Personal Blogs

Q. How does an ant who’s not driving a taxi any longer feel?

A. Exuberant. 

A cat can look at a queen.

Cats have nine lives.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Every dog has his day.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Many hands make light work.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush.

Birds of a feather flock together.

It’s always darkest just before the dawn.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cut your coat according to your cloth.

A stitch in time saves nine.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Tonight Winter knocked at my door

But Spring was peeping over her shoulder.

Is Ricotta hotter.

Or is Feta better?

How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently, by Tim Harford. 

 I came, I saw, I concurred.

I was charmed to read a couple from Bridport with surnames White and Christmas have married to become the White-Christmasses.

Going further afield, there is Romanian surname Biban and a French one Thierry. I’ll leave you to work that one out.

Amazingly there is a French/German surname Dubel, and a surname Burled. So there could be a double-barrelled surname Dubel-Burled.

A, B, C, D and E went out for a meal. The restaurant was very crowded, but managed to vitamin.

The modern consensus is no, but early in the pandemic there appeared to be evidence that smoking protected against Covid-19. This seemed surprising, but when dealing with an unknown quantity conventional wisdom might be overturned. Perhaps the smoke kills virus particles, it’s plausible.

Here’s a study that compared test-confirmed Covid rates among hospital patients who smoked and those who did not.

https://www.qeios.com/read/WPP19W.3

The article abstract concluded

“Conclusions and relevance: Our cross sectional study in both COVID-19 out- and inpatients strongly suggests that daily smokers have a very much lower probability of developing symptomatic or severe SARS-CoV-2 infection as compared to the general population.”

Should I resume smoking after all these years?

No. As discussed here

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1740-9713.01413

the correlation is likely to be an example of Berkson’s paradox, not a real effect.

Smokers are more likely than non-smokers to need hospital treatment for reasons that are unconnected to Covid. So if you test everyone on a respiratory ward, a smaller proportion of the smokers will have Covid relative to the non-smokers.

But the idea that smoking could protect against infectious disease, and confer other other health benefits is old.

“During the London plague of 1665 children were instructed to smoke in their schoolrooms; and in 1882, in a Bolton outbreak of smallpox, tobacco was actually issued to all the residents of a workhouse.”

See 

Here are some photographs my brother Simon took of unusual fungi.

The first is the candle snuff.

The second is the birds nest fungus.

Think of any number whatsoever and there is a prime number starting with the digits of that number. For example if you pick 42, 421 is prime. In fact there are infinitely many primes beginning with 42, such as 421 or 42139 ...

Another example: the first primes starting with the current year number and the next are 20201 and 20219.

In every case, for any sequence of non-zero digits, infinitely many prime numbers start with that sequence. For instance infinitely many primes begin with 3142592. I guess I could find the first, in fact I will try in the morning.

And in fact I found three!

314159207 314159227 314159257