if i could only find a way to exist as an honest statistician, right?

you know what they say...

this is better than the vox article, which says something about the vox article given the place that maclean's holds in canadian journalism, but even normalizing at 50 is pretty sketchy.

canada is the biggest country in the world. germany is roughly the size of one of the atlantic provinces. so, just in terms of the probability of getting from zero to fifty without it taking off, you could have all the way up to fifty different isolated deaths in canada before you get to an epidemic in germany.

i know you have to do the graph somehow, and this is purposefully extreme, but it gets the idea across.

to start with, if you're going to compare small countries to canada, you should begin by looking at provinces, or even regions, rather than the whole country - but that's just a start. while germany isn't much bigger than new brunswick, the population density is also astronomically higher - another incredibly important factor.

it's going to be hard to do this right until this is done, and until then the data is going to reflect the biases of the person that plotted it.

https://www.macleans.ca/society/health/coronavirus-deaths-these-charts-show-how-canada-compares-with-the-world/

so, i got the things i need done for the next roughly two weeks. i can now gorge myself and rest my weary body, after nine hours of walking and hauling around groceries.

i didn't go out on day one and buy out the store, but i've been slowly building up supplies of things over what is now two months of hermitting. yes, there's the four packages of toilet paper, but i actually would normally have two-three on hand anyways. i'm actually lower on pasta than usual; under normal circumstances, i like to have about 36 days worth in tupperware.

hey, i've been in the situation of it being the first of the month and trying to figure something out. it's easier if there's already food, so i don't fuck around when it comes to that - there's certain things i keep a surplus of, and some of it is dwindling more than i'd like. i should be ok for the rest of the month at least, before i crack and have to buy some of that cracked-out pasta, you know the kind with the weird swirls and shit, like it's trying to find an algebraic solution to your mother in law's nasty cooking, but is instead just spiraling out on means that it thought were golden, but are merely just pasty brown.

anyways.

i've now slowly squirreled away oddities such as four tubes of toothpaste, an entire fridge door worth of block cheese, three red hot sauces, three cans of coffee and who knows what else shuffled away on to the side. let us hope that this is the last nine hour day; let's hope i can just sneak out for some tomatoes, moving forward. my legs can only handle so much...

these days, though, are such total body exercises, they really are - you're walking, you're lifting, you're hauling for miles. you feel it in your calves, but this has to be hitting you everywhere. which is fine - i don't want to build muscle, but i'm happy to tone what i've got.

i need, however, to inform you that this whole "social distancing" thing is a charade. it is - it's absurd. whatever the merits of it's intentions were, what actually exists, what is really existing social distancing, is just nonsense, unfit to even display the label of whatever delusion, whatever pseudo-science, that may have birthed it.

you will begin this charade outside of the store, where people will smoke various things, while talking loudly to themselves, rarely more than a few inches from each other. if you have the audacity to inch ahead of them, they will take it as an invitation to move ahead in line, entirely oblivious as to why they're outside in the fucking first place. and, who are these people, exactly? my experience today was to be stuck in line between two absolutely hideously disgusting bearded men who were essentially transiting toilets on their faces not once but twice, none of whom seemed to understand basic personal space by somebody that was visibly disgusted by them, let alone what social distancing was or why they were outside. one of them repeatedly spat through his beard while standing in line.

under normal circumstances, i would not have gone within ten feet of these people, let alone six. but, because of the rules, i was forced against my will to stand in line with them for a period of time i would generally not have tolerated. i repeatedly felt more in danger of getting sick standing in line than i did once i was in the store, in addition to needing to suppress the need to vomit for being forced to tolerate them. yuck.

then, once you're in the store, nobody even cares anymore. people walk by each other, cough all over each other, make like bad zeppelin records and go down the wrong aisle, etc. you think you're in line for a real tight-ass establishment, but you get inside and it's like an insane class posse show.

they've got these plexi-glass windows installed to try to create a spit barrier, and it's maybe the most grounded idea i've seen yet, but it's like the cone of silence - the cashiers can't hear anything behind them, so they just poke their heads over to talk to you, as you're keying in your atm number on the device that thousands of people had already used just that day.

and, then, you're off to leave your cart with the attendant, who touches every single one of them when he sanitizes them entirely haphazardly, between smoke breaks.

