Category: Misc
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Planktonium
The wondrous (tiny) world of plankton.
Phytoplankton (small plant-like cells) are producing half of all oxygen on earth by photosynthesis, like plants and trees do on land. Zooplankton are forming the base of the food chain of aquatic life. Plankton are also playing an important part in the global carbon cycle. The plankton are threatened by climate change, global warming and acidification of the oceans.
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The History and Future of Everything — Time
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Why are German numbers backwards?
My German is relatively basic, but this is true for Dutch as well. 42 is pronounced twee-en-veertig (“two and forty”).
Spoken language was in existence before written language. Many numerals existing today were created long before reading was practised, so if there is any direction in a language at all, German does not “read” “backwards”, it speaks “backwards”.
But then, very likely numerals are not named with regard to direction at all, but for the logic behind counting. In Breton, the number eighteen has the name tri-ouch “three (times) six” โ I cannot discern any direction in this numeral. In Finnish, eighteen is called kah-deksan-toista “two (from) ten (in the) second (ten)”. The logic seems to be to view the decades and then say how far into which decade we are. Again, there is no reading direction implied in the number name. Similar to this Finnish logic, Old Norse used a counting system not based on tens, but on dozens and multiples of the divisors of twelve (e.g. 60 = “Schock” in German). “364 days” in Old Norse is fiora dagar ens fiortha hundraths “four days into the fourth hundred (= 120)”. (Please note that “hundred” once meant 120.) I don’t claim to understand the logic behind “einundzwanzig”, but the question might be to understand the thinking behind numerals and find out about historic counting systems, not about reading direction.
In Old English, a language descended from Germanic dialects, numerals where “backwards”, too: fฤowertฤซene “four-teen”, ฤn and twentiฤก “one and twenty” etc., and you can still find remnants of an old vigesimal (base 20) counting system, e.g. “score” for 20.
There are many more languages that speak or read (some of) their numbers “backwards”, among them Greek, Latin (both directions possible), Celtic languages etc., and of course languages that actually read right to left like Arabic, where our written numbers come from. The question could be rephrased as: Why does English read their numbers in the wrong direction? Because obviously the “backwards” way is older and may even be more widespread (there are thousands of languages and we don’t know how they count; why should English be the norm from which to judge numerals?).
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user1914
[…]
Even if you did succeed, what then? How long are you going to keep your borders closed? A restriction to a few countries might help the first week, but within a month it wonโt even much matter, because thereโs too much spread elsewhere. Itโs not like a variant worse than Delta is going to go away any time soon, so youโre stuck in a permanent state that in most places both canโt be created and canโt be sustained if you did create it.
For those places that showed they can sustain it, would you even want to, and for how long? When would it end? Whatโs your plan?
The other issue with travel restrictions is they continue long, long past the time when they still make any sense. Once containment has generally been lost, the restrictions donโt do anything. At a minimum, they do nothing unless youโre in a much much better place than the region youโre cutting off, whereas there were many cases of longstanding mutual restrictions where the same variant was dominant in both places, which is pure folly.
[…]
Itโs worth noting that if a new variant is about to displace the old one, then lockdowns designed to stop the spread of the old variant are much less worthwhile. Once thereโs a displacement event, the previous infection level no longer matters at all. If anything, previous infections could be an advantage, if the new variant is more dangerous, and/or it means the spread can be slowed down due to natural immunity. The flip side is if somehow natural immunity was going to stop working entirely against the new variant, then every case prevented in the meantime is a pure extra case, which based on history seems unlikely but is possible.
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Zvi Mowshowitz
I think this final graph is a bit confused here, unless โthe original strainโ here means Delta. Delta had about a 120% advantage over ‘the original strainโ or 70% over Alpha. Iโm going to take this to mean 500% as compared to that 120%, so 600% of original versus 220% of original, or about a 170% additional increase. Which isโฆ better, but still quite a lot.
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This is a super scary graph, assuming it is accurate.
thezvi
This is gonna be a “fun” Christmas period.