English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

A: What is the origin of "Indian Summer" and is it offensive?

0

Actually, every REAL Native Of Turtle Island knows Indian Summer meant the "Americans" actually hunted Indians.(Indians are people of color thank you. Not wannabes) We know our history like any other Nationality. During the fall is when most Natives were killed, (Black Kettle comes to mind) or m...

user4550

Why bother with origin stories, these people...just din them into your heads!

A: Help the helpless with how-to-ask tag tips

12:28 AM

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Shucks, this is a pretty popular feature-request... Let's give it a try & see if it's more helpful than annoying: This'll pop up every time someone tries to ask a question with sql. It's not context-sensitive - if they've already included everything in that list, they'll still get the popup. B...

> If we don't hate ourselves after a few weeks of this, . . .

heh

12

A: What should be used in place of "Too Minor?"

Ok, there's a new reject reason for this specific case: This is not a replacement for "too minor", but it does replace one of the things folks were using it for (even though it wasn't strictly appropriate there either): edits that don't make any positive changes to the post.

I don’t remember the one he cites about conflicting with author’s intent. That’s interesting.

52

Q: Markdown change: Intra-word emphasis now works

There are tons of questions I could maybe post this as an answer to, but before choosing the best one, I'll just post this as an announcement question that can be linked elsewhere. The short story From now on, intra-word emphasis is possible in our Markdown version. That means you can now write...

12:51 AM

@tchrist All the answers there seem to be 'mansplaining' or "I don't see how anybody could take offense"

> We know our history like any other Nationality.

So, you believe the various lies and myths that make your nation better than all the others?

I've never heard that before (about the time for killing). Or 'Turtle Island' either. But it seems to be substantiated (if by 'we', it means only Northeast North America).

@Mitch Is it? I assumed all of it was just a rant. Turtle island?

Huh, apparently so.

1:09 AM

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者: You gotta try the Bruichladdich Octomore. I got some for me b'day and it's da bomb.

@Robusto It must have cost a bomb too.

Not bad. About twice the price of a good scotch. And worth it.

I prefer water to alcohol, cheaper and tastes better, lol.

I am reminded of the old W. C. Fields remark on the subject: "We survived for days on nothing but food and water."

I think there was a woman who survived on her urine when she was trapped in a boat for days.

1:13 AM

Why do you insist on running the conversation into the ground?

It's just free association, my favourite tool.

So we're paying a price for your freedom, is that it?

OK, we will go back to alcohol now. The cycle is complete.

I remember the first time I consumed alcohol. I drank half a bottle of wine at one shot. Over a few minutes though.

After that, it seemed that my voice dropped an octave.

@Robusto That does sound interesting. I've tried the port charlotte one but the octomere is intriguing.

I wasn't too impressed by the Port Charlotte. Too rough, not full enough. Is the octomere good then?

It's amazing. And it's a blended scotch.

1:18 AM

@Robusto What?

All the Bruichladdichs are blends.

@Robusto Not the Port Charlotte I think. Hang on, let me check.

"It's like Laphroaig suddenly got civilized. The peat is actually quite tasty. A happy marriage of island and highland." (How I described it to someone.)

@terdon Port Charlotte is single malt. And inferior to the Octomore.

@Robusto Yes, I'm having one now. But they're also Bruichladdich.

Yes, I concede the point.

1:21 AM

I didn't know the main Bruichladdich line were all blends though. I've never been much of a fan, perhaps that's why.

I should have said all the Bruichladdichs I've tasted were blends.

@Robusto I always assumed the ones I tasted were single malts but I've really tasted very few. I like the peaty stuff so the one distillery on Islay that doesn't do peaty never had much of a draw for me.

I will have to try this Octomere thing.

You should.

I might go for the 9€ sample first though.

Couldn't hurt.

1:25 AM

Otherwise, I'll go for one of the Weemys that I haven't tasted.

And they're actually cheaper oddly enough!

masterofmalt.com/search/weemys/…

@terdon It's totally an angry rant, but it seems written by someone who may very well be native American. Or they could be trolling. Either way it's not an answer.

@Mitch Either way, they're trolling. As far as I can tell, being offended by that is just silly. American Indians have a metric crapton of excellent reasons to be angry and offended but that ain't one of them.

3

I didn’t understand the colored people thing. Some riff on that old “What Color Is God’s Skin?” tune?

@tchrist Not colored, of color. Please.

@terdon I refuse.

Colorized.

Colorific.

Chromatically challenged.

1:33 AM

Do we have a question on the huge variety of terms to describe the various shades of black that used to be in vogue? Things like octoroon, quadroon, colored etc?

