Covid 19

C is for Covid 19

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. Since I didn’t discover the challenge till April 1st. – the first day of the challenge, I missed the pre-challenge post where you let readers know what theme your A to Z will be outlining. As this is day three, I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


What is the point of a virus?

Our lives have been turned upside down by a virus, an object so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye. I say object, because although some commentators have referred to Covid 19, a Coronavirus, as “living” on different surfaces for various lengths of time, a virus is not really alive in the usual sense – it is a parasite that cannot exist long outside its host cell nor reproduce on its own. Scientists still debate whether the many viruses should be included in the “tree of life” for they do contain DNA and/ or RNA which are the building plans for all life and the chances are that they have accompanied us closely on our evolutionary journey. But if they are not really alive and their only capability is replication – in the process, damaging or even killing their hosts – what is the point of them?


Darwin, who gave us the Theory of Evolution, was originally training to be a clergyman but far from debunking the ideas that geology was spreading about the Earth being millions of years older than the Bible indicated, Darwin disappointed the devout Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle by postulating the theory which would explain the progression of life to be found in the rocks. After the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin settled down to marriage, family and working on his theory, holding back from publishing his work until the last minute, when others threatened to get there first, out of a touching desire not to upset his friend FitzRoy’s religious sensibilities. But during this period, Darwin’s beloved daughter – Annie, died of Scarlet Fever (a bacterial rather than viral) and Darwin’s own belief in God took a terrible knock. The final nail in the coffin for Darwin’s beliefs was his learning of species of parasitical wasps that lay their eggs inside a living caterpillar so that when the eggs hatch, the wasp young feed and grow – eating their host from within. For Darwin, the idea that God could create such cruelty not to mention take the innocent life of his daughter, was too much to bear.


So Darwin would have been fascinated but appalled had he been around to see how the development of our understanding of the parallel evolution of viruses and animals, reveals something so pointless and so potentially devastating for the animal kingdom. We sit transfixed by daily news broadcasts announcing death tolls reaching and exceeding thousands in different countries but this is nothing compared to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. We think that 50 million people died worldwide but it could have been up to 100 million – our means of recording the deaths in that pre-global village world was simply not adequate enough to know. Given the ease of the spreading of the virus by modern transport and mass travel, we might think that we are doing very well to have contained the pandemic as well as we have, government failure to act notwithstanding…

So what is the point of virus? Well there simply is no point, they just are because they are. They hone our immune systems but if they didn’t exist we wouldn’t need such defenses. They are not living organisms such as bacteria (though we could do without some of those little critters too). If you believe in God, you would have to ask yourself why he would create such a thing. If you don’t believe in God then and you accept evolution as the roller-coaster ride that has brought species and their attendant parasites, including viruses, to the place we are today, then, ironically, something which is arguably “life”, is a metaphor for life itself. Life appears to have been, likely, accidental though probably inevitable given the inconceivable multitude of planets that exist in the universe. Life, apparently, exists for no purpose other than to exist and reproduce and as the mathematician  Augustus De Morgan, said in his short rhyme “Siphonaptera”, from his book A Budget of Paradoxes (1872), (Siphonaptera being the biological order to which fleas belong)

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
(Wikipedia)

If that analysis seems a little negative, stay with me, it’s not the whole story…

Now to the technical stuff:-
If you want to understand what a virus is, there is a good article here. This excellent article explains the body’s defence mechanisms – in particular B-cells and T-cells. A very technical article explains the body’s immune system over-reaction called the Cytokine Storm which is mostly the cause of death with Covid 19.



B is for Blog

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

Why do we Blog?

I love blogging, both writing and reading and hopefully, interacting with other people, bloggers or not, through comments. What makes a good blog for me? Words like interesting, quirky, fresh, well written and, mostly, personal come to mind.

What do I mean by personal? Well even if someone is writing about some thing, I like it if, in the way that they tell it – I learn something about that person. As I said in the previous post, blogs were conceived as nothing more than dated entries – diaries in effect, and though they have gone in many other directions since then, some people still use them as diaries. If you read such a blog, then you don’t need to ask the question which you might ask upon reading an old-school paper diary. Did this person write for themselves or did they have a view to publication and a wider readership? If a blog is published, made public it’s author hopes to be read. Those that are published privately are equivalent to the old private diaries – anyone keep one of these? Please, comment and tell us how it is for you and why you use digital to diary… One group who keep private diaries but with an eye to their future readership, are politicians who mine their diaries for their autobiographies. Do you use your blog – refer back to past posts – do tell!

