mike carey

All spaces matter.

At the risk of being Captain Obvious, the Admin comment you posted was in a repost of the photo, presumably it replaced a political comment that had been made on the photo. Like you, politics is not what comes immediately to my mind in response to it.

True indeed. Even if you do that it doesn't guarantee that you won't be pinged here for being verbose.

This is his RM profile - https://rent.men/Russ_NYC

Has the pizza @MikeBiDude ordered been delivered yet?

Being held and cuddled is truly an amazing thing.

Yes, it is exactly that! /s

Someone should have asked him if he means the Dominican Republic or Dominica.

I haven't watched it, but it has garnered a lot of publicity here, so much so that our public broadcaster's flagship Q&A panel discussion program had it as the subject of this Monday's episode. They had a panel that included the federal government's eSafety Commissioner, a tech journalist and a thoughtful pair of widely followed instagramers. They had one of the producers of the doco on the line to answer some of the audience questions.

When you know everything there's no need for that.

Love a Channel Islands accent!

The Financial Times has published this data analysis of Covid-19 so far, outside their pay-wall. https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-global-data/ John Burn-Murdoch at the FT has done some great data analysis and charts over the months. He's on Twitter @jburnmurdoch.

While it makes sense to plan for Broadway Nov 2021, it may pay you to do some research on whether you can roll the expiry date of any of the credits over and plan accordingly. Being stuck here, I'm looking at places in Australia that I might not otherwise have considered, and will look at other countries as travel to them is opened for us. The only airline credit I have has been extended to 31 Dec 22 by the airline so there's no urgency on that front, but I have a bit of a travel itch that I need to scratch.

For the first time in a while, I've seen some new thoughts on the manner of spread of the virus. The gist of it is that we have not properly understood the nature of how it infects new cases. The article is pay-walled on the Atlantic, but the site allows a limited number of free articles each month. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ For me the key conclusions are that the models of transmission that epidemiologists used from the outset in the pandemic were based on the way that influenza behaves, and that it is becoming apparent that SARS-CoV-2 works differently. Influenza spreads predictably, with a consistent chain of infection from one case to the next, with the virus being equally likely to spread from each case. This means that the R number is a valid representation of the likely speed of spread of an outbreak. SARS-CoV-2 spreads differently. Most of the infections arise from a very small proportion of cases, in something that is analogous to the 80/20 rule. It spreads in clusters from super-spreader events: some infected people will infect a large number of others while most won't pass the virus on at all. The R number doesn't provide a useful indication of the spread of the virus. This goes some way to explaining why the spread of the pandemic has not been predictable. Countries and regions with similar conditions had different patterns of infection. The measures that have been taken to stop its spread have generally worked but the instances where the virus has evaded them seem to have been few but each caused a large number of new cases rather than many with each causing a few (as would happen with influenza). In a sense it there was an element of chance in an individual being the source of further spread. In an extreme illustration, as few regions in Italy had most of the cases and deaths, while other regions with similar cultural and demographic conditions and similar health services had few. This is significant for how it affects contact tracing. With influenza it makes sense for health authorities to track and trace people a patient has been in contact with while they were infectious because most cases will be transmitted to other people. With most cases of SARS-CoV-2 not being passed on to others there is less value in tracking forward to each patient's contacts, most won't have it. What is needed is backwards tracing. When you know that cases occur in clusters, there's more value in finding where each infection came from as that person will most likely have infected a number of other people at the same event. This seems highly significant. It provides some insights into the sorts of circumstances where clusters are likely to arise—crowded noisy indoor events, choirs, closely packed bars, Rose Garden events—and to prioritise them for restrictions, with less emphasis in settings that are less likely to be the source of infection spread.

As of 6 March!

Haha, yes, it can easily be missed (as I did when I posted it). I've read that English speakers can read texts by only noting the first and last letters of words. The experiment is usually done by scrambling the internal letters, but I've noticed that I've read completely different words than the ones written, based on the first and last letters!

That last word you quoted from me should have been scrubbed!

I've seen them for a while, but there's a rush of them lately. They seem to be there just to post links to other sites, so I see them as spam advertising rather than bots. They typically have a black and white torso photo and nothing much else. RM takes the profiles down pretty quickly, so the visit still shows up when you log on but the profile is no longer there for you to check out. I'm about 50/50 catching them before they are scrubbed.

Indeed, and I see it wasn't the person I expected it to be, that person in fact backed you up! Yes, my bad, I apologise for misunderstanding what you were referring to in the second para. I had, however, read the entire thread as it was posted, Unfortunately, I didn't remember every detail about who said what, and I didn't go back and read it again to look for details of what you and others had said on this matter that might have provided context for your comment today.

Oh, I was unaware that there was a challenge to make some particular point in one's choice of an avatar or that using a photo of a boat in some way failed that (or some other) test. I'll read the TOS more closely.

I suspect that for some that is a happy conjunction of the two occurrences.

Yes, I know, and you've said as much before. It was never going to be easy, even more so with the current difficulties. I didn't raise it again here to re-ask the question but because guys like you needed to be mentioned in this thread.

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