I read a (very nice) novel based in N. Orleans of the 1800s and the vocabulary was quite fascinatingly exact.

I'd had no idea before reading the book.

Peuple of chaleur, normally purple.

Great, I just searched the site for octoroon and misspelled it as octorron. Found one hit for the latter, fixed the spelling and got no hits. I figure, fine, I'll go correct whichever idiot misspelled it and yay! It was my own answer.

barracoon, coquetoon, doubloon, ducatoon, macaroon, musketoon, puftaloon, quintroon, rigadoon, saskatoon, scandaroon, shagroon, terceroon, tosheroon.

Brigadoon.

beat me too it.

I would like to see the mathematics behind quintroons and terceroons.

Dried prunes.

1:39 AM

I wonder if people really knew and distinguished those, or if they were an invented taxonomy by someone overly... concerned.

@tchrist Lornadoons

@Mitch Apparently, they were. At least in that particular society, the amount of black ancestry was directly related to your social status.

Picayunes

@terdon Inversely related.

as a teenager I assumed octoroon was a type of snack and melungeon was a type of fish

I suppose I ate a lot as a teenager.

quintroon /ˈkwɪntruːn/. rare.

Also quinteron, -oon.

Etymology: ad. Sp. quinteron, f. quinto fifth.

One who is fifth in descent from a Negro (cf. quadroon 1 b), and has one-sixteenth of Negro blood.

1797 Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3) XII. 796 note, ― The children of a white and quinteroon consider themselves as free from all taint of the negro race.
1835 D. Booth Anal. Dict. 324 ― ‘The child of a Quintroon by a white father is free by law.’ Such was recently the West-Indian slave-code.
1878 Bartley tr. Topinard’s Anthrop. ii. vii. 374 ― The first are called mulattoes,··the fourth, quintroons.

1:42 AM

Hello.

But would everyday people really think 'Gosh, if only my great grand pappy's uncle had been a mulatto, I coulda been a terceroon instead of just high yaller.'

@Mitch Well, in a small society where your parentage is known and that difference actually changes the way you're treated, I expect that yes, they did.

Hi @Cerb

Hi!

@terdon Your parentage can still be known in a larger society, as long as some people know you and your background?

I guess this makes O’Bama a doubloon.

@Cerberus Of course, but it is far likelier to be known to everyone in a small one.

1:46 AM

Only your mother is certain.

@tchrist Thanks.

Others are not so lucky :)

Has anyone read the Patternist series by Octavia E. Butler?

No. Thought about it.

@terdon who actually knows their parentage past maybe great grandparents, except for the European royal family, West African villages with their griots singing everybody's life history, and Mormon geneology freaks?

@tchrist I found Wild Seed to be a very enjoyable read. I only just found out it's part of a series and am wondering which order I should read the rest in.

So a quadroon has 1/4th African ancestry, an Octeroon has 1/8th, but a Quintroon has 1/16th? No wonder the South lost the war.

1:48 AM

Our presidents seem to be some strange progression: dubyu, doubloon, ... What’s next?

@Mitch Not I.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 You left out terceroon.

terceroon /tɝːsəˈruːn/. rare.

Also 8–9 terceron, 9 tierceroon.

Etymology: a. Sp. *terceron, f. tercero a third person, f. tercio third: cf. cuarteron, quinteron.

The offspring of a white person and a mulatto, being third in descent from a Negro; = quadroon 1 a: see note there. (Distinguished from quadroon 1 b.)

1760–72 tr. Juan & Ulloa’s Voy. (ed. 3) I. 29 ― The Tercerones, produced from a White and a Mulatto, with some approximation to the former, but not so near as to obliterate their origin.

@tchrist dachshund?

@terdon Or...is it just likely that you are known by the people you know, wherever you live? Do people in small villages know more people?

@tchrist According to wikipedia, terceroon means the same as octeroon

1:50 AM

@Cerberus Not more people, they just know everyone in the village.

quadroon /kwəˈdruːn/.

Forms: ɑ. 8 quarteron, (9 -oon), quatron, 8–9 -eron, 9 -roon. β. 8 quaderoon, 9 quadroon.

Etymology: ad. Sp. cuarteron (hence Fr. quarteron), f. cuarto fourth, quarter; the mod. form may be due to assoc. with other words in quadr-.

1. a. One who is the offspring of a white person and a mulatto; one who has a quarter of Negro blood. b. rarely. One who is fourth in descent from a Negro, one of the parents in each generation being white.
In early Sp. use chiefly applied to the offspring of a white and a mestizo, or half-breed Indian. When it is used to denote one who …

and according to OED it means the same as quadroon. sheesh.

