A.C. Flory's Blog, page 59

My Best Reads of 2020, Part 2: More Book Reviews

Some great reviews by Audrey Driscoll, Vokhtah included, but also an excellent review of The Old Woman and the Mad Horse. It’s written by an Aussie buddy of mine, Cage Dunn, and I can attest to the fact that it’s a great read.

I haven’t read the other two books, but my TBR pile is starting to look rather thin so…:) Oh! And while you’re looking at all these books, check out Audrey ‘s Herbert West quartet. One word: awesome.

New Cases of Covid-19 in Victoria, as at June 27, 2020

The Dept of Health & Human Services [VIC] publishes Covid-19 case data, but it’s not wildly accessible. There are no graphs or charts, and the breakdown of infections – i.e. the source of the infections – is only available on the day of the media release. In other words, it’s buried.

I don’t know whether this is a deliberate attempt not to ‘worry’ people, or simply typical DHHS bureaucracy. Either way, the messaging is not getting out there, so I trawled through the data and created a simple Excel spreadsheet.

First up, the raw data for MAY, 2020:

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Next, the raw data for JUNE, 2020:

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As you can see, I wanted to show the source of the infections, but gave up when the data was too hard to find. Apologies, but I do have a life.

Now for some charts from that data. The first one is a line graph showing the ups and downs of infections [in Victoria] for all of May and June.

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This chart gives a decent overview, but the data is squashed up because you can’t fit almost 60 days onto a small chart. Despite this, you can clearly see three things:

Victoria only had two days on which we recorded zero new cases: June 6 and June 9.Victoria never really got rid of the virus. That was why Premier Dan Andrews resisted Scott Morrison’s push to reopen as quickly as possible. Sadly, he didn’t resist enough. Or Scott Morrison proved to be a bigger bully than expected.Apart from a few small dips, new cases in Victoria have been rising steadily since June 9. This is in stark contrast to May. In May, new cases fluctuated up and down, but the overall trajectory was down. In other words, the lockdown was working.

The next two graphs show this more clearly. The first is for May:

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The second graph is for June:

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What’s even more worrying than that upward trajectory for June is that the number of new cases has doubled in just four days – i.e from 20 on June 24 to 41 on June 27.

All up, we’ve had 10 consecutive days of double digit new cases. 10 days in a row. And in the latest news, a nurse working at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, one of the biggest in Melbourne, has tested positive for Covid-19.

Scott Morrison may believe that we can control this virus, but that is pure, arrogant bullshit. The numbers don’t lie. We can’t ‘control’ this virus any more than we could control the bushfires that devastated two states just a few months ago. Remember them? Remember how good Scomo was at ‘fixing’ the inferno? Yes, I thought so.

The truth is that nothing has really changed [for the better] since we originally went into lockdown:

Despite all the hype about the contact tracing app, I’ve heard nothing new about it since it was revealed that it doesn’t work that well with iPhones.We have some more intensive care units, and more medical personnel trained to use them, but overseas data has shown that even the most sophisticated health care system can be overwhelmed when the virus surges out of control.We have more PPE [personal protective equipment], but I don’t know whether we have enough for medical personnel in a surge. Pretty sure we don’t have enough for medical personnel and the general public if shit hits the fan.

So where exactly is Australia’s magic bullet supposed to come from?

One option that does work is the mandatory wearing of masks in public – to protect us from those who are infected but don’t know they are. Masks stop them from breathing on us.

South East Asian countries, like Thailand, that have mandated the wearing of masks have almost ridiculously low infection rates. Here is Oz, however, people still give you funny looks if you wear a mask in public, so I guess masks are a no-go.

So what else is there?

Well, there is testing. If there were random, compulsory testing [like in booze buses] we’d get a much better idea of how many asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spreaders there are, but it seems that testing is a) voluntary and b) mostly looking for people who are already sick. People who fear they may be forced into self-quarantine for 14 days are refusing to be tested. The irony is that they could well be the very people we most need to test.

