Archive for March 21st, 2021

You see the signs, but you can’t read…

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

Sometimes, the warning signs are lit up with neon and searchlights, and people still miss them.

A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup.
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.

Now, I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden, but I feel like there’s at least two big warning signs that were missed here.

1.

San Francisco-based uBiome was founded in 2012, and kicked off the company in an unusual way for a biotech startup: via a Kickstarter campaign. Its offering was an at-home test to sequence the DNA of its customers gut microbiome, which could then in turn purportedly be used to improve health.

I’m an absolute believer that you should avoid – indeed, run away from – any crowd funding campaign that is medical or health care related.

2.

In 2018, Richman was even named an “innovator” winner in Goop’s “The Greater goop Awards” and at its peak, uBiome was valued at $600 million.

Goop? Seriously? No s–t.. Again: anything that’s recieved an award from Goop, is promoted on Goop, or has any involvement with Goop: run like hell in the other direction.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 355

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

Science Sunday!

I’ve been fascinated by rocks and rock hunting and geology since I was a young child.

I’m just not very good at it. So instead, I enjoy reading the works of others, like John McPhee.

Mr. McPhee talks with Eldridge Moores, a University of California geologist (and collaborator with Mr. McPhee on Assembling California) and reads from Annals of the Former World (affiliate link).

Bonus #1: “A Brief History of Colorado Through Time”. I used to collect those “Roadside Geology of…” books. I should at least go out and replace my copy of Roadside Geology of Texas (affiliate link). Perhaps I will be able to use it soon.

Bonus #2: “Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest”. Or, giant lava flows!

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Obit watch: March 21, 2021.

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

George Bass. I think he may have been an obscure figure to most folks: Dr. Bass (a professor at Texas A&M) was one of the pioneers of underwater archeology.

After being honorably discharged in the late 1950s, he pursued a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, an American photojournalist named Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.
Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.
“You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.

…

Early on, archaeologists who sought to take advantage of the aqualung remained aboveground, relying on reports from hired divers, who lacked archaeological expertise. Professor Bass took a more hands-on approach. He became the first archaeologist to do his own diving while supervising other divers. And he organized on-site training in underwater excavation methods for fellow archaeologists and students.
With help from scientists he recruited for his teams, he engineered new methods for removing artifacts from the seabed and for spending long periods underwater. One crucial early insight was that objects that look like rocks may actually be the corroded remnants of metal goods. Professor Bass X-rayed what he found interesting. If a rocklike object contained an inner cavity where a metal artifact used to be, he would pour epoxy inside and cast a replacement.
His excavations produced illuminating material about ancient shipbuilding. His first expedition, off Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.
Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.
“Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”

Roger Baldwin. He and three of his Army buddies – Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, collectively known as the “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” – were early pioneers of basic blackjack strategy.

It led Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor and blackjack expert, to validate their calculations on an IBM 704 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to write the best-selling 1962 book, “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” which helped bring the Army group to public renown.
Mr. Thorp recalled the influence of the men’s strategy in his 2017 memoir, “A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.” “The Baldwin group,” he wrote, showed that the advice of the reigning experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra two percent advantage.”
Arnold Snyder, a renowned author of blackjack books, said by phone: “No one actually knew what the right strategy was because it hadn’t been calculated. They figured out what to do if your hand totals 15 and the dealer has an 8 up: do you hit or do you stand?”

Dick Hoyt, marathon runner. He ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1992 and finished in 2:40:47.

Oh, I forgot to mention, it should be “they”, not “he”. Dick Hoyt was was pushing his disabled son, Rick Hoyt, in a wheelchair the whole way.

Rick Hoyt was born in 1962, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to control his limbs or speak. “We had long since learned how to interpret our son’s smiles and nods,” Dick Hoyt wrote in his 2010 book, “Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son.” “But as good as everyone in the family was about figuring out what Rick needed, we were still only making educated guesses.”
But in 1972, engineers at Tufts University built a computer that allowed Rick to communicate by choosing letters with a tap of his head. His first words were “Go Bruins,” revealing a passionate love for sports.
In 1977, Rick asked to be involved in a five-mile benefit run. Though his father was not a competitive runner, he pushed Rick in his wheelchair the entire distance, finishing next to last.
“When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us,” Rick Hoyt told The New York Times in 2009 with the help of his computer voice program. “And it feels like there is nothing Dad and I cannot do.”

You might remember this from one of Rick Reilly’s SI essays.

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