes doing, as they would almost have to do in order to do this research, and overplay the benefits.  It is not clear to this day that GOF research on viruses has done anything useful.  Vaccines, for example, are not devised using GOF research.  I first heard about GOF research in 2011 (in a Virology Department presentation btw) and I was immediately scared about it.  I've also toured a BSL-4 lab (very impressive) and a BSL-2 lab (not where I'd want to work on anything dangerous).

Pandemic Handling

Finally there is one small issue about pandemic handling that also involves Fauci, but has been so warped by the politics we can't get straight answers.  Many Republicans and especially MAGA are still convinced today that masks are useless (often along with the unfounded notion that COVID-19 was fake, and the mRNA Covid vaccines caused all the deaths).  This is bad, very bad.  But even Trump himself got the vaccine which his Operation Warpspeed had helped create more effectively than otherwise.  Though Democrats often dispute that Operation Warpspeed made the vaccine available more quickly, it specifically helped fund development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, which proved to be among the most effective or even the most effective, and if the independently funded Pfizer vaccine work had failed to be useful it might have taken far longer to get a useful vaccine without the Moderna one.  As it turned out, both vaccines became available at about the same time, sometimes giving the public a choice, and most likely cranking out shots more quickly than if it had been left to Pfizer alone.

Early in the pandemic, Fauci (and others) emphasized the importance of hand washing (which is relatively unimportant in the transmission of COVID-19 and many other infectious respiratory diseases) and did not tell the public that masking was a good idea.  This was not good.  (This attitude was and still is common among doctors--including my own PCP at the time--and even in hospitals.)  Later, when it was finally advised that masking was important, the public was prevented from getting highly effective N95 masks and instead told to use simple cloth masks, which are not highly effective and generally protect others more than oneself.  I see this as a grave error.  Instead, all measures possible should have been taken to ensure an adequate supply of N95 masks both for professionals and the general public.  There should have been an earlier Operation Warp Speed for making N95 masks as well as vaccines, and/or lifting sanctions to enable buying them from China.  I myself would never have appreciated N95 masks unless I had a friend touting them and giving some away.  Even today people wear lesser masks without much thought.  The government now recommends people use N95 masks in risky situations but has never made a big deal about it, as big as the deal to use cloth masks was during the peak days of COVID-19, so many people have never heard about it.

Jesus and "The Teacher of RIghteousness"

The story of Jesus recounted in the Christian Gospels could not have happened.  At the time of Jesus, the Romans were in full control of the region, through their prefects and the client king Herod they had elevated to the throne after defeating the Hasmoneans.  The Romans were meticulous record keepers, and they recorded none of the key stories in Gospel, including Massacre of the Innocents, the supposed crowds of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem, the judgement of Pontius Pilate, and the Crucifixion.  If these things had happened, the Romans would have recorded them, and they didn't.  So, these stories are all fiction, and they were likely invented by The Apostle Paul, and his followers, who founded a religion based on Jesus' resurrection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bWIY04BsAg

Paul's inventions came after the historically true assassination of James, the so called "brother of Jesus," who had a popular sect in Jerusalem that came to odds with the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus who ordered James's assassination.  Paul was a hanger in the court of King Herod Agrippa II who intended to marry someone there, and he claimed he witnessed the assassination of James, which is quite possible.  He certainly heard of it not long after.

But Paul's invention of Jesus didn't come from nothing.  He was aware of much that had been happening before the assassination of James.  He was surely aware of key ideas from James's sect, which had been becoming too popular for the likes of Ananus.  He may have talked with James, which is what the Gospels say, and even been a part of James's sect until James's death, after which Paul went his own way with these ideas.

Those ideas likely involved the teachings of a figure earlier than Jesus, The Teacher of Righteousness, the key figure in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Teacher was a much earlier figure, from either the first or second centuries BCE.  Millennialism was a primary feature of these teachings (also reflected in some of the Gospels) that the coming of God was at hand in about 40 years, and when that didn't happen many turned away his sect but others changed the story.  The Teacher was persecuted by "The Wicked Priest" in Jerusalem who is unnamed and historians can only speculate which one he is.  The Teacher was ultimately put to death by unnamed authorities.  This may or may not have been before the Romans defeated the Hasmoneans and replaced them with a client king, King Herod.

But along with the Millennialism, The Teacher taught some if not many of the virtues which would be familiar to Christians.  The followers of The Teacher, the Essenes, were a communal sect foreshadowing the later communal sects of Christianity.  This brings to mind The Sermon on the Mount, and in fact the Beatitudes have a striking resemblance to some of the teachings in the Dead Sea scrolls (eg, blessed are the poor in spirit), though the caves where they were found is some distance from the site traditionally believed to be where Jesus is said to have given the Sermon (near the Sea of Galilee).

One historian tried to advance the theory that The Teacher was Jesus, and this has never been very well accepted because the dates are so far apart.  But this is not what I am saying.   I am saying that The Teacher was likely part of the inspiration for the story of Jesus, which was an fictional invention of Paul and his followers.  The Teacher was probably also an inspiration for the sect of James, though James's teaching might have been quite different from Paul's and likely lacked key parts of Christianity like the Resurrection and the notion that Jesus was God.  Jewish Christianity which is said to have been the continuation of James's sect also lacks the idea that Jesus was God, merely an important human teacher, and Islam incorporates that view.

King Herod Agrippa II held that the assassination of James was illegal and Ananus was deposed.  Not long afterward, the Revolts were begun with Ananus as a key leader, and lasted for years until the Romans sacked Jerusalem (including destroying the Second Temple).  