I have no time for those who say they don’t read or watch fiction because fiction is the one way we have to see what it might be like to be someone else and some blogs can offer this too. I would go so far as to say that story-telling is one of our fundamental human characteristics – “Look! These paw-prints show that a lioness, oh and her cub, passed this way say, 3 days ago and she was limping.” A story formed in our big brains. They say that 80% of our big brains developed to work out what other people were going to do next – that all the other things we accomplish are byproducts of those big brain capabilities – transferable skills! I think that storytelling whether aural, novel, short-story or blog, is one of those defining characteristics of humans that emerged as byproducts of our need to understand “the other”. Never be afraid to share your stories…

Many blogs fall by the wayside after a few posts, a few months, and that is reminiscent of those New Year’s Resolution to “Keep a Diary” but then sometimes you catch the habit, your life’s schedules permit the space to write without struggle and best of all you find it rewarding either for yourself or because you get feedback from others. We all like interaction, but building an audience is hard work and it has to be said that Blogger does not make it easy to find other people – only by searching one “interest” at a time and sometimes it would be nice to conflate two or more – for example, science buffs who also play the ukulele and crochet…

I was spoilt by the experience of my first blog Ripple, hosted on Mo’time. Mo’time was a small blog operated by the manager of a large Italian blog which he used as a testbed before incorporating new wrinkles into the main one. I say small but if I remember correctly, some 10,000 bloggers had started blogs but due to the aforementioned rapid attrition factor, it seemed like there was quite a small core of stalwarts. A more accessible listing made it easier than Blogger to connect and befriend other bloggers. Sadly, the main Italian blog was sold and after a couple of months, the new owners closed down Mo’time. We were bereft at losing our eclectic community bunk-house and some of us tried to find alternatives and a few have ended up staying in touch via Facebook – a scattering of friends around the world…

So! Here I am having picked up this blog again after a few years when writing didn’t seem to fit, liberated by the lockdown and determined to complete the A to Z 2020 Challenge and hoping to make some new friends – hit that comment button, please!

The Death of Cash?

humanist55
One of the recommendations for businesses operating during the Covid 19 pandemic, is that they should encourage people to pay by contactless debit card. I say encourage, because whilst we and many other countries are rushing headlong towards, if not a cashless society, at least a much-reduced role for cash and yet there are still some obstacles – hence the reason they were recommendation rather than enforced restrictions. Last weekend, before the lockdown was more strident, my partner and I decided to head for Filey and a walk on the beach where we hoped we could be sufficiently socially-distant. Imagine our shock ar finding that everyone seemed to have had the same idea, the weather being fair if breezy and the seafront was almost as crowded as a summer day. Okay, we could keep reasonably distant from other people and the brisk off-the -sea breeze whisked any miasma emanating from others swiftly away. Besides, at this stage, it was a numbers game and the chance of catching the virus seemed but a small percentage as long as we kept our distance and touched nothing. Nevertheless, we risked ordering a cup of tea, paper cups naturally, from a cafe where I paid with a contactless debit card. I remarked that it was fortunate that they had the facility but the woman behind the counter said that the majority of their customers, local, elderly and not enthusiastic about card payments let alone contactless, prefer to use (filthy)cash still.

So there is the first issue – resistance. But in China, a country also well on the way to a cashless economy, the lag is more of an urban/ rural split though this might also equate to an older generation of peasant society since the youth have often left for the cities. This is not just a resistance issue but an internet access issue since all payment systems depend on internet coverage for universal availability. Wait that’s not quite true – on another continent not hitherto noted for financial innovation, things have taken a different direction altogether – in Africa, they have developed mobile phone apps to make payments. Where China has skipped over the whole Debit card stage and gone straight to the smartphone using 3D barcode scanning, in Africa, they have skipped over the whole banking stage because they don’t have enough banks and like China, they especially don’t have enough banks in rural areas. Also, Africa does not yet have enough smartphones to do QR Codes but it has a thriving market in secondhand mobile phones which together with necessity, the mother of invention, has created a uniquely African solution. Africans also demonstrate the highest rate of peer to peer payment – that is paying another person by text.

Top of the league for a cashless society, closely followed by Canada and then the UK, is Sweden where many people cannot remember using cash in the last month. But here another warning note has been sounded, the government has asked the Swedish people to envisage what would happen if there was a prolonged internet outage due to solar storm or more sinisterly, due to cyber warfare and they have suggested that citizens prepare emergency packs including – yes you guessed it – cash.

