andrewducker | Interesting Links for 04-09-2024

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Interesting Links for 04-09-2024

1. Is My Blue Your Blue? (Hue 177 for me, bluer than 76% of the population): (tags:colour perception names )
2. Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant for maths problem do worse on tests: (tags:maths ai teaching )
3. Rail nationalisation takes a step closer under Starmer's first major public reform: (tags:rail uk labour )
4. Labour won't ban dynamic pricing despite Oasis tickets anger, but will make it more transparent: (tags:labour economics music )
5. New coastal neighbourhood masterplan unveiled for Seafield in Edinburgh: (tags:edinburgh housing sea viaDanielDWilliam )
6. What British women really fantasise about: (tags:fantasy sex uk )
7. I'd love to see some science-based discussion on this piece about whether Covid is something worth stressing about.: (tags:pandemic )
8. Grenfell disaster - key points: (tags:UK fire fraud death OhForFucksSake )

I'm at 171 but that was only because I was being forced into a binary choice. Turquoise is neither green nor blue. It is turquoise (or blue-green).

1. I came in at ninety something, but only because I was stuck with calling turquoise green since it wasn't blue.

I was expecting the test to be about people's central example of blue.

I was having such a hard time with the turquoise.

"Your boundary is at hue 182, bluer than 89% of the population. For you, turquoise is green."

Same here! I object to their not being a 3rd category.

The whole point is to find the border between where you feel that green and blue meet. Giving you a third option would make the whole thing rather pointless.

But to me, and possibly others, "turquoise" is as valid and entire a colour category as "blue" or "green". Perceptually.

And also, what about cyan? It's kinda important... Lol

Every colour is valid. There is no such thing as an invalid colour.

Your boundary is at hue 168, greener than 85% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

Er, I also say turquoise is turquoise and didn't like the binary-only choice!

The whole point is the binary choice - to find the point where it tips, for you, from being more green to being more blue.

8. In addition to everything else, every other building with cladding from those manufacturers should be checked.

Edited (wrong icon) 2024-09-04 13:11 (UTC)

I think we have got that far in the seven years. I believe that the cladding on many (maybe most or even all) high rise buildings in the UK has been checked.

Given that Grenfell Tower was clad for the aesthetic sensibilities of neighbours, I don't think checking is even appropriate in some cases - going straight to removal makes more sense.

There is a secondary problem. In some tower blocks many flats were sold to tennants as part of a right-to-buy. Many of these owners cannot afford the removal of the cladding but it is really an all or nothing job, so needs consent from all owners. The market value of the flats is now less than the cost of removing the cladding, so the residents are between a rock and a hard place, unless a government will pick up the bill ...

Yeah. It's an awful situation to be in. Suddenly your home is illegal, there's no way to sell it, and you can't afford to do anything. And won't be covered by insurance.

We've been getting regular "it's time to stop worrying about covid" articles since some time in 2020, many of them saying "only X thousand people have died" even as they had to change that to "only X hundred thousand" and then as the numbers reached a million deaths in the US alone. And they keep telling us that we have tools to handle it, and then they took away the monoclonal antibodies, and testing hospitalized patients for covid, and reporting how many people are hospitalized with covid, and free vaccines for people without insurance, and almost every protection other than staying at home.

But somehow it's "scaremongering" to point out that at least a thousand Americans died of covid in a recent week. Yes, she says she "supports my right to wear a mask," which I suppose means that she doesn't think the Nassau County police should be able to demand that I unmask because they don't believe I have a good enough reason to want to avoid infection.

When someone starts an article by admitting that they're afraid of death and disability, and my masking, or asking my doctor to mask, or turning down invitations is a reminder that covid is still deadly, I might take them seriously.

I know that's not a science-based discussion, but frankly at this point I'm not just afraid of this still-deadly virus, I'm afraid of people who would rather I died quietly than be out there in a mask, trying to live my life, as people keep saying I have to.

I'm still worried, still masking & vaccinating. I've avoid it thus far & am immune compromised, so I desperately desire to continue this state. That's not even discussing 'Long Covid', for that matter.

