sharris

Emoticons are so 19th century! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon

Interesting, so should the worst happen (your opinion may vary), the US could end up with its first female president (and a Democrat) by default in Nancy Pelosi. (file under: unlikely, but possible).

Why wait for the day after - could this be the future of model railway shows? Just remember to put some clothes on before activating your telepresence robot!

I always prefer to use the site specific emojis on the button here as I never remember from one message board to the next which can accept phone emojis and which just plain or marked up text. On the old site they were a pain to get to on some phones, but even my ancient iPhone can get to them easily since the site upgrade.

What AY gets up to behind closed doors should stay behind closed doors

It's my birthday soon - presumably I'll have to forego blowing out the candles as it's unhygienic and spend all the blowing-out time washing my hands instead.

And apparently the train captain can (or could) command the train to shut the doors and start off from outside the train with obvious comic potential... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/01/dlr_train_leaves_staff_on_platform/

I suppose if you get laid low with a viral infection, you wouldn't want an opportunistic bacterial infection adding to your problems.

One time I was on holiday in Gozo with my partner at the time. We'd been out somewhere for the day and caught the bus back to where we were staying and when almost home the bus driver asked if we minded getting off a bit early. The driver turned up a side road, parked and let us off. Turned out it was his last route of the day and he'd parked right outside his house.

I'm quite curious too about the exactness of the 'recovered' count. Is every one of the 134,000 or so tested worldwide and found to be infected being rigourously and continually monitored to determine when they are symptom-free and clear of the virus, including those with mild symptoms who are self isolating at home? I would think it wouldn't be hard for a lot of mild case recoveries to simply fall off the radar. Or more a case of counting who has initially tested positive and hasn't turned up at hospital with severe symptoms or died in within the expected time-course of the illness? Added to those in hospital who have been monitored closely and recovered.

A curry the night before, and I'll definitely have a 3 metre exclusion zone around me

However, the great unwashed often provide some built in guidance as to how far away is a safe distance.

I was taught that there were conventions (sometimes broken - e.g. by clockmakers using IIII rather than IV for 4 because it visually balances VIII better on the other side of the clockface) that define what the maximum difference between the subtracted digit and the following one can be. For example: if you were going to optimise the number of digits used, 49 would be IL (50-1), but it's actually written XLIX ( (50-10) + (10-1) and 99 could have been IC, but it's actually written XCIX ( (100-10) + (10-1) ), and 45 would be XLV ( (50-10) + 5 ) rather than the more optimal VL (50-5). That's why it would not be normal to write 1999 as MIM (1000 + 1000 - 1), but instead as MCMXCIX (1000 + (1000 - 100) + (100 - 10) + (10 - 1) ). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/245709.stm

I just saw this snippet of news on The Guardian's covid-19 rolling news: It strikes me as somewhat foolish that the US administration should put itself in a situation where both the President and Vice President might simultaneously succumb to the same disease. Do any US experts on here know whether there is normally a protocol that should minimise this risk?

Protective advice as supplied by MC Hammer

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872358/ "The Essential Toxin: Impact of Zinc on Human Health"

Will the bars at Ally Pally be checking your ID to make sure you're not too young, or too old?

Very true - the main point is that at the moment, within the bounds of statistical error you could fit almost any curve to the data and we should both avoid being complacent over a dip, or panic over a single rise.

SWMBO says she won't let me into the house tonight unless I've bought myself some vitamin pills on the way home. She already has a stash, but says I can't have them because they're 'lady's vitamins'. I asked if that meant that if I had some I'd grow boobs. Rather unkindly, I thought, she said that I already had!

So do I - I got SWMBO tickets to Upstart Crow for a Christmas present- for a performance this weekend.

One jump doesn't really mean much - with the smallish numbers we have there are bound to be spikes - we'll need to wait to see if it is sustained or just noise in the overall trend.

I'll leave it up to you whether you want to interpret it in the original Latin sense or the rather looser modern usage. If we're going to be pedantic, various fan sites appear to give the Planet of the Apes flu a mortality rate of 90% or higher while COVID-19 is estimated to be around 3%.

I'm not sure whether you are suggesting that we should just let the virus run wild rather than delaying its progress. If so you should remember that we don't have unlimited medical resources to deal with what would be a rapid increase in severe cases. Also worth remembering that while we may have our focus on the virus, there are still plenty of people with severe, unconnected, conditions who also need treatment. Overloading the health service could put them at risk too as resources are diverted to virus victims.

If the Metro is to be believed on salary thresholds the NHS is one of those special cases where the threshold has been dropped from £25,600 to £20,480 for new immigrants - those already with settled status should be ok ('should' as anything to do with Brexit seems to be on shifting sand). https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/29/post-brexit-immigration-rules-12324404/ What is probably more significant to NHS staffing levels is the number of EU NHS workers who have been disincentivised to stay in the UK and decided to leave anyway.

That might depend on reporting times and daily increases - the global dashboard at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 still has yesterday's UK figures while the UK's dashboard at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c90da5b4e9f9a0b19484dd4bb14 has today's UK figures (yesterday and today being relative terms as they represent the previous day's reporting). Current global dashboard figures - reported cases: Sweden 477 Norway 440 Netherlands 503 UK 384 Current UK dashboard figure: 456 Within the limits of statistical reporting, I'd say they're all pretty close and wouldn't want to judge one country as doing particular better or worse than another.