Life Under Lockdown (III)

Another week trapped in glorious quarantine. Yay !

All remains quiet on the eastern front. Working from home is much like working from work, except more comfy but with fewer people to talk to. The shops remain open and fully stocked. The wi-fi is working and Netflix continues to delivery reliably excellent picture quality. All is well with the world, except that of of course it isn't, but in my little world things are positively lovely. Would it be nice to go outside more often ? Sure. Does it have me clutching at the walls ? No.

To be fair, I'm probably in the extreme tail end of the Gaussian when it comes to enduring isolation. I'm in a country where no-one is panic buying anything, I have a job for which funding was already pre-allocated, I live with my girlfriend and tiny fluffy dog, and I a large chunk of my life is spent behind a screen anyway. Would I prefer it if I was back home in Cardiff ? No, because Britain is handling the supply of goods with the skill of a toddler who's decided to jam crayons up their nose. I'd prefer it everyone I knew there was trapped over here instead though.

In work we've resorted to holding out regular coffee mornings via Skype, which has proved a big success. This helps a lot when you're not on Facebook. We've even started doing remote board games, which was a lot of fun too.

That aside, I tend to scan through my social media feeds pretty quickly these, since they've become monotopics, diatribes of cynical invective. They can summarised thus : coronavirus is awful and most countries are doing a shitty job to tackle it, especially the US. There, we're done. I just don't know what more we're supposed to do with that information. I certainly don't need to read this in two hundred elaborate, thorough and thoroughly inventive ways every single day. It's not helpful.

What I am starting to wonder more and more about is when the Czech Republic's restrictions will start to have a measurable impact. Measures started about two or three weeks ago, when the case numbers were still very low. The Czech government is predicting 3,000 cases by the end of the month, eventually reaching a maximum of 15,000. Currently the number of cases continues to rise, but so does the testing rate (which is now as high per capita as in South Korea). The Wikipedia page is pretty comprehensive and updated daily; this site is better for visuals as it lets you highlight countries more easily than most other graphing pages, this one plots the reproduction number.

Last week I said I guessed we'd have to wait two or three weeks more to see any sign of an improvement, if there was one. Still, I admit to a twinge of disappointment that there's no indication of that yet. With all the social distancing, the face masks, the disposable gloves in supermarkets, the ban on groups larger than two, it seem impossible to believe that it won't. Maybe it won't all suddenly come to a screeching halt, but it's got to make some difference, right ? We'll have to continue to wait and see, I guess.


I'm still dividing my work and leisure time more or less as a did before, which is made easier by Shirley having to work to a schedule. But this week I indulged myself by exploring one of those grey areas between science and outreach : developing interactive content. I discovered that the Blend4Web plugin is a really easy way to make Blender files run in web browsers with minimal effort, so that demanded some attention. The first "complete" project, an interactive model of the Virgo cluster, can be found here, and you can also see the Milky Way's hydrogen disc here (with full technical write-up here, public outreach version to follow). Oddly, both of these seem to meet with high approval to anyone I show them to, but have thus far fallen utterly flat on social media. Well, pish, I say : I maintain that if seeing 774 galaxies in your web browser isn't your cup of tea, you must be a weird individual indeed.

With any luck, this might re-open the long hoped-for prospect of an interactive Arecibo. Next week's task will be to start looking in to how to make a first person camera, and see if the complexity of the mesh is too much to expect for a browser to handle.