Milton Friedman was a Nobel prize-winning economist whose ideas became deeply influential both inside and outside academia. He broadly advocated for free markets with minimal government intervention. For example, he opposed the military draft, minimum wage laws and occupational licensing, and supported school vouchers and legalisation of drugs and prostitution. He was an advisor to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and he is widely thought of as the intellectual father of the ideology of neoliberalism.
There are models for just about anything you can think of. Fundamental physics, economic markets, epidemics, brain function, climate, click-through rates, animal behavior, election outcomes, to name a few. There’s a universe of possibilities for ways to model any given phenomenon, and only a few small hidden oases in an otherwise barren desert. What’s a model-builder to do?
I have decided to take a philosophical turn with this blog, because why the Dickens not. Philosphers love doing useless crap (just kidding, I heart you guys), so in that spirit I have converged upon the ultimate philosophical waste of time: Does god exist?
Ever since Newton/Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus in the latter half of the 1600s, it seems like the world has been enthralled by beauty and possibility of the continuum. This event marked the beginning of modern physics and mathematics, and there is virtually no topic in either of these fields that is not deeply interwoven with calculus.
Sometimes, though, I think they may have been a little too successful.
On February 22nd, PLOS medicine published a paper on cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) following vaccination on which I was the lead author. CVST is a type of blood clot in the brain that can lead to stroke and death. In this paper, we carried out a pooled analyis of 11.6 million people in England, Scotland and Wales, comparing the rate of CVST events in individuals before and after receiving the vaccine. We found that in the 4 weeks following vaccination with Oxford-AstraZeneca, the risk of CVST events approximately doubled. We did not see any increase in risk of CVST events following Pfizer.