Category: learning curve

A random selection

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Three things to blog about today. All three are completely unconnected.

Firstly, the red-winged starlings have discovered the loquats on the loquat tree. The upshot of this is that the garden is now constantly filled with the noise of red-winged starlings, actual red-winged starlings, and half eaten fruit all over the floor. A rough estimate suggests that possibly slightly less than 5% of the crop is ripe, and that’s what’s attracted them so far. Thus, things are likely to get at least 20x as noisy and messy before the loquat season is done.

Oh joy.

I still want to go to the Faroe Islands (yes, this is the second thing, no direct link from the loquat situation above). I think I actually want to go there more than I want to go to Iceland now. And not just for the natural beauty, but for the engineering prowess of that country.
Yes, including the world’s first undersea roundabout (that looks like a jellyfish):

The amount of money they are spending on tunnels is huge, and it gets even huger when you consider how few people will benefit from those tunnels because of how few people actually live there. The pro-capita spend is utterly ridiculous and almost – almost – obscene.

Thirdly: I’m off to the physio again tomorrow morning and hoping for discharge. Not in a gungy fluid way, more the administrative kind, please. Last week’s exercise was wiped out by sickness, but I’ve been working hard since then and I’m hoping that I’ve done enough catching up to warrant freedom from all the restrictions that have been in place since I tore my calf.

Hold thumbs. Cross fingers.
Thank you.

Back to it (and it’s hot back home)

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After a couple of really awful days, today has been… less awful. I still have no voice, and am subject to painful coughing fits, but things are slowly improving. I have more hope for tomorrow.

Back in the UK, all the news (apart from all the other news) has been about the record-breaking temperatures. It looked like Sheffield – SHEFFIELD! – might even get up towards 40C today. That’s quite literally unheard of. Clearly, something is up. And yet, the climate change deniers (you may recognise them from being anti-vax/pro-Trump/pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine on any given day of any week) have stuck their oar in again with the old:

Lol. So this is “climate change”, is it?
We used to call it “summer”.

Oh yes. I remember the summers of my youth in Sheffield, where it regularly got up to 40C and the trams had to stop running because the overhead lines were being damaged by the heat. That happened every summer. And you couldn’t escape it, because – just like Brize Norton and Luton yesterday – the runways at the airports had all melted. That’s a typical UK summer, alright! Just what we’re known for. When someone says “English summer”, it’s always melty runways and over-stretched power lines that spring immediately to mind, amirite?

Even Ireland joined the party, recording it’s hottest day in over 100 years yesterday, and then it’s hottest day in 24 hours, today.

Temperature records have been kept in Sheffield since 1882, and while a couple of hot days as a standalone can’t be used as evidence that things are heating up generally, it’s interesting to note that the record temperature has been broken today (39.4C still TBC), yesterday (36.1C) and then in 2019 (35.1C). Before that day (25th July) in 2019, the previous highest temperature was 34.3C (1990).

Now, I recognise that these records can obviously only go up, but it’s more the speed at which they are going up which is the interesting/scary part.

Here’s a graph from 2019 which shows the gradual increase in mean temperatures in Sheffield:

…together with the maximum and minimums for each year. And those are all trending upwards.
We’ve now just seen that maximum increase by more than 5 degrees in less than 3 years. I’ve added today’s new record in as a red dot, so you can see just how much of an increase it really is. Incredible.

The climate deniers – being experts, like they are in Eurasian geopolitics (last month), vaccine development (last year) and supporting the fat orange man (since 2016) – will tell you that these things aren’t significant, but there’s actually only so many times you can dismiss these increasingly occurring events as “not significant”, before you have to come to see that in sheer numbers alone, they actually are very significant.

But this is just another wake-up call to ignore.

A note: I still don’t think that the media helps the understanding and gravitas of the situation by publishing “scare stories” and hyperbole about climate change. It belittles the situation and provides plenty of ammunition to those who want us to ignore what’s going on. So please stop doing that. [laughs]

Go West

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More training today for the Boy Wonder, so I am up and around the West Coast area north of Cape Town. He has a three hour session, so it might have been worth heading home in the interim were it not for the fact that that would mean over 100km of driving and diesel is terrifyingly expensive.

And so I headed for the beach. Not to sunbathe, because it’s dark and dank and gloomy here, this morning. I’m still not allowed to run, so I banged out a gentle 10.41km along the coastline:

Happily, even at an average of 6.2kph, this was a nice easy wander. Very hopeful that I’ll be able to do some real exercise real soon now.

And then back to the sports centre to pick up my son. This is very much my second home at the moment, and yet it’s still all very alien. As I drove back along Blaawberg Road, I watched the steroid-fuelled drivers zig-zagging their Ford Rangers in and out of the traffic, and I was encouraged to “turn to Christ Jesus” (missing comma?) by placard-waving godbotherers promoting their happy-clappy church.

I saw stores I have never seen before, like “Baby Exchange”.
Second hand infant clothing? Maybe. Or maybe something far more sinister.
Continuing the religious theme: “Lawnmower Mecca”. Limited in the scope of their business, perhaps, but with the small parking area packed with pilgrims worshipping at the high altar of Flymo and Lawnstar.
And “Toni Roma’s Italian Restaurant”. Well, what else could you do with a name like Toni Roma except for opening a pizzeria or being a circus acrobat?

Maybe Toni does both.

As I write, the last of the mountain is disappearing behind a river of thick cloud blowing in from the South Atlantic and despite the fact that we’re approaching midday, if anything, it’s getting darker.

It’s beginning to rain.

Tonight, we’re going out for live music and general festivities. We may have to wrap up rather warmly.

Interesting graph

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From a famous mathematician.

Your chances of sharing a space with someone who is Covid positive, based on a given prevalence of Covid in the local population and a given number of people in the space:

So (using the arrow as an example), when 7% of the local population have the virus, if you share a space (supermarket, pub, restaurant, SA taxi) with about 20 people, there’s a 50% chance that at least one of them will be Covid positive.

For those that are interested in the maths, I’ve calculated the probability of at least one person in the room having Covid as 1-(1-p/200)^N Where p is the population prevalence as a percentage and N is the number of other people in the space.

In the UK at the moment, prevalence is somewhere around 4%: 1 in 25 people are positive. And that means that if you are packed tightly in any given space together with any more than about 90 people, there will be at least one of you who is positive…

Oh. Oh dear.

And yet there are still no precautions of any sort being put in place. Quite bizarre

Of course there are a few terms and conditions to Kit’s graph.
Some people might isolate if they are Covid positive. Some people might be Covid positive but asymptomatic. Some people might not have bothered getting tested, so they won’t know if they’re positive or not. All of these might affect the assumed prevalence.

And then, of course, just because you share a space with someone who is Covid positive doesn’t mean you’ll get infected (although, see headline above). That will depend on the size of the space (and therefore your proximity), the amount of time you and they spend in the space, the ventilation in the space and – of course – whether either (or both) of you is wearing a mask.

But it’s a super useful tool for just showing how likely any of us is to be sitting next door to someone who is positive. Lovely stats. Only mildly scary.