@Mitch Umm how do you mean? Many people know their ancestors centuries back.

@tchrist I so wanted it to be a third. I'm trying to figure out the math now.

@terdon Perhaps it is just that you are less likely to encounter someone who doesn't know you in a village.

1:51 AM

It used to be for one quarter red and three quarters white.

And, if you live in a city, you are more likely to have many people who know you live farther away.

@Cerberus many don't.

@Cerberus what families are so disciplined? Those with money.

@tchrist How about someone who is 1/8 or 1/16 Asian?

@Cerberus They assume, not necessarily know.

1:52 AM

@tchrist what if an octoroon and a quadroon have a kid? 3/8ths, right?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Most people I know do at least know more than a century.

@Mitch Nah, it is a very popular hobby among the people.

@Cerberus Now you’ve gone and made me wonder: did the yellow Chinese who worked on the famed transcontinental railroad mate with the red Indians, and if so, what happened to their orange offspring?

@Cerberus Most of these are loanwords from Spanish; I doubt there were many Asians in that era

@Cerberus that's up to great grandparents (which I conceded).

@Cerberus More than a century, that's fairly easy. "centuries", though?

1:53 AM

@terdon Not sure what you mean, but many people do know.

Maybe what tchrist said, only the mom knows.

@tchrist Umm I don't know, what railroad? I was rather thinking of my Indonesian ancestress.

First Transcontinental Railroad

The First Transcontinental Railroad (known originally as the "Pacific Railroad" and later as the "Overland Route") was a 1,907-mile (3,069 km) contiguous railroad line constructed between 1863 and 1869 across the western United States to connect the Pacific coast at San Francisco Bay with the existing Eastern U.S. rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the Missouri River. The rail line was built by three private companies: the original Western Pacific Railroad Company between Oakland and Sacramento, California (132 miles (212 km)), the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California eastward from...

@choster There have always been many millions of Asians!

> The Central Pacific, facing a semi-skilled labor shortage, relied on some black employees[12] escaping the slavery and turmoil of the American Civil War and many emigrant Chinese manual laborers for construction.

1:54 AM

@Mitch Great-grandparents is less than a century...

> Most of the black and white workers were paid $30.00/month and provided food and lodging. Higher skilled and supervisory jobs paid more. Most Chinese were initially paid $31.00/month and provided lodging. They bought and cooked their own food—just as they desired. In 1867 this was raised to $35.00/month after a strike.

I know tons of people who know their ancestors centuries back, many of them not high born.

@Cerberus Not in the Spanish Western Hemispheric racial caste system

@Cerberus depends on how late they start a family. ~25 years per generation

@tchrist Considering that the Chinese were essentially kicked out of America, any kids that got left behind probably were few enough that they didn't need special words to describe them.

1:56 AM

@tchrist Ohh...but why "the first"? I'm sure you could already travel by train from, say, Istanbul to Paris by then?

Or couldn't you?

@Cerberus wrong continent

@choster What's that?

@choster ...but elsewhere!

@Mitch That's three generations back, so 75 years?

I suppose it depends on how you count...

> Upon the completion of their work on the CPRR's portion of the Pacific Railroad, many Chinese workers moved on to other railroad construction jobs including with the Central and Southern Pacific. Of those that left the company's employ, some returned to their families in China with their savings, while others sent to China for wives and settled in various western communities as miners, laundrymen, and restaurateurs. Some returned with their families and settled into "China towns" in various cities. The majority who remained in the United States, however, returned to and settled in the San…

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Right continent!

1:58 AM

@terdon The Spanish invented terms for various racial mixes, as there was a great deal of mixing. The English and Dutch systems banned miscegenation

Hey, I am living proof of the contrary!

How very white of them.

Or perhaps it was shall we say not encouraged but happened anyway...

@Cerberus A train from Istanbul to Paris doesn't cross the North American continent. And it arguably doesn't cross the Eurasian continent either.

@Cerberus and the separation. I'm thinking of myself where my grandparents were in their sixties when I was born, and one more generation is close to a hundred.

1:59 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It counts as transcontinental.

And neither does it cross the New World continent.

@choster So did the American one, I thought, but it happened anyway.

@Cerberus What continent?

@Cerberus Naturally. Thomas Jefferson could tell you.

@Cerberus Also, nothing outside of the USA counts as a first anything, even if it pre-dates the American first.

@Cerberus there should be one.