a charade.

it's all it is.

get ready for this thing, canada. your puny social distancing does nothing.

don't be confused - this is what they want.

https://globalnews.ca/news/6905295/coronavirus-china-hostility-report/

you need to be looking at death rates, not case counts.

the case counts are completely worthless.

the reason that canada has fewer cases is that we're undertesting - particularly in ontario.

this is absolute nonsense.

we're about a month behind the united states in terms of the epidemic curve, and we have roughly 10% of the population. so, if we were exactly on par with the united states, we'd have something less than 7,000 deaths. there's currently around 4,000.

i would expect 20,000 deaths in canada minimum by the time this is done.

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/4/21242750/coronavirus-covid-19-united-states-canada-trump-trudeau

in the end, we might learn this is a counter-intuitive consequence of something called sudden stratospheric warming, which is at least consistent, even if the outcome is confusing.

that would be the case where it's essentially bad luck, and it may be good news in the long run.

it could be that what is happening with the polar vortex is some ramification of a changed climate interacting with an increased level of sunlight. it is possible that it's actually breaking up and we're essentially seeing chunks of it fall off.

or, this might be less unusual than we think it is.

what's clear is that it isn't entirely clear, and that there isn't any reason to think it's permanent.

so, why are we dealing with record-breaking cold in canada, when the rest of the world is dealing with extreme heat, and the hottest year on record?

it's not cold in sweden or russia. it's only cold here.

we were at the bottom of the solar cycle, which was skewing the weather. anthropogenic climate change doesn't change the solar cycle - that still happens, for better or worse. as we are getting out of that funk, we should expect these extremes to reverse and the warming to reassert itself, but this is the worst spring yet, and nobody saw that coming.

i kept saying that it looked good but it was too early and may have, in the end, jumped the gun a little.

still - why is it twenty-thirty degrees below normal here? is the pole wandering, or what?

when the solar cycle picks up, you should expect a more intense polar vortex; let's remember that the cause of the polar vortex expanding is an absence of sunlight, so it does follow that when you bring in more sunlight you should bottle it back up, which is what it looked like was happening for most of the winter. but, then, it just kind of imploded...

it's not expanding - it's even warm in nunavut. it's only cold right here.

so, did the culmination of factors kind of break it, then? like if you spin a top too fast and it runs off the axis?

if so, is that the end of our polar vortex? hmm. stay tuned...

note: it could just be bad luck.

this is weird, no doubt. everything right now is kind of weird. but, my analysis has not changed - you should continue to expect an acceleration of warming in this region as the sun comes back, even if it takes a while to kick in.

the aura has been threatening me this morning, but has not crashed my consciousness. let us hope i can exist free of it for the rest of the day.

i got the sleep i needed, and i was feeling better until a few seconds ago.

is the migraine coming back again? i dunno.

let me try to get some cleaning done in here and go from there.

actually, i'd say you're looking at at least 200,000 deaths in the united states as a best case scenario, with potentially as many as a million.

but, i don't think these hippie measures are grounded in science - that's just herd immunity.

i'm not arguing against the fascist lockdowns because i think the economy is more important than health, i'm pointing out that there's no reasonable expectation that they're going to work, and presenting you with a more realistic and, what i think is inevitable, number, instead.

we need to get away from this idea that we're in control; we're not, and, if there's anything positive that comes out of this, let us hope that it is a tendency to relinquish control more readily to science, to logic and to randomness.

maybe this will act as our collective exit from the era of classical science and into the era of modern science, where we no longer pretend we are at the top of some kind of hierarchy, or that we are here to protect the earth, as we have since the days of aristotle, but instead understand our need to see ourselves as equal with the other life forms on this planet, in a web rather than a chain, and in a relationship of mutual need rather than one of dominance or extraction. this is a myth that the science has let go of, but that the culture trails behind on, often reinforced by a religion that crowns us as special, as different.

we're not special. we're not different....

this shift in mindset away from anthropic dominance and towards a concept of ecological interdependence is necessary if we wish to survive the rest of the century. it will be resisted, but such resistance is futile; the other option is extinction.

there's a lot more people that are going to die from this, and there's nothing that can be done or could have been done or even should have been done about it.

it's too late to do the things we could have done that would have mattered.