Blue 178, 80%.
I have weak red cones and consider myself "colour partially-sighted".

We had new LED traffic lights recently and my father-in-law said that the Go light was blue. If forced to pick a side I would agree with him.

I wonder how much the colour depends upon the screen ? It is not as if I have colour-calibrated my phone, so see no reason for its blue to be the same as my tablet's.

Some of my local traffic lights here seem to me to have an odd blueness in the green, which is a fairly new change for me, so maybe related to LED.

Your boundary is at hue 171, greener than 72% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

But I imagine that the results could depend a lot on the light in the room, the screen being used, and the device settings.

Welsh (and probably stuff from the Goedelic branch of the Celtic languages, too, I guess) has a word glas which is sometimes translated as greeny-blue. These days it means blue, on the whole, but once was closer in meaning to green. That's still very visible in some words and idioms. e.g. glaswellt meaning 'grass'.

I read somewhere that not just the Celtic languages have a fuzziness around the green/blue distinction, but don't have time to investigate further at the moment...

Japanese is like that, too. The word for green only came into common usage fairly recently (post-WW2); everything before that was mostly referred to as blue, and still is, if colour is referenced in a plant name or whatnot.

It’s a pretty common thing in a lot of language families, really.

Edited 2024-09-04 16:12 (UTC)

My new favourite Wikipedia article!

Haha! Language and perception/cognition differences are just neat.

On an OLED monitor if that makes any difference, and whingeing at a couple where it's too tied to be one or the other.

Yeah, a couple were just impossible to call.

Well, no. They were breen. Or maybe groo. But those weren't options!

There is scholarly debate, but some say that ancient Greek poets did not distinguish between green and blue.

https://www.grunge.com/285728/the-real-reason-ancient-people-didnt-see-the-color-blue/

https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/why-there-was-no-word-for-blue-in-ancient-greece-and-how-homer-and-aristotle-perceived-colors

When Homer refers to the sky as "bronze," he does not mean that it is the color of bronze but rather that it is dazzlingly bright, like a well-polished shield.

What a beautiful idea. Makes me want to reread Homer paying more attention to the use of colour.

1) Your boundary is at hue 170, greener than 76% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

Exactly as I expected. I've gotten used to asking other people if this is blue or green for them (the answer is always blue XD).

Your boundary is at hue 172, greener than 63% of the population. For you, turquoise is blue.

#7: I don't think there's much more to say about the science of Covid; we've been studying it intensively for well over 4 years. Yes, new discoveries will made and hopefully new vaccines and treatments, but we really have plenty of scientific data. As we are now: Covid rarely has severe acute outcomes (hospitalization or sudden death) in healthy vaccinated people under 70, but it does kill tens of thousands of people (in the UK; scale appropriately for the country you're interested in) each year. Whether you should "stress about" that depends on whether you are, or care about people who are, elderly or vulnerable. Covid causes chronic symptoms in roughly 5% of people, including children and healthy adults, and this can include really debilitating Long Covid. Whether you should "stress about" that depends on how often you want to take a 1 in 20 chance of experiencing something between unpleasant and disabling for a period ranging from months to years. We have precise measurements of the economic effects of people missing work due to acute Covid and dropping out of the workforce or having to move to a part time or less challenging job due to Long Covid. Whether you should "stress about" that depends on whether you think fewer people being able to work to their previous full capacity has bad effects that you care about.

"Is it worth stressing?" is not really a scientific question, it's a question about risk tolerance for both individuals and society. We pretty much know what the risks are. Sure, it would be nice to have more fine-grained data about how frequent and how bad different forms of Long Covid can be, and about the population who are vaccinated but haven't had boosters in several years, and about how much more dangerous variants are or could potentially be. But we know plenty enough to know how dangerous Covid is, and to calibrate our stress about it based on that.

You know more about this than I do: are the various studies using basically the same definitions of "healthy"?

