The notes from a conversation with the head of international infectious disease at mass general that have been going around.
Notes from a call with Edward Ryan MD, Director of International Infectious Disease at Massachusetts General Hospital:
1 Close to 100% of the positive cases in MA are Omicron. Delta is almost completely gone from New England.
2 This surge will peak sometime between 1/10 and 1/21 and then begin a quick downhill journey of two to four weeks.
3 We will end up with a 20-50% positivity rate.
4 February will be clean up mode, March will begin to return to "normal"
5 Omicron lives in your nose and upper respiratory area which is what makes it so contagious. It isn't able to bond with your lungs like the other variants.
6 The increased hospitalizations should be taken with a grain of salt as most of them are secondary admissions (i.e. people coming in for surgery, broken bones, etc. who are tested for COVID)
7 We won't need a booster for omicron because they wouldn't be able to develop one before it's completely gone and we're all going to get it which will give us the immunity we need to get through it.
8 COVID will join the 4 other coronaviruses we deal with that cause the common cold, upper respiratory infections, RSV, etc. It will become a pediatric disease mainly affecting young children with no immunity.
9 40% of those infected will be asymptomatic
10 Rapid tests are 50-80% sensitive to those with symptoms, only 30-60% sensitive to those without symptoms
11 Contact tracing is worthless because we're all going to get it and there's no way we could keep up with it.
12 We are fighting the last war with COVID and should be pivoting back to normal life, but society isn't quite ready for it yet.
13 There is no need to stay home from work or to be a hermit unless you're immunocompromised or 85 or older, but he does recommend staying away from large gatherings for the next six weeks.
14 Spring/Summer will be really nice
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A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Part 1
Watch the complete film at josephwouk.locals(dot)com.
Anyone who missed this Speilberg film made 24 years ago MUST see this film which is much more relevant now than it was then. - JW
David, an artificial kid which is the first to have real feelings, especially a never-ending love for his "mother", Monica. Monica is the woman who adopted him as a substitute for her real son, who remains in cryo-stasis, stricken by an incurable disease. David is living happily with Monica and her husband, but when their real son returns home after a cure is discovered, his life changes dramatically.
10/10
Can't re-watch it again
I was 13-14 when I watched this movie. It's a long movie if I recall it correctly. I was so moved by it's theme, so I watched it all. I had strong feelings of sadness and sympathy towards little robot David that wanted to be a real child and to have a mom to love him. And that little bear ... I cried during some scenes. I don't ...
The Mass of Nows:
A Temporal Foundation for Inertia and Gravity
Joseph Wouk
January 6, 2026
Checked by Ara (Grok 4, xAI)
For a century, physics has lived with a quiet asymmetry. Special relativity shattered absolute simultaneity, forcing us to accept that "now" is observer-dependent—an infinite stack of "now-slices" foliating the four-dimensional block universe.
Yet when we turned to dynamics, to the origin of mass and force, we continued to treat space and time as a smooth, empty stage on which particles play. Inertia and gravity were described with exquisite mathematics, but their common cause remained mysterious. The equivalence principle told us they feel the same, but never why they are the same.
The Mass of Nows proposes a simple, radical answer: the stage is not empty. Between the infinite now-slices lies a dense plenum—the zero-point fields of every possible now, permeated by the four-dimensional extent of every particle's wave function.
Mass is not a property particles possess; it is the ...
