The Prisoners’ Dilemma of Covid 19 ••

by Madeleine Kando

The Prisoner’s dilemma is a concept in game theory that demonstrates how two prisoners acting in their own self interest both end up with a worse outcome than if they had coordinated their behavior.

This applies to the current situation and it maybe explains why the infection (and death) rate is so high the United States.

In the game, two bank robbers have been arrested. They cannot communicate with each other. The police have no proof of a major crime, but can convict them on a lesser charge. They have two options: to confess or to remain silent. If both remain silent, they each get a 2-year sentence for the lesser charge. If one confesses and the other one remains silent, the confesser gets a 1-year sentence and the other gets an 8-year sentence. And vice versa. If both confess, both receive a 5-year sentence.

The optimal decision would be for both prisoners to remain silent, but they are out to get the least amount of prison time, and do not care about the other prisoner.

If we replace the 2 prisoners with 2 states (California and Arizona), we can see why there is no incentive on the part of the Governors to keep their state on lockdown. (see next illustration).

The blue square is obviously the best option. The states cooperate with each other and will be able to reopen safely.

In the green square, Arizona tries to stop the virus by locking down, but California, which is open, transmits the virus. Arizona does not get the benefit from locking down, so reopens the state. This is called the Nash Equilibrium. If the states coordinated their strategy of moderate reopening, both would have been better off. Read more...

Happy Holidays!

PS: Santa is closed, but we are OPEN!

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In search of the Past

by Madeleine Kando

At my age, the future is a pretty shaky and a relatively short affair. The past however has left a long trail behind and it is only natural for me to turn in that direction to find some security. The past will always be there, unchanging and safe. Which is why I have these hiccups. Every ten years or so, I get obsessed with my lineage.

My maternal grandparents were upper class Hungarians from Jewish descent. There was pressure in the old Austro-Hungarian days, to ‘assimilate’ and become ‘a proper Hungarian’ (meaning gentile), which is the reason why much of my mother’s Jewish lineage descended in obscurity. My grandfather even changed his Jewish name (Guzman) to ‘Görög’, which means ‘Greek’ in Hungarian.

My father was of Hungarian nobility. His family left a trace a mile long and finding my way around the Kando family tree wasn’t easy. After many frustrating dead ends, climbing up side branches only to find myself stuck amongst in-laws with names I didn’t recognize, I finally found a Jakab Kando, way up in the canopy. He didn’t have a date or a face, but his son Janos was marked as being born in 1659.

But why stop there, I thought. With the help of numerous documents that a generous family member sent me, I went all the way up to the 9th century, where I met a chieftain by the name of Kund or Kundu.

Kundu was one of the Seven Chieftains of the Magyars. The Magyars (Hungarians) left the Ural Mountains in Central Russia, and after a long migration, invaded the Carpathian Basin in the 9th century, under the military leadership of Arpad (845-907). The Seven Chieftains are considered the founders of my native Hungary.

Contrary to popular belief, the Magyars do not descend from Attila the Hun. Sorry to burst your bubble, Orban. Hungarians are descendants from a peace-loving, fish eating tribe, somewhere in the Ural mountains. Attila lived in the 5th century and was long dead and gone by the time the ‘Magyars’ came on the scene. Orban’s fabricated mythology (called Turanism), plays on Hungarians’ desire to feel special by telling them that they are descendants of Attila the Hun – a martial, autocratic, and patriarchal society. But it is a dangerous nationalistic vision, easy to get lost in. Like the fantasies of Tolkien or Game of Thrones. Read more...

The World's Universities Ranked and Located; An Update

by Tom Kando

Once in a while, I  play  with statistics that list and  rank the world’s major universities. At this time, such a game may be a welcome distraction from   the  double nightmare of Covid-19 and Trump’s attempted Coup d’Etat.

 My source is the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2020.html  The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was created  in 2003.  It uses six  indicators, including the number of  Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers, number of articles published in scholarly journals, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index, and per capita performance of a university. More than 1800 universities are ranked every year and the best 1000 are published. I don’t know whether their methodology is the best, but they have good credibility, and  at least they can’t be suspected of pro-America bias.

