Do not Adjust Reality Your Mind is at Fault

 

The optical non-illusion. I'm interested in what happens in your mind when your brain sees a picture and thinks it's an optical illusion, but it actually isn't one. 

I think one inference is that perception is faulty in a normal mind. Also that something happens after the mind has been tricked so that the trick continues when there is no trick.

Looks like covid leads to erectile dysfunction

 

Sperm quality and absence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in semen after COVID-19 infection: a prospective, observational study and validation of the SpermCOVID test

Semen quality impairment is associated with sexual dysfunction according to its severity

Coronavirus gambling with lives and reopening the bookshop

The question I am often asked is. "Why is Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate still closed?"

The answer, so far, is. "The risk of killing us and our customers remains too high."

With the narrow passageways, the impossibility of cleaning all 30,000 books on the shelves, I think it fair to say that we, the people who work here, that is, would definitely catch coronavirus.

The main thing that I look at, when updating this information, is how likely reopening the bookshop would kill us and our customers. 

So for me and a lot of my customers who fall into the 60-69 age group and have been double vaccinated, the chance of death if we were to contract Coronavirus, based on the most recent figures is 1 in 200.

Back in March 2021 when I last did the basic research the figures were at least 10 times worse, so the vaccines have made a huge difference.  

The crude mortality rate for influenza is about 1 in 6,500

The other main figure is, how likely are you to get infected.

So if like me, you are in the 50 to 69 age group, in any given week you have about a 1 in 200 chance of catching it. Although I guess this isn't strictly true as the figures are for testing positive.

This doesn't actually translate into. if you are between 60 and 69, in any week, at the moment, you have a 1 in 200 chance of getting coronavirus and 1 in 200 chance of death if you get it, but it will do as close enough for me.

I think that if you are fairly carful vaccinated, mask, hand washing, avoiding crowded indoor places, then in your 60s you have a better that 1 in a 1,000 chance of dying of coronavirus this year. The figure for unvaccinated people in their 60s is too low how to make make.my difference to the vaccinated. However I think the crude approximation for an unvaccinated person dying of coronavirus this year is about 150 to 1

Here in the UK a very big factor that gets missed from the figures is the massive UK death rate so far compared to most other countries. By this I mean that many of the people most likely to die of coronavirus have already done so. Despite this the UK death rate is still very high compared to most other countries.   

The results of some big studies in America link show those who were unvaccinated were 4.5 times more likely than the fully vaccinated to get infected, over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It doesn't look as though there will be any move in the direction to protect shop workers better, compulsory masks or even vaccination passports, which were being talked about for non-essential shops seem to be on hold. 

Another update published today 13th September.

Out of more than 51,000 Covid deaths in England between January and July 2021, only 256 occurred after two doses.

To put this another way the crude statistic is you were 200 times more likely to die of coronavirus if you hadn't been vaccinated during that period link

Of course less people were vaccinated then and those who were were more likely to die.

Trying to predict where we are likely to go this year compared to last year isn't so encouraging 

The other COBR figures published about now, 15th September 2021 are 

These figures are much more encouraging.

There are lots of different and conflicting figures here  
  

This post is a draft in progress, that should eventually make it easier to update the bookshop website. 

Initial indicators for the boosterjab are looking good link 

Once again travel is the biggest problem link

The situation with pregnancy Link

Covid third leading cause of death in England in August

Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death in England in August, up from the ninth leading cause in July, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) says.

This is the highest ranking for Covid since March, when it was also the third leading cause of death.

In Wales, the disease was the seventh leading cause of death in August, up from 22nd place in July and the highest ranking since March.

Provisional figures from the ONS show that in August 2021 there were 40,460 deaths registered in England and 2,614 in Wales, both higher than the five-year (2015 to 2019) August average (10% and 5% higher, respectively).

The rate of deaths due to Covid was significantly higher in both England and Wales in August 2021 compared to the previous month. BBC Link

Merck says antiviral pill cuts COVID deaths in half

The pharmaceutical company said the drug - molnupiravir - reduced COVID hospitalisations and deaths by 50% in people recently infected with the virus. 

If cleared, Merck's pill would be the first shown to treat COVID, a potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic. 

The study results were released by the company and have not yet been peer reviewed. 

However, an independent group of medical advisers monitoring the trial recommended stopping it early because the interim results were so strong. 

Merck and its partner Ridgeback Biotherapeutics said early results showed patients who received the drug within five days of displaying COVID symptoms had half the rate of hospitalisation and death as those who received a placebo.

The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID who were considered higher risk for severe disease due to health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. 

Retail

Shop workers most likely to catch COVID in Ireland – data

Retail and supermarket staff were hardest hit by COVID in the last two coronavirus waves to batter Ireland, new figures show. 

Data from the Central Statistics Office shows retail assistants, cashiers and checkout operators were the workers most likely to contract the virus in the second and third waves of the pandemic.

This was a significant shift from the early stages of the pandemic, when healthcare staff and social workers were most likely to catch the virus - making up 60% of cases among workers in April 2020. 

The new figures show that in the first wave of COVID, as the country locked down, 6% of the total cases in workers were in nurses and midwives.

That level, the data indicates, fell to 4% in the next two waves of the virus. 

Retail staff and checkout operators made up 6% of cases among all employees in the same time period. 

UK Europe's covid hotspot BBC link

Flu kills about 11,000 people on average every winter in England, and along with other winter viruses also leads to more than 1,000 hospital admissions a day.

Death by bad maths and not understanding science.

Back around the end of WW2 there was a saying something along the lines of:- That WW2 and all subsequent wars would be won by the side that had the best German scientists. I have just watched a situation (Stopping the Oxford AstraZeneca jab because they couldn’t work out the risk equation relating to morality and possible side effects) where German politicians killed a lot of German people because either their maths was bad, they couldn't understand scientists, well I don't really know, but I am going to work at it here like a hole in a tooth.

In the world of particle physics there is stuff that you can't understand because you aren't intelligent enough and  stuff you can't understand because you're human. In the world of particle physics it is easy to take unbelievers away and show them the "double slit experiment" 

Picture from the Wikipedia article 

Here on the internet you can't do this, so I had to find another way to explain this business of there being some things you can't understand because you are human. 

1 Light travels at the speed of light

2 Time doesn't occur for light, photons or light waves do not experience time because they are traveling at the speed of light.

3 Light either observed as waves or particles can be polarised and this state of polarisation can be observed. 

It therefore follows that when light is polarised it has always been polarised because it doesn't experience time. 

So the light that travelled from the sun and passed through your polaroid sunglasses was polarised 8 minutes and 20 seconds before it reached your sunglasses i.e. when it left the sun.

You can't understand this because you are human, or perhaps you can, psychologists often call this the Dunning–Kruger effect.

I made a stupid maths mistake yesterday, I saw one of those daft things on Facebook

What fascinated me was the MS Windows 10 calculator made the same stupid mistake that I did, failed to apply the BODMAS rule and came up with 4 instead of 104.

The calculator on my android phone came up with the right answer.

I guess having been a mechanic of sorts, on and off and for years part of my mind was expecting an answer around 100, but I have been doing a lot of humanities reading recently, so some part of my mind flipped and did the whole sum just from left to right, as though I was reading a story.

When the pandemic first started I became aware of an issue between the two types of mind, politicians and journalists tend to have a humanities background. With the pandemic the people who hold the information are the scientists who mostly don't. Here in the UK and now in Europe I'm coming to the conclusion that a breakdown in communication between these two groups of academics is killing as many people as the virus. There is an aside to this which is to do with mathematics and how the part of the brain that tends towards panic and stress, seems to also so be to do with mathematics. So a perfectly ordinary mathematical question if loaded in terms of the figures that relate to virus mortality, suddenly becomes impossible for ordinary intelligent people.

Most of my family and a lot of my friends have scientific backgrounds and I tried the simple question, what is 20% of 20% of 25, first loaded with pandemic mortality figures and then as an ordinary question, I can only say, try this on your friends.

My coronavirus mental mathematical picture looks something like this:-

Here in the UK about 4,000,000 people have tested positive and about 120,000 people have died. If you knock the zeros off that’s 12 in 400 or 3 in 100. To put it another way for about every 30 people who tested positive 1 died of coronavirus.

If the vaccine is 80% effective that means before the vaccine 10 people would die and after it only 2, or to look it another way instead of 1 in 30 about 1 in 250.

The younger you are the less likely you are to die and of course older not so good, the 1 in 30 applies to people around 55 years old, if you are 65 it’s about 1 in 20 and 45 about 1 in 100. Over 80 it’s about 1 in 5 and under 30 about 1 in a 1,000.

Looking at todays figures:-  "The UK has recorded a further 4802 coronavirus cases and 101 deaths in the last 24-hour period, government data shows." you don't have to be a genius to approximate 100 in 5,000 or 1 in 50 which is a lot better than 1 in 30. Most likely both lockdown and vaccines are bringing the overall case rate down and the vaccine is bringing the mortality rate compared to the positive test rate down. so your chances of dying of coronavirus are nearly half what they were before the vaccine rollout and getting better all the time. Best of all we have less than 10% of new daily cases compared to the peak. so what is 10% of 50%?

I don't really know how to put this across to the important people influencing how the pandemic is killing people. These important people are mostly journalists and politicians. I think there will also be some lawyers involved, but mostly in The fallout and the blame game afterwards. The difficulty is to try to get them to understand some very simple sums now and save some lives. so I am aiming this mostly at people who did history art and music and excelled in English but just got through with their maths. The people who did the maths and sciences I think just make the assumption that when most people look at a simple sum their mind comes up immediately with some sort of approximation of the answer.

Without vaccines I suppose a reasonable guess is the pandemic would have eventually killed about 1 in 50 people and made about another 1 in 50 very ill, Whether the 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of a person dying of a blood clot because they have had the vaccine can ever be calculated is difficult to say. What is certain is that a large number of people who didn't get the vaccine because of politicians and journalists, not being able to understand the scientists, do the sums or whatever that was all about, well they will die. 

I am adding an update here because of the publication of Public Health England vaccine

effectiveness report

For anyone having difficulty understanding the report here is a simple explanation.

1 There is very little difference in effectiveness between the Pfizer and the Oxford jab.

2 This data is about over 80s 2 weeks after their first jab.

3 An unvaccinated group of 100,000 3% 300 get symptomatic covid 45 go to hospital and 40 die.

4 A vaccinated group of 100,000 60% protection 120 get symptomatic covid 10 go to hospital 7 die.

I should stress here that with every day that passes after the vaccination the situation improves.

 

A further update 21.03.2021 when I first posted this I intended to link it to several places within social media and the first one was Quantum Physics News Facebook group

this is the link to where members of that group have commented 

1,000 hits here over 150 comments there after 2 days was enough to manage for the time being.

Further update 30th March. 234 Germans died of coronavirus today Germany reported 13,110 new cases and the German Government suspended use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in the under-60s over concerns about rare blood clots. There have been 31 unusual blood clots among the 2.7 million vaccine shots given in Germany. It's not really possible to calculate if the number of rare blood clots would have been larger or smaller if people hadn't had the vaccine'

This post is primarily about understanding and communication between scientists and everyone else, especially politicians and the media. Highlighted with science that scientists can't understand, although some claimed to understand something. 

For the science in this I could add what happens if if you polarize light and it travels a distance and you polarize again. Obviously the light itself is not experiencing time but something is being done sequentially in a place that has no time. This would seem to suggest that events happening sequentially are different two events happening within the dimension of time.

10.04.2021 uk population 67.6 million coronavirus deaths 127 thousand so about 1 in 500 of the entire population dead. 67,700,000 to 127,000, well that would be 13,000 x 500 = 6,500,000   5x13=65

14.04.2021

David Dodd, the chairman of potential vaccine maker GeoVax, has said reports of blood clotting linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should be "thoroughly investigated". 

Speaking to Sky News, he said the technology used in the J&J and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines - which use an adenovirus - does have some relationship with blood clotting. 

"We should be concerned but we should put it in perspective," he said, pointing out there have been almost seven million J&J doses administered in the US and six reported clots. 

He added those who developed clots were women of reproductive age, so it could be they were taking oral contraceptives which already carry a risk of clotting. 

24.04.2021

Data reveals impact of one vaccine dose on COVID infections

A key government scientist has said that real-world data shows coronavirus vaccines are "working really well".

Around 74,000 people were admitted to hospitals with the virus in recent months, but only 32 of them were vaccinated, official data from March shows.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme Professor Calum Semple, one of the scientists advising the government on COVID-19, said the results are "very good news".

Prof Semple said researchers looked "very carefully" at the hospital records of the 74,000 people in the data sample.

They worked out that 43,000 had been admitted after vaccinations started. Within that number just under 2,000 people that had received a jab. They then looked at how many days there were between receiving the vaccine and the onset of their symptoms.

Prof Semple said: "Most people admitted had caught their infection within a week on either side of vaccination and then there was a really sharp drop off in numbers, so that, after three weeks after being vaccinated, we could only count 32 people out of the 2,000 that had been vaccinated.”

It works out at less than 2%, and that is in the elderly population.

"It's really good real-world data showing that this vaccine works and one dose works really well," he said.

April 21st we are running at about a 1 in 100 chance of dying if you test positive aprox. 2,000 new cases and 20 deaths, I would say in the narrow passageways of the bookshop browsing for an hour if one of the other customers has got then some others others have a good chance of catching it. My advice at the moment is to buy your books online. We will open when I calculate that it is reasonably safe to do so. April 22nd about 1 in 150

18th May 2021 update study of UK over 65s results showing very high antibody rates from both vaccines in the uk

The solution to the problem of gravity

 Today, Christmas Eve 2020 I bought the slowhump.com domain name from 123 for about £20 set it up so I could publish to it and about an hour later it works.

Today it’s the problem of gravity, this problem defeated people like Einstein so for the purposes of this please don’t Google “dunning–kruger effect” here we go.

Gravity explained without any maths – proof – mundane stuff like that, for ordinary people.

The universe is expanding. Everything is expanding, you the ruler you measure things with, earth, planets, stars, black holes and stuff. This was caused by an explosion called the “Big Bang”

Gravity is caused by the amount everything is expanding accelerating, G-force if you like, this should be seen as the rate of acceleration, like a sports car, plane or rocket accelerating. The size everything can reach has no limit, but you can’t measure this because you and your ruler and the atoms you and your ruler are expanding at the same rate. 

please follow this link to comment 

Electricity, electrons, atoms

At the atom level, as far as we know, everything is made of the the same three things (protons, neutrons and electrons), that is all atoms. I think that there may be something missing between Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics though, but electronics is closely related to how things that happen at the atomic level, or quantum level interact with things happening at the newtonian or ordinary mechanical level.

Human beings are not able to understand exactly what happens at the quantum level, this isn't a matter of an individual's or a group's intelligence, but it is an issue that is related to how human beings process and receive information in an ordinary mechanical newtonian world and how the senses are used.

In most cases we get our information about what is going on in mechanical or scientific terms, either by seeing something or by hearing something. If the thing we are observing is too small, to far away to quiet, then we have developed devices to overcome this.

We can look at very small things with microscopes, far way things with telescopes, get a hearing aid and so on.

When we go to look at something, we can shine a torch - a stream of protons pointed at the thing, the protons (light) land on the thing, some of the light bounces back and reaches our eyes where a transducer processes the light into electrons which do things we don't yet understand in the electrochemical computer we call our brain.

With electrons, trying to look at them with a photon, trying to determine what they are like, involves throwing photons and other electrons at them. This means there is a strong element of, trying to find out something about a brick by throwing tennis balls and other bricks at it and mapping where any that come back land.

So back to where we were at in the previous post. The thermionic diode. adding another lump of metal to a light bulb. So at this point in the history of the subject we went from understanding electricity to be a flow of something from positive to negative, into being a flow of electrons from negative to positive.

An issue here is that there is both positive and negative charge and to understand electronics to the point where you can make useful things by connecting electronic components together, you have to be able to consider electrons in their own way way.

Simplistically; in an atom:-

An extra electron; causes a negative electric charge.

A missing electron in an atom; causes a positive charge.

The spinning of electrons in atoms cause a magnetic field.

Changing the the energy level of an electron in an atom causes it to give off a photo.

These things work the other way around.

Brushing your hair scrapes some of the electrons of the surface of the hairs and causes a positive charge. So it stands on end, sparks or fails to do anything much.

When a photon is absorbed by an electron it changes the electron's energy level. 

Doing the same thing to a lot of electrons related to atoms in one area produces a measurable effect.

Next up should be a diagram/drawing of an atom.

Whole atoms are very small, you would get about a million lined up across the thickness of a human hair. It's a bit hard to visualise a million, there are about a million seconds in twelve days, so it could be time to count up to a million slowly.

If the nucleolus of an atom was about the size of an egg then the edge of the atom would be about a mile away.

This is a picture representing a single silicon atom, from the point of view of electronics the protons are positive, the neutrons neutral and the electrons negative.

If this atom had 15 electrons and 15 protons then it would be phosphorus

If this atom had 13 electrons and 13 protons then it would be aluminium

14 is the atomic number of silicon. Nothing else has 14.

In electronics situations develop where some silicone atoms have either 13 or 15 electrons and stay silicon.

Confusion about Ohms Law and the Direction that Electricity Flows In.

In electronics the basic equation is Ohms Law

thing                                    unit

Resistance   R              Ohm   Ω 

Current         I                Amp    A

PD

EMF        E or V                    Volt    V

Voltage

PD or p.d. standing for potential difference. (the voltage measured between two points in an electric circuit)

EMF standing for, electro motive force, but considered not to be a force although who knows what goes on in the mind. 

As you see it's the voltage where you get the problem.

At the moment, while  a 1.5 volt battery, can be thought of as having a potential difference between each end and an internal resistance, most of the time, just think of it as a 1.5 V battery.

I guess one way to look at this is the EMF is the voltage at the battery terminals or generator, when nothing is happening, no current is flowing. As soon as current is flowing then the internal resistance of the battery means that the voltage at the end of the battery becomes a PD. Strictly speaking that would include measuring it as current would flow around the circuit to move the meter.

Electricity in electronics is mostly a flow of electrons around a closed circuit. The electrons flow from the negative end of the battery through the device (torch, phone, game, etc) and into the positive end of the battery.

Unfortunately when electricity was being discovered it was decided that the flow was from positive + to negative - and this is called conventional current flow. I would say that if you are going to manage to understand some electrical components properly, then best just accept that electricity is a flow of electrons going from negative to positive and that the arrows on diodes and transistors are all the wrong way round.    

Trying to hold the flow of holes in your head along with everything else, well you know how it is with holes in the head.

So Ohms law.

 Some tips.

V never goes at the bottom.

Getting the battery symbol the right way round can be remembered by breaking the long line in the symbol in half to form the + symbol. 

The direction electricity flows in was discovered by Edison's assistant Hammer in 1880. This is a complicated business (the discovery that is) Discovered before by English scientist Frederick Guthrie in 1873.

But the Hammer Edison one is easy to understand and involves putting another  bit of metal in a light bulb with a wire leading outside the light bulb.

The electrons excited by the heat of the element will flow toward the extra bit of metal if a circuit is completed. They won't flow the other way, it's like a one way street, and called a diode.