Brighton: i360

100 Not Out! — my lockdown diary — is out on Kindle. Link

Quote of the Day

”It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market … hares have no time to read.”

• Anita Brookner

Musical alternative to the radio news of the Day

Lang Lang: Franz Liszt | Liebestraum, S. 541 No. 3

Link

Pure Schmaltz, but what the hell!

Also: Seb Schmoller tells me there’s an interesting livestream tomorrow evening from Upper Chapel in Sheffield.

Programme: Beethoven String Quartet No.5, Op.18 No.5 and Dvorak Piano Quartet No.2, Op.87 played by Ensemble 360.

Long Read of the Day

Scott Galloway: The Great Dispersion

Thoughtful and sobering essay.

Small data, big implications

Zeynep Tufecki is one of the smartest people I follow. In recent times she has written some of the most insightful stuff about the pandemic. Now she has a newsletter on Substack where today she writes about a striking, informative study just released from South Korea, examining a transmission chain in a restaurant. “It is”, she writes, “perhaps one of the finest examples of shoe-leather epidemiology I’ve seen since the beginning of the pandemic, and it’s worth a deeper dive.”

If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (about 21 feet) and 4.8m (about 15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.

That’s the quick and dirty of it. But there’s a lot more detail here, and like many stories, it is best told through a picture:

First, just reading the study is an exercise in what it means to do a study really, really well, with the resources of a government that’s committed to generating useful information…

Great piece if you want to understand why some of us are not going to be dining indoors in restaurants for a while yet. And it raises one intriguing puzzle: why have there been no recorded cases of infections recorded from cinemas?

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Beavers build first Exmoor dam in 400 years. Awww. Link.

• Steve Jobs pitching for planning permission for his company’s new HQ. Vintage Jobs. 20-odd riveting minutes. Unmissable. Link

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