I'm asking because I'm not at all sure whether I count as "healthy" for these purposes, in part because I'm not sure whether they still think depression is a risk factor. My main if not only post-covid symptom is bronchiectasis, which is a lung problem and so ought to be relevant, but obscure enough that it could easily be missed in statistical comparisons. (I'm pretty sure that my orthopedic problems aren't relevant, and the low-level allergy to some cats is if anything working in my favor, because it means I'm taking long-acting antihistamines almost every day.)

Edited (hit "enter" too soon) 2024-09-04 17:45 (UTC)

This page is based on good citations of current research. I think citation #14 is probably the most significant of the list.
https://whn.global/public-service-announcement/

And as scary as that page is, it doesn't even mention the blood clotting, which is the primary feature of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The great news there is that researchers now know why the spike protein is causing clots. Fibrin binds directly to the spike protein. And knowing that means that counteracting agents could be found and delivered.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07873-4

‘A ton of Covid out there’: US summer wave not taken seriously enough – experts
Epidemiologists push newly approved booster vaccines as current virus strain threatens at-risk groups
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/04/covid-19-summer-wave

Having my roommate test positive for COVID at the Glasgow Worldcon and several friends having dealt with or dealing with COVID, it ain't over yet.

Get your updated COVID jab, four free test kits (at the end o' September the article sez), and remember to get Paxlovid if you can take it early. It really, really, really works. And you don't have to be 80 or older to get it without co-morbidities this side o' the pond. (Ask me why I spent a few hours researching NHS Paxlovid rules...) Having my own experience with being the one in the hotel room with the positive test, it ain't a fun time, even if your hotel does not catch on fire.

5. A new environmentally friendly coastline.

The picture shows a sea-wall not far above the waves.

I thought we were supposed to be moving away from hard sea walls, to soft, growing, flood-able areas that were better at resisting attack from the the sea over the long term ?

[ Eventually the sea will break a sea wall, but plants grow back faster than the sea can destroy them when the geography/geometry is right. ]

That sea wall has been there for many decades. It's just that on the land side of it there are currently a series of car showrooms and tile shops.

It's the bit at the far right of this photo

http://www.portobellocc.org/pccpn/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screenshot_2021-01-30-UTF-8Seafield20project_website_1920_1080_DD02-pdf1.jpg

Hmm. Car showrooms on what should be prime real estate.
Do they make the most money per square foot at large scale ?

* Richer Sounds seems to have the record for that: high tech gear stacked high in small shops. But that model doesn't consume enough land ...

It's quite far out of town. Or it was until the population of Edinburgh went up by about 20% in the last 20 years. Now it's prime real estate.

IIRC the record for return on floor space for retailers is held by Apple Stores, hands-down. That sparse/minimalist layout is deceptive as they sell high-value goods in huge quantities! (Compare the margin on a new iPhone or a Macbook Pro to the margin on the sort of remaindered hifi separates systems or home cinema set-up that Richer Sounds sells: the Apple kit is more expensive and undiscounted.)

Wikipedia and the Guinness book of Records both say Richer Sounds:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richer_Sounds

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/68867-greatest-sales-per-unit-area-annually

When I visted a store a decade ago I found that it wasn't all discounted ends of lines. Whilst there were not many big names it was serious stuff.

As Andrew says, quite far out of central Edinburgh and pretty close to the city tip, the city sewage works, an old gasometer and the local bus depot. I've always thought it was the part of town where the difference between current usage and most socially or economically valuable usage was highest.

I got 174 which is the median and am absolutely delighted.

You are *so* centrist!

I am usually a hard case or a weird outlier or break the process. This truly delighted me.

Me too: "Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral."

However most of the colors presented were not what I would call blue or green, but rather aqua.

Rarely for me I am significantly bluer than the population at large

"Your boundary is at hue 180, bluer than 85% of the population. For you, turquoise is green."

Ah - only at this point have I got Andy’s centrist comment - sorry Andy!

Hah! I assumed that you were simply responding with the dignified silence that it deserved!

No, I'm rather ashamed of myself but now I'm also belatedly shrieking with laughter.

I'll take that :-)

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Interesting Links for 04-09-2024

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171

Re: 171

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#7

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