What Sweden and indeed most societies that are going quickly cashless demonstrate, is that the adoption is people-led – grassroots up not bank or government down. People like using apps for their convenience and if spending money was easy, perhaps too easy, with a Debit or Credit Card – then waving your phone at a terminal doesn’t seem like spending money at all – at least until the bill arrives…
One of the things that accelerates the adoption of whatever form of cashless purchase, is when the associated charges are reduced to the point where small traders, busses and toilet payments, all small, become viable. But there is a downside when, as in Sweden, even banks no longer want to handle cash either in or out, and the number of branch closures increases. This is also due to online banking, but again, the rural, elderly, internet poor and disadvantaged suffer first and most.

Another reason often put forward by those who wish to encourage the race towards cashless, is the potential reduction in crime – no bank robberies, no safes necessary, no pilfering of cash by staff, no money laundering. However criminality rarely goes away – it just shifts to new opportunities so cybercrime includes identity theft, new forms of fraud based around digital payment methods. Like the fight between humans and viruses, each side tries to stay ahead. For example, a new generation of payment cards will incorporate ultra-thin fingerprint readers which means my partner and I will have to stop paying with whichever card is appropriate to our budgetary arrangements. Once again, poor and older people often use cash to physically allocate spending – the rent jar, the shopping jar etc. and these people are the least likely to have time, means, understanding or inclination to use those natty apps offered by banks to assist you to manage your expenses…

Other aspects of crime might be that those who deal outside the law such as drug dealers can hardly use digital payment systems because they leave a trail (though not a paper trail!) and whilst some might cite this as a way of squeezing such activities out of existence, it would more likely create alternative illegal currencies or barter systems. Even the Bitcoin, a virtual coinage much touted as being impregnably secure, based as it is on blockchain technology, turned out to be hackable if criminals could muster sufficient encryption busting computer power. Interestingly, the method for tracking down these robberies was to trace the extreme power consumption required by such computing power.

Another huge area in the debate over the pro’s and cons of cashless is the aspect of control. There are no bank charges for keeping your money under the mattress and at the other end of the scale, once you are totally digital banked, you are at the mercy of bank charges, interest rate changes – once there is no physical cash, the banks don’t need to work so hard to incentivize you to choose their bank to keep it in. Furthermore, it is easier for the government to keep track of citizen spending and indeed the citizen themselves with digital. China’s government are rumoured to be entering the market, currently dominated by two large phone payment apps, with their own offering and where will citizens hide from the police or the taxman then? Of course, the answer given to that one, is if you have nothing to hide…

So. the current virus crisis might push a few more people to finally adopt payment by card and contactless but as a society, we perhaps need to question our unconscious slide towards cashless, be it for fear of solar storms, cyber crime or overweaning government control. Remember, its not for nothing that the rich have always placed their trust in gold and land…

We Find Ourselves in Strange Times…

humanist55
With the Covid 19 Corona Virus filling the airwaves, the over-the-garden-fence the Messenger, WhatsApp and Zoom conversations and yes Old School Texts and Phone calls, the virus thrusting change upon us faster than we could imagine, is it too early to look to the future beyond the outbreak and ask what might be in store for us?

I have not posted here since 2013 when during the early years in this house in Yorkshire, without friends hereabouts, I had continued to develop online exchanges and a new type of friendship. Mo’time, my first serious blog platform, came and went with a change of ownership but having tried a few possible alternatives, some of us found our way onto Facebook where a half dozen of us still hang out and observe each other’s lives from afar. At least one I met in person, in the real world and though there are others I would like to meet, for the moment, the virus has stopped all real-world meetings. But there is an upside, the deaths of thousands notwithstanding, in our social isolation, we have time to think, to draw breath and to reach out to old friends across the void, to finish old projects and begin new ones, rediscover what makes us who we are and where, singularly and collectively, we might head from here.

One thing I never embraced ever since I first encountered it in 2011, is Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, it is a valuable tool if you want to get early warning of an earthquake (Google indexes Twitter in real-time thus picking up important news wherever it might be trending) but the idea of size limited communications just does not appeal to me and it is no surprise that it has become the favourite mouthpiece of the world’s most vacuous ranter. Complex truths need more nuanced treatment, space to grow, so for me, the blog form is the one and it feels good to be back, writing again, thinking on the hoof and in between posts, chewing the cud. (Don’t know where the sudden bovine imagery came from – I’ll be referring to the milk of human kindness next!)

I will let some old friends know and hopefully make some new ones along the way and I will reference things I find too, starting with this article I found on Flipboard https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/wxekvw/the-world-after-coronavirus-healthcare-labor-climate-internet which examines just some of the questions about the future we can begin to wonder about, and although it is written from an American viewpoint, there is much that applies to the rest of our global village…