Saturday: words! supply chain, walk
Apr. 4th, 2020 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutThe BBC had an article about a German word. It was from a couple years ago but mysteriously Firefox seemed to think I would be amused by it. Or something. I am not sure how Firefox decides to populate a blank page.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180903-to-have-sitzfleisch---its-a-professional-compliment
Anyway. There is a Thing that English speakers do, which is to talk about German words and how weird they are and how they express something that takes a Whole! Phrase! to Say! in English! Or something. Sitzfleisch (yes, it means your butt) is pretty short for that type of article, so I thought, okay, I will read this and attempt to understand the point. I failed. I failed, however, for a somewhat unexpected reason. I had understood that the exact synonym (shorter!) in English -- bottom -- meant the exact same thing, or at least, it did in British English in Regency novels, I know, not a particularly awesome source for language use in oh so many ways. But yes, it really does mean the same thing: persistence, ability to take a beating and stick with a project, etc. He's got bottom means the same thing that the admiring use of Sitzfleisch apparently means (meant?) in German. According to this article, anyway.
I will carefully back away from any idea that flitted across my mind about other uses of the word bottom.
Aaannnnnyyyyyway,
people are now writing interesting articles about the supply chain. If I am ambitious, I may try to create a link heavy post on the topic. But I actually also scheduled a zoom call for book group on Monday, so now I should probably go read the book. Except I am rethinking the merits of having the treadmill in my office, because between the weather, social distancing and not going to school / work, the treadmill is getting quite a, er, workout from multiple people in this house now. I sort of want to move it to the upstairs hall, and I was down with removing the bookcases and somehow getting the toys and so forth on the bookcases moved out of the house entirely, but then I remembered that the TV is mounted above the treadmill so that would have to be moved, too, and that really pushed the project into Not This Weekend territory.
Maybe if I wait long enough, school and work will reopen.
A while back, I had a conversation with my friend J. I said, you know, even once this is over, what this event exposes is that every time a culture that has herds of some animal connects hooked into the global air travel network, the stuff they and their animals are used to passing around gets dropped onto a bunch of immune naive hosts and chaos can ensue. Maybe we should enumerate how many of these groups we have left on the planet. There was a tangent about how we cannot enumerate all the viruses, and I do not disagree. I figure, you should just monitor when the isolated groups become sufficiently prosperous to have ongoing, above a certain threshhold contact with air travel. One or a few contacts are unlikely to set off a Contagion (er); but if you get enough people traveling, and relating closely enough to people elsewhere in the world, well, Off to the Races I guess is an appropriate idiom.
Lately, tho, I have been thinking (mostly in the wake of this: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-trump-pandemic-program-viruses-detection) that what we ought to have is a vaccine industrial complex that monitors these cultures and their connectivity to the global air travel network (look, I am not saying that the herders themselves need to be flying to DisneyWorld or whatever, I am just saying that intermediaries who have business contact with the herders and with the rest of the planet have to start existing in adequate numbers and flying on planes sufficiently often, where adequate and sufficient are pragmatically determined ranges subject to retrospective analysis of natural experiments yada yada yada). We would fund the vaccine industrial complex (VIC, affectionately, with all kinds of entertaining explanations for the name, like, do you want to be a victim? No? Fund VIC! Do you want to win the war against viruses? Fund VICtory! You think I am not serious, but I am the person who created the term ASIN, and my not particularly secret meaning for it was that it was a sin that we had to create such a kludge to transition us away from 9 digit plus a checksum ISBNs to a universal identifier to allow us to carry a wide range of products).
VIC would be funded by an international group (probably through WHO, with the US constantly whining about why do we have to pay more than anyone else, duh, because we are the ones with the most to lose in terms of GDP, and China constantly trying to pay more than us to make us look bad). They would do the sort of stuff that the above mentioned program did, but most of the funding would be focused on creating vaccine platforms that could be used to develop specific vaccines against whatever family was likely to escape, and shorten the time to develop a specific vaccine for the specific instance that started circulating widely. I envision that the first, useful thing out of the program would be something that drastically improves the specificity and efficacy of the flu vaccine, which in turn would lead to investigations into why a program designed to prevent a novel thing was instead spending all its money on something that has been around forever.
