russholmes

Craig Murray is basically a decent guy. He fell out with the British government when he was ambassador to Uzbekistam and broke protocol by protesting about the treatement of Uzbeks by their government - being boiled to death etc. He was subsequently bullied, disciplined and dismissed from his post for acting with humanity and integrity. I think he was traumatised and experienced something akin to a psychotic break, after which he saw conspiracies everywhere in officaldom. I used to follow his blog and it was a mixture of reasonable analysis and unsubstantiated consipiracy theories. In this case, he was clearly in the wrong - he is a blogger with a big following, and he posted material in breach of the injunction. This is why the authorities went for him: (1) breaking a court order, and (2) potentially identifying a sexual assault plaintive. In the UK the authorities don't muck around if you behave like that. This is why he is in prison.

I have seen this stated before. What is your source please? This is false: SARS-CoV-2 is significantly more lethal than seasonal influenza for all ages past puberty. In fact, at 50 it is almost 15 times more lethal. https://github.com/mbevand/covid19-age-stratified-ifr

Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough for butter. I was mainly using it for cooking and ended up using olive oil for most things. I used to have a bread machine, and bread seemed to bake just fine without salt. Store bought bread without salt was impossible to find.

A significant minority are quite sensitive to salt. I fixed my high blood pressure by reducing salt intake. I got it down to hunter-gather levels - less than 1 g per day and combined with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables for potassium. It took a week before I started to notice my BP falling. Came down from 135/85 to 115/70 over a period of 12 weeks. Also cut out alcohol, anything more than a glass of wine raises my BP for a day or so afterwards. Of course, you can't eat any pre-prepared food this way as it has way too much salt. No bread, cheese, butter etc. Food begins to taste much better after a couple of weeks on a low salt diet as salt dulls the sense of taste.

Bow hunting is illegal in the UK. Permitted firearms and ammunition are also regulated on animal cruelty grounds. http://www.thedeerinitiative.co.uk/uploads/guides/90.pdf

Yes, the UK police caution is "You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

Adverse inferences can be made in court.

The British Marines tried this in Operation Moneybags.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WscQIp3Kac

It is an unpleasant slur both in UK and US English. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gimp

What Facebook's system does by design is to propagate and amplify simplistic, emotionally potent narratives. These tend to be fictional i.e. misinformation because reality is nuanced and boring. Further, this has been used by bad actors to seed social discontent and affect democratic elections. Facebook know exactly what is happening on their system and by whom.

There is a more balanced review article on herd immunity here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02948-4

The BMJ is not a credible source, it is the Daily Mail of medical journals. The author of that article, Peter Doshi, has form:

"I think the first thing we to review is who is Peter Doshi? And why is he so insistent on getting this data?

Peter Doshi received his BA in anthropology from Brown University, MA in East Asian studies from Harvard University, and Ph.D. in history, anthropology, and science, technology and society from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those would be fine credentials for someone who is going to teach history or anthropology."

https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/pete...

In one axis, and I don't think they were capable of doing it at the time suggested.

The Rayleigh limit in spatial resolution of an image forming device is given by:

l = 1.22 * λ * L / D

Where λ is wavelength, L is distance and D is optical element diameter.

For satellite at an altitude of 150 km with 2.4 m diameter mirror and 0.4 μm blue light, this gives a spatial resolution of 0.3 m. To read a number plate requires an order of magnitude better than this.

Same here. I went to a fairly good state school and never received any English grammar but got some French grammar. The French language teaching was terrible - hours and hours of memorising irregular verbs. I passed all the exams but still can't speak the language.

I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).

Small classes are excluded, so as you say, biased towards private schools. My niece was hit by this but luckily still did well enough to get a place. She was attending a large school in a deprived area. Her coursework was A*, given predicted AAA but was downgraded to ABB.

The minister of education's reason for downgrading the grades was so that pupils did not end up in jobs they were not capable of doing. Delicious irony.

I have hard water so washing machine and dishwasher get limescale. I just run them on a hot cycle with a bottle of white vinegar every month or so. Leaves them sparkling clean. Same with the kettle. No need for nasty descaling products.

There is no such thing as free will, is there? Decisions are a consequence of physical brain state.

The government communication in the UK has been lamentable. Confusing, inconsistent and patronising. On the other hand, we had idiots who stripped the supermarket shelves of toilet rolls and canned tomatoes for months despite being implored not to do so. If they had gone after the masks...

According to this research in the Lancet, masks help but not as much as physical distancing.

2 m distance reduces risk by 10x face mask reduces risk by 6x eye protection by 5x There is some uncertainty in these figures

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

I think the reason that various authorities advised against masks is political - there simply weren't enough and to direct the supply to clinical workers.

Quite. Much of the cult status of Feynman was created by the man himself. He had several books written espousing his genius. As for his charm - salesmen are charming, psychopaths are charming. Charm is a 5 letter word for manipulative, as many of his colleagues wives discovered.

Ageed. When the quoted dietician is repeating the old canard regarding protein and amino acids, it calls into question the rest of her statements.

This is specific to tobacco: firstly that the tobacco leaves pick up trace amounts of polonium-210, and secondly that inhaling tobacco smoke concentrates the Po-210 into localised deposits within the lung. Because Po-210 is a short range alpha emitter, these deposits deliver a significant radiation dose to small areas of lung epithelium. This dose is believed to contribute to the carcinogenic effect of tobacco smoke.

Eating vegetables does not lead to tissue irradiation in this manner. You are not at risk from eating tomatoes (or other fruit and veg) whether or not they are fertilized with rock phosphate.

A nose lets you breathe while you eat.

Immunity to coronaviruses does tend to fall within a year or so, but this is believed due to immune memory rather than viral mutation (coronaviruses have a modest mutation rate). This is a different mechanism than influenza. Subsequent reinfections are believed to be mild. A vaccine would provoke a longer immune memory by way of an adjuvant. Discussion of this in the TWIV podcast: http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-591/

UV-C is completely absorbed by atmospheric oxygen and ozone - none reaches the ground.

The BMJ is the Daily Mail of medical journals, its target audience is whisky-nosed old buffers. Real doctors read the Lancet.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nedgv

They seem to be confusing mortality rate (MR) with case fatality rate (CFR). Mortality rate is deaths per thousand per year applied to the whole population. Despite its name, CFR is the proportion of actual cases who die, and is a probability rather than a rate.

The CFR is estimated at between 10 - 20 %, i.e. a symptomatic member of the population (a case) has a 10 - 20 % chance of dying. 30 % of the global population of 1.8 billion were infected over the several year course of the epidemic, which equates to 600 million cases leading to 60 - 120 million deaths.

MR was >2.5 %, so more than 2.5 % of the global population died per year during the epidemic. With a population of 1.8 billion, this equates to >45 million deaths per year over several years.