The Romans seem to have sided with the followers of James in that even when Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem after the later Bar Kochba revolt, Jewish Christians were not.  Jewish Christians understood themselves to be fundamentally Jewish and followers of the Torah, as well as the teachings of Jesus, though they were excluded from both Judaism and Christianity centuries later, and many converted to Islam after that.

Passwords and other securanoia

 My security minded friend sent me another article today on how I should be securing my security cameras from unwanted watchers.  I replied thusly:

I keep inside cameras turned off when I'm not on vacation, and care little about the others.

I do not pay for monthly services and use my own local storage cards on my digital cameras.*

My analog cameras have a local hard drive for storage, and are all outside, but do have internet access except when the app sometimes mysteriously requires a password I can't remember.

My biggest problem is remembering passwords.  

Passwords and endless security measures I do not want cause me more grief than anything else and I hate being forced to change them or use passkeys or other additional security measures.  I can usually deal with two factor identification but sometimes it causes problems too.  I've always been ultimately able to access my credit accounts but always worry that at some critical moment I won't be able to.  I have never been subjected to identity theft and have never lost money to any kind of theft.  Once I lost my physical card and was able to cancel all the charges I didn't make, and another time I was billed for something I didn't order or receive but was able to get that cancelled too.  I have been ordering things online since 1996 and more than anyone else I know and sometimes directly from small companies.  I think more people are taken in by fishing scams that say you are being charged for something you didn't order, than are actually being charged for things they didn't order.

I worry more about losing access to things and quite often I've been unable to access my cameras remotely because the apps for the digital and analog cameras will unexpectedly require me to remember a password.  Keeping track of all my passwords has been very difficult even with a book dedicated to that.

I keep my computer hard drives unencrypted because my final plan is that all my creative works be accessible to my heirs and/or the general public rather than lost forever, but Apple keeps trying to force me, against my wishes, to encrypt them, which would mean they could be lost forever just for that reason.

No matter how many times I tell iCloud that Chrome on my Desktop Mac is a "trusted device" it never remembers that, and forces me to go through the Passkey/Password/2 factor identification dialogs every time I want to access my photos.  I then have to be very careful not to be sent down the Passkey rathole.  I presume this is a form of desktop warfare, and I think much securanoia is just that.  It's not really about keeping me secure, it's about forcing me to use some particular set of apps.

Passkey seems like the most dangerous thing of all because if I were to use Passkey for everything and I lost that, I'd lose access to everything.

*I did once enable monthly services.  That was on my November trip last year to California when I wanted to monitor my cats.  The AI on the monthly service plan never seemed to identify cat presence outside correctly and wasn't useful in finding what happened to my oldest cat a day after I left home that killed him.  I tried using my phone but quickly gave up.  By the time I got home and was prepared to more seriously use check it out from the comfort of my computer with a big screen, the data had 'expired' because it was older than the days allotted.  The only thing I was able to do was remove, save, and download all the data from my SD card on the outside camera which on which the raw video was still available.  But I found it's basically watch 24 hours of video and figure out what happened.  I can hardly do it for 10 minutes at a stretch.  So it was a waste of money to enable the monthly services for online AI, and it's not worth it to me to plug my existing 24 hours of video into a generic AI to figure it out.

Karim Khan

About the only thing we can be fairly certain of is that Karim Khan's replacement will drop the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.*  And that will be telling, since it was both Israel and US who have been pushing to get Khan removed ever since his warrant for Netanyahu, and Marco Rubio even said beforehand that the administration had was taking actions to get him removed.

(*And not Putin.)

Here's the most definitive report I've been able to find on the actual acts Khan is accused of actually doing (you have to really dig to find this):

https://apnews.com/article/international-criminal-court-un-misconduct-accusations-a275e676e074c00d34c769c8bbdf69d7

A later report from 2026 reports Khan was cleared by a 3 judge panel of any relevant misconduct:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-investigation-united-nations-4f01c8ce5259dc726a565ce9a7f0a37b

This often gets referred to elsewhere as rape (I don't think it rises to that) or sexual harassment (it could qualify for that, but I generally question the concept and the standard ultimately applied by IOS which is the appearance of impropriety which is a terrible slippery slope, along with the concept imbalance of power which generally ignores the often superior powers that women have).

1.  He is alleged to have asked her to lie with her on a hotel bed (she did so) and ultimately he "touched her sexually" (elsewhere it is clarified: her breasts).

2.  He is alleged to have asked her to go on vacations with her (I'd dismiss this as completely unimportant).  She apparently did not, in this case she would have had to say yes for it to happen.  It was reported she was often reluctant to say no because of the imbalance of power.

3.  He is alleged to have put his hand in her pocket (I would say, this is no big deal, though perhaps not completely unimportant, and we don't know the precise context).

4.  He knocked on her door for 10 minutes at 3 am wanting to talk with her.  (It should be remembered that she was a very close aide who made many work related trips with him). I would call this completely unimportant to the charges.

Two items that are borderline seamy, and two that are completely unimportant.  Of which we know nothing about the antecedents--things she may have said or done.  We more or less know the context: she was his closest aide on important trips.  

And we are not at all talking about what would unequivocally be regarded as sexual acts.

IOW, it is not the Khan did not stop doing things when he was told not to (ie no means no).  It is rather that he did not first obtain affirmative permission for doing a couple of things that may have appeared improper and two others that were not unreasonable under plausible circumstances.  Or that he could not have obtained suitable permission by any means because of the alleged "imbalance of power."  (I feel that both of these latter qualifications may be regarded as anti-sex.  Why cannot any two adults come to have sexual relations by mutual consent?  And in many if not most cases, men are virtually required to be the initiator.  That is the way mammalian sex works.).  It is telling that many of Khans greatest detractors are Israeli defenders, and Israelis have a long history of documented violent and forcible rape against Palestinians, and in those cases no means nothing.  We see this kind of beyond hypocrisy frequently among those who are the most obsessed and uncritical about things like sexual harassment.