I last wrote such an article about three years ago.  I now offer you an update, with some interesting factoids. All calculations are mine. I hope that  you enjoy perusing these.  I focus first on the top 100 and then on the top 500 universities of the world. 

Table 1. Top Universities of the world. By Region

Region	Top 100	101-500	Total 500	%
Europe	36	147	183	36.6
North America	45	108	153	30.6
Asia	11	100	111	22.2
Australia-New Zea.	7	19	26	5.2
Middle East	1	11	12	2.4
Latin America	0	9	9	1.8
Africa	0	6	6	1.2
Anglo Countries	60	157	217	43.4%

 Table 1 shows that a disproportionate number of quality universities are located in  Europe and in  North America - primarily the US -  with North America especially dominant in the “elite” category (top 100). Read more...

Living in the Here and Now

by Madeleine Kando

On the advice of my friend Karen, I am trying to live in the here and now. She tells me that it will stop me from worrying and help with my chronic insomnia. That it will bring me bliss and happiness. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think I had a choice. Short of being dead or not yet born, don’t we all live in the here and now?

I am being facetious of course. Living in the here and now refers to the mind, not the body. Although it would be quite a trip to move to the past, body and soul. I could shake hands with Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln. I could kick Hitler in the you know what and give my grandmother a big hug and thank her for all the beautiful books she has written and translated. Still, aside from these brief and novel events, living in the past wouldn’t be all that exciting. I would always know what would happen before it happened.

So, here I am, in the here and now, waiting for bliss and happiness to hit me. I am doing my deep breathing exercises, eyes closed, hands on knees, humming and waiting, waiting and humming… My lower back tightens up. My mind tries to focus on my Mantra, but my brain says ‘You need a drink’. The bliss and happiness is in no hurry to arrive.

And where does it travel from? Is it already in the present or does it live in the future? Instead of waiting for it to arrive, I could move to the future for a while and save it some traveling time. The problem is, the future being so immensely vast, I would have to know whose future to move to. Nothing would prevent me from moving to someone else’s future, let’s say some enlightened Guru, who couldn’t claim that future as his, since it hasn’t happened yet. I could grab his bliss and happiness and drag it to MY here and now. Read more...

The Elephant and the Donkey

by Madeleine Kando

On an island in the sea there lived an elephant family and a donkey family. They were not exactly friends but since it was a great big island they usually kept out of each other’s way and lived their lives peacefully by pretty much ignoring each other. At times they had to interact because, as the donkey was trying to build something, he needed the elephant’s strength and discipline to haul stuff. And when the elephant was trying to figure out a repair job he needed the donkey’s brains and resourcefulness to figure out how to fix it. But all in all, they spent their days avoiding each other as much as possible.

The elephant spent his time stomping about, making sure that nothing was disturbed in his domain. He liked things to be nice and tidy. His waterhole undisturbed by foreign creatures, the sandpit where he liked to roll around in, nice and dry and his little elephant babies all in a row, marching to his beat behind him. And no one dared to oppose his wishes, seeing that he was a great big elephant.

The donkey also liked things his way. He made up for what he lacked in bulk, by his wit and stubbornness. He was an adventurous little fellow. His brood showed him respect even as they wandered off to explore some foreign-looking object on the beach. He didn’t mind that much. He himself was endowed with a curious nature and instinctively realized that stunting his children’s sense of adventure wouldn’t serve them well in the long run. He was clever and because he was so small compared to the elephant, he often covered himself with a lion skin when he went foraging. Even the elephants ran off as they saw him approach, which made him chuckle.

As the island became more popular with the outside world, things started to change. Many other animals were drawn to this beautiful, bountiful island. Some liked to play with the donkeys, others liked to march with the elephants and for a long time life was good on the island. Read more...

America’S Ranking

by Tom Kando

 Regarding Covid-19, there is quite a bit of talk about “herd immunity” lately. This is the view that the best response to the pandemic is neglect. That is, let the epidemic spread until a majority of the population is infected, after which most people recover and become immune. In this approach, mitigation measures are kept at a minimum; as is damage to the economy... and more people die. 

Sweden is one country which tried this route initially. However, when its Covid-caused death rate soared, it changed course. In the US, it is the Republicans and the Trump administration of course who advocate “herd immunity.” The president himself, having survived the virus, is more than ever convinced that the pandemic will blow over and that there is little need for major mitigation. 

