Life Under Lockdown (VII)

Well, not really : life after lockdown would be more appropriate. Lockdown is all but over, apart from a few token measures likes pubs and bars having to close at 11pm, which eliminates nightclubs but not much else.

On many levels I'm thoroughly confused by the whole thing.

First, from a purely personal perspective, I very much prefer working from home to in the office. It's a nicer environment with less distractions. Knowing that I can work when I want is a subtle but very powerful relief form the nature of the office. It's hard to describe exactly. Certainly no-one at work is ever going to come round and check I'm actually working, but there's always the underlying expectation that I should be working. So any diversion - any at all - makes me acutely aware that I'm not working and I should be. This... discomfort is likely self-generated, but no less effective for that.

What I'm trying to get at is that in the office there's less of a sense of a choice about how and when I work, whereas from home this is done absolutely entirely because I want to*. It's subtle, but powerful - and ironically makes me more inclined to get stuff done, not less. I suppose it's an empowering sense of responsibility, if we have to resort to silly clichés... oddly, eliminating the work/life split actually gives me a much greater feeling of freedom than the daily routine of trudging to the office, feeling obligated to work, and then trudging back again. I also like the alternative branding I heard : instead of saying "working from home" we should be saying "working from anywhere".

* Or rather, it feels like this. Of course if I were to stop working, eventually people would yell at me, and finally stop paying me any money, but it doesn't feel like this.

At a simpler level the office is also full of far too many meetings, which I don't miss at all. Via Zoom, I can listen to them but get on with doing something useful without having to yawn in front of everyone. Oh, and we have a wonderful garden home office setup now, thanks to Shirley.

Based on all this, going back to the office on a daily basis has little or no appeal, and I'm glad to say that the institute is being thoroughly sensible about the whole thing. But it contributes to my confusion about whether ending the lockdown is a good or bad thing. I don't want to be trapped inside, but I also don't want to go back to the daily grind. I've been in a few times, and the once-routine half-hour trip feels like such a pointless burden. It's weird. I do actually like spending time with my colleagues (otherwise I wouldn't have been here for going-on seven years !) so this is doubly confusing.

It definitely didn't help that the observations I had to do were starting earlier and earlier. 8am is no problem, but even though I generally wake up early, starting at 7am seemed to breach some critical threshold and made me feel quite zombified. Perhaps it's the total lack of morning me-time. Fortunately, Robert's taken these over from California, so that's made things at lot easier.

But it's on the virus front that I'm really perplexed. Here's the latest trend :

Cases stopped growing exponentially roughly around day 14 and new cases peaked at day 21. Since then they've declined and flattened*, being pretty stable for the last month. What I'm puzzled about is why. Restrictions have been eased gradually since early April, and there's not much indication of any major track-and-trace system to replace it. The weather hasn't changed. Testing rates haven't fallen. The streets and the parks have felt close to normal for some weeks now, and no-one takes social distancing the slightest bit seriously except in supermarket queues (and even there that's becoming less rigorous). So what's keeping the case numbers so low ? Why aren't they growing as rapidly as they did during the early phase of the outbreak ? Is this a false dawn in the eye of a hurricane, or has the virus just given up ?

* A bit like the Roman Empire but with less Visigoths.

The only major difference is the lack of tourists. Is that enough, or is something else going on ? Is there a higher level of natural immunity/resistance to infection than previously supposed ? Was the previous rapid rise more due to discovering existing cases than a reflection of the actual infection spread, implying the infection rate is lower than feared ? I haven't got a clue, and it's all very strange. Speculation is welcome. It increasingly feels like there might be something to the claim that the virus follows a natural progression regardless of lockdown policies, which doesn't make a lot of sense, but there we go. I fully get that in this realm of small numbers, the statistics will be dominated by local clusters (such as an infection in a coal mine recently), but it's not at all obvious to me what's preventing it from having another general community spread.

In short, since the infected population seems to be only a few percent at best, I don't understand why things are any less dangerous now than they were two months ago. 

As for life in general, all continues well. I've finally reached a stage in the coding of FRELLED where I've starting learning how to write the GUI. Not all of the core code is done, but a great part of it is - including a much more robust axis system that'll make it far better for dealing with cubes of any frequency and spatial size. Learning how to setup a GUI in Blender 2.7 has a much steeper learning curve than in 2.4, but it's also far more powerful. The trouble is the documentation is pretty bad, emphasising thoroughness instead of being pedagogical. So if you want an example code to do something simple like create a drop-down menu, you find it hidden in a code that can dynamically update said menu and show little preview icons of live materials. It's very hard to disentangle the relevant parts from the mass of unnecessary bells-and-whistles, so I'll be posting code to help clear stuff up for people.

We've also been out and about a bit, but no major social activities yet. We took Lu to the garden centre...

... and to the zoo. I'm convinced the new puppy should be called Shaka, so we can yell "Shaka Lulu !", but we'll see. Anyway, Lulu was almost attacked by a jagurundi, who did not like her one bit (Lu was fairly indifferent to the experience) :

... and an Amur leopard cat. Despite not being much bigger than a domestic cat, this guy clearly saw Lu as prey. Lu was not impressed by this.

Also they had adorable baby elephants and a Przewalski foal. You can't really go wrong with the zoo. Visitor numbers are currently limited and the indoor exhibits are all closed, but this doesn't really diminish it much.

What else ? I've been somewhat obsessively playing Rome 2 Total War, which will get its own post soon, while Shirley binges the heck out of Supernatural. I also bought the complete box set of Stargate SG1. And I'm referring a paper. All in all, for my part I have nothing to complain about in this new normal.