When it comes to therapeutics, there are a couple of existing drugs that have an anti-inflammatory effect and may reduce the number of covid-19 deaths, but they’re still largely untested.

And that’s about it. Short of another draconian lockdown, we don’t really have any effective way of controlling the virus, which leads me to think that our success the first time around was due more to luck than good management. Sadly, I fear that our reopening won’t be as lucky because the ‘stages’ are based on the idea that all of us will ‘do the right thing’. Yeah, right. -facepalm-

The reality is that the messaging has been wrong from the start. People were told that they wouldn’t be badly affected by the virus, so now all they can see is that they’ve been made poor, bored and unhappy just to save a few oldies who were going to die anyway. ‘Eff that… Little wonder then that when the leash is loosened there’s a rush of me,me,me behaviour.

If our leaders really had wanted to reopen ‘safely’, they should have started with an education campaign that focused on the reality of the virus and what it does to people. Then they should have made any reopening, no matter how minor, contingent on the lack of new cases. Clear rules with clear targets.

Finally, they should have made it very clear that the instant people stop obeying the rules, the whole town/state/country will go back to lockdown. And when the inevitable happened [like toddlers pushing the boundaries], the consequences should have been followed through. Again, clear rules and clear consequences.

Instead, we’ve had a wishy-washy ‘plan’, mixed messages all over the place, and media showing how hard it is to live with the lockdown instead of how hard it is to die of the virus… And yes, ABC and Ita Buttrose, I’m looking at you. Since when did the people’s ABC pander to the likes of Scott Morrison?

To be honest, I think we should have had another Grim Reaper campaign:

The Grim Reaper advertisement

Right at the end, the voice over says ‘Prevention is the only cure we’ve got’. Sounds familiar, don’t you think?

There’s been a lot of controversy about the Grim Reaper strategy, but the truth is it worked. It made us aware of both the danger and what we had to do to stay alive.

Overkill? I don’t know. If we act like toddlers, shouldn’t we be treated like toddlers?

Sadly, none of the possibilities I’ve outlined have actually happened. We had a poorly organised, draconian lockdown that resulted in massive queues outside every Centrelink office in the country. And we’ve had big chunks of society thrown under the economic bus, but in terms of ‘management’, that’s about it. Now, I fear we’re having a reopening that’s being ‘managed’ as well as you’d expect.

We could have reopened safely, but Scott Morrison didn’t do a single thing to make a safe reopening possible. He just laid out his ‘plan’ and expected everyone to make it happen. Yeah, the smirk may be gone but #ScottyFromMarketing still knows bugger all about human nature.

Buckle up for stage two my fellow Victorians. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Meeks

Red Tea and Sweet Bread

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I did no work for this post whatsoever. The Offspring made the sweet bread rolls, and I can’t even tell you where the cup-and-saucer came from as the mark is so small and smudged I couldn’t make out even a single letter. But it is pretty.

I’m a genius!

-grin- no really! I just read a New Atlas scientific article about :

“…biohybrid synapses that let living cells communicate with electronic systems, not with electrical signals but with neurotransmitters like dopamine.

New Atlas: https://newatlas.com/computers/artificial-synapses-living-cells-communicate-dopamine/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=ff0315b360-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_17_12_51&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-ff0315b360-92416841

Remember when Miira was inducted into Innerscape and basically lost her whole skull so Kenneth Wu’s nano interface could connect the AI to her brain? Not quite there yet but…this article shows that it’s coming. And I actually forecast it…

Okay, okay, probably not that hard to do if you read sci-fi, but I’m still proud as punch.

Ahem, that’s all. As you were….