 
Absent a vaccine, “herd immunity” can only be achieved if, say, 75% of the total population goes through the wringer (= catches the virus). But how many people die? 

I fervently hope that our nation does not throw in the towel, and does not resign itself to “herd immunity,” i.e. to accepting the current astronomical rates of infection and death as the new normals. 
However, our record so far is not promising. Read more...

An Immigrant’s America

by Madeleine Kando

In a poem ‘le Rondel de l’adieu’, French poet Edmond Haraucourt writes the famous phrase ‘partir c’est mourir un peu’ (leaving is dying a little). It best describes the true meaning of farewell. Each time we say farewell, it is as if we die a little.

For me, even leaving on vacation feels a bit like dying. My old self is dying to make room for my new, yet undiscovered self. The thought of going shopping for a new self always brings a smile to my face.

Leaving has played a constant role in my life. I got my first taste of leaving when I was 4, when my parents left Hungary, the country where I was born, to settle in Paris.

Back then, I already considered leaving a place as something positive, like a soldier who adds stars to his uniform. The more places you leave, the higher you rise in the ranks. It was exciting and my age safeguarded me from seeing the risks that is always attached to leaving the familiar.

Since I settled in America, my last stop after so many moves, I have been trying to bridge the gap between two continents, like a giant standing on two floating icebergs in the middle of the Atlantic. If you ever tried to balance on two wobbling structures, that is how I feel about me living here in the US, but part of me also being in Europe.

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Did Trump Invent the Shoulder Shrug?

by Madeleine Kando

I gave up expecting Trump to say something remotely interesting a long time ago. His descent into the abyss of incoherence is accelerating by the day, be it a result of mental deterioration or an unwillingness to step outside of his adolescent comfort zone.

His body language, however, has fascinated me since he became President. In the Movement Therapy profession, we talk about a person’s ‘movement vocabulary’, similar to a verbal vocabulary. I witnessed the lack of this nonverbal vocabulary when I worked in a state mental hospital, here in Massachusetts. On the locked wards of this asylum, patients moved about like robots, mostly a result of over-medication. They had lost all their capacity to express emotions through movement. Some approached us with a rambling gait, eyes staring at this new apparition in their otherwise monotonous existence, then went back to rocking in their corner, smoking one cigarette after another. In the dark, pea green halls of this medieval place, we witnessed what untreated, overmedicated mental illness can do to a human being. They were the forgotten souls of our profession and the health care system in general.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the rich and expressive vocabulary of the dancer, the clown and the mime. The late Marcel Marceau was a nonverbal virtuoso. I invite you to relish this amazing mime in action here: Marcel Marceau I Bip As A Skater [1975] 

With this background in mind, what are we to make of Trump’s nonverbal lexicon? Where does he fit into the spectrum of what is possible for a human being endowed with a body that can convey a practically infinite amount of nonverbal messages? 

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Politicize This

by Tom Kando 

As the covid-19 pandemic was starting to affect the US half a year ago, the idiots on the right began to politicize the issue right away. Responding to my  article  Mother Nature?  (March 23, 2020), an anonymous reader wrote the following:

“Tom, following your penchant for statistics, Coronavirus deaths per million population: - Italy 206 - Spain 194 - Belgium 71 - Netherlands 68, France 54 - Switzerland 53 - UK 35 - Sweden 24 - Denmark 18 - Austria 16 - Ireland 14 - USA 12

Thank you President Trump for acting rapidly in blocking European flights!”

He added: “Contrary to your assertion, the death stats show that Western Europe remains the epicenter of the Coronavirus, every other stat is just a question of who measures the most. Besides, when our summer becomes the southern hemisphere’s winter, the southern hemisphere will become the epicenter. While I recognize we all have a problem, my previous point was to show statistically that we have more competent executive branch leadership (reacting faster and minimizing loss) than the other European democracies, and that I personally am grateful that Trump is president rather than the senile idiot the democrats are about to nominate. I would also point out that while Italy by far appears to be the most incompetent and ill prepared of the European nations, at the same time New York which has almost 50% of our Corona cases is ironically led by two Italians named Cuomo and DeBlasio!"   

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