Friday 4 December, 2020
Brighton: i360
100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out as a Kindle book. Link
Quote of the Day
”It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market … hares have no time to read.”
Anita Brookner
Musical alternative to the radio news of the Day
Lang Lang: Franz Liszt | Liebestraum, S. 541 No. 3
Pure Schmaltz, but what the hell!
Also: Seb Schmoller tells me there’s an interesting livestream this (Saturday) evening from Upper Chapel in Sheffield.
Programme: Beethoven String Quartet No.5, Op.18 No.5 and Dvorak Piano Quartet No.2, Op.87 — played by Ensemble 360.
Long Read of the Day
Scott Galloway: The Great Dispersion
Thoughtful and sobering essay.
Small data, big implications
Zeynep Tufecki is one of the smartest people I follow. In recent times she has written some of the most insightful stuff about the pandemic. Now she has a newsletter on Substack where today she writes about a striking, informative study just released from South Korea, examining a transmission chain in a restaurant. “It is”, she writes, “perhaps one of the finest examples of shoe-leather epidemiology I’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s worth a deeper dive.”
If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (about 21 feet) and 4.8m (about 15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.
That’s the quick and dirty of it. But there’s a lot more detail here, and like many stories, it is best told through a picture:
First, just reading the study is an exercise in what it means to do a study really, really well, with the resources of a government that’s committed to generating useful information…
Great piece if you want to understand why some of us are not going to be dining indoors in restaurants for a while yet. And it raises one intriguing puzzle: why have there been no recorded cases of infections recorded from cinemas?
Other, hopefully interesting, links
Beavers build first Exmoor dam in 400 years. Awww… Link.
Steve Jobs pitching for planning permission for his company’s new HQ. Vintage Jobs. 20-odd riveting minutes. Unmissable. Link