The ethics of ‘herd immunity’

I think a lot of people do not understand what ‘herd immunity’ actually means. This first graphic is what the very first case of Covid-19 would have looked like – 1 infected person surrounded by millions of people with no immunity at all:

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Now contrast this with what happens when a population has 70 – 90% herd immunity:

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When a newly infected person crops up, he or she is surrounded by people who have already developed immunity to the infection so the virus has nowhere to go and dies out.

Or to put it another way, the virus cannot reach new victims because they are protected by a barrier of people with immunity.

This is what is meant by ‘herd immunity’ – the protection of the uninfected by those who have already been infected. You could also say this is the protection of the weak by the strong. Bear that in mind.

But, and there’s always a but, you can only reach herd immunity if almost everyone in the population is already immune. The question then is: how do we get to herd immunity?

In the modern world, vaccination programs have all but eradicated diseases such as measles, small pox, polio, tetanus, tuberculosis, rabies etc. More importantly, people who have not been vaccinated are still protected because of herd immunity.

Is there any other way of acquiring herd immunity?

The simple answer is no, the more complicated answer is ‘maybe’. If you look at the list of quite deadly diseases eradicated by vaccines, you notice that they’ve been around for thousands of years. Assuming they were infecting quite a lot of people for all those thousands of years, why did humanity not gain herd immunity to them?

The answer is that 70 – 90% mentioned above. Relatively benign infections that didn’t kill off their hosts may well have led to herd immunity in the past, but deadly ones like small pox clearly didn’t. Isolation probably protected a lot of populations in the ancient world, but even today, with so many people travelling from one side of the world to the other, it’s still not possible for that many people to be infected and recover all at once.

Without an effective vaccine, Covid-19 will continue to circulate through the global population for years, much like the Spanish Flu.

If an effective vaccine against Covid-19 is never found, we will have no choice but to gain herd immunity the hard way. But the cost will be heavy. The elderly and those in ‘care’ will die. A lot of medical personnel will die. And so will people of all ages who have pre-existing medical conditions.

One of the highest co-morbidities for Covid-19 is diabetes.

And guess what? There are 422 million people with diabetes in the world today, and 1.6 million die directly from the condition each year. Now add Covid-19 to that mix and you get an awful lot of people aged 20-70 at risk of dying.

Other co-morbidities include high blood pressure, lung conditions, HIV etc.

Now imagine all these people dying, year after year after year until we reach the magic number of 70 – 90% immunity.

It’s a horrible scenario, yet many governments are flirting with the concept of ‘natural herd immunity’ because they see it as a magic bullet that will save their economies. Sweden is one such country, and the almost inevitable results are now in:

[image error]Taken from a video posted by Dr John Campbell: https://youtu.be/K4SQ-NOV-iU

From left to right, we see Country, population, number infected [with Covid-19] and number died [of Covid-19].

Sweden has roughly twice the population of Norway, Finland and Denmark, but about five times as many infections. When it comes to deaths, however, Sweden is waaaaay out in front. But it’s the breakdown of those deaths that’s truly horrifying. A great many have occurred in care homes where the sick have received next to no basic care. Instead, many doctors have recommended cocktails used for end-of-life palliative care. These cocktails often have a negative effect on the respiratory system. And yes, that means the sick and elderly die faster.

I strongly suggest you visit Dr John Campbell’s Youtube video for more details.

When I was a kid, I remember learning that the ancient Greek state of Sparta would place newborn babies out on a hillside overnight, so that only the strongest would survive to become warriors. Later on, I learned that in [some?] Eskimo tribes, the elderly would walk out onto an icefloe and calmly wait to die, so they would not be a burden on their communities.

I do not know how accurate either of those stories are, but they taught me the difference between voluntary euthanasia and state sanctioned, involuntary euthanasia. I felt sad for the Eskimo elders, but even now, so many decades later, I still feel nothing but contempt for the Spartans. They mandated that helpless babies should die to save Spartan society from becoming ‘weak’…

Do I really need to spell it out? Any society that puts money and saving ‘the economy’ ahead of lives, no matter how much of a ‘drain’ those lives may be, is no better than the Spartans.

