Month: May 2020

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Testing

Along with my investigation of the SARS-COV 2 Virus and how it infects humans I also need to understand how the current detection tests work. Let’s get a few things straight first though. The current [early May] testing regime in the UK is pathetic and nowhere near enough to be able to track where this virus is going. Also, let’s be clear about this, Covid-19 is not a mild cold or flu. Some people won’t suffer very much with it but others are dying. I read a tweet from a 30-ish year old person saying that it felt like they couldn’t breathe for three days. I don’t want to experience that.

There are two main types of test that can be done for the virus. At the moment, in the UK these are done when you first show symptoms. That way, if you have CV-19 you can isolate and if you haven’t then you can go about your business. This is a method for reducing the transmission of this killer disease.

The first test detects the virus itself. This can be done by taking material from easy to reach places on the human body. For this test to work you need to have been infected for a few days already and for the virus to multiply in your body to get to the nose or throat. As the infection continues this test becomes less effective because the virus stays largely in the lungs and reduces elsewhere. As this virus is RNA only and the test can only detect DNA there is some chemistry magic to be done first to convert the RNA and then all DNA in the sample is copied. Finally more chemistry is done to detect the DNA version of the RNA of the virus. This can take two hours to two days. All it tests if whether you have the virus in your nose or throat at that time. It doesn’t mean you are clear. There can be errors.

The second type of test detects the body’s response to the infection. It detects the cells in our blood that fight the virus. By definition this test needs to be done once the infection is being fought. There are two main types of antibody that can be detected and the amounts of those in the blood vary over time. I found this lovely graphic on Wikipedia:

Covid-19-Time-Course-05

It’s quite hard in these times to find decent correct information on the web about what is going on. I’ve been avoiding newspapers and other traditional media and mainly sticking with podcasts where the presenter / interviewee is qualified or Wikipedia. The World Health Organisation website is brilliant too and has the level of detail I wanted.

My next communication might be about the UK Govt response to this crisis. But I’m not sure I’m willing to enter that pit of desperation yet.

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Pass It On

I decided last night it would be sensible to see what facts I can find out about this coronavirus that is spreading around the world. There are rumours of a relaxing of the lockdown and so finally I should learn what I can about the disease. Trying to find reliable sources might be tricky but I’ll spend around an hour and see what I can get.

Transmission Type

Data from published epidemiology and virologic studies provide evidence that COVID-19 is primarily transmitted from symptomatic people to others who are in close contact through respiratory droplets, by direct contact with infected persons, or by contact with contaminated objects and surfaces.

Incubation Period

It would appear that from first contact with the virus it takes a median of 5.1 days for symptoms to show. This means 50% of people will have symptoms before or by five days after infection and the other 50% after 5.1 days. Most people will show symptoms within the first 11 days of transmission. By most I mean around 97%.

Contagiousness

During the incubation period, also known as the “presymptomatic” period, some infected persons can be contagious. Therefore, transmission from a pre-symptomatic case can occur before symptom onset. It is possible that people infected with COVID-19 could transmit the virus before significant symptoms develop. It is important to recognise that pre-symptomatic transmission still requires the virus to be spread via infectious droplets or through touching contaminated surfaces.

A Harvard document has “reports” of people being infectious two days before symptoms start. This is not good and a reason for social distancing. LINK.

Asymptomatic Transmission

An asymptomatic laboratory-confirmed case is a person infected with COVID-19 who does not develop symptoms. Asymptomatic transmission refers to transmission of the virus from a person, who does not develop symptoms. There are few reports of laboratory confirmed cases who are truly asymptomatic, and to date, there has been no documented asymptomatic transmission. This does not exclude the possibility that it may occur. Asymptomatic cases have been reported as part of contact tracing efforts in some countries.

Testing

My current understanding is that testing for Covid-19 requires there to be virus in saliva and or snot. This means that you are likely to be showing symptoms as the virus has replicated enough in your body to affect your mucus membranes. So, if you get a test and it is negative there are some issues. Firstly, false negatives are possible and so the test might say NO but actually you have the disease. Also, you might not have enough of the virus yet so still have the disease but test negative. A positive test is more likely correct although there will be a false positive rate, this is likely much lower than the false-negative rate.

This is quite interesting because one of my standard lessons to Year 11 and also the sixth form is about this exact thing. Is a medical test good enough for use with the public looking at type 1 and type 2 errors.

Source Of Information

All of this information came from World Health Organisation reports from their excellent pages covering this disease.

I feel a little happier now that I have a good source for these facts and feel more confident that I know what I’m talking about. For me one of the saddest aspects of this is the fact that the WHO have to have a page dedicated to myths that are circulating the internet and discussions because largely people can be stupid. It doesn’t help that the US President is a fucking lying racist sexist moron and other leaders around the world are also stupid [Brazil and UK, also many more].

When this is over I hope there’s a bonfire of those leaders who did nothing for the two or three weeks when it was clear that Italy was fucked. It seemed obvious to me at that moment that we needed to shut the country down to save lives. It was ridiculous that I was expected to work in an environment of around 1500 people many of whom had returned from skiing holidays or similar. I just don’t think the leaders of many countries understand the following:

  • Exponential growth
  • Six degrees of separation
  • Combinatorics
  • Vectors of disease transmission
  • How to be nice and do the best you can for humanity

LLAP.

