andrewducker | Interesting Links for 13-10-2023

1. Misery for motorists as Rishi Sunak's HS2 cut set to put half a million more lorries on the road: (tags:transport doom uk hs2 )
2. Bentham's Mugging (a short play, wherein moral purity is found wanting): (tags:morality philosophy funny )
3. WordPress makes its posts available via the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc): (tags:WordPress socialmedia )
4. 'Brahmastra Part One: Shiva' - for those people who like a very pretty religious superhero musical: (tags:religion movies trailer video india )
5. On Whataboutery in response to Hamas.: (tags:israel palestine terrorism )
6. Breakthrough in reading unopened ancient scrolls by scanning them: (tags:archaeology ai technology prehistory )
7. France bans all pro-Palestinian demonstrations: (tags:France Palestine protests )
8. Covid can cause our brain cells to fuse together causing cognitive impairment.: (tags:Pandemic brain Doom )
9. Edinburgh Princes Street closed due to 'incident' as buses and trams affected: (tags:Edinburgh transport buses trams )
10. Edinburgh's Princes Street closed and buses and trams disrupted after man found dead in early hours: (tags:death edinburgh )

I've seen horrible personality-changing effects in others. So have friends. To the point where they can't be friends with the affected person at all.

I am super glad I got off lightly - I really don't have any post COVID symptoms at all. Unless it fucked my heart up... But who would ever know, given my Scottishness!

We can't escape. I still don't know what the best strategy is here. Given my natural tendency to be attracted to any doomish stuff that might give me an excuse to stop thinking about the future and just spend the next 5 years or so having fun. (Then curse myself as I live to 100)

Though, black humour - finally we can actually say that people are getting stupider and be right. If the -10 IQ estimate is at all valid, and such an effect widespread globally.

I am somewhat worried that I will eventually get a week of decent sleep and *still* feel rubbish.

:-(. Somehow I thought you'd escaped the plague!

Try the week of decent sleep? It might be worth it to know. Yes, logistically hard for you. I guess a solo holiday would be required!

We are both just about surviving on fairly rubbish sleep. I am not going to abandon Jane to a week of horror so that I can have a lovely time with my feet up!

Oh, and I've *definitely* had Covid once, last summer. Quite possibly in Feb 2020 (Jane and I both had a horrible cold/flu after an academic came back from China and coughed his way through a meeting she was sat next to him for). And quite possibly in the last year, as I've now had about 10 colds this year brought home from school/nursery, so I don't know how I'd tell!

Edited 2023-10-13 13:43 (UTC)

Ah the joys of children! I wonder how my mum managed - my dad was away a lot for weeks and maybe months at a time pretty much our whole lives (and she had no family to help, and my father's parents would not/did not). She only ever had part time jobs though.

But if you theoretically could arrange it, you could later let Jane have a week off in return. Well, I guess you aren't into the idea. But maybe its time might come, in years to come!

Oh yeah. Gideon's gone to bed not-next-to-Jane once ever. Once he's going to sleep at night without being attached to her then I have no objection to her having a night away.

My mum looked after the three of us while my dad was away for a fair bit of the time. But she's told me a few times about us playing around her while she curled up on the floor for a nap, and she'd just hope that none of us would decide to wander off and play with the electrics before we woke up.

I vaguely recall my mum saying she used to nap when we did. But my sister at least was sleeping through the night from a very very early age. Which has to help. And of course, my mother was 24!

In the last year you couldn’t tell by testing?

I'd be testing near constantly. And I do not trust the home tests, particularly not for any of the variants since 2022. They seem to have an accuracy of less than 50%.

Edit: To be clear, I'd get a test kit if I got something which didn't feel like the normal cold that I've basically had constantly for the last year.

Edited 2023-10-13 14:31 (UTC)

I (famously) NEVER get colds. Not even when my most intimate of intimates does (very regularly). When I felt cold then a tad feverish 3 days after a (super rare) visit to a bar in the big city where the woman almost opposite me coughed her way through the night - I kinda knew. Test confirmed. Even though I'm never sick, I would say COVID doesn't feel 'normal'. (Though I never got a cough at all. Just 2 days light fever, 3 days stuffed nose, one week loss of smell).

Why not test? There's not likely to be a false positive and if you don't trust tests anyway, a false negative is no different from no test? But a positive test would put you in a better position to know how much to look after yourself afterwards.

Of course, regardless of what the test says, one ought to STAY THE FUCK AT HOME with any respiratory illness. Like that stupid coughing woman should have!

The last bit is basically where I am. Look after myself, don't cough on people more than I have to.

But there's no way that "having a cold constantly" for a year is normal. Please get it checked out. Maybe an allergy? In any case, see about it!

Oh, I get a few days off every so often, but with him bringing home a cold from nursery every two weeks and her doing the same from school, but on a different schedule, the times where neither has had one for at least a week are fairly intermittently spread.

6 is impressive.

3 is very pleasing.

1 .. so we need a new north-south railway but it doesn't have to be high speed ?

Absolutely. But the cost of making it a high speed line compared to the cost of a slow line isn't that big.

In terms of putting kit on the ground, true.

But a high speed line has more constraints on the route - how wiggly (up and down as well as sideways) it can be. How does fewer route options affect planning negotiations, which I believe have a large bearing on how long the project takes and hence on how much it costs ?

It's not half a million more lorries, that's a terrible headline. It's 500,000 additional lorry *journeys* per year. "...figures crunched by transport firms predict there will be 500,000 extra lorry trips on the roads as a result of cancelling the rail line to Manchester – roughly equivalent to an extra journey a year for every single registered HGV in Britain." It's not good, but it's not awful - if on a typical day you see 300 lorries while driving, you might now see 301. It's a less than 1% increase.

Ah, thanks. I hadn't realised that as a proportion it's not that high.

Interesting Links for 13-10-2023

8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

Re: 8 ... DOOOOOM

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject