scottsdad

Passed a flat in Maddiston yesterday. All through the election they had a big ALBA sign above their door and saltires in all the windows. All still there.

How are you able to post on P&B with no internet?

Talking to the wife and she is really worried. I started talking to her about how the vaccines are working and all that but she shut me down. She isn't scared of the virus, or of getting ill. But she is terrified of another lockdown. She thinks that is another one is announced in the near future she might not be able to cope. I wonder how widespread this view is - totally understandable.

Quick question for some of the older folks here - did you go to the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988? I did with the school - we had the big tower that ended up in Rhyl. It was great. A classmate of mine was violently sick in the bus on the way there. We were glad to arrive and get out of the stench. If you're too young to know what this was like, there is a Taggart episode you can stream when there had been a murder at the festival.

When I used to be on twitter, I followed Trump. Always fun to have some utter lunacy spicing up the timeline.

It could indeed be better - but 2.8% positivity is still a good thing. We're well away from it bursting past 5%. The hospitalisations are my concern here - how low did we get these? 60ish?

Ancelotti has left Everton, and the favourite for that job is Eddie Howe. Think he maybe heard the Everton job was coming up and fancied that instead?

That's what I had thought but the text from the school was crystal clear. So if he had been on that bus, me, the wife and our daughter would be self-isolating* rigidly, not leaving the house for 2 weeks. *we would not be self-isolating. f**k that.

Have a look at my posts on this thread from 11th March.

Got a message from my son's school. Anyone on a certain school bus on a certain day should self-isolate, and so should their families. Luckily he was on a different bus. Makes me wonder how many people are actually ill from this bus journey full of teenagers

Outstanding book. I have never seen the movie, and wouldn't want to. I don't see how it could be better than, or equal to, the book.

Falkirk to level 1

I'm in the same boat. This was apparently pencilled in as the date to announce a nationwide drop to level 1, but clearly not going to happen. There was talk of some areas going to level 1 but the Tories (boo, hiss) are against that. I guess they want everyone moving down the levels together for some unknown reason.

Hang on - you said I wasn't the only scientist on here. I'm asking the others to come in here and say what they think. Unless there is an article somewhere studying the professions of P&B users, I don't think the literature will help.

No, what you said was "I can assure you that this isn't true in general" when I said that scientists use statistics. I'm making the point that evert scientist I know does use them. It isn't arrogance - just calling out bollocks when I see it.

Fair enough. If other scientists want to come on and explain how they can gather any meaningful results without some sort of statistical analysis, I'm all ears. It would save me a shitload of time if I could do that, let me tell you.

As a scientist for the last 20 years, published over 40 journal articles, book chapters and conference papers, and working in a university department full of scientists...I thank you for your assurance. It must just be every scientist I know that uses statistics.

Sadly you can't really be a scientist without doing some statistics. Being good at biology at school didn't help me when I started doing my PhD and had to learn about various statistical tools I needed to use. But even non-statisticians can see that infection levels are rising. As yet there is no up-swing in terms of deaths. ICU and hospitalisations are relatively flat. But I get the worry - pre-vaccine an increase in infections always led to an increase in deaths and hospitalisations. The questions now become more granular - we're no longer at infections = deaths. Who is getting infected? Is it young, non-vaccintaed people who are unlikely to fall seriously ill? Are the people catching it symptomatic? If these are the kinds of questions we're asking now, then this is good news. Then we can target and plan responses beyond infections = deaths = lockdown.

I'm not a school teacher, but a university lecturer. Over the last year the move to online/hybrid teaching has really increased our workload and stress levels. I know that online is inherently inferior to face-to-face teaching but I (like my colleagues) am absolutely shattered by it. And my teaching load is tiny compared to a school teacher's one. I can only imagine that they're marking the days to the summer break. So for me, not surprised at all at anything suggesting that they work more on top of what they already have done.

Sorry I don't know the history of this. But I have something of a similar experience, but from the other side. When I met my now-wife, her daughter lived with her ex-husband. Things started out OK, she stayed with us every second weekend and half the holidays. Things changed when we went to pick her up one day and casually mentioned that we had got married. I don't know what trigger this sent to her dad, but after that he stopped our access completely. We went to court and all that jazz but there was a time (again, about 15 months or so) when we didn't see her. We saw her when she was 4 and a half, then again when she was almost 6. That's a big chunk of time to miss. This is all ancient history now of course. But over the years we missed out on huge chunks. I won't go in to all the ins and outs but we eventually got to the place where we thought "she'll come to us when she grows up". We became these strangers who would sometimes visit but had no real connection with her. Fast forward to last Christmas and she moved out of her dad's place and now lives 5 minutes from us. There's still a big emotional distance though. We saw her yesterday and to be blunt, we have small talk and not much else.

Did you go on a school trip when you were a kid? And if so, where? I'll start. In 1994 we went on a tour of world war 1 battlefields across Holland and Belgium. Not just these but memorials, cemeteries, etc. We took a bus to Hull, then overnight ferry to Zebrugge, then travelled around visiting these places. We went to the Menin Gate where they played the Last Post and I kid you not, the whole class was in tears afterwards. In 1996 the school reran the trip and a few senior pupils were asked along - including me. It wasn't near as much fun second time around as I wasn't with all my classmates and instead was babysitting some utter runts. There was a EuroDisney (as was) trip bit I didn't fancy that and didn't go.