Great way of picturing how vaccines work over by Randall Munroe: “To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.”
Some public health experts argue it can be done, but the experts in carrying out that kind of thing, the politicians, believe it cannot. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/covid-19-is-now-a-global-problem-in-search-of-an-irish-solution-1.4464511 Easily forgotten, but that’s a good definition of what a politician is: an expert in what’s possible to do, which may not be what a health expert says we should […]
Surprise: Playing video games can be good for your mental health, a study from Oxford University has suggested, following a breakthrough collaboration in which academics at the university worked with actual gameplay data for the first time. The study, which focused on players of Nintendo’s springtime craze Animal Crossing, as well as EA’s shooter Plants vs. […]
Zynep Tufecki has an excellent analysis in the Atlantic of why Covid has been such a shock to every health system in the world. In short, we humans tend to be poor at systemic analysis, especially of complex systems with non-linear outcomes. This leads us to tend to under-estimate the impact of certain events – […]
In November 2018, former defence secretary Gavin Williamson introduced a zero tolerance approach for drug use, saying it was the only way to ensure excellence was maintained as he highlighted that the purchase of illicit substances fuelled organised crime. via https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/24/rise-in-number-of-british-soldiers-being-sacked-for-drug-use Instead of powering organised crime, you could tax it, and fuel the health system.
I don’t know why walking is so conducive to letting your brain think. Maybe it’s to do with the blood flow, or like the way sticking your tongue out helps you concentrate, the steady, regular steps allow your mind to delegate body control to some unconscious subroutine, freeing your conscious mind up to really focus. […]
Over the other side of the big water, there’s been a lot of Trump inspired ‘freedom’ flaff about not wearing masks when asked, or indeed, doing anything that might reduce the spread of Covid-19. Brilliant way to explain why some rules and limits are good:
One thing about how humanity has dealt and is continuing to deal with the Covid-19 outbreak is that it’s really a huge experiment with country scale populations. Some really interesting effects are being seen, I’d say that the research hasn’t even really started yet. There’s all sorts of questions that could be examined, from mental […]
Don’t pack too light: A few weeks into coronavirus quarantine, a reader who had cleaned out his home according to the decluttering guru Marie Kondo’s ultra-popular KonMari method emailed me to ask if I had heard from anyone else who was regretting that move. He’d been happy with the results until the country’s circumstances had abruptly changed, […]
