Woman actually on a horse = worse attitude than most car drivers and blinding levels of self importance.

Lots of horses on the TPT and >90% seem sensitive to the needs of others.

Did have one woman once shout at me for not slowing down. I can assure you that I wasn’t going at any great pace and she was IMHO cantering? the horse and it was too fast. Consequently, she was dominating the (wide) section and I felt this was arrogant on her part.

Car drivers are sold the dream of car driving as liberating but actually it traps you into spending hours stuck in traffic

Yeah, driving is a miserable and stressful activity. That’s an empirical fact! It sends everyone’s cortisol levels up. And many of these people are wedded to their cars as extensions of their personality, like status goods or vanity baubles.

Now I’m a bit older it makes me laugh.

When your life is crap its nice to have something to hate.

That more or less sums this issue up. Many people seem to live their life with a simmering state of internal rage and for some reason read the Daily Mail also :D. They are looking for someone to transfer that anger onto whether it be migrants, scroungers or now…cyclists. Plus also I feel the roads have become uglier places in recent years with a “me me me” type of person wanting to bully everyone out of the way in their SUV.

Thanks. I was using Imgur but it seems to be broken :D

Without trying to sound callous, the average stay in a nursing home is only 2 years IIRC, which probably means your average nursing home resident has significantly less than 2 years to live, so why make vaccinating them a priority?

The roads near me are as busy as a normal day. I read also that some schools have 50% to 70% attendance because all parents are claiming to be key workers.

Roads today are just as busy as normal.

What pisses me off are the ignorant ****ts who insist on walking two-abreast on narrow pavements on busy roads.

I’ll be back to doing a night loop that mostly involves the TPT near me.

I’d ride in the day but the TPT will be like bank holidays every day now unless heavy rain.

And you were on it too, like a driver moaning about traffic! 😆

I take your point but I’m not a casual or recreational user, plus I have a clue about how to ride a bike :D

The TPT was very busy earlier, almost like a bank holiday.

I was really hoping that as we moved into winter the trails and paths would go back to normal.

Too many casual cyclists without a clue, entitled dog-walkers and passive-aggressive ramblers.

That’s me too. A little stats knowledge from university but not a lot.

With so many specified parameters in a model, I’d be concerned about overfitting.

That’s my 2-pence intelligent comment. :)

It’s not Physics and one should not pretend it is.

Positivism was fashionable in the 60s in fields such as social sciences, economics etc. It was thought that with enough parameters human behaviour could be reliably predicted as you say mechanistically and deterministically. Everyone was looking for iron laws. Theoretical foundations for this can be found with Spencer, Comte, etc. It’s generally been abandoned for more modest modelling using statistical methods with acknowledged limited generalisability. Anything involving human behaviour seems to resit being understood like physics.

I’m (Very) fit and healthy with zero risk factors for COVID19, and I was terribly sick in April. But I think my fitness helped keep me out of hospital.

How u feeling now 6 months on? I’ve heard about so-called long-COVID and it’s concerning. It’s said that a significant percentage of those who recovered have heart damage.

Systems with a lag (hysteresis) are hard to control – a good example is the economy. We see boom and bust cycles, and this epidemic will be no different. the typical timescale for change is about two weeks.

It’s probably more like an autopilot in turbulence since money and finance almost have lives of their own, but I take your point. OTOH, the technical analogy shouldn’t be leaned on too hard since human behaviour in open (social) systems seems to always defy being treated as solely a technical problem.

But where is the point of equipoise?

You mean the point where – in the absence of significant herd immunity – the infection/admission/death rates remains constant? Doesn’t that beg the question of what rates of infection/admission/death you’re trying to keep constant (I think you call it the R? Plz excuse my layman’s knowledge)? Presumably, the higher rate requires harder braking to keep constant as well?

I think we’re back to some confusion about the ends of these measures. Are we trying to minimise the death rate or ‘optimise’ the death rate (sounds heartless I know) to the ends of preventing the ICUs being overwhelmed but preserving economic activity?

See also, walking pairs who instinctively head for opposite sides of the path to let you pass.

Yeah, that pisses me off. It shows collective indecision and is an invitation for someone to cross to the other side right in front of you. I’ve decided that when a couple do this it indicates all is not well in their relationship :D

SUV’s. May are wider than their lanes here on the narrow roads of Cheshire.

Utterly absurd vehicles.

/end_of_rant

And the BV5500, how do you get on with that, cope with maps ok?

Seems to do its job ok. Google maps works for example.

I got a Blackview BV5500Plus for £100 from Amazon.

It won’t win any style awards or impress anyone but I don’t care.

I bricked an iPhone and a £200 android phone in 2019 by getting them wet. One of them got wet when I was out cycling and got caught in a storm of tropical magnitude despite it being in an inner pocket of my jacket.

My Blackview is ruggedized and much more water-resistant than your average phone. Plus it was cheap so if it breaks it’s not the end of the world.

The very, very basic question is how do you get the data out of the various lab systems and into your fancy number cruncher?

A temp on minimum wage cut and pasting into excel?

As I said way up there the problem isn’t the tools, it’s the lack of understanding.

If you’re using excel as a database, or intermediate/pseudo database, it isn’t the best choice because it doesn’t offer up much in the way of validation/safeguarding data. This is one reason they came unstuck. Systems entirely reliant on expert user inputs aren’t a good choice for most applications. People are fallible.

The problem is that the PHE developers picked an old file format to do this – known as XLS.

As a consequence, each template could handle only about 65,000 rows of data rather than the one million-plus rows that Excel is actually capable of.

That’s interesting and means the Guardian were wrong, although in both scenarios the issue was the sheet maxing out on rows. In that sense, the Guardian was half right.