I used Sweden as the example in this post because the results of that country’s experiment have been so stark, but almost all of the countries of the First World have flirted, or are still flirting, with herd immunity…as a choice. Instead of saving lives while waiting for a vaccine to become available, they’ve chosen strategies that encourage herd immunity in the hope that their economies won’t suffer.

The reality, however, is that no country is near the magic number required for herd immunity to actually work. Not one. Meanwhile, the death toll rises.

So who is to blame?

The epidemiologists who recommended that governments aim for herd immunity?

Or the politicians who accepted those recommendations and went ahead with what amounts to involuntary, state sanctioned euthanasia?

Or are we, ultimately to blame?

Yes, us. The highest death tolls have so far occurred in prosperous, Western, democratic countries. That means we voted those politicians into power. Or maybe we just didn’t vote at all and allowed them in by default. Either way, we got the leaders we deserve.

Meeks

Covid-19 – micro droplets

With so many countries re-opening after lockdown, the risk of a second wave grows every day, especially as research now shows that the standard social distancing recommendations are…far too optimistic.

The research, conducted in Japan, uses lasers and special cameras to capture how the virus is spread, and how far it goes. The video below has some English dubbing and/or English sub-titles. Although the whole, hour+ video is interesting, the segment about the actual research begins at 29:10 and ends at approximately 35:18:

The research shows that even speaking can spread the virus via both large droplets and tiny micro droplets. The large droplets fall to the ground fairly quickly, even in an enclosed space with little air circulation, but the micro droplets remain in the air for over 20 minutes. Because they’re so small, they also spread a great deal further than the recommended 1.5 or 2 metres.

The take home message is that confined spaces – like public transport, office buildings, shopping malls, supermarkets and classrooms – are the perfect breeding grounds for micro droplet borne virus particles.

The good news is that masks do reduce the distance that both large and small droplets can travel. And /that/ is why countries that mandate the wearing of masks in public have less viral transmission than Western countries in which people are ‘self conscious’ about wearing masks. Apparently it’s okay to become infected and infect others, but heaven forbid that we should look silly…

And now a word about the hypocrisy of my government in scolding protestors attending the Black Lives Matter demonstrations:

those protests ALL happened in the open air where normal air circulation [with or without wind] would have dispersed the droplets quickly,this is in contrast to people returning to work – at the behest of this government – in confined spaces with air conditioning instead of natural ventilation. Does anyone else remember the legionnaire outbreaks caused by contaminated, commercial air conditioning units?a great many of the protestors wore masks,this compares to people travelling or working in confined spaces without masks.the organisers of the protests, at least here in Australia, were handing out masks and hand sanitiser to help reduce the risk of infection,I’m not aware of any public transport employee handing out masks or hand sanitiser to travellers. Ditto supermarkets. Office buildings etc etc etc.

It’s the height of hypocrisy to say that it’s okay to catch the virus from public transport, or offices, factories, shops, restaurants etc…to save jobs…and the economy…and the effing budget bottom line…but it’s not okay to catch it while protesting state sanctioned murder.

And we all nod wisely and say ‘tut tut’.

I find that more disturbing than I can say. When did we turn into such placid sheep?

Meeks

p.s. My thanks to Dr. John Campbell for talking about the Japanese research in his latest video update: https://youtu.be/kmo_1Tcdp30

How to cheat a paranormal polygraph test

I’m in the middle of a scene where the Yellow [a very powerful healer] is interrogating Death using its paranormal talents to work out whether Death is lying or not.

Death must lie, and the Yellow must believe the lie, but how can it when it’s aware of Death’s feelings?

That was the point at which I remembered that sociopaths were supposed to be very good at cheating real world polygraph tests. As iVokh are essentially sociopaths, I realised that what worked in the real world might also work in Vokhtah.