I also went for a walk with M. I tried to go for a walk with A., but wound up walking with R. and hurt my knees and toes walking too fast. I put A. on the treadmill with BitGym, and read her a chapter of Snow Treasure. T. declined to do BitGym on the treadmill.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180903-to-have-sitzfleisch---its-a-professional-compliment
Anyway. There is a Thing that English speakers do, which is to talk about German words and how weird they are and how they express something that takes a Whole! Phrase! to Say! in English! Or something. Sitzfleisch (yes, it means your butt) is pretty short for that type of article, so I thought, okay, I will read this and attempt to understand the point. I failed. I failed, however, for a somewhat unexpected reason. I had understood that the exact synonym (shorter!) in English -- bottom -- meant the exact same thing, or at least, it did in British English in Regency novels, I know, not a particularly awesome source for language use in oh so many ways. But yes, it really does mean the same thing: persistence, ability to take a beating and stick with a project, etc. He's got bottom means the same thing that the admiring use of Sitzfleisch apparently means (meant?) in German. According to this article, anyway.
I will carefully back away from any idea that flitted across my mind about other uses of the word bottom.
Aaannnnnyyyyyway,
people are now writing interesting articles about the supply chain. If I am ambitious, I may try to create a link heavy post on the topic. But I actually also scheduled a zoom call for book group on Monday, so now I should probably go read the book. Except I am rethinking the merits of having the treadmill in my office, because between the weather, social distancing and not going to school / work, the treadmill is getting quite a, er, workout from multiple people in this house now. I sort of want to move it to the upstairs hall, and I was down with removing the bookcases and somehow getting the toys and so forth on the bookcases moved out of the house entirely, but then I remembered that the TV is mounted above the treadmill so that would have to be moved, too, and that really pushed the project into Not This Weekend territory.
Maybe if I wait long enough, school and work will reopen.
A while back, I had a conversation with my friend J. I said, you know, even once this is over, what this event exposes is that every time a culture that has herds of some animal connects hooked into the global air travel network, the stuff they and their animals are used to passing around gets dropped onto a bunch of immune naive hosts and chaos can ensue. Maybe we should enumerate how many of these groups we have left on the planet. There was a tangent about how we cannot enumerate all the viruses, and I do not disagree. I figure, you should just monitor when the isolated groups become sufficiently prosperous to have ongoing, above a certain threshhold contact with air travel. One or a few contacts are unlikely to set off a Contagion (er); but if you get enough people traveling, and relating closely enough to people elsewhere in the world, well, Off to the Races I guess is an appropriate idiom.
Lately, tho, I have been thinking (mostly in the wake of this: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-04-02/coronavirus-trump-pandemic-program-viruses-detection) that what we ought to have is a vaccine industrial complex that monitors these cultures and their connectivity to the global air travel network (look, I am not saying that the herders themselves need to be flying to DisneyWorld or whatever, I am just saying that intermediaries who have business contact with the herders and with the rest of the planet have to start existing in adequate numbers and flying on planes sufficiently often, where adequate and sufficient are pragmatically determined ranges subject to retrospective analysis of natural experiments yada yada yada). We would fund the vaccine industrial complex (VIC, affectionately, with all kinds of entertaining explanations for the name, like, do you want to be a victim? No? Fund VIC! Do you want to win the war against viruses? Fund VICtory! You think I am not serious, but I am the person who created the term ASIN, and my not particularly secret meaning for it was that it was a sin that we had to create such a kludge to transition us away from 9 digit plus a checksum ISBNs to a universal identifier to allow us to carry a wide range of products).
VIC would be funded by an international group (probably through WHO, with the US constantly whining about why do we have to pay more than anyone else, duh, because we are the ones with the most to lose in terms of GDP, and China constantly trying to pay more than us to make us look bad). They would do the sort of stuff that the above mentioned program did, but most of the funding would be focused on creating vaccine platforms that could be used to develop specific vaccines against whatever family was likely to escape, and shorten the time to develop a specific vaccine for the specific instance that started circulating widely. I envision that the first, useful thing out of the program would be something that drastically improves the specificity and efficacy of the flu vaccine, which in turn would lead to investigations into why a program designed to prevent a novel thing was instead spending all its money on something that has been around forever.
I also went for a walk with M. I tried to go for a walk with A., but wound up walking with R. and hurt my knees and toes walking too fast. I put A. on the treadmill with BitGym, and read her a chapter of Snow Treasure. T. declined to do BitGym on the treadmill.