adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Nov 29, 2021 10:46:47 GMT
"My stance gets politicised ... against me"Your stance IS political, you stupid, stupid person. I've just spent the weekend at the Hay Winter Festival, stewarding. Covid passes were being checked on entry to the site, with wristbands issued so people could get back in. At a rough guess, ~99% were masked at all times except when eating and drinking...
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keitha
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2024, hopefully the year I get out of P2P
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Post by keitha on Nov 29, 2021 11:35:31 GMT
"My stance gets politicised ... against me"Your stance IS political, you stupid, stupid person. I've just spent the weekend at the Hay Winter Festival, stewarding. Covid passes were being checked on entry to the site, with wristbands issued so people could get back in. At a rough guess, ~99% were masked at all times except when eating and drinking... It's a shame I didn't know it was on this year,only knew it was on on Thursday and I'd made arrangements for weekend ( but my reaction to the booster would've meant I couldn't attend ) I suppose for me one issue is If I go for a walk later I will see mingled households sitting facing each other across tables in the pub all non mask wearing and a lot more than 56 people in the building and no check in on app or whatever whereas the cinema people sit in rows so I imagine less chance of transmission. than in a crowded pub. I'm not sure if it is a Welsh thing, but my recent experiences are that Mask wearing indoors ( Shopping centres etc ) is down to well under 50%, and certainly at one of the larger cinema chains there was no checking of passes and no request to wear masks. Restaurants I reckon 50% wear them to go in and they are often taken off before reaching tables. Shops a good 20% of staff aren't wearing masks ( my argument is if the staff don't set the example ...) Even when I went to get my booster vaccine people had to be reminded to put a mask on and one of the staff giving them kept pulling his down Below the Nose does seem to be the default here
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2021 11:40:41 GMT
I think it was everyone's mother who said "just because everyone else leans out of the window of the train doesn't mean you should"
Perhaps such advice is pertinent here
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Nov 29, 2021 11:46:52 GMT
Just been to Sainsburys, in London. ~50% of people not wearing masks.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2021 12:10:09 GMT
Masks
oh my god, just make it up as you go along like other nutters
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Nov 29, 2021 12:14:51 GMT
and to be seen to be doing something. And, as is the zeitgeist, we can measure it - how many wear a mask! - as if that is the outcome that matters. I don't disagree, but I do think that last point is important. It's peer pressure vs "don't give a scoobies". Are we all in this together? Or not? And yes, you can certainly extend that line of thinking to criticise support for vaccine rollouts in the developing world... (obviously doesn't apply to Johnson, Cummings, Steve Baker, Rees-Mogg, or anybody else of that tribe).
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IFISAcava
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Post by IFISAcava on Nov 29, 2021 12:16:24 GMT
Am deleting a triggering post. my point was that we need to boost ASAP. and that focussing on masks misses the point. But not worth starting a fight.
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IFISAcava
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Post by IFISAcava on Nov 29, 2021 12:19:58 GMT
Masks
oh my god, just make it up as you go along like other nutters
It's amazing how polarising things have become.
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registerme
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Post by registerme on Nov 29, 2021 12:45:06 GMT
But not worth starting a fight. I was interested in the discussion, not the fight .
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2021 13:06:21 GMT
Masks
oh my god, just make it up as you go along like other nutters
It's amazing how polarising things have become. I agree the vaccines are the answer absolutely. Good play.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Nov 29, 2021 13:20:07 GMT
What I do find strange is that given we have this wonder of the internet and we are undergoing a life changing attack from this virus that there can be people who so lack interest to find out about basic virology or it seems electron microscopes You may find it interesting to watch my friend Marty talk through what a dead Covid virus looks like Yes, I wondered that too. But I then also wondered whether this wasn't an example of another part of the problem too. Poorly informed people doing their own research and in some cases, and for various reasons, heading off down conspiratorial (etc) rabbit holes. Anyway michaelc fair play for putting your hand up and saying "I don't understand". Here are some good primers:- Origins of lifeEvolutionVirusesArchaeaCell biologyBacteriaDNA RNA Virology ImmunologyCRISPRThere's quite a lot to consume there, but if you do work your way though it'll give you a good foundation from which to build on. I've tried to order the above list sensibly but at one level it's a bit like quantum mechanics. We certainly don't know or understand everything, but what we do know supports our theories at least in as much as we can build stuff that works because of it. The reason I went back to the "origins of life" etc is because viruses are perhaps the earliest form of complex life (there's an interesting discussion to be had about whether or not they're actually alive). So you kind of have to start at the beginning . There are some parts of what you wrote that I like but some patronising although perhaps that's understandable given my previous recent posts which were/are trying to convey detail and subtly that is hard to express. Interesting to note that the first of your links I clicked on (Viruses and yes sorry I jumped ahead) stated in the very first sentence, indeed the fourth word, that viruses are submicroscopic ! I guess their definition excludes electron microscopes. Anyhow, its still very hard to extract the information that provably informs what a virus is and the rest of the theory is (of which there is plenty). The history section is mildly helpful in that regard (and as an aside it refers to periods when "scientists believed that..." as if the truth they now know is absolute) . To be clear I'm not disputing it just observing it is difficult to read anything other than "...this is what it is..." rather than "...we know this because of this...". A bit like if in my first maths class, the lecturer/teacher asked if you can accept that if for all pairs of integers a and b, can you accept that a+b=b+a without exception and without proof then yeah most people would accept that and we can move on. But in this world of covid19 we seem to _start_ with scary pictures of stuff without any explanation. Even the Wiki entry starts with "A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism." - Why should we accept that? (Again, I'm not disputing it ! The world is round.....)