Of course, using the 32-bit version of excel was only half the problem because excel is very much a quick and dirty ‘database’ or intermediary between databases. Perhaps understandable given the rushed nature of the track and trace, but otoh Boris boasted about it being world-class?!

Given the profile/level of investment and >6mths this has been going on for I wouldn’t have thought it unreasonable for some kind of controlled system to be put in place e.g. with SQL database backend and frontends to interface with various users i.e. test centre upload results and enter summary information, administrators generate reports, test and tracers generate and manage cases etc.

I’m no IT expert but haven’t there been a lot of problems rolling out such systems in the public sector?

I know for a fact that fire rescue has no central/national database and neither does town planning. All their data resides at the local level on a hotchpotch of paper and electronic records. It also make FOI requests problematic because they can claim compiling the data imposes an unreasonable cost.

It’s also possible that they were importing into Excel 2003 which has the much smaller row limit.

Linky

This is quite a good explanation from the Guardian. It seems that some labs were sending in their results as a .csv to PHE who would import that data into excel. A .csv doesn’t have a row limit but an excel sheet does, ergo any rows over a million will simply be culled during the import, and this wasn’t spotted initially.

Presumably, the labs were just exporting all their tests to date each day into the .csv too. It all sounds terribly unsophisticated with a lot of redundant data handling and everything hinging on a dodgy excel sheet.

And it will have been a super daft “oh yeah, I didn’t realise that” error, like not clearing down what should be a temporary table. We’ll never know unless they decide to tell.

The sheet ran out of rows is what happened and data that was supposed to be appended failed to be appended and nobody noticed for several days. This was spun as an IT error but it seems someone didn’t understand that excel has a row limit. As someone who used excel before Office 2007, I was accurately aware of this because it used to be about 65 k max rows but was changed to 1 million rows. If you didn’t use excel before Office 2007 you may never have run into this hard limitation.

I very much doubt they are using Excel for anything other than ad-hoc reporting.

It appears that excel sheet fed the wider track and trace? Or have I got it wrong? Why else is it being reported that tracing potential contacts was delayed a week?

I think as TiRed pointed out, with just a few thousand being tested earlier in the year, PHE opted for a quick and dirty solution in excel and never got around to adopting a more appropriate solution as the scope grew.

Or just put a check to use another sheet/file when full? (putting aside the questionable choice of using excel)

It’s possible that whoever had custody of the data didn’t know about the row limit; 1 million rows are enough for most applications. If you didn’t use excel prior to Office 2007 – when the limit was just 65 k or so – then row limits may not be something you’re cognizant of.

Genuine question why do so many twitter experts that back brexit & covid deniers etc have ‘Forex Trader’ in their bios?

Forex trading seems to have been heavily promoted on the interwebs in recent years. Various chancers sell ‘systems’ and software and have youtube channels offering tips etc.

It appears to be sold as a bit more accessible than day trading for example, but both offer the opportunity to ‘get rich quick’ unlike the more careful strategies associated with share dealing.

Bottom line is that there is absolutely no bar to get over to call oneself a ‘forex trader’ in the internet age, but it could lend one the appearance of being ‘smart’.

Excel has a row limit of 1,048,576 per sheet. That’s one unwieldy spreadsheet! I wonder why PHE were even using excel and not a proper database?

Most cases round here have been in meat processing plants. I’m assuming its the cold in the those places that has not helped.

That’s a good point. I never thought of that. Will be an interesting winter.

The Virus loves cold conditions

That’s an interesting point. Cold air tends to have a lower relative humidity so the droplets expelled from sneezing and coughing tend to disperse/evaporate faster than in warmer air. At least that is a working theory I have read. Now I believe this coronavirus can withstand aerosolization so maybe the above is of no consequence? Perhaps someone more knowledgable than me can interject?

If there is no Chancel on the deeds, then the Church can no longer dig out dusty old docs stating its due.

The rules changed a few years ago forcing the church to prove your liability or drop it forever.

I’m not sure that relief from the liability is quite as absolute as you think.

Wear space blankets.

But if you listened to Boris’ speech last week he made a big point about protecting the NHS

I’d like to see that formalised or quantified rather than just being a talking point. If they said that X00’s of hospitalisation per week was their limit I would feel more confident that there was a method to their madness.

The Grammer school I went to was a combination of Victorian build and 60s modernism with some ancient pre-fabs knocking around.

The pre-fabs were absolutely freezing in winter, you could see your breath.

The rest of the school must have cost a fortune to heat. Some of the rooms near the boilers were hot as **** with the heating on. You had to open the windows during the winter. The ones further downstream from the boilers were cold.

For those calling churches parasites for pursuing this, I believe that in some cases where it has been pursued they didn’t really have a choice, as it is an avenue they were forced down (i.e. by financial rules of having to investigate all avenues).

Perhaps by the same insurance companies who then sell homeowners chancel liability insurance? :D

Any view of what the continuing social distancing policies and measures are trying to achieve now?

Are we trying to minimise loss of life or prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed?

Not that these measures and policies are precision instruments (contrary to the implication of such heard back in the spring from official sources). I do feel that a lack of clarity here from the government is promoting some of the ‘rebellions in the shires’ that we are seeing.

I had a friend who recently bought a house and the solicitor was all over the Chancel Liability and in a panic about it.

I wonder if conveyance solicitors have some reason to be ‘overemphasizing’ this liability? Was there a recent court case or an instance of a church billing residents? It was my understanding that this liability was best treated as a kind of fossil or relic?

Edit – It seems that back in 2008, churches had until 2013 to register a property as being liable at which point this liability should be flagged on the deeds/land registry documents. If they didn’t do this then a property could in theory still be liable but it would be more difficult for them to claim.