And for these alleged misdemeanors, the warrants against the greatest criminal of our era will be dropped.  And meanwhile, the vast documented rapes by Epstein clients go uninvestigated and the vast documented rapes in Israeli prisons are accepted, demanded and even celebrated by Israelis.  The Gaza genocide and pogroms in the West Bank continue.

Now Khan could NOT be described as any kind of leftist.  He was a Tory from the UK who only issued the warrant against Netanyahu (and failed to do so for many others who might have qualified for conducting genocide) under a lot of pressure, possibly even including the pressure from the initial secret inquiry into his alleged sexual harassment which had already started.  He had previously and more quickly issued a warrant for Putin (which in my mind is specious).

Also, FWIW, Khan is a married Muslim (married to a UN civil rights investigator) with two daughters.  And himself a judge of considerable stature.

The aide who was allegedly harassed did not make these things public (which was when they really took off).  She refrained from doing so possibly because she was in favor of the warrants against Netanyahu.  It was two of her "friends" who heard about the matter who made it public.

This raises many possible ideas as to the context and antecedents of the alleged sexual harassment.  

Nowhere in the public discussion are the things she may have done prior to the alleged acts in question.

Journalist Patrick Lawrence calls this affair (leading to the likely dropping of warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant) a "Descent into Lawlessness"

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/further-into-lawlessness

Ultimately Khan was sacked not by a judicial process but by a political one, by the Assembly of States Parties, which was no doubt (see Rubio's comment) heavily lobbied, bribed, and or coerced by the US (which has observer status) into making the vote against Khan.  After actual judges had investigated the affair and concluded there was no there there.

Commentator Craig Murray has concerns about the affair but keeps hedging that we don't know the facts.  The problem with this copout is that we do know the allegations and even they are pretty weak tea.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/07/narratives-of-moral-conflict-karim-khan-and-delcy-rodriguez/

Murray's article may be far more interesting in his defense of Delcy Rodriguez who is now often demonized on the left for selling out.  He also uniquely points out that Venezuela is actually getting the money from oil sales, less a relatively small US fee, and of course with no control over where the oil is going, which is a violation of sovereignty.  He has been to Venezuela and talked to top officials.  Ironically, according to Murray, Venezuela is getting the money from oil sales far more quickly than when China was handling the process.

Left to Right Peace and Freedom Coalition

I've been very skeptical of all these Left to Right Coalition proposals.  Sam Husseini's is the best I've seen.  As far as he goes, I'd support it.  He  stands for peace (not defined well here but elsewhere it's clear he would end support for Israel and other wars and imperialism), equal rights for all*, and freedom of speech, universal healthcare, tax the rich, restrain corporations, and protect the environment (also left undefined and I worry about it).

https://husseini.substack.com/p/the-need-for-a-radical-center-party?utm_source=publication-search

He dodges Immigration saying it would not be an issue if we stopped imperial wars and meddling AND the "War on Drugs" (war on poor people and democracy actually).

That being said, there are "far" left orgs I'd support too, the best of these currently is PSL (unmentioned by Husseini, and he laughs at Cornel West who I voted for last time...but wouldn't next time).  PSL even got their Presidential candidates onto the Texas ballot (which West did not).

*He leaves unmentioned sex change bathroom and sports rights and minor sex change rights.

MakePlaylist Version 1.100 now online

I have now uploaded MakePlaylist version 1.100 to SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeplaylist/

This is the version I have used to demonstrate that MakePlaylist is what I call a Lossless Information Procedure.  Even the smallest increase in data or data quality is reflected in the output data quality.  To do so it needs to generate millions of virtual playlists, which required considerable internal streamlining (what I've called Cyclotron mode) to be practical.  It also has an option to test what I call Paradoxical Information Procedures, for which some increases in data or data quality can cause less output data quality, ie, going backwards.  I discuss these types of information processing in an earlier post (which now needs a bit of updating to include the latest results obtained with 1.100 before it was finally uploaded, not to mention general editing, but the post is still basically correct):

https://verydeepleft.blogspot.com/2026/06/paradoxical-and-other-information.html

I need to get back to making other improvements to MakePlaylist for it's intended purpose of actually making playlists.  But eventually I also plan to add a mode to demonstrate Truncating Information Procedures which curiously requires adding more random numbers.  The Paradoxical type is achieved with simple data loss, which I think has far reaching implications.  And improve on the results and show they hold up for other conditions (which to some degree I have already done but not written up yet).

Sick People Should Stay Home

 I hate it when people go to concerts, movies, other social activities, and work when they are sick with respiratory ailments, carelessly spreading their germs to others.  It happens all too much, and I can trace every respiratory illness I've had (like the flu then pneumonia that almost killed me last month) to one or more such people.  I vowed never to remain near such a sick person, even at the cost of embarrassment.  Yesterday there was a person repetitively coughing and loudly sniffling with rattles right behind me at a concert.  It started just before the music director gave his intro.  I waited that out and as soon as he stopped I made my way out of the very tight row of people to a space in the corner of the hall where there were hardly any people (and nobody apparently sick).  I didn't quite get there before the music started.  I'm also going to remember to bring a mask to every concert etc in case I am delayed or trapped.  And generally not sit in the middle of front sections again because that really makes it hard to escape.  If there had been assigned seats, I'd have to go talk to an usher.  Many people give excuses like "it's just allergies" when they may have low grade infections caused by mycoplasma like walking pneumonia which are easily treated with antibiotics (which some doctors don't do).   I've been to places where nearly everyone was coughing with the chesty cough indicative of walking pneumonia, and sure enough I  caught it there, lasted a couple weeks until I got an antibiotic then went away quickly. Conditions like COPD lead people to easily pick up (and spread) other diseases, and are still disturbing to others.  It may be appropriate for people who cough a lot to wear masks in public as a precaution.  I pay attention to when I cough and rarely do so when I am healthy.  If it happens during social activities I turn away or cover my mouth.

