Coronavirus in Ireland – the Latest!

Posted in Covid-19, mathematics on March 28, 2020 by telescoper

Just a quick post to point out that I’ve set up a page on which I’m tracking the number of cases of Covid-19 in the Republic of Ireland.

I intend to keep the data on that page up to date as information is announced by the HSE and won’t do lots of updates as posts. I thought I’d show the latest figures here though.

The second (log-linear) plot is perhaps more informative. It shows some evidence of a flattening compared to an exponential curve. The plot in green is an exponential with a time constant of 3.5 days; it’s not a fit to the data, it’s just there to show what exponential growth would look like on such a plot (ie a straight line).

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Health and Safety

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags , on March 28, 2020 by telescoper

Among the additional measures introduced last night to combat the spread of Coronavirus in Ireland was the cancellation of all non-essential medical appointments.

Looking at my diary I realise that I was due to have a checkup on my knees next Friday. That won’t be happening now I suppose.

It’s about three months since I had steroid injections in both knees to halt the arthritis therein. The jabs were quite painful but worked very well and I have been able to dispense with the use of a walking stick since I had them.

The effect of these injections only lasts a few months so I was due an inspection to see if I might further ones in the near future. I think I’m doing OK, however, and I’m sure the hospitals have more important things to be dealing with right now, so I don’t mind the deferral at all.

Although I haven’t really needed my walking stick recently I think I might start carrying it again on the rare occasions I go out during the ‘lockdown’ – so I can hit people with it if they get closer than 2m from me.

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Everything is going to be all right

Posted in Covid-19, Poetry with tags , , on March 27, 2020 by telescoper

This evening the (acting) Taoiseach Leo Varadkar announced further restrictions as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak in Ireland, meaning that most of us are now confined to our homes for at least the next 14 days.

Remarkably, the main news on RTÉ this evening responded to this announcement with a reading of this poem by Irish poet Derek Mahon.

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

by Derek Mahon

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Bad Statistics and COVID-19

Posted in Bad Statistics, Covid-19 with tags , , , on March 27, 2020 by telescoper

It’s been a while since I posted anything in the Bad Statistics folder. That’s not as if the present Covid-19 outbreak hasn’t provided plenty of examples, it’s that I’ve had my mind on other things. I couldn’t resist, however, sharing this cracker that I found on Twitter:

The paper concerned can be found here from which the key figure is this:

This plots the basic reproductive rate R against temperature for Coronavirus infections from 100 Chinese cities. The argument is that the trend means that higher temperatures correspond to weakened transmission of the virus (as happens with influenza). I don’t know if this paper has been peer-reviewed. I sincerely hope not!

I showed this plot to a colleague of mine the other day who remarked “well, at least all the points lie on a plane”. It looks to me that if if you removed just one point – the one with R>4.5 – then the trend would vanish completely.

The alleged correlation is deeply unimpressive on its own, quite apart from the assumption that any correlation present represents a causative effect due to temperature – there could be many confounding factors.

 

P.S. Among the many hilarious responses on Twitter was this:

 

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Move!

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , on March 26, 2020 by telescoper

I think it’s time to share a bit more music, so here’s a track from an album I have on vinyl that features a quartet led by guitarist Hank Garland with Gary Burton on vibes, Joe Benjamin on bass and the great Joe Morello on drums. It was recorded in June 1960 which means that Gary Burton was only 17 years old at the time! You’d never know that by listening to his superb playing. The tune is a bebop standard called Move which was written by drummer Denzil Best and based on rhythm changes, though to my ears the bridge sounds a bit different.

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Life going on..

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 on March 26, 2020 by telescoper

I’ve had the feeling that this blog is in danger of turning into some sort of plague diary so I thought I’d pass on a couple of examples of life going on. It’s not quite business as usual, but there’s no point in us sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.

As it happens I came onto campus today, mainly to check on the Library Cat (who was absent from his post, but well provisioned with food) but also to check the Departmental mail. Somebody has to deal with the invoices, or at least the minority of them that don’t come electronically. In fact there were only two.

Anyway, as I walked through campus I saw the building work on the Kilcock Road site continuing apace. It can’t be difficult to practice social distancing at the top of one of those cranes:

The last picture I took of the construction site was on St Patrick’s Day (17th March), just nine days ago:

It’s from a different vantage point, but you can still see they’ve added quite a lot in the past week and a bit. You can also see how much the weather has improved. In fact the last few days have been lovely!

Another thing worth reporting on is that there’s been a notable uplift in submissions to the Open Journal of Astrophysics recently. It’s almost as if some people have got some time on their hands to write papers! I’ll do a separate post about a few developments on the OJA front in due course but, for the time being, I will just mention that as a fully online journal all our processes run remotely anyway so we are, and will remain, fully operational throughout the Coronavirus emergency.

Well, now I have to get my act together and activate another remote computational physics laboratory session. Fingers crossed!

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The Appliance of Science

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , on March 25, 2020 by telescoper

Well, today is another beautiful sunny and surprisingly warm day in Maynooth. It’s just a pity that owing to the additional measures announced yesterday people aren’t really able to get out and about to enjoy it.

I know some people are experiencing a lot of anxiety over this disruption to normal life. I have experienced severe anxiety and panic attacks in the past, but they have almost always been triggered by the presence of large crowds of people around me. There’s not much chance of that happening these days! I do wish I could sleep a bit better though. I don’t want to be dealing with insomnia again on top of everything else.

I did however have some anxiety yesterday. Rather irritatingly, the washing machine in my flat chose to conk out a few days ago. I didn’t fancy the idea of being able to do my laundry for the best part of a month so was thinking of getting a new one. I suddenly thought yesterday that the shops I might buy one might be closed so dashed around to a little store just around the corner from me. The guy in charge got a reasonably priced model for me ready last night and today came around and plumbed it in and took the old one away for recycling. Emergency over, almost before it started.

