Category: My Work

  • Covid Update: 20 June

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    Brendan Barry
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    So today’s post will be a little bit shorter than usual. The big reason is probably good, but also worth addressing. States are increasingly less reliable about their data. For several weeks I have mentioned that Philadelphia had not been updating their vaccination data. Last week or two weeks ago I noticed a small line…

  • Biden’s English Ancestry

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    Brendan Barry
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    We all know Joe Biden as the Irish American president. And that’s no malarkey. But, go back far enough in your family tree and you may find some interesting ancestry and ethnic origins and that’s no different with Joe Biden. Keep in mind that our number of ancestors doubles every generation. You have four grandparents,…

  • Inflating Areas

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    Brendan Barry
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    One trend people have begun to follow lately is that of rising prices for consumer goods. If you have shopped recently for things, you may have noticed that you have been paying more than you were just a few weeks ago. We call this inflation. The Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) tracks this for a…

  • Covid Update: 7 Jun

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    Brendan Barry
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    Technical difficulties yesterday. But I wanted to run the latest Covid numbers to start this week of posting, so we’re just going to use the Monday data, which is the lowest of the week since it captures the data reported by authorities on Sunday. That said, where are we? Last week we began to see…

  • Covid Update: 31 May

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week I wrote about how new cases had maybe flattened a wee bit in their rapid drop from peaks earlier this year. But the good news is that even in where new cases declines may have slowed down, they continue to decline. We can see the tails at the right ends are all back…

  • Covid Update: 23 May

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week I wrote about how we were seeing new cases continuing to rapidly decline. This week we can say cases are still declining, but perhaps a bit less rapidly than earlier. The charts above show that slowdown in the tail at the right of the chart. First some points to note, Delaware reported that…

  • Some Data on Deaths in Gaza and Israel

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    Brendan Barry
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    I’ve seen an uptick in traffic to the blog the last few days, specifically my older content on the Middle East. I don’t exactly have the bandwidth to track the conflict between Israel and Gaza in addition to Covid-19 and my other projects. But as we approached the ten-day mark since Hamas first fired rockets…

  • Baseball’s Injury Problem

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week, Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic wrote an article examining the recent spate of injuries in Major League Baseball. For those interested in the sport, the article is well worth the read. For the unfamiliar, baseball played only about 1/3 of the number of games as usual last year due to Covid-19. This year,…

  • Covid Update: 9 May

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week I wrote about how, for new cases, we had seen a few consecutive days of increasing cases. Were we witnessing an aberration, a one-off “well, that was weird”? Or was this the beginning of a trend towards increasing new cases? A week later and we have our answer. Just a one-off. If we…

  • Covid Update: 2 May

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    Brendan Barry
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    I didn’t write a post last Monday, but this Monday I am. A few things may have changed in the Covid situation. The most important is that we may have finally seen the peak of this current wave’s surge of new cases. For the last few weeks we’ve seen cases rising in the five states.…