Albert Einstein on Capitalism

Perfect synopsis.

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.

Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

— Albert Einstein

Calcium

[Not intended as medical advice, see your doctor for that.  I don't know your situation at all, which may preclude some of the ideas here, especially if you are or will be taking any kind of medication.  Likewise, see a Nutritionist for nutritional advice targeted to you.  As always, my posts are intended to be thought provoking, but never the fully edited final word on anything.  I am not an encyclopedia and I don't have time to go back and fix everything I've written as new information comes in.]

Back in 2017, a friend of mine in her 50's got osteoporosis and started a treatment program.  For a few years she had to take Fosamax, which helps make weak bones more rigid but also can make them more brittle than normal if you take it too long.  The best thing is to reach the point where you don't need Fosamax any more in a few years and from then on get the proper nutrients every day for normal bone remodeling which will, over time, restore full bone normality.  Fosamax is a band-aid you don't want to keep wearing.

This made me start thinking about my bones and took a look at the Recommended Daily Allowance for Calcium.  I was shocked to see that it was 1,000mg for adults and 1200 mg for seniors.  I thought I was getting plenty of calcium from (then) 2 cups yogurt, but that was less than half of the RDA.  And not much else in my diet had calcium.  My multivitamin didn't add much.  So, I started supplementing calcium with a single 330-500 mg Calcium/Magnesium tablet every day to fill the gap.

Visiting my sister and brother-in-law in 2019, my attorney brother-in-law noticed my supplements, and gave me a scathing critique.  "You should not be supplementing calcium," he said.   "You'll get atherosclerosis.  You'll get kidney stones."

I replied, "You only get those things if you are out-of-balance somehow.  Meeting your minimum daily calcium requirement is not out-of-balance, it's in balance."  I could not change his mind at all.  He was highly opposed to supplements almost in principle (as it seems many doctors I've known have been).

I was very concerned about him that since he is lactose intolerant and avoids dairy altogether (except 2 cups of special ice cream with lactase for lactose intolerant people) he was not getting enough calcium.  And my sister too, who did have small pieces of cheese with her salads but less ice cream.  They were both already in their 70's and starting to look like they were rapidly shrinking.  I've tried and tried to get my sister to consider supplementing calcium but it's never happened so far.  She'd have to face her husband's disapproval for one thing.  And for another, she doesn't like to do anything technical, like calculating the calcium supplementation required, preferring to leave everything technical to her husband.

Nine years later now they both look extremely shrunken.  My sister has constant neck and back pain and her neck has become flexible.  Her two upper front teeth simply broke off one day and she had to get a partial dental.  The shrinking is not just in statue but in depth.

Everywhere I go I see elderly people who look like they do now.  I doubt any of them are getting enough calcium.  Few seem to even be aware that seniors need more calcium than adults and how much that is.  (BTW, this is a well known fact that most US seniors are not getting enough calcium.)

Retrospectively I now blame lack of calcium for my short stature.  In freshman year of high school, a friend of mine convinced me that drinking milk was for babies, and I quit doing so.  I really didn't have other significant sources of calcium in my diet then.  I didn't regularly eat yogurt or ice cream.  That was surely bad advice.

*****

Doing this can get a little more complicated than people might like.  You should not take simply take supplements having the RDA for calcium.  You need to figure out the gap between your diet and the recommended amount for your age, and then fill just that gap.  You don't want to get too more more calcium than the RDA because then you could get kidney stones, etc.  

But there is some slack here.  You can have somewhat more than the RDA without issues, so long as you stay below the upper limits.  It's when you go past the upper limits that you could get the kidney stones, etc.  The upper limits are a bit more complicated since they vary for young people, pregnant mothers, adults below 51, and adults above 51.  For non-pregnant adults under 51 the upper limit is 2500mg and for adults over 51 it is 2000mg.  Thus the range for eldery people is the most narrow: from 1200mg recommended to 2000 mg upper limit.

It's not really hard to do, though it takes a little time and arithmetic.  Nowadays you can simply ask your favorite search engine for the calcium in any kind and quantity of food.  You could probably even get it to add up the calcium in a long list of foods that constitutes what you eat in a given day.  I do the adding up myself.

Better than using a search engine is actually looking at the Nutrition Facts on any labeled product.  Then you get the exact numbers for the specific products you are eating (though lots of fresh foods are not so labeled--there you need to use the search engine).

I wrote everything down on an index card with columns for calcium, protein, and sodium.  It's a worthwhile exercise to do at least once, I wish I had the time to do it every day.

I don't recommend the example below as an ideal diet for anyone, even me.  I'm more interested in showing the method of adding up the calcium including everything.  This just happens to be what I ate yesterday when I was keeping track of everything, everything that went into my mouth.

