Reorte

Maybe not for factual sources (at least not entirely, when others exist), but they will do when looking at society overall at a given time.

Primary and secondary can be a bit different - not too many parents are happy with letting primary school age children off to school on their own, but are less concerned when they get a bit older.

I've not had that (only got one cat for starters), but I have had mine hurtle to the door as I've opened it to go out, only to skid to a halt when she sees it's chucking it down.

On that part at least I'm not planning on doing anything until Covid's history.

That's the view I took when I was at school, despite the school complaining about pupils removing their ties (nothing worse than that even) when getting on the bus home - was an ordinary service bus, not a school one. Mind you then some of the sixth form pupils were known to head to a pub at lunch, and one of the teachers would ignore that if they bought him a pint when he went in to check. Can't quite see that happening now, even though some of them would've been 18.

Well we're moving on to Welsh narrow gauge, putting together a plan to tour them has been something I've been intending to do for a few years - is it practical to do the whole thing by train? (there's plenty of full size trains there I wouldn't mind a trip on too, e.g. the Conwy Valley line).

Sounds like the closest Highland equivalent is probably the Jacobite then, although that's obviously a somewhat different case to a heritage railway. When I've been on it or just in the area when it's been there it's always seemed packed, and that's running what I assume is the longest train they possibly could.

It's often said that cats can't be trained, but it looks like de-training them isn't very easy either!

Why such a delay? Is that what can happen if a train misses its path by a whisker?

Those sound like the reports which are quite laggy - the fall had definitely slowed to almost stuttering out a week or two ago but appears to have picked up again (in percentage terms rather than absolute numbers). They tend to get picked out as saying what the situation is now, even when there's quite strong evidence that the situation's changed. This can result in caution in relaxing, but go back to that week or two ago and they were cheering on large falls at the time it was looking like it was stuttering.

Thought the whole point of the orange lines was to indicate "don't climb above here."

Looks like the fire had got going before it landed.

Plenty at Llangollen, less at Corwen IIRC but you can go for a pleasant walk and have a bite to eat before getting the train back. Berwyn's a nice stop on the way too, and not too far back to Llangollen to walk back along the canal.

Nothing to say other than I hope it comes out of the other side of this. I've been a couple of times and enjoyed it - always like a pleasant railway in pleasant surroundings.

Oh, that's how it's being done. If I hadn't seen this I'd have probably just seen the envelope, thought "yes, I know there's a census coming up" and chucked it in with the rest of the recycling without looking. Anyway how is the usual "fill it in on paper" method not socially distanced? Seems it's one of the few things that can work as usual.

We're definitely getting in to second jabs now. Looking at the numbers the number of second jabs has increased a great deal in the last week, although it's still much lower than first jabs. That fits in with the timing of getting the vaccination programme going.

Need to be careful with historic life expectancy - a great deal of the increase was from improved childhood mortality rates, rather than the upper end increasing, at least when you go back far enough. Smoking must've been a big contributor throughout most of that graph too. I do very much agree with the previous poster but one on it all being seen as far too black and white these days. Give me a choice and in many cases I'd rather have a bit of pollution than the alternatives quite honestly, and if that happens to knock a year or two off my life so be it. But that doesn't mean I want to go back to the smogs either.

When my parents got the jab they chose to wait until they could get it done near to them, even though they'd had had an invite to the regional centre a bit earlier - 100 miles away. To be honest I'd have been tempted to take the longer journey just for a good reason to have a change of scene!

The levelling off of the rate of decline of cases was a worry but it seems to have started going down again (although Monday's always been a low number day) - perhaps the effect of vaccinations are starting to show up in the numbers, now that a noticeable proportion of the population's been vaccinated?

What's sensible IMO depends anyway, there's no way you can define a hard and fast rule. They've said in the past that getting in to the car to go a short distance is OK, yet since I'm fortunate enough to live somewhere where there are plenty of pleasant places to walk and cycle straight from my doorstep I'd feel that using the car at all could not be justified for me, but on the other hand if you have to drive a bit anyway then a bit of leeway wouldn't seem unreasonable.

Higher than now, lower than pre-pandemic is a definite possibility, but it's too early to know how things will really shake out.

There's a lot of variation from place to place. Where I used to live I knew my neighbours on either side, and that wasn't at that much more than a "Hello" and a bit of a chat level. Where I am now there's a pretty good community spirit in the row I live in (there's only one house that isn't, and they'll still say hello when we pass). I can understand being unwilling to ask for assistance, people generally like to be able to do things for themselves; it took a bit of persuading before my next door neighbour would let me cut her lawn for her, even though she struggled a bit with the mower, has a tiny patch of lawn, and I could cut it when doing mine even without having to unplug my mower. In the end there was an exchange of a rail oil lamp from the clutter at the back of her garage (must get some info from here on what it was for someday) for a lifetime of mowing, although I would've done it for nothing (and said so).

Right now we can't be sure at all. Whilst it's not really practical to wait until everything is 100% certain before planning everything it makes more sense to plan on the basis something can go ahead, with the end possibly being in sight, with tests that might help things go ahead that would otherwise be too uncertain. Come the time it may be that there's no point in the test, or it may be that the situation is still too uncertain for the event to be able to go ahead after all, and whilst I don't like being over-cautious this does seem like a situation where it's better to plan for something that may not be needed than not plan for it and it turns out it is.

Sure, but it's still a hell of a lot of data to return. After a bit of digging I found a value of 2 mb/s between the rover and the orbiters, and I think the equivalent back to Earth but I didn't find a definitive answer for that one, which is a pretty impressive rate considering the distance, even with the size of the receivers back on Earth. I'd also read that the raw data that went in to that video was 30 GB.

Wouldn't a younger population not so heavily affected by issues like obesity explain most of it?