The last 19-20 months of pandemic have taken a toll on everyone in one way or the other. We all have stories, anecdotes, experiences, and have participated in “have you heard” conversations. The beginnings of the pandemic were just devoid of information. It was chaos in the normal and the mathematical sense. It is the mathematical sense that always interests me. People confuse chaos with randomness. Actually mathematical chaos is quite predictable – if you understand the initial conditions. Of course, there’s the rub. When I think about the early days of the pandemic we have the initial conditions of (a) a population used to ferreting out information from the internet with relative ease and (b) a situation when there wasn’t information. Into the void…nature hates a vacuum… let loose the dogs of war… take your pick. The milieu was ripe for the lowest denominator of accuracy to provide fuel for conversations from water cooler to talk radio, Facebook to “in the know” sites, and all the existing and emerging channels of information and disinformation. Continue reading →