It might seem like "too much" peanut butter but you may notice that the total saturated fat is still fairly low because no eggs, little nuts, little meat, and no red meat, at least yesterday.  Anyway the most recent research seems to show that dairy and peanut butter saturated fats are actually somewhat protective, but the saturated fat dogmas haven't been updated to reflect this.  I like natural peanut butter (nothing other than peanuts and salt so you have to stir it) because it's convenient and almost as much protein as eggs.   Yesterday I didn't get any of the most dangerous saturated fats, those from red meats, but sometimes I do have 3-4 oz lean steak instead of chicken, which still wouldn't be very much.  I've also switched since writing this to snacking with regular or low sodium Ezekiel bread, I only have regular bread (usually the whole wheat variety) for breakfast.

I have never had a bad A1C measurement but recently I've become very focused on keeping it low because I believe it is actually the number one factor in heart and other diseases for elderly people.***  You will note that there's very little sugar in my diet now.  I do use orange juice but only in the very tiniest amount for flavoring.  I eat a tiny bit of sugar and a tiny piece of chocolate.  I need the artificially flavored electrolyte drinks right now because I have diarrhea from taking an antibiotic.**  I didn't have any fruit mainly because that's not compatible with current diarrhea.  Normally I'd eat a fresh apple or banana.  On nutrition focused friend of mine thinks its pointless to eat fruit at all but I find the fiber beneficial.

Food / Calcium

1 oz Orange Juice (mixed with no sugar Citrucel) 2 mg

4 large slices Dave's White Bread            80 mg

4 tablespoons all natural peanut butter     36 mg

7/8 cup Chobani Nonfat Greek Yogurt    225 mg

1 scoop whey isolate                                105 mg

Centrum for Men 50+                               210 mg

2 Ultima Electrolyte Drinks                     94 mg

3 oz cooked chicken breast                       10 mg

3 oz Protein Pasta                                      0 mg

8oz can no salt added green beans            40 mg

2/3 11.5oz can low sodium V8.                33 mg

2 Tbsps Olive Oil                                        2 mg

1 Tbsp Heavy Cream                                   10 mg

7 cups RO water (coffee, mixes, ice)           7 mg

(Local Tap Water would be 105-140 mg)

1/2 cup Low Sodium Marinara Sauce.        20 mg

1/5 oz (one tiny square*) Chocolate w nuts  4 mg

3/4 tsp Sugar (in whey drink)                       0 mg

Before calcium powder: 876 mg calcium

1 tsp Calcium/Magnesium powder            267 mg

Total Calcium: 1143 mg

I was a bit below calcium target, but not far.   I was a bit too conservative when measuring out the Calcium/Magnesium powder.  I didn't actually know how the numbers were going to work out.  Going forwards, I think I may use the 1 1/2 tsp suggested amount.

That powder was my calcium supplement yesterday (sometimes I take a 333mg pill instead, which would have put me just slightly over 1200 mg).  But I'll explain below why I think the powder is better than nearly all the pills.

The total 'supplements' contribution to my calcium was 567 mg (multivitamin, electrolyte drinks, calcium/magnesium powder).  Almost half.  And that's in spite of eating slightly more than the standard serving of yogurt and about as much calcium as most people in US eat.

I love to have a spaghetti dinner every day and I think that's fine with exact portion control (pasta is weighed on my scale) protein pasta and low sodium marinara.  Pasta itself is zero sodium (and I put no salt in the water) which helps stay within optimal sodium. I do aim to cut back the extra two pieces of regular bread and peanut butter but it was the only snack I had available to go with my whey drink in the afternoon yesterday.  Today I had the low sodium Ezekiel bread with the lightest rub of peanut butter possible.  Going forwards, I plan to use low sodium Ezekiel Bread for snacking, with less peanut butter, and so reduce the daily peanut butter to 3 tablespoons or less.

Good calcium supplements (including pills and powders) are are sold with Magnesium included because you need to have calcium and magnesium in balance.  The recommended balance for calcium:magnesium is 2:1, so many pills have this exact ratio.

But it actually doesn't make sense if most of your other calcium comes from dairy, because dairy products are 10:1, the supplement should try to bring that back into balance.  So a 1:1 calcium magnesium supplement powder makes sense for me whose other calcium comes mostly from dairy.

The 1:1 Calcium Magnesium powder I get (NOW) is also made with citrates, which are more easily absorbed than the calcium supplements made with carbonates.  Most calcium magnesium pills are made with carbonates.   Adding it to my whey isolate drink makes it seem less watery and more like milk.

(* It wasn't long enough ago that I couldn't help myself but to eat a whole 3.5 oz bar of chocolate every day.  My recent near death experience with pneumonia and dehydration has made me a different and better behaving person now, and hopefully from here on.)

(** The day I started taking electrolytes the situation dramatically improved.  It's as if part of the problem was the interplay between the anal and urinal sphincters, which are connected, and of course are connected to the nervous system and all of its electrolytes.  My antibiotic lists no food or supplement interactions but out of an abundance of caution I apply a 4 hour spacing rule used for others, no supplements within 4 hours of taking the pill, before or after.) 

(*** From NIH published research I've read, the biggest risk factor for heart disease in elderly is in insulin resistance, aka type 2 diabetes, not in fats****, anyway.  The saturated fat dogmas haven't been updated to reflect this.  Lots of my thin elderly friends on lowfat diets are still taking statins, which I wonder about, then stuffing themselves with candy.  I think they should be more focused on insulin resistance, as I am.  I quit taking statins when I retired and could do my own low fat cooking instead of eating at Chinese buffets and steak bars every day. When that happened, I started noticing that statins made me feel weak  My doctor wanted me to continue statins anyway, perhaps a different one, looking at my BMI category, she said my LDL was still a few points short of target.  I don't think BMI reflects my stocky and above-average muscular body style correctly, I see Percent Body Fat, as I get on my biometric scale, a better indication of how much excess fat I have, which is as I understand it the relevant factor for heart disease.  I have always done better on percent body fat than BMI, and as of right now I am no longer even "obese".  Right now I can't seem to find the very impressive NIH published research I read last year on insulin resistance vs hyperlipidemia that put insulin resistance on top for elderly people while discounting hyperlipidemia a lot, but there is much research and writing that makes a similar case that can be easily found, such as https://www.optimalwellnessmd.com/blog/uncategorized/atherosclerosis-is-it-due-to-lipids-insulin-or-inflammation which mentions many studies.)

