Honors 223

Winter 2021 Sec.

2
Finding Truth: Disagreement and Engagement in a Complex
World

Homework #1
Due Jan. 10, 2022

1. Think of a societal problem or issue that is relevant to you. Briefly describe the issue. Why
is it important to you? What might be done to address the problem?
LGBTQ issues are really important to me. Specifically with legal rights including marriage,
adoption, trans healthcare, removal of gay panic defenses, and more. I’m queer myself and it’s still
a big issue, especially outside of just the US. Queer and trans people need to be protected classes
across the world and receive the same rights and straight people.
2. Download and install the Octave software package. Locate a data set of total daily U.S.
COVID-19 cases by date. Enter some of the data points into a script. Plot the data using
Octave with (a) a linear vertical scale and (b) a logarithmic vertical scale (use semilogy).
(c) What does each view of the data emphasize? Turn in your plots and brief comments.
a)

Code:
d = 0; c = 15;
d(1) = 1; c = 15;
d(2) = 10; c = 57;
d(3) = 20; c = 158;
 d(4) = 30; c = 6408;
d(5) = 40; c = 98287;
d(6) = 50; c = 360593;
d(7) = 60; c = 673750;
d(8) = 69; c = 951463;
d(9) = 79; c = 1242055;
d(10) = 90; c = 1520391;
figure(1)
semilogy(d,c);

axis("square","tight","xy");

plot(d,c);

title("Days vs Cases")
xlabel('Day')
ylabel('Cases');
d(11) = 101; c = 1766626;
b)

Code:
R0 = 3;
dt = 0.2;
nd = 6;
cm = 1;
 t = 0:dt:60;

for n = 1:length(t)-1,
cm(n+1) = cm(n) + (R0 - 1) * cm(n) * dt/nd;
end

figure(2)
semilogy(t,cm)
hold on
semilogy(d,c)
hold off
title("Days vs Cases Logarithmic")
xlabel('Day')
ylabel('Cases')
c) The fact that the plot shows a straight line means the increase in values is exponential. I also
estimated the R-naught to be about 3, meaning that one sick person will spread it to 3 more
people, thus tripling the number of cases at each occasion that there’s spread. And this is all only
in the first 100 dates of the pandemic.

3. Reading: Bryson, Part I, Lost in the Cosmos. List three things that you found interesting
from this section of the book.

It’s crazy to imagine the scale of the universe. Both as an impossibly huge thing and an
impossibly small thing. The universe is bigger than we can imagine and is still expanding, still
leaving residue from the big bang. At the same time, the function of the universe is microscopic.
The functions of all the universe are done at the atomic level in numbers greater than we can
count. However, those particles are unimaginably small. 500 billion can fit in the dot of an ‘i.’