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Purge Problems – Fixed

Recently I had to fix this site as some malicious code had appeared in the file structure and, although the site looked OK to me I know it was sending some observers off to obscure sites. So, having had this happen once before about four years ago I had a good sense of what needed to be done and also what the dodgy php files looked like.

So, I set off to purge the website of anything that looked a little dodgy. Then using what remained and back ups from before I was able to rebuild the site and get it running as it was, minus one communication that was titled “Well” but while I probably moaned about CV-19 and said some stuff that I’m doing I don’t know what it was about. I had a look at the WayBack machine but it hadn’t crawled my site that recently.

It also turned out that I deleted an index file of one of my old websites in the purge. I guess it was easy to do. The problem was that now I didn’t have a copy of that file and I couldn’t even remember what style it was or what it looked like. I had moved away from FTP back ups and more to using some backup plugin to my site. This was a mistake. I had thought that this page might be lost forever and then I remembered the WayBack machine.

My first search was for the page on this site. Nothing was retrieved and then I remembered that the Internet Archive might have got a snapshot of my original site. It had! With some tweaking of the HTML code I was able to recreate the index page and now this site runs 99.99% the same as it did before I got fucked over. I’ve also been trying to think of all the domains I have owned in the past and I think this list is about all of them:

  • iparish.org.uk
  • ianparish.me.uk
  • iparish.plus.com [not really owned by me as it was a sub-domain]
  • whatuseismaths.com
  • fooyah.net/wordpress

I think that’s it. I’ll chuck in another if I think I’ve missed one. I’m struggling to know how I used to edit my webpages because I don’t recall having a computer before around 2001 but maybe I did. Internet access was poor then anyway. I do know that when I worked at my second school in about 1998 I had a site that was up and running.

My OldSites are listed on this page.

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Set Up

I spent part of yesterday setting up the final parts of the new PC. I’m very happy with the result. The new things are the PC itself and some peripherals like the keyboard, mouse and mat. Because the mousemat thing was too big for the old desk I bought a new desk for the PC. I was stuck with the sizes that the desk could be because of the tiny size of my dining room which is where it all lives. I guess I could have put the system somewhere else but I wanted this position for the easy access to a wired LAN.

Terrible Picture Of New PC
Terrible Picture Of New PC

I guess apart from tidying up cables I am done. It was very satisfying to wire in the whole system in its home for the next few years.

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Green

Yesterday while out for my allowance of daily exercise I noticed how lovely and green everywhere was looking. The sun and warmth over the last month – not a good thing by the way – has really helped the flora develop. Every path I walked on seemed lush and vert. Here’s a photograph I took while at one of the river Medway inlets, the old brickworks wharf.

Gorgeous and Green
Gorgeous and Green

Here’s a very nondescript satellite view of where the photograph was taken.

Medway Inlet
Medway Inlet
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Clouds

It’s a funny old thing that when flying in X-Plane you wish for clouds but they kill your frame rate because it’s X-Plane. Then when you finally put clouds in or real time weather you end up with not being able to see anything most of the time because – clouds. You have to take off in cloud or fly through cloud and then not see anything for a while. Once above clouds the world looks pretty much the same wherever you are.

Weather X-Plane
Weather X-Plane

Look at this picture. It’s gorgeous but the world looks faded because it’s not that often you get the wonderful clear days where you can see for miles.

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Habits

Considering how much time at home I have at the moment you would think that I would be writing quite a lot on this site. I think I’ve just got out of the habit and the next album review is going to take some time so this is a communication make me feel as though I’ve actually done something positive. I’ve spent quite a bit of time sorting out the technology in the house over the last few weeks.

I have bought and installed a new PC including getting the software all transferred and working properly. I’ll put some pictures on here once it is finally complete. I’m waiting for some kit to arrive and I need to get out to collect the new desk for it. After that I’m sure I’ll put something on here about it. The new PC runs X-Plane a lot better than the old one so I’ve been playing on that a little recently.

ERCO Ercoupe X-Plane 11
ERCO Ercoupe X-Plane 11

I’ve been playing some Minecraft running my own server. It’s good fun and feels productive. I really enjoy the farming and mining aspect of this. The complex builds I leave to the kids. It’s a far better world than this one currently. To enable three of us to play in the house we are using the Bedrock edition along with playing on the PS4, PC and iPhone. The phone has a DS4 controller binded to it and then the video is output to the TV in the dining room. This whole system works quite well but when moving from one platform to another some of the button mapping is slightly different and this can cause issues.

I’ve also been playing Deliver Us The Moon on the PS4. I’m enjoying it. The puzzle solving isn’t that hard but there have been times I’ve wandered around trying to figure out what I am meant to do. I hope to finish this game over the next week or so.