(****It bugs me no end that most people have come to regard low density lipoproteins (the entities, not the LDL relative blood measurement) as diseased.  In truth, low density lipoproteins are the essential lubricant the body needs like an engine needs motor oil.  You could not live without them.  High density lipoproteins are like the oil additive that keep it flowing smoothly under different conditions.  You can have too high HDL--when it keeps the low density lipoproteins from doing their job.  Not that you need to eat saturated fats, the body can synthesize LDL's.)

Here is another (Vegan) POV on calcium.  They claim the US RDA are inflated because of high sodium and animal protein diet.  May be some truth to that, if your sodium is lower and your animal protein* is lower it not be necessary to achieve US RDA but 300mg or so lower.  (This is still more than many Americans, especially seniors, get.). (*"animal protein includes dairy, which is probably the #1 dietary source for most people, including me. If you're Vegan and not consuming dairy, you will almost certainly have to supplement even if you follow their lowered recommendations.  Vegan recommendations also therefore do not apply to people like me, even though I use relatively little meat, I still seek high protein which increases the need for calcium.  So the Vegan POV does not apply to me and I'm back to RDA.)

https://www.vegancanada.org/news/article/2020/01/23/misleading-calcium-recommendation.html?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=18597142512&gbraid=0AAAAAC2laoEA6W5grs7fEVO0TycsLLRLX&gclid=Cj0KCQjwr4jSBhCSARIsAOX1E-Iq_SgorrjeBbbfbP3oh2iB5ATOWisbL-ufLmJ7iQPrAGFlD7lKPLcaAnNpEALw_wcB

Another caveat is that one shouldn't have more than 500 mg calcium at one meal.  My plan of having yogurt plus multivitamin (totaling about 500 mg) in the morning, then whey drink with calcium supplement (totaling about 500 mg) in the afternoon or evening already does that.

Truthfully, I was much less careful about the total amount of calcium back when I argued with my brother-in-law in 2019.  That argument got me to start thinking about how the supplements add to natural sources so I only need to supplement the gap, and so I've been more careful about supplementation since then.

Petroleum Jelly

White Petrolatum, also known as Petroleum Jelly, often recognized under the trademarked name Vasoline, is one of the most useful skin protectants.

Vasoline has always been sold to consumers in small tubs.   This makes zero sense unless the goal is to sell as much of the stuff as possible.

With a tub, every time you use the stuff you dip your finger in the tub, pulling out a small bit for whatever purpose, you leave all sorts of germs, skin oils, and other crap (sometimes literally) on the remaining stuff.  After I've done this for awhile, I'm motivated to buy a new tub next time, wasting most of the earlier tub contents.

OR, if I use one tub of Petroleum Jelly for mechanical purposes, such as lubricating the corner of the door threshold, I'm motivated to get another tub for personal uses, because I don't want any of the crud from the doorway getting into my personal care.

It's much more reasonable to have Petroleum Jelly in tubes, allowing you to squeeze out exactly what you need and leaving the rest unadulterated.  This is the way it is sold to dermatologists and other medical doctors.

But since Vasoline was first sold to consumers in tubs, virtually everyone else who sells Petroleum Jelly in a retail store sells it in something like a Vasoline shaped tub so they'll recognize what it is.

The now disappearing Walgreens was the one retail store where you could buy Petroleum Jelly in nice blue flexible plastic tubes where you can squeeze it out like a professional.

It looks like when I need to buy more Petroleum Jelly in a tube, I'm have to get some professional variant at Amazon.  And I worry that the tubes may not be as nice as the Walgreens ones were.

100% pure Petroleum Jelly is generally far superior to all the other sorts of products which add extra ingredients, such as Aquaphor.  Now, Aquaphor IS conveniently sold in tubes.  But those extra ingredients are almost never necessary or useful but just create the conditions for the product to degrade over time.

Paradoxical and other Information Processes

[This is still a work in progress.  However, illness and long runs are slowing progress.  I will link back or copy to a future post so you don't have to keep looking back here.]

Introduction and definitions

In the discussion and experiment that follows, I propose to define an Information Process as something that takes an input stream of information, if any, and produces an output stream of information, if any.

I imagine 5 basic types of Information Process:

Lossless, where more or better input, no matter how small, is reflected in more or better output.

Truncated, where the tiniest changes in input may make no difference in output.

Paradoxical, where less information can sometimes produce more or better output (such as tiny amounts of information being worse than none). 

Independent, Where input if any is completely ignored in producing output.

Dumb, Where no output is produced.

Paradoxical sounds strange but may be the most common one.  It seems to be a description of human beings, and, I would have thought, most computer programs of any significant complexity.

I was shocked to find out that a fairly complicated computer program I have been developing over the past few years is actually Lossless.  No matter how little the input information it is given, even amidst increasing misinformation, it still performs better than with no information.

The only ways I could think to make it Paradoxical require that there be be information loss in the program itself.  I can't say I've proven this but it looks to be correct for all such processes.  Information lost within the process interacts with the quantity or quality of input information to produce the Paradoxical effect.