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2021 13:31:04 GMT
There are online philosophy MOOCs you could join, they are free and cover what is truth and what is what etc
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Nov 29, 2021 14:10:46 GMT
Interesting to note that the first of your links I clicked on (Viruses and yes sorry I jumped ahead) stated in the very first sentence, indeed the fourth word, that viruses are submicroscopic ! I guess their definition excludes electron microscopes. The OED definition of "submicroscopic" is "too small to be seen by an ordinary light microscope."Can we just go back a step, please? Are you suggesting that you don't implicitly believe the basics of what used to be called "germ theory"? Scientific orthodoxy pretty much agreed on that back in Louis Pasteur's time, nearly 200 years ago. Viral and bacterial (and fungal and protozoal) "germs" have simply refined the basics of that... Before, the generally accepted explanation for the causes of diseases were miasmas... <phew>
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Post by bracknellboy on Nov 29, 2021 14:12:02 GMT
Absolutely 100% serious. My biology studies ceased at 14 and chemistry at 16. Maybe that explains why I'm such a thickie in this area. I presume you're not talking about optical microscopes where there is a direct connection between sample/eye/brain but nevertheless it is interesting for me to learn and/or be reminded after so many years that these things can be "seen". To me, viewing this stuff (cells etc), would seem to be the basis then of all the science that is being discussed. After all, without "viewing" the items listed in your last post at cell level it would seem very hard to make any progress scientifically. To know what is happening and to know whether an intervention is helping or not. It is fascinating to me that the media and indeed scientists when addressing laymen make such basic assumptions such as we all know the kind of stuff you brought up in your last post. If a "highly educated" thickie like me wasn't aware of the facts you mentioned I wonder what other folk think about it all? In summary, I think we all would benefit from a science lesson refresher. To b clear, I was not suggesting that you (or anyone else come to that) was "a thickie" because you didn't know certain things. We all know some things, and not others. The reason my post expressed a certain amount of "surprise" (or incredulity) was that you appeared to be quite stridently / vehemently saying stuff was essentially unknown/made up/hypothesis/scare tactics whilst not having appeared to have ascertained facts. Rather than that, I would have thought the starting point was to be inquisitive to the facts, or perhaps to ask the question of others as to whether something was actually know or simply supposition/hypothesis, and if something was known, how was it known. FWIW: I also gave up biology at 14. Even though I was more science/maths based, and had the luxury of being able to take 10 subjects for O'Level, biology was one I did not do as I simply found it uninteresting. While doing my Physics degree, I did however take a single term module in genetics (it wasn't quite called that) which did make me realise that there was 'interesting stuff' there. After all, chemistry and biology are really just minor subsets of physics :-)) On the subject of microscopes etc. If you want to "see" the structure of something, you need a) to use something which interacts with the object b) is "smaller" than the thing you want to see c) have a detector able to detect whatever it is you are using as your "probe". The human eye is able to detect electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength in the range of 380-700 nanometers (no I didn't know that, I googled it). This is what not surprisingly we therefore call 'visible light'. Cells are in the range of about of 0.01 to 0.1 mm. Therefore they can be studied using visible light, as the wavelength of visible light is smaller than cells - even if that needs to be with the aid of an optical microscope. As it happens, I also see that the naked human eye can see objects as small as 0.05mm, so in theory you could see some cells without the aid of microscope, but you obviously wouldn't be able to make out a lot. Viruses however are much smaller than cells. Viruses range in size (obviously) but are typically down around the 20-200 nm generally. So cannot be studied using visible light. Electron microscopes however use a beam of electrons as your 'probe'. It is the interaction of the electrons with the subject matter which is detected. They can see objects down to the size of an atom. They were invented in the early '30s, and frankly revolutionised huge swathes of human knowledge: biology, chemistry, material science... By the way, in case you hadn't cottoned on: you can't study viruses by looking at cells: viruses aren't 'made' of cells, as clearly witnessed by the fact they are many times smaller. A significant piont of viruses is they lack so much that a cells have: they can't produce energy, and they can't replicate of their own accord. The whole point is that they succeed by invading cells and hijacking the cells own mechanisms for its own purposes (which of course is simply to produce multiple copies of itself).
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Post by Deleted on Nov 29, 2021 14:14:41 GMT
it kind of depends where you are posting from. If a large office block in Moscow it makes complete sense ;-)
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