Next week I’m going to get back to writing “music” on the PC. I’ve been practising recently trying to re-learn the things I last did about five years ago. I’ve also changed which software I use to one that seems a little more intuitive. Eventually I hope to write something that actually sounds good and fun. It’s hard because I nearly gave up at first before I remembered that everything is hard at first and the only way to get better at something is to do that thing. It’s something I say in my day job a lot and it’s nice to take my own advice!

I installed some security cameras in the house. Not really because I’m worried about crime but more because I can and they were on sale on Amazon. I do like that they alert me when there is movement in the frame and they also have a good night mode. What I’m less happy about is the auto-arming software needs to always run on my phone and I don’t like any piece of software that does that. This isn’t a problem at the moment because it’s not like I’m leaving the house that much. I’ll investigate more when I return to work.

I am working. From home. In a way that seems strange but I’m doing what I can and trying my best given the resources and limits that I have. I do hope everyone is safe and that’s the bigger issues really. I know I’m lucky to still be getting paid and I am making sure that is justified. I wish everyone well at the moment and understand that I come from a position of privilege completely on this. This current lockdown situation must be utter shit for a lot of people. I’m reasonably used to being away from work for the summer holidays and I have been thinking that the last summer I worked through was probably when I was nineteen in 1991. I have only ever had one job where the summer was just a normal work time.

I’ve been listening to podcasts while moving around the house and doing little things. I would normally have the radio on and listen to a radio station from New Orleans but their news is just as shit as ours and so now I’m trying to listen to more podcasts and that means just playing stuff through my phone during the day. Mind you, I can only concentrate on the podcast when I have certain brain functions going. While typing this I am listening to music, because I am doing words and so listening to conversation would confuse me more than I am currently. I’m listening to Amerikkkant by Ministry.

On to the habits. I need to change my habits slightly to make sure I add content to this site whenever possible. I’ve been away for a little while and I’ve been busy restoring this site along with setting up things on a new PC. Also, I’ve been trying to make sure that my back up systems work properly. There are routine things that I am working on to improve my site security and content. Here’s to new habits and enjoying the things we do along with being productive.

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Red Hawk

This is my first communication on this restored site. I can’t see anything wrong with it at the moment although I may have deleted one of my old websites and I think that has gone forever. I’m sure one of the spare hard drives knocking around will have a copy but it’s whether I can be bothered to go and look for it. There’s a time/reward concept I’m trying to develop and the ratio is pretty low for that one.

Since 17th March 2020 I have spent just one day in work and that was voluntary. I helped supervise those children of keyworkers on Monday and it was nice to be somewhere else. While I feel OK 80% of the time I’m sure a change in scenery helped me for a few days. It’s been over a week since I was last feeling rather desperate. The big news, buried in this paragraph, is that the lockdown is costing me quite a bit in terms of technology that I keep buying. I think I’m done for now, but the most recent purchase was a new PC. I had a situation with the old one and although I think that was largely my fault – I was removing a headphone jack when it powered down – the headphone jack is close to the power button and I think it activated it -the PC was old and I decided that a new purchase would last a good five or six years and need to be quite good for gaming.

So, the PC has 16GB ram, an Intel Core i5 and a RTX 2070 graphics card. So far I have been very impressed although I’ve also upgraded some of the infrastructure surrounding the PC to suit the new machine. Setting up the PC was straight forward and installing all the relevant software that I wanted was easy and took about a day. A bonus of getting a new PC is the ability to break the old one down and use its components. So, the old SSD is now installed on the PS4 as extra storage space and that works well. I bought a cheap enclosure for the SSD and now have an extra 500GB storage on that. I had a back up hard drive running in the old PC also and that has found its way into the new machine and still runs as a back up to the NAS.

The most important bonus of this new machine is that it runs X-Plane quite well. There is no stuttering under high graphics settings and while I’m not fussed about super realistic VFR graphics, the whole simulator runs really well. I have bought some aircraft in the past, most notably an F18, F35B and a V-22. I wanted something a little simpler to fly but also fast. There are quite a few prop planes included in X-Plane but they don’t fly that fast and what you want to do when playing is get up quick, do some aero, shoot some stuff down and then get somewhere else quick.

I had a look at AOA Simulations as they are people I have bought from before and they had an advanced trainer jet for sale. It’s the T-7A Red Hawk. It’s a nice looking plane and so I paid for it. Some of the freeware on X-Plane is pretty good but the level of detail on the payware is delightful. I’m aiming to upload some videos of this beauty to YouTube and will do so once i figure it out. But, screenshots are easy and here are some I’ve taken.

T-7A Red Hawk Gibraltar
T-7A Red Hawk Gibraltar
T-7A Red Hawk Falkland Islands
T-7A Red Hawk Falkland Islands

Someday soon I’ll give more details and links to lovely stuff as I explore this aircraft and X-Plane a little more. Just as a guide I used to get around 15-20 FPS on my old PC and the bottleneck was the processor. On this current/new machine I’m getting 50-60 FPS. Now, to you ultra-gamers out there 50-60 might not seem like much but I have to tell you that X-Plane is a stupid simulator and anything more than 30 is a decent job. Have a look at the forums and see people complain about clouds and almost everything getting in the way of frame rates above 20. Anyway, I’ve got places to fly.

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