Personal Blogs

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

Death, today I felt

You sniffing round

Hoping to add me

To your scorepad.

Plague is a serious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia Pestis. It is rare nowadays but was responsible for the Great Plague of London in 1665, for example. Looking further back, most people have assumed it presented as the Black Death in the Middle Ages, but with some scholars unconvinced until relatively recently. More daringly, some have wondered if the pandemic that took place in the reign of the Roman emperor Justinian might be the same disease.

Recent work with datable human remains makes it almost curtain that Y. Pestis is indeed what caused all three of these plagues with a small ‘p’. Blood flows into a living tooth, and a pathogen in the blood may be in the teeth of a person when they die. Tooth enamel is very resistant and fragments of pathogen DNA can survive in the tooth for thousands of years.

Researchers have collected DNA samples by drilling into ancient teeth and used computers to reassemble the fragments and look for a sequence that identifies Y. Pestis. Results show that almost certainly the Great Plague of London, the Black Death, and the Justinian plague were the same thing.

And here’s a big surprise; it turns out the bacterium has been about for some 5000 years at least. But it only changed into the deadly form about 4000 years ago, when it swapped in a gene from some other bacterium.

See Ancient Plagues Shaped the World, Scientific American, November 2020.

Read tonight: “l suppose it’s power for the course.”

These all come ultimately from Latin salsa or saltus = salted. The same root gives us salt, of course, but also salary, originally a regular payment to allow purchase of salt. But further back Latin sal has common roots with Ancient Greek, ᾰ̔́λς which halide and halogen come from. And perhaps these all stem back to a word for sea. I love these connections between words.

If you love words and word origins as much as I do, you’ll enjoy the fine detective work in this blog post about codswallop.