In any case it seems there in an exemption from the special measures for businesses deemed essential because they involve selling “products necessary to maintain the safety and sanitation of residences and businesses”. I presume a washing machine counts under that!

Anyway, apart from that little flurry of excitement, we’ve been busily trying to conduct online teaching sessions as best we can. It has become apparent that the mathematical work we do in the Department of Theoretical Physics really requires drawing tablets and pens so we’ve had to purchase a few of those for tutors who didn’t have them already. Apart from that it seems the staff at least are adapting to the new regime, and perhaps even enjoying the novelty of all this technology. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and maybe when (if) this is all over we’ll carry on using some of the new gadgets and software in the future.

Now that we’re rolling with the teaching, though, we have to give some thought to how we’re going to do the end-of-term examinations. I have a cunning plan..

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A Longer Haul

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , on March 24, 2020 by telescoper

 

To nobody’s great surprise today we received official confirmation that there will be no face-to-face teaching for the rest of the semester at Maynooth University; teaching had been go on until early May. This news also made it into the Irish Independent. The previous announcement was that classes would not resume until 29th March (this Friday), now they won’t resume until the next academic year begins, in September. There will also be no in situ examinations, with all assessments being switched either to homework or remote assessments. We were pretty sure this was coming, as there is no sign yet of a reduction in the spread* of Coronavirus in Ireland, so we are as prepared as we can be for this contingency, although we now know we’re in it for a longer haul than originally announced.

Today I’ve been setting up a laboratory session for my module on Computational Physics. Instead of working in our computer lab under supervision, the students will have to work through a set of Python coding problems on their own. They’re doing numerical integration this week, by the way: being a bit old-fashioned I like to call this quadrature. The demonstrator and I will however be available (via Microsoft Teams) to deal with queries. This isn’t ideal of course but the software does allow participants to share screens, as well as audio and video chat so, I’m quite optimistic that it will work out reasonably well. I’m planning to deliver a lecture to the students on this module on Thursday which, given that the group is reasonably small, should also work reasonably well.

Update: I had a big problem uploading files to Microsoft Teams, which I couldn’t fix. I need to get that sorted out or it won’t be possible to share plots, graphs, etc. Hopefully it’s just a temporary glitch, but it’s very annoying.

My early experience with Microsoft Teams wasn’t marvellous, which led me to tweet:

I have to say though that it is perfectly functional (so far), once you get used to it. I still prefer Zoom, though.

My only other gripe is that working from home seems to have made some colleagues a little bit trigger-happy with the `ReplyAll’ button on their email.

Anyway, it seems that last night, on the wrong side of the Irish Sea, Boris Johnson finally got around to reading out the statement Emmanuel Macron dictated to him last week and the United Kingdom is finally having some form of discipline imposed. We await possible announcements of further strengthening of the restrictions already in place here in Ireland, but for the time being we carry on pretty much as before. There are few people around and about in Maynooth and many of the shops and all the pubs are closed, but it’s still possible to shop without experiencing a feeding frenzy.

On top of all that, it’s a lovely sunny day!

*I’ve put a page here tracking the daily increase in number of COVID-19 cases in Ireland.

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An Eye for Bumfodder

Posted in History, Literature with tags , , on March 23, 2020 by telescoper

Deliveries of my subscription copy of Private Eye have been a bit unpredictable recently but the latest edition arrived today, with the following hilarious cover:

That reminded me of a thing I wrote recently on the issue of toilet tissue. As far as I am aware, paper in a form specifically designed for the use of wiping one’s bits clean after defecation wasn’t introduced until the middle of the 19th century, but waste paper was commonly used for that purpose much earlier. In the 18th century it was apparently commonplace to tear pages out of cheap books to use as lavatory tissue, and it appears some people would buy books both to read when on the job and for cleaning up afterwards.

This practice gave rise to the word bumfodder, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as:

  1. Toilet paper. Also occasionally: a piece of this.

  2. attributive and allusively. Worthless or inferior literature; any written or printed material that is perceived as useless, tedious, or unnecessary.

In case you didn’t know, this is also the origin of the word bumf, which the OED gives as

  1. slang (originally in British public schools). Paper (of any kind). Now rare.

  2. Toilet paper. Now somewhat archaic.

  3. orig. Military slang. Written or printed material that is perceived as useless, tedious, or unnecessary, as bureaucratic paperwork, advertising, etc. Also occasionally: worthless or inferior literature.

I have to admit I’ve used the word `bumf’ in the third sense on a number of occasions without realizing quite how indelicate is its origin.

The first instances of `bumfodder’ quoted in the OED date from the mid-17th Century, which surprises me a little because I was under the impression that paper was an expensive commodity then. By the 18th century, however, it was obviously much cheaper, presumably because of mass production, and so consequently books and newspapers were much less expensive. Waste paper was then used quite frequently not only as toilet paper but also for wrapping groceries and other goods. I should mention, however, that paper was used at toilet tissue in China as far back as the 6th Century AD, so Europe was obviously a bit behind on the matter.

Anyone who has read any 18th Century literature – the humour in which is often rather coarse – will not be surprised by the number of scatalogical jokes about bumfodder going around. Obviously I couldn’t repeat any here.

P.S. Now wash your hands please.

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R.I.P. Kenny Rogers (1938-2020)

Posted in Beards, Music with tags , on March 23, 2020 by telescoper

I’m not a great aficionado of Country music, but I was very sad to hear at the weekend of the death of one of its icons, and possessor of an iconic beard, Kenny Rogers. Here as a tribute is one of big hits, a song with a message for those of us who like a flutter now and then..

 

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