I will be keeping an eye on one thing, though…

This is what the flu season looks like so far in the US. The red line in this complex graph shows that we are at a very high point right at this moment:

It is a big bad year for the flu, so one-point-five gazillion people moving across the landscape and hanging out here and coughing on each other can be a problem. But, if we look just at Minnesota, there is a more nuanced picture. Similar data for just the North Star State graph out this way:

Notice that here, the flu season appears to be rapidly going away. That red line is still up high, which means lots of flu around, but we are in a downward swing.

But also notice that it is not uncommon for a flu season to have a second, smaller but meaningful, bump on the way down, and sometimes (like last year) that can be a big bump. So, my question is this: Will we have another bump starting next week, and will that bump be because one-point-five-gazillion people showed up to contribute to our flu?

Or, since people who are really sick may not travel, maybe having one-point-five-gazillion non-flu-ridden people sprinkled around in the population will provide some sort of epidemiological buffer, a contribution to local herd immunity of sorts, to hasten the decline of our flu numbers.

Maybe all the flu will jump on the Eagles fans and they’ll leave with it.

Anyway, I think there is a small but not insignificant possibility that we will have a Super Bowl Bump in our flu statistics.

Watch this space. If it happens, I’ll post on it and crow. (If it doesn’t, I’ll delete this post!)

If this is a thing, a Super Bowl Bump for the flu, we would have seen it before. Unfortunately, different states keep and present their data in different ways. I’m sure there is some database out there I can mine, but since I don’t now where it is, we’ll have to use less than ideal data.

Have a look at Texas:

This is a graph from Texas showing the flu season, using an OK but not ideal metric, percent of medical facility visits due to a flu like symptom. Notice that there is a bump at the time of the Super Bowl in 2017, when it was in Houston. But the bump starts to happen before the Super Bowl and is that year’s main influenza event in Texas. And Texas is huge, so a Houston event would not show up. Conclusion: Texas does not inform, nor does it falsify. More study needed.

(By the way, yes, I’m aware that a venue-by-venue look does not show what happens when newly infected fans from out of state go home, it only shows the effects of an influx of people on that area.)

The 2016 Super Bowl was in Santa Clara California. Again (not bothering with the graph), California’s flu season tends to peak around Super Bowl time and it died that year. Also, it was not a very big year. But, again, this is a large state with way too much data watering down any effect, unlike Minnesota, where half the people here live in the Twin Cities and the Twin Cities is where the Super Bowl is being held.

New Orleans in 2013? Yes,there is a tiny bump so minimal I won’t even show you, and it was a low level year for the flu. Again, not an ideal scenario.

Really, the best case I can find among all the Super Bowl Sites for a flu bump in a state, i.e., bad flu year, the state on the way down and not at peak, and a concentration of population, is 2018, though Minneapolis had the Super Bowl in 1992. There are no reliable data that I can find for 1992. So, if this is ever a thing, this is the year that may happen.

Do feel free to look at the visiting team’s home towns over the last dozen years or so and report back if you see anything!

By the way, Pink a) will be singing the national anthem and b) has the flu, it is said. So, that should be interesting. Maybe that will be the controversy.

The Great DeflateGate Controversy

You have probably heard that an accusation has been made against the New England Patriots regarding their balls. It has been claimed that they intentionally deflated their balls during certain, perhaps many, games, in order that players be able to hold on to said balls during play. There is some evidence that this is true. In particular, the New England Patriots seem to have an exceptionally good record playing with balls that are wet and/or chilly — exceeding betting spreads which are, essentially, complex and generally accurate models — 80% of the time.

But now, a New England based scientist who has disclosed, as is proper, his fanship of the New England Patriots, has released a study suggesting that the Patriot’s balls may have deflated naturally, after they were moved from a warm environment to the colder environment of the playing field.

Thomas Healy, former college punter and founder of HeadSmart Labs, a sports safety think tank, has carried out experiments to test this hypothesis. Here is the scientist, Healy, pointing to the relevant calculations:

And here is Healy explaining his research on the behavior of foot balls:

No Emerging Consensus on Deflate Gate

Timothy Gay, who wrote “The Physics of Football,” which included a forward by Patriot’s Coach Bill Belichick, also chimed in. He notes that deflated balls would certainly provide an advantage, but he agrees with Healy’s results, and has confirmed them with his own calculations.

