Fred's Blog

Author: Fred Rothganger

  • Foiled prediction

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    I keep reminding everyone that I predicted a wave of COVID that crests around New Year. Well, we’re one week past that and the wave shows no sign of cresting. It boggles my mind that the 6th wave is now more than 2X bigger than the 3rd. Boggled. Anyway, the prediction also had a standard…

  • Theology of the Quran

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in , ,

    I recently read a translation of the Quran (reviewed on Amazon). The main motivation was to better understand how Muslims think. Partly this is background for a character I’m writing. Partly I just want to know whether Islam really teaches the kind of violence we westerners have come to associate with it. Based only on…

  • Rising 6th wave

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    Looks like the numbers for COVID are really shooting up. The 6th wave is almost as big as the 3rd wave. Hopefully, the peak will come soon and this will be over. I expect that COVID will be over in 2022, whether or not it goes away.

  • Dune

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in ,

    Just watched the new Villeneuve version of Dune. In addition to being an A-grade scifi epic, it accomplishes the nearly impossible: clarity. The screenwriter actually understood the novel and boiled it down to its most basic elements. Brilliant work. I’ve previously watched the David Lynch version and the Syfy version. The reputation that Dune is…

  • Start of the 6th wave

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    Just want to remind you that on August 31 I predicted that if we have another COVID wave, it would peak around New Year’s Day. This was based on nothing but looking at the graph of daily case counts and noticing that there’s a peak about every 4 months (120 days). We passed a minimum…

  • Prediction for a 6th Wave

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    Looks like the 5th wave is peaking. I thought for sure the 4th was the end, but it wasn’t. If we have a 6th wave, I predict it will occur around December 31 this year. This is based on a simple observation: the peaks of the waves seem to come about 4 months apart (average…

  • 5th Wave

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    I find it a bit surprising and discouraging that we’ve developed a 5th wave of COVID. This wave is well on its way to rival wave 3, and it hasn’t peaked yet. The thing about dealing with a force of nature is that only rational behavior succeeds. Despite the speed at which effective vaccines were…

  • How to build a sentient robot

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    Sentient robots show up frequently in science fiction. We all have this feeling the someday we will build such things, but how do we get there? Sometimes it happens by accident. Lightning hits the machine, or a screw goes in backwards at the factory. Whatever it is, magic happens and now the machine is special.…

  • Pissing off mechanics

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    I’ve recently gotten two different car service people angry with me. There must be something wrong with the way I communicate, and I feel bad about it. Incident 1 A few weeks ago, our 2012 VW Jetta died. We were coming home from a long road trip, passing through Oklahoma on the way to Albuquerque,…

  • Money

    —

    by

    Fred Rothganger
    in

    A while back I posted a story called the Lemonade Stand. Here I want to explain more explicitly some of the ideas behind that post. Most people will probably find these ideas non-intuitive. The economy is really about natural resources and things people do with them. This includes farming, which is the activity that matters…