But if information loss causes Paradoxical behavior, what causes Truncating behavior?   Well, the only answer for my program appears to be the injection of random numbers.  Something like this appears to be generally correct, and I note that digital audio processors add dither when lowering resolution.  I cannot prove that it always requires noise or random numbers, but it is an interesting conjecture that some sort of active operation has to take place rather than just being a passive loss where information just isn't copied, for example, because passive losses produce Paradoxical and and not Truncating.

Methods

The program MakePlaylist program randomly selects songs or albums for playlists to play as background music.  I've worked on things like this for about 30 years ago and realized that you must use Random Without Replacement (RWOR) operation instead of Random With Replacement (RWR) to prevent a great and largely undesired disparity in how much things are played.

But I have been concerned with two different but similar problems.  In the first situation, I was continuously playing songs in a background process until I feel like listening to music, then I turn the amplifier on and hear them.  But I might only listed to the background process a few hours a day, and the rest of the time the songs are being marked as 'played' by the RWOR system even though they haven't actually been listened to.  That was the kind of thing I was doing in the late 1990's, when I scarcely imagined such things as playlists, I scarcely imagined them until 2021 when I got Roon and an Oppo player I could use it with.

In the present situation, with MakePlaylist, I still might not actually listen to all the songs in a particular playlist before replacing it with a new one.  Around 2023 this always happened with my playback program (Roon) after I shut off the streamer remotely.  Roon would hang and when restarted it would start the playlist from the beginning.  So that was a big problem then, but Roon has fixed those problems now, but it can still happen anyway that I don't listen to every song in every playlist because I decide to listen to a bunch of other individually selected items in the interregnum, then my place in the previous playlist may still be lost because Roon doesn't keep your place in a playlist if you start listening to other things. (Inconveniently, Roon never shows the number of the item in a playlist that you are playing either.)  I can imagine it's pretty commonly done that way too, Roon is a High End player program that requires a subscription or large initial payment and generally has all the features available in other programs.

And then the question becomes, in cases like these, where the information about the songs played is combined with and perhaps even dwarfed by misinformation about songs being played that weren't actually played, is it possible that RWR performs better than RWOR ?  And I can define this performance in a singular and objective way: how many playlists do I need to create to listen to every song in a library?

(Though one could also look at the distributions of times things were played and details like that, it's much easier for the present experimental purposes to boil the question down to one easily described and measured number, which obviously is related to the distribution too but it doesn't define the spread or kurtosis of the distribution which can vary among methods, but in all cases I have seen, RWR has higher kurtosis than RWOR meaning longer 'tails'.)

With a properly working RWOR system, and when you listen to every item in every playlist, it will take ceil (L / S) playlists to listen to everything where L is the size of the library and S is the size of each playlist and ceil is the ceiling operator which rounds up fractional bits.  I call this number of playlists, or the number of songs listened to (depending on context) in such a count of playlists, one epoch.

I realize that the problems' I am investigating could be solved analytically with probability formulas, but I chose to solve them experimentally by building test shells around Make Playlist: first TestPlaylist and now TestPlaylistRange, because it was a lot of fun.  Ultimately my results can be compared with the true means from analytic probability theory, though it is more difficult to get the distributions and other ancilliary information like that.   Then my statistics such as confidence intervals can be assessed.

Tests show that MakePlaylist works correctly in both RWOR and RWR modes.

For convenience here, I have stuck with a library size of 1000 and playlists sized 100 items each, though that is longer than most people make playlists (20-30 is more typical) the even numbers are easier to think about for experimental purposes).

I run experiments in which the last item actually listened to in the playlist (<LP>) can be set to any number between 1 and the playlist size, and playlists are created over and over until every item has been played.  This may require making many thousands of playlists.

Since this is all based on random numbers (via the pseudorandom number generator built into Tcl, which is fairly good but simple) the number of playlists can vary a lot from one experiment to the next.

So, each such experiment is repeated from scratch all over again for many repetitions and averaged to get stable and presumably accurate results.  I have found that I can get reasonable stable results in most cases with 1000 repetitions, but there is still some "noise" in the graphs, so for the really important tests I do 10,000 repetitions.  I compute statistics such as 95% confidence interval, 82% confidence interval (useful for comparing two numbers) and residual kurtosis.

MakePlaylist and all the companion programs including TestPlaylist and TestPlaylistRange are available as Free Software under a GPL 3+ at SourceForge.  What is described here requires Version 1.1 or greater.

Algorithms

These are simplified from what MakePlaylist actually does, mainly because of the options.

RWR

    Make list of all titles

    Until desired playlist length reached:

        Draw a random number

        Scale number to match size of list

        Index into list and copy title

        Put title into playlist

RWOR

    Make list of all titles

    Until desired playlist length reached

        Shuffle list randomly

        While there are still more items in list and desired playlist length not reached

            Copy first or next title from list

            If it has been played in this epoch

                Continue

            Put title into playlist

            Add title to played history

            Continue

                                    

RESULTS

RWR vs RWOR, 100-1 LP, 1000 reps

I was very pleased that my RWOR selection system correctly selects all the items in the library in precisely 1 epoch every time, 10 playlists of 100 titles each, so long as all items are played.

Playing only 99 files out of a hundred makes RWOR substantially worse, requiring 2 epochs to play all the files.  Still many times better than RWR.  Each additional unplayed file has a lesser effect than the previous one.   Even just playing 1 file out of 100 in the playlist, with a library size of 1000, it was still better, ever so slightly, than RWR.

This is the Lossless behavior.