2:00 AM

@Mitch I'm not sure what you mean...

one that goes across the Bering Strait.

Uhoh.

@choster Hmm what?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Haha, oh, is that it, then...

@Mitch There probably is one now.

@Cerberus monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/…

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Why would you say that? The Americans did it first anyway.

2:01 AM

> The first Eurasian transcontinental railroad was the Trans-Siberian railway (with connecting lines in Europe), completed in 1905 which connects Moscow with Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. There are two connections from this line to China. It is the world's longest rail line at 9,289 km (5,772 mi) long.

@Cerberus Well, it fills in the missing link to allow for rail travel from one side of the continent to another.

@choster Umm what is that about?

@Mitch Sure, sure. They always do it first.

@Cerberus NM, must have crossed threads some ways back

I know the name Thomas Jefferson. I think he was an American founding father? Was he an early president?

Oh haha.

2:02 AM

> A second rail line connects Istanbul in Turkey with China via Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This route imposes a break of gauge at the Iranian border with Turkmenistan and at the Chinese border. En route there is a train ferry in eastern Turkey across Lake Van.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But taking the short side is cheating! Anyone can do that.

Eurasian Land Bridge

The Eurasian Land Bridge, sometimes called the New Silk Road, is the rail transport route for moving freight and passengers overland from Pacific seaports in the Russian Far East and China to seaports in Europe. The route, a transcontinental railroad and rail land bridge, currently comprises the Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs through Russia and is sometimes called the Northern East-West Corridor, and the New Eurasian Land Bridge or Second Eurasian Continental Bridge, running through China and Kazakhstan. As of November 2007, about 1% of the $600 billion in goods shipped from Asia to Europe...

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 first in space. sputnik doesn't count. first person in space. Gagarin doesn't count. first woman in space. wow...between Tereshkova and Sally Ride was 20 years.

Silly ships that need a bridge to get across the land.

First in Flight.

> In April 2007 the Russian government announced that it was considering building a double track broad gauge rail tunnel under the Bering Strait between Chukotka and Alaska. The tunnel, as projected, would be 60 miles (100 km) long and would include oil and gas pipelines, fiber optic cables and power lines.[63] The tunnel project was estimated to cost $65 billion and take 15–20 years to build.

Oh, only 65 billion.

I wonder whether that would be worth it economically.

Who wants to go from Alaska to the far eastnern shores of Russia?

Both areas are thinly populated.

2:08 AM

Perhaps they wish to go the other way.

> The islands are sometimes called Tomorrow Island (Big Diomede) and Yesterday Isle (Little Diomede) because they are separated by the International Date Line, thus Big Diomede is 21 hours ahead of Little Diomede, not 23 hours (a common misconception), due to locally-defined time zones.

One way makes as little sense as th'other...

@Cerberus Tourists obviously. For the weather.

> During winter, an ice bridge usually spans the distance between these two islands; therefore during such times it is possible to walk between the United States and Russia.

@terdon Oh, of course, why didn't I think of that. Sunshine and culture.

The Beirut of the north!

There’s a GMT+14 timezone. You would think that GMT±12 would suffice.

2:13 AM

@tchrist well, if you're in GMT+12, and you want to do DST, you'd need at least GMT+13, right?

That means that an SE “day” is 40 hours long.

> The IDL and the moving point of midnight separate the two calendar days that are current somewhere on Earth. However, during a two-hour period between 10:00 and 11:59 (UTC) each day, three different calendar days are in use.

Interface Definition Language

Haha.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 But what do you need the +14 for?

@Cerberus Not sure.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Apparently.

> At New Year, the first places to see daylight are the South Pole and McMurdo Station in Antarctica, which both experience midnight sun. Both use UTC+13 as daylight saving time.

2:17 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Perhaps it is just a statement by Canada, look how large we are!

@Cerberus Mercator Projection.

I know.

@Cerberus Pretty sure we don't use GMT+13/14 or even GMT -12.

I believe this one is to scale, with respect to the areas of the continents.

Human Projection.

2:19 AM

Canada's timezones are GMT-3.5, GMT-4, GMT-5, GMT-6, GMT-7, GMT-8, GMT-9

A lot.

oops, no GMT-9

There used to be Yukon time, but I guess no longer.

America’s timezones are:

Samoa Time Zone (UTC-11:00),
Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone (UTC-10:00),
Alaska Time Zone (UTC-09:00),
Pacific Time Zone (UTC-08:00),
Mountain Time Zone (UTC-07:00),
Central Time Zone (UTC-06:00),
Eastern Time Zone (UTC-05:00),
Atlantic Time Zone (UTC-04