Life In The Anthropause
I’ve had quite a productive day today. I made a start on applying woodstain/preservative to the sleepers that frame the patio at the back where the shed is sited and the greenhouse will be sited (sleepers being railroad ties for my North American readers). There’s more to do but it depends on how the weather holds up.
I also produced 1500 words of fiction for the work in progress. I seem to be making up for ground lost in the early weeks of lockdown when I couldn’t concentrate. It is all first draft, but I’d rather have too much first draft to edit down than too little.
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I subscribe to New Scientist which means I also have access to their news articles as they appear daily. Two caught my eye today that relate to things I’ve blogged about here.
On 7 July (Irk The Purists) I commented on a report issued by the “Alternate” SAGE group. It got a bit of a (polite) kicking in New Scientist too (UK could eliminate the coronavirus but it might do more harm than good). Delivering drive-by shade in discussing Alt-SAGE as ‘self-appointed’, the article comments, amongst other things, that:
Elimination is worth aiming for if all we want to do is put an end to covid-19 […] But lockdown has already significantly affected other areas of healthcare provision. In the UK, elective medical procedures have been delayed, cancer screening has been put on hold and thousands of people have avoided seeking care for serious health issues, including for heart attack symptoms.
[…]
The Independent SAGE group suggests that having one case per million people in a population could be used to define having the coronavirus “under control”, but group member Gabriel Scally admits that this figure isn’t based on hard evidence about how the virus spreads.
Even this goal would mean significant, prolonged changes to behaviour in terms of social distancing, personal hygiene and mask wearing. “From what I’ve seen so far, I’m not hopeful,” […].
The second piece (Big drop in Earth’s surface vibrations seen during covid-19 lockdowns), notes that:
A few days after Belgium introduced stay-at-home orders to help contain covid-19 in March, Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, noticed that his instruments were detecting far less noise than normal. He contacted colleagues in other countries and found they were observing similar things.
They analysed records from 268 seismometer stations around the world and found a sudden quietening of seismic noise that began in China in late January, then spread to Europe and the rest of the world in March and April, in line with lockdown implementations.
I’m interested that the quietness I often commented on was more than just a drop in the ambient noise levels but was something much more profound.
I should add that I’ve taken the title for tonight’s post from an opinion piece in the current print edition of New Scientist discussing the benefits of lockdown for the environment and particularly with reference to rewilding, a subject in which I’m increasingly interested.
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Music: Here’s Wilco Johnson and Roger Daltrey with a cast of thousands, including three of the great English bass players–Norman Watt Roy, and glimpses of John Entwhistle, and Sparko.At 1’16 there’s a guy in a suit who’s having a great time and who reminds me of 1970s Glasgow. Also, strong vibes of every school disco I can remember.
More Sparko in the Friday twofer bonus clip, playing a Gibson Grabber bass if my eyes don’t deceive me.
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