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Shutdown rituals can become annoying, as they add an extra ten to fifteen minutes to the end of your workday (and sometimes even more), but they’re necessary for reaping the rewards of systematic idleness summarized previously. From my experience, it should take a week or two before the shutdown habit sticks—that is, until your mind trusts your ritual enough to actually begin to release work-related thoughts in the evening. But once it does stick, the ritual will become a permanent fixture in your life—to the point that skipping the routine will fill you with a sense of unease.
(More technically, to implement the portfolio construction suggested by modern financial theory, one needs to know the entire joint probability distribution of all assets for the entire future, plus the exact utility function for wealth at all future times. And without errors! [I have shown that estimation errors make the system explode.]
A Man for All Markets
Edward O. Thorp
Biden dove into the science with Murthy and Kessler, seeking a daily tutorial. He was a question machine. He asked, how does the virus attack the body? Droplets from an infected person’s cough or sneeze, or even normal breath, enter the nose and throat and attach to the plentiful cell-surface receptors called ACE2, taking over the cell and multiplying, they told him. Since the lungs are like a respiratory tree ending in small air sacs, also rich in the ACE2 receptors, the virus moves there and can destroy the lung cells. They also described how the virus can attack different cell types and tissues, including blood vessels and the heart. How about the vaccines being developed? Biden asked. There are two types, the doctors said. The first was an adenovirus-based vaccine that enables the cells to produce spike proteins that build up antibodies, effectively soldiers, to defend against the virus. The second was the mRNA—the “m” is for messenger. This vaccine activates immune responses by giving cells the instructions to produce a spike protein. It’s like a recipe of your DNA. The body then remembers how to fight off the virus if later infected. The mRNA formulation can be changed in the vaccine if a variant of the virus pops up. Viruses often mutate.
Peril
Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
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