Progress on "The Way of Things"

My booklet has been getting bigger and bigger over the past year (it is now over a hundred thousand words) but it seems ready to tidy up, so I will be posting the tidied up sections one by one and linking each post to the section titles in last July's The Way of Things, which can serve as a contents page.

Hairku

Is it time to clean
the plug-hole? There's no hair there.
                     Fluff enough, though. So.

Five years ago today

June's Tunes 4

June's Tunes 3

Seven Years Ago,

in the garden, this honeybee

was walking all over a bee orchid:

 

you-should-run

June's Tunes 2

Five years ago,

on the village duck-pond...

Five years ago,

on the village duck-pond, there were ducklings (as there are this year :-)

Science is built of facts

for people who can see

that when they tell us and we don't learn, we are ignorant.
If I tell them and they don't learn, they assume I'm wrong.

They have everything, which makes them think that they have a duty to complain about everything.
We don't have anything, which just goes to show that we don't deserve to complain about anything?

                                                                If their physics is false,
                                                                whose problem is that?
      (if their logic is false, so that they cannot think logically
      about their own problems, then whose problem is that?

What is it like to be a bat?

You know what it is like to be a bat. To be a bat is to be a mammal like no other. You spend half the day dozing in caves, and then you all leave together. You flap about, in order to get anywhere. You find out where you are by seeing how the sounds you make come back to you. You are where all the others are. Each of you is there because everyone else is there. Everyone else is a bit batty. You know what it is like to be a bat.

Health and Safety

"Police officers are, quite rightly, furious at the government for failing to prioritise them in the vaccination schedule."

Click on that quote for more on that "quite rightly,"

Blaming the government is how our democracy works; but I was wondering, who failed to get the police vaccinated in the early days of this pandemic, when it would have done them (and therefore us) much more good?

Many months ago (here is a link to one timeline) the vaccines were safe enough to be given to thousands of volunteers, for phases II and III of the testing process (for a description of those phases see the quote below, which is cut-and-pasted from WHO). Could some of the vaccines not have been made available then, for key workers who volunteered (for the vaccines, not for participation in the trials, which were presumably randomized)? Tinkering with the timetable of the current roll-out of mass vaccinations would inevitably involve some risk to that roll-out. Why do people who failed to think this through earlier, when it would have done more good, now think that they know better than the government how to balance those risks?

Here is that WHO quote:

"An experimental vaccine is first tested in animals to evaluate its safety and potential to prevent disease. It is then tested in human clinical trials, in three phases:

In phase I, the vaccine is given to a small number of volunteers to assess its safety, confirm it generates an immune response, and determine the right dosage.

In phase II, the vaccine is usually given [to] hundreds of volunteers, who are closely monitored for any side effects, to further assess its ability to generate an immune response. In this phase, data are also collected whenever possible on disease outcomes, but usually not in large enough numbers to have a clear picture of the effect of the vaccine on disease. Participants in this phase have the same characteristics (such as age and sex) as the people for whom the vaccine is intended. In this phase, some volunteers receive the vaccine and others do not, which allows comparisons to be made and conclusions drawn about the vaccine.

In phase III, the vaccine is given to thousands of volunteers – some of whom receive the investigational vaccine, and some of whom do not, just like in phase II trials. Data from both groups is carefully compared to see if the vaccine is safe and effective against the disease it is designed to protect against."

Happy Valentines Day

Two Dragons

Flocks of susurrating starlings can look a bit like dragons.

And flocks, herds and tribes are deathless things.

Cultures endlessly accumulate knowledge.

They can be a bit robotic, though...

     Freedom has given us two parties, which compete for our votes. Individuals can choose to vote for one of them, or to waste their votes on other candidates, or not even vote at all. They can also apply to enter the parties. If they suit a party, they will do well within it if they dedicate themselves to performing well by its standards. Or they can leave the party, at will. And all of that freedom serves to maintain the culture of the party. The parties persist, each position filled by some appropriate person.

     And as they compete with each other, they evolve, in their own way, carrying us with them, as they evolve in an essentially mechanical way. They are a bit like a blue dragon and a red dragon, fighting over who gets to appoint our leader... or scapegoat? The parties compete for significant numbers of votes, but each vote is relatively insignificant. How can we feel responsible for what our representatives do? And yet, we are responsible for obeying the laws they make. And we are a democracy. Does the buck not stop with us?

     Could we make our parties more representative, if more of us joined them? Or would that tend to make our country even more divided? Perhaps we should get ourselves a more proportional system; then we could join (or at least vote for) a wider range of parties. If we do not, will the two parties move mechanically (in ways we barely understand) toward something even less representative? If so, then one way or another, we will be getting a different system. Should we think about voting for a transitional Liberal government and get a vote for PR (even though last time we got austerity and a vote for Brexit)?

     The people are collectively responsible for the form of their democracy, for voting within that system, for the outcome of that voting, and for what their leaders do. But most people in our democracies think that what is done in their name is not their fault. They scapegoat the politicians. And not without reason. Most of us did not vote for the people in charge. But everyone feels that their vote is relatively insignificant. And the outcome of an election really does have little or nothing to do with any particular vote, as though none of the voters are responsible.

Happy New Year (again ;-)

A limit of Empiricism

I set out to observe the world in a scientific way,
so I photograph the pond, and process the photo digitally,
and the sunlit willows being reflected in the shadows of other willows
show me that this part of the world at least is made of wave-mechanical string:

These Days

these days, those who are not "celebrities" for at least fifteen minutes are nobodies

Merry Xmas

Merry Custard (and a Happy New Year ;-)

(yesterday was the shortest day)

Looking back to what was once new, "Custard" :