Bill Nye has also entered the fray, but he disagrees with Healy. Nye is backed up by a major web site known as “Funny or Die.” From a piece in Salon,

“Funny or Die” and Nye actually demonstrate[s] what would happen if balls went from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to 51 degrees Fahrenheit for such a short amount of time. Most importantly, Nye reminds us that man-made climate change is real. And unlike “deflate-gate” it is, as Nye says, “something about which you should give a fuck.”

Here is Nye’s video:

Who will win the Deflate Gate Debate?

I’m thinking the jury is still out. But Bill Nye is certainly right about one thing. Climate change is real, and something to truly give a fuck about.

When is the Super Bowl on?

Sunday, February 1st, at 5:30 Central Time. It should be a good game, but don’t get your hopes up. You wouldn’t want to be deflated.

One year after moving to Minnesota, I relocated to the city of Falcon Heights. If you know the Twin Cities you may be familiar with the “Saint Paul Campus” of the University of Minnesota. This campus is located almost entirely within Falcon Heights, not Saint Paul, and I think this is a missed opportunity. How cool would it be to take classes in ornithology, or visit the Raptor Center, in Falcon Heights Minnesota, rather than pretending to be in Saint Paul when one is not? Someday, perhaps, this transgression will be repaired.

In any event, during that very year (and I lived there for only one year, so I have the timing nailed down) the Minnesota Vikings were in the playoffs with serious Super Bowl prospects. All they needed to do was to beat the Atlanta Falcons to move on to the Big Game. During the night, before the weekend on which the playoff game would be held, City of Falcon Heights public works technicians, or somebody, visited all the signs on the border, all the signs that said “Welcome to Falcon Heights,” and changed them to read “Welcome to Vikings Heights.”

The Vikings were expected to win this game easily. Instead, they lost the game badly. The signs were changed back quietly.

The main large falcon in the Twin Cities is the Peregrine Falcon, and here they live on office buildings and beneath large bridges spanning the Mississippi. But we are not that far from the range of the Prairie Falcon. If you look at most bird guides, the Prairie Falcon will be shown to the west of Minnesota, in the Dakotas, and to the south in Western Iowa, but if you look at actual sighting data, you’ll see that they are spotted now and then in the North Star State. The other common falcon here is the American Kestrel but we also have the equally diminutive Merlin.

There are a lot of interesting things about Falcons you should know. One is the taxonomic relationship of these various birds. It is a bit complex and beyond the scope of this post, but the thing that is most interesting to me is the position of the Caracara. The Caracara, which is a vulture-like falcon (perhaps) is in with the other Falcons taxonomically, yet the Falcons are part of a larger group that includes regular raptors. This is interesting because birds that tend to scavenge have adaptations that facilitate scavenging which are virtually antithetical to those that characterize the swift and powerful Peregrine and kin. In other words, within the diurnal raptors that are not vultures, the Caracara as a group and the large typical falcons as a group are truly opposites, yet uncannily closely related.

Another interesting thing about the larger Falcons is the way they demonstrate the altriciality of large raptors. Many large raptors take a very long time to develop, in some cases two or three years, into full adulthood. This may be because it is hard to be a large raptor so it takes a lot of physical development and learning. Or, it could be a strategy young raptors have evolved to be cared for by adults for longer, since large raptors tend to take up a lot of space. It is actually in the interest of growing raptors to slow the whole process down a bit. Maybe.

The large Falcons demonstrate this by having broad wings as yearlings and pointy falcony wings only in their second year. I don’t know a lot about that process, but it would be interesting to explore.

It is also interesting to note that by at least one measure of intelligence (according to Wikipedia) Falcons and Corvids are the most intelligent of birds.

Finally, while Falcons probably have a much deeper than currently appreciated evolutionary history, it does appear that they diversified during the Miocene at about the same time that grasslands became common. In this way the Falcons may join the ranks of antelopes, lions, and other grassland animals in being key species in the particular sub-age of mammals (that has no name of which I’m aware) which also includes the hominids (us). This is all poetically exemplified in the art of Falconry, of course, where the lone man stands with the lone bird on his arm on the lonely steppe/prairie/veldt seeking unwary bunnies and tasty pigeons to hunt down and kill. Truly, this is the age of the Falcon and the age of the Human. And the bunnies and pigeons are taking it in the neck.