Dork Scratchings

  The news here in the UK over the last couple of months has focussed on the unfolding catastrophe of Covid19 in India.  It has been implicit in pretty much all of the coverage that the situation there is much much worse than we have suffered in the UK, and this has been backed up by numbers showing just how many more people have died in India than here. True to form, our media have almost universally failed to take into account the fact that the population of India is nearly 25 times bigger.  I think dividing one number by another is not part of the training.... Here's a chart that puts things in context.  I've used 66.65 million for the UK population and 1.366 billion for India: INDIA OFFICIAL:   These are the Indian government official statistics republished by JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data showing 311,000 deaths INDIA ESTIMATE: These are from David Spiegalhalter and are based on excess mortality.  The best estimate is 1.6 million but could be as low as 600,0...

I decided to watch Contagion on the telly the other night.  I thought it might be fun to see how Hollywood's idea of a pandemic matched reality....  Anyway, can you spot the glaring mistake in this clip? That's right!  He said math  when he should have said maths .  Math ith a roman catholic thervith! There was another problem too.... In the exponential phase the numbers infected increases by the same factor each day, rather than squaring each day.  Or to put it another way, the sequence should have been $$ x_n = 2^n $$ and not what he said, which was $$ x_n = 2^{2^{n-1}} $$ Dear Hollywood, I am happy to offer my services as on set math(s) consultant.  I am very cheap.

When it comes to getting action on the climate crisis I think no-one has been more successful than Extinction Rebellion .  I remember at a party one time showing the NASA CO2 graph to a lady who didn't believe it could be real.  "If this were true people would be running around in the streets screaming" she told me.  That's why XR's tactics actually work.  You can hear day in day out about the urgency and severity of the crisis, but while people are carrying on as before it's difficult for the information to break out from the intellectual part of your brain, and occupy the bit that can actually make a difference. I don't have an issue with XR's tactics, but I do worry about how we often talk to the public when we do have their ear. The pie chart above is completely made up, but I think it's about right. A tiny proportion of the general public make up their minds by looking up facts and figures; a slightly larger - but still tiny - number ar...