For RWR, under the test conditions of L=1000 and S=100 it takes an average of an astonishing 7.506 epochs to select all the titles (95% confidence interval is 0.003, but the high kurtosis also means that 0.003 is probably an underestimate of the confidence interval so I can't be sure it's even above 7.5).  Some titles are played over a dozen times before all files are played once.  I knew RWR was bad, but I didn't realize it was this bad.

Redefining the epoch as the number of files played in an epoch of playlists. the RWR stays virtually constant as fewer items are played in each playlist.  It should be this way as each RWR draw is precisely the same, completely independent of all played histories.  In this regards, RWR is an Independent process, always the same regardless of input.

I felt like I had discovered the magic point where the misinformation outweighed the information and felt jubilant that I had discovered something important.  But I knew I needed way more test runs, and a test infrastructure that computed important statistics so I could determine whether the difference from RWR was significant or not.

At that time, I was making actual playlists from folders of files, storing results to the played history, and running the -stats option of MakePlaylist (which also loaded the history and folders of files) to see how complete it was.  I was not able to run more than a small number of the toughest cases.

To make the tests run faster, I made an option to eliminate all playlist and database output.  Everything is done inside the TestPlaylist shell, which textually includes the current MakePlaylist as a procedure.  And instead of selecting actual files in folders, it simply selects from integers numbered 1...<library size>.  These refinements make it possible to create the needed millions of playlists even using a pre-compiled language (Tcl) without any parallelism.  I also added statistics to the output.  This was not all done at once but in a series of separate refinements.

At first, the result with 10000,100,1 being the magic point held up when I did 10 test runs of each.

With more improvements, I was able to increase the number of test runs to 100 the result still held, but with hardly any statistical significance.  But with even more improvements, I was able to increase the number of test runs to 1000, and then the result failed,  RWOR was still better than RWR even when playing only one title out of 100 from a library of 10000.  The 'magic point' disappeared.  The statistical significance of this difference is quite a bit shy of 95% confidence.

RWOR playlists required for 1/100/10000: 96820

RWR playlists required for 1/100/10000: 97774

Actual difference: 954

Difference required for 95% confidence of difference: 1106

The difference required for 95% confidence the means are being sampled from different distributions is the sum of the two 83% confidence intervals.  The calculation is now done by TestPlaylist but these calculations were done by hand.

I was disappointed that 95% confidence was not achieved but rather unwilling to repeat these tests with, say, 10 times more repetitions than the already 1000 repetitions because these runs each took a week and a half already.

 But if we ask the question of whether the true values favor RWR over RWOR, my original conjecture, that is probably greater than 95% at this point, because there are 3 possibilities:

1. RWOR better than RWR

2. They are the same.

3. RWR better than RWOR

#3 is the farthest from the existing mean values from large number of tests.  Given that, #2 is more likely than #3.  #3 is the least likely of all, so it is possible that RWR is worse not better or same is already at a 95% confidence interval.  I don't know how to do those calculations, but I think my original idea that RWR is better specifically at 1/100/10000 is likely disconfirmed near 95% confidence, possibly better.

And things aren't hetter (and likely worse) with a smaller library size of 1000 either:

RWOR playlists required for 1/100/1000: 7307

RWR playlists required for 1/100/1000: 7507

Actual difference: 200

Difference required for 95% confidence of difference: 342

This suggests that the library size either isn't a factor, or goes in the reverse direction from what I conjectured, larger libraries show better results for RWOR down to one 1 unit of valid data out of 100.  So it looks like I don't have to keep trying larger and larger libraries to find the pivot point.  And that's a very good thing because each tenfold increase in the playlist size causes a tenfold increase.  And they were already taking over a week.

BTW, when RWR at 1/100/10000 says 77774 playlists required, that's for each run.  Do that 1000 times and it means 77,774,000 virtual playlists need to be created.  That's why it takes so long.  I think my Tcl code is actually very fast.

So, even with only 1 file played out of 100, RWOR still achieves better results than RWR at every library size I can try.  And there's no indication that even larger libraries would break this.

That is why I am calling my RWOR algorithm Lossless.  The performance with less and less information is monotonically asymptotic to No Information (RWR) so it never gets worse than No Information.  You could in principle work backwards from the number of playlists required to play all the files to the number of items that are being skipped.  You'd just have to create millions and millions of playlists to be sure. 

At this point, the only way I could figure out to makeMakePlaylist Paradoxical was to make it lose some of the information it is supposed to save.  I decided to add a PARADOX <LP> option to MakePlaylist which causes it to fail to record the first LP items in the played history.  This then produces the Paradoxical result that fewer than LP items are played, there is only misinformation and no correct information at all.

The only way I can see to achieve a Truncating result is to replace the first items with RWR truly independent items.   I plan to add a TRUNCATE <TP> option in which the first TP items are randomly chosen with RWR.  By default, history is still recorded for them (ie, there is no information lost) but that's irrelevant for RWR, it is independent of any history.  One could also combine the PARADOX and TRUNCATE options.  I suspect it would still produce truncating results but with lower epoch counts than just TRUNCATE alone.  The virtual epochs the RWOR system 'sees' are shorter, making things repeated more often, but it barely matters to the truncating result which is identical with RWR at TP and below.

Paradox 4, 15-1 LP, 10000 reps vs RWR avg 100000

MakePlaylist version 1.100 which can perform these and other experiments is now available on SourceForge.  It is written in the "interpreted" (actually, precompiled) language Tcl (which is similar to Python but I like it better) and runs directly on Mac and linux systems regardless of hardware, on other systems you will need to install Tcl (I suggest installing Homebrew first, if you can do that you're 95% there).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeplaylist/