Posts by TRT 9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
So what you're saying is... there's no point telling everyone because it'll just happen anyway?
What do you want?
Information.
Whose side are you on?
That would be telling. We want information...information... information!!!
You won't get it!
By hook or by crook, we will.
They managed to send out a leaflet about COVID to everyone right enough. Alternatively just tell the Lib Dems they can include an election message on the letter and everyone will get six copies within a week at zero cost to the NHS.
Well I have to admit I do fear that in these times of heightened sensitivity around infection, the thought of catching the flu will cause anxiety in many. If not just because it can be caught in a similar way to covid so if you're exposed to one you're exposed to the other and that with reduced exposure to the flu virus fewer will develop a natural immunity this year.
As for our perception of risk, we are poor at appreciating low frequency risks, amplified by medium severity or a wide range of severities. You just have to look at the AIDS epidemic to see how stupid we are.
I was being sarcastic.
"people decided they were too stupid to think"
I look out the window, I see it is sunny. I open the door, it's like a furnace out there. Am I too stupid to think it's a bit hot for a walk when I'm not used to it? Or that I should put some sunscreen on? So is it then wrong for the Met Office to put out an alert because it's so bleeding obvious that it's a bad idea to go out in the midday sun? Is it wrong for the government to legislate the mandatory use of seat belts? One scenario has an obvious an immediate danger, the heat, which we no doubt all have experienced at one point or another. The other is a statistical threat obtained through observation of the experience of a population. You can shout until you're blue in the face about seat belts, you can screen more and more gruesome public information films showing melons and heads and bits of brain and dead people and quadriplegics on ventilators for 50 years... do people listen? Do they do the sensible thing? Do 75% of the population use the safety device the law now says their vehicle must have fitted? What about the other 24% who can but choose not to or the 1% who actually really can't for some good reason. Will people get used to it eventually?
YMMV of course, but where does the state's responsibility towards the individual end?
I'll upvote you for continuing the discussion without resorting too much to personal abuse as so often can happen.
Absolutely! Fuck the met office and their heat wave alert. I'm going for a five mile hike to the shops without any sunscreen on. Bleeding nanny state. I'd drive only I don't want to wear a seat belt. They don't work you know. 90% of all KSIs of people travelling in a car were wearing a seatbelt at the time so obviously they don't work and it's just a social experiment on mass obedience.
</ sarcasm>
Point being it's like a dosimeter. UV. You wear a little badge when you're outside, if it changes colour you've received a warning dose of UV. But if you went out with sunscreen on... do you see what I'm saying? The app was written to warn you of close proximity known to be sufficient to transmit the original variant of Covid with no other precautions in place. Because we now have so many vaccinated, which reduces the chance of both passing it on and catching it, people wearing masks and a strain around 7 times as infectious, people are mixing more, getting back to work, socialising... the numbers are all over the place. The Bluetooth app which was a dubious way to measure stuff to begin with and I'm still amazed it seems to work, hats off to the boffins, is being treated like a precision tool but really it's only a guide, a warning device. I don't understand why the government insists on using it like it does, as if it's a diagnostic device. Every time they tweak the rules it's going to change the performance of the app. That doesn't invalidate it, it just means you need to see what it means in the correct light.
As for the claim there's no evidence... you think the scientific community of the whole world hasn't been all over this like a rash?
Try "An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19" Howard er al PNAS Jan 2021.
I sincerely hope the misting of my glasses when I wear the surgical face masks required at work, which are actually worse fitting and lower grade than the ones I bought and use on the trains and tubes, isn't a result of spit droplets... that would be yuck. I'm hoping it's a result of condensation of water vapour which, as you know (don't obviously) is when water becomes a gas and then a liquid again. I sincerely hope my mask allows gas to penetrate, because I kind of need that to happen. Call me old fashioned but I'm rather in the habit of respiring now. Big fan of it really. Couldn't live without it. I suppose you'll be telling me perfume molecules are bigger than virus particles next - I've heard that one before. "Proof" that because you can smell perfume and fag smoke wearing a mask, viruses can get through. School must have been something that happened to other people.
The funny thing is IT is so all pervasive now that on this forum you're likely to get comments from everyone ranging from conspiracy nuts to the people who write the epidemiology modelling code to the ones who do bio molecular lock and key simulations to forex trading. This really is a microcosm. And thanks to the reg not having any real rules on names on posts we can all choose to wear a mask!
As for the app... housemate has been pinged twice now. Essential worker going into city daily on the train. The likelihood is that both occasions were during the train journey rather than a colleague. The thing is both times negative - no transmission. BUT that was during the time masks on trains were compulsory. And now of course there's this big cry to delete the app and to cripple it. Not once have they asked about mask wearing. The parameters of the app were derived from massless transmission studies.
Are we allowed to throw professors of engineering down a scaffold tower instead? Because that's utter ballocks. Are they talking about a single layer of cheesecloth? Are they talking inelastic collisions rather than stuff that sticks and adsorps? Are they talking actual viral particle size or the size of exhalation droplets which can contain 1,000s of particles in a single droplet?
Many still have a nut clamp on the terminal. You have to remove the plastic shroud to get to it. I have seen one though that had a thing like a plastic bottle top that screwed down and forced jaws to clamp the terminal post. All the live metalwork pre-fuse was covered until the last moment and no tool was required to get the clamp off so less chance of clipping the chassis with a spanner. Not that common though.
Usual process is to remove the strap that makes the chassis negative first then put a cap on the negative post so it doesn't matter if the spanner hits the chassis.
I'm currently wondering about how the term "self-isolating" has mutated in well under 18 months. It now means the same as "isolating" rather than carrying the previously somewhat specific meaning of "isolating / quarantining as a result of a decision one has made oneself rather than being instructed or forced to isolate / quarantine following medical instruction etc".
Quarantine itself has of course broadened from the original very specific Venetian word "quarantena" - a period of 40 days of isolation of ships, passengers and goods required by law in Venice during the time of the Black Death.
Although (in the style of Arthur Dent) I prefer to think of quarantine as more of a sort of "cordon sanitaire".
TfL service location details e.g. train tracker - Did you know there are load gauges on Tube Trains? It helps the braking for one thing, but it also shows which carriages on which head codes are empty, lightly occupied or rammed to the gunwales. One would have thought this was essential data in the current socially distanced world, but it's only available to a restricted audience.
Just checked it again... not used it much during lockdown... It's definitely still improved over the early days of this version.
Lacking still:
an ability to put in one's own waypoints,
to have the "ME" pointer located near the bottom of the map so one can see more of the map showing what's in front of you (essential in the countryside where features may be so far apart they can't be seen on the next level of zoom out),
to quickly turn the compass on and off so you can get back more screen area,
to have the 10K mapping series available.
It really feels like a first GR version of a product. Stable, basic features, but no refinements and minimal field testing.
Reminds me of a "game" I saw once... where was that? Westherts College I think. It was at a digital media event at what's now the Harry Potter studios near Watford.
From what I understood it was a virtual reality orienteering game, played in 1x time. Consisted of a 3D model of a figure walking endlessly across a geo-mesh landscape.
What the flipping heck was that called? It'll come to me as I type... a name I recall involved in it was... erm... Alf Wright! That was it, Alf.
And the software was called... Wayfinder? Wayfarer? Waymaker? Something like that.
Anyway, my previous experience of software from OS is mixed. The first mapping product was actually great - scratch off a silver panel, enter a code, download a map. Brilliant!
Then they launched a Version 2 which worked in a subscription service fashion (Maps-as-a-subscription-service). That was totally bloody useless. Worse than useless - dangerous. It required an always on internet connection, even for the downloaded maps which it deleted with gay abandon at seemingly random times. Not good for people walking in hills and valleys and mountains where the signal was more off than on. You had to hold the zoom at one specific level or it replaced it with a blurred image, so zooming out and in to find specific features and relate those to a wider area was impossible. You couldn't take a compass bearing on a sighted object, like the only farmhouse on a hill or a radio mast, and then use it on the map because the screen was so small that you could only see detail on the map up to about 200m maximum, and any attempt to scroll around or zoom out and back in again reset the ability to see the detailed map that you had bought and downloaded or if the signal went any you HAD a subscription, it deleted the cache. Thankfully they got it sorted out, but it took them over 2 years to do so. Total misunderstanding of how their digital product would be used - monetisation took priority over safety.
I'm sure they put on an Arnie triple bill quite regularly, but the draw of The Guvornator was what first drew my attention and got me visiting there regularly. Also the Rocky Horror triple bills - TRHPS along with two or three of the movies mentioned in the opening song... greasy food from the box office... loved it. On the days we hadn't stuffed our bellies at The Black Chapati.
Sounds like we were there at the same time! I was at the Uni. The Poly was "the other side of the tracks".
The refectory at the uni I ate at very seldomly indeed, maybe only the once - it deserved its nickname of "The Rectal Refectory". The food really was shit.
Why is "being out of step with the rest of the continent" backwards? There's a direction to these things is there?
It IS an insult, even if it is an observation.
Moved on with no problem? Moved on WHERE?
We DO use metric and we ARE a mixed units society. Children are taught metric right through school, as indeed was I from over 40 years ago, and I use metric for most things. I use miles and mpg... I know the units and I understand them. They're what we use in everyday life. They're relatable. As for Americans... they use lbs for someone's weight... Never got that myself... now STONES and POUNDS... I used to understand how heavy that was in relationship to me... now I use kg.
But no hard feelings; here, have 0.568 of a litre on me.
I drove a car with one of those on it this holiday. Totally bloody useless. I only had it on because I thought it was part of the cruise control - turns out it had just a limiter rather than true cruise. Nothing to do with breaking the law - it's not turned on by default, it's settable to any limit regardless of the road limit... helps possibly with average speed cameras in road work areas on a motorway where increased vigilance is required but the limit is tight, if you can be arsed to turn it on and set it.
Is it really the law that one has to drive hands on the wheel and eyes on the road? I'd have thought it was more along the lines of it being prohibited to operate the vehicle in a careless or dangerous manner which is then interpreted to mean being in control and aware of the road.
My car parks itself, hands off the wheel. Is operating it in that way illegal? I have to have my foot partially braking for it to work and have my hand near the wheel.
Changed my upvote to a downvote at the last line. All technically accurate and correct but then you go on about being 'backward' and insisting on using old units... why is it backwards? 1. Old units tend to be appreciated instinctively by older people who grew up with them and what is backwards about being inclusive? 2. The imperial units of mph, miles, yards, feet and inches, and mpg are on all the road signs. Why is it backwards to want people to understand and apply the message in the real world?
We live in a mixed measurement world and it's not a problem. I fill my car with litres and understand the economy as mpg. My emissions are measured in grams per kilometre, and my thermometer is set to centigrade but my insurance is based on my annual mileage estimate.
they'll have to repipe out into the road. The current pipe goes some weird and convoluted route in order to reach the far back corner of the house where it is sealed in a concrete shroud just big enough to fit a cock - key through the slit. TBH if they are willing to replumb it just to fit a sodding meter, good luck to them! I'm not paying for it.
I wanted to take advantage of a new subscriber deal so my flatmate who was moving with me became a new customer. Would they actually accept that I wanted to sign off their services? No they wouldn't. I ended up telling them that I was moving to Norway for a 3 year work contract in a remote area with absolutely no mobile coverage and which I had already looked up did not have an international subsidiary associated there, and that my bill forwarding address would be my parent's house - they even tried telling me they were going to connect my mother's house to their cable network - I'd chosen that address because they live a mile down a shared private road and that either the cable company wouldn't pay to dig it up, resurface it (which TBH is desperately needed) and install a new cabinet with a repeater just for the sake of keeping one paying customer OR if they did do that, the £60 a month they wanted was far, far cheaper than even getting the road resurfaced, paid for on a credit card!
I think you know which beard astronaut's name was part of the company branding.
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