That led me to the internet where I found this fascinating article in Wikihow: https://www.wikihow.com/Cheat-a-Polygraph-Test-(Lie-Detector)

If you’ve ever secretly wondered how people can cheat the polygraph test, it boils down to knowing how the machine and the interrogator asking the questions work together. This can be broken down into a few key things:

The control questions – i.e. the harmless questions – allow the machine to gauge what physiological reactions the subject has when ‘telling the truth’. These reactions then become the baseline against which the ‘real’ – i.e. dangerous – questions are compared.If you can change your physiological reactions to the control questions, the baseline will be faulty.Then, when the real questions are asked, the machine will not be able to tell which answer is a lie because the lies will resemble the baseline.

Of course the skill of the interrogator also comes into it, but I now have enough to write the scene convincingly. -joy-

cheers
Meeks

Accessible art

I’m a real Philistine when it comes to modern art; basically I don’t like it. But I do love these:

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The screenshot above is of a mural painted on a blank wall! It comes from blogger, MyOBT [MyOneBeautifulThing]: https://myonebeautifulthing.com/2020/06/09/patrick-commecy/

MyOBT is well worth a visit as Donna has heaps more photos of these incredible murals to show you. Oh, and they’re all done in France.

As soon as I saw the French murals, I was reminded of the siloart springing up here in Australia:

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Very different styles, and yet the images are both beautiful and playful. They invite viewers in, and I think they’re wonderful. Here’s the link to the siloart website: https://www.australiansiloarttrail.com/

If you know of any other artworks like these, please tell us about them in the comments.

cheers
Meeks

New composer – Fran Soto!

Giddy with delight! New music to write to by Spanish composer, Fran Soto.

First up, the track that made me fall in love:

If you like this track as much as I do, you can find Fran Soto on:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Echian

Soundcloud: https://youtu.be/rKiEtiN1hj8

You’re welcome

Pink tea, pizza and glasses

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I don’t normally do plugs for brands, but I’ve totally fallen in love with this Nerada, Organic Rosehip with Lemongrass and Ginger Tea. It has no tea in it, which means it contains no caffeine, which means I can drink it after 12:00 midday without losing sleep at night. But the best thing about it is the flavour. It actually tastes nice…as in, I actually look forward to drinking it.

Who’d a thunk a herbal tea could taste good?

Apologies to all my Greenie friends. You were right. I should have listened.

Next, I’d like to draw your attention to the artfully displayed slices of pizza next to the tea. The filling includes tomato paste, homegrown basil, Greek fetta and homemade caramelised red salad onions. Oh, and the pizza base is homemade too. Click here to be taken to the recipe.

The Offspring made it all last night for dinner, and because it isn’t super greasy like commercial pizza, we could reheat it for lunch without feeling as if we were swallowing bucketfuls of grease! But the Offspring didn’t stop there. This morning, my clever Offspring fixed my computer glasses for me!

Back in the old world, I would have hopped in the car, driven down to Warrandyte village and asked the nice people at Eyes-on-Warrandyte to fix it for me. But the old world is gone. We’re not quite into a doomsday scenario, but it’s still not safe to go shopping, whatever the politicians may say. So what was I to do?

DIY, of course. I got out my trusty computer tools and a small magnifying glass and quickly realised that the screw holding one arm to the frame was close to falling out. Part of the reason for that was that a small thingumajiggie was bent.

I won’t bore you with the, um, technical details. All I’ll say is that I took the screw out and straightened the thingumajiggie, but could not get the damn screw back in. I simply could not see what I was doing, even with the magnifying glasses. See for yourself. These are my specs next to the tools:

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Now, this is a closeup of the screw that goes in the glasses to hold the arm in place:

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I was swearing in a very ladylike way, “Oh poppycock and balderdash!” when the Offspring came to my rescue. Said Offspring did some swearing too, but in the end…ta dah…my glasses are as good as new!

Thank you, Offspring. You will eat tonight.