Would departments where you sit and observe spiders, or other non-humans, also count?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Would departments where you sit and observe spiders, or other non-humans, also count?
Hold on. There’s a message on my computer..
How does SMBC know me so well?
Yes they would.
It’s true: tau is better than pi.
So I live in one of three counties in Oregon that are not opening up this week. I’m 100% OK with that. I’ve actually established a lifestyle that copes with this. I have adapted. I can do this for the rest of the year and beyond. Hell I’m actually thinking of ways to accessorize my masks to add some flash. Some see a horrible pandemic, I see opportunity to trend some fashion.
@nomaduk #4:
Yeah, I got distracted by that too, and had to look it up. It does make sense.
One of the articles I read said, “There could be a transitional period of using both mathematical constants while we phase out the old and humor the intransigents who can’t or won’t change.” Given that humanity has had two centuries to adopt the metric system, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
CS department…
2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile ?
Must be a right university.
I just saw this: Mongolia versus Covid-19, and Mongolia Kicked Its **ss* (Hooray for Mongolia!)
https://medium.com/@indica/covid-underdogs-mongolia-3b0c162427c2
Rich Woods@6: If, by ‘humanity’, you mean ‘the United States’, well, yes. Everyone else on the planet has pretty much gotten the message (although Britain still maintains road markings in miles rather than kilometres, they have still managed to go metric in most other areas — though I suppose Brexit will encourage the usual suspects to try to reverse that).
nomaduk @4, the t-shirt doesn’t say that tau is better than pi. It just says that tau is greater than pi. Which is uncontroversial, unlike the metric system.
Yes, I’m one of those CS geeks. :-)
@7, I thought that was Kent State.
A nightmare every National Guard unit has to this very day.
And interestingly, a chemical I worked with while “qualifying” men with their protective masks, as it has a minimal effect on me.
@8, excellent news, as Mongolia is a massive challenge, both with a significant urban base and seriously rural populations, that’s a doublebarrel bear to deal with! But, I challenge the story, as Sweden and Germany were listed as failures, ignoring the reality of gaffes and successes, that’s distilled Russian disinformation.
Sweden had community based self-isolation and community based “get your ass home, you’re sick” that fails in nations with weak community ties like the US. Germany isn’t a failure, if one wants to see failures, look at the top three, US, Russia and Brazil. Want a Western failure aside from the US, our ally the UK.
US, 1,562,714 sick, 93,863 dead, Russia, 317,554 sick, 3,099 dead, Brazil 291,579, 18,859 dead, UK 252,234, 36,124 dead. SUCCESS!!!
Or something.
Trump said we’d win until we’re tired of winning. Alas, with Trump, everything is Bizarro opposite, so winning = losing.
I’m tired of winning, Trump style!
Still, one hell of a great job for Mongolia, leveraging that which is a strength of community observation, which reported turns for the worse and any attempts to violate quarantine. Plus modern epidemiology. Blending the two can be tricky!
Pierre Le Fou@10: You are absolutely correct.
Tuttavia, tau è meglio.
Anybody know why Russia’s reported number of deaths compared to number of cases is so low, compared to the rest of the world with any significant number of cases? Have they adopted the Southern Strategy of fucking with the numbers, or are they just exceptionally hearty folk?
Ridana, is it possibly because their cases got the disease later, so it will take time for the deaths to catch up?
@21:ridana
Apparently, any cases wherever a comorbidity is present it’s being used as the cause of death, hence keeping the numbers dying from Covid-19 artificially low. This is the type of thing that happens when you live in a dictatorship.
nomaduk @12: As T.S. Eliot observed
tra l’idea e la realtà cade l’ombra
If you don’t mind adding another level of hell to the lives of students and teachers, it’s a great idea! Some folk have way too much time on their hands. A factor of two. Yeah, brilliant.
@21 ridana, not entirely sure, but several cases of defenestration might have to do with lower reported numbers.
Several physicians mysteriously, including one in an ICU for COVID-19 “fell” out of windows not too long ago, when Russian numbers were reportedly low. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I was breathing at around 40 breaths per minute, even if I wanted to jump out of a window, that was far outside of my capability to do so.
@PZ, your university isn’t following the lunacy for one reason. They remember history, when a much longer total shutdown occurred right after WWI and somehow, despite today’s extinction sayers, we managed to survive and rebuild.
Ridana, In Russia, the number of covid-19 deaths are so-so, but deaths through other causes (particularly community-acquired pneumonia) are through the roof. Go figure.
Thanks all, that’s what I was thinking. The Red State/Southern Strategy with a Russian flourish. You’d think they’d want to adjust their numbers upward a little bit though, enough to still look good, but not so jump-off-the-page suspicious.
Ridana @19: Putin hasn’t given a shit about looking good for decades. He lies more blatantly than any other leader, we know he’s lying, he knows we know, etc. And his people love him. He’s Trump with a brain.
Rob:
Thus the numerous photo ops, such as the bare-torsoed horse-riding, the bare-torsoed gun-wielding, the bare-torsoed fishing, the judo-throwing of mere black belts, and so forth.
(cf. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/putin-confesses-hilarious-manly-photo-ops-were-staged/323654/)]
John @21: Your apparent desire to appear totally clueless is puzzling. The point, understandable to a child, is that Putin doesn’t care how he is viewed in the West. Did you really not get that, or can you simply not resist posing as the gadfly? Never mind. The answer is obvious.
Sure; the master of propaganda doesn’t care how he appears to “the West”.
(heh)
@John, well, Putin’s propaganda is blowing up in his face, as there is significant dissatisfaction with his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Enough so that those few doctors that sailed out of the closest window hasn’t tamped down the anger in the populace.
BTW, did you really think that shirtless nonsense on a horse was for the West? The pretend Judo matches were for the West? He plays the virility card to his domestic audience, not any other audience.
So, he’s now a virile fuck up, whose impotence in protecting his people from a horrific disease has now tossed his entire PR image straight into the burning dumpster.
Meanwhile, we have Captain “Bonespurs” Chaos in the Offal Office, trying his worst and succeeding at that worst.
wzrd1:
That comment was in response to the quotation with which it was prefaced.
The narrowing of scope to “the West” was only introduced by Rob after I made that comment, in an effort to save some face.
That’s but an aspect of his image-building.
Here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/putin-brand/
Re: Ray Ceeya @ #5…
Hmmm…. An MCU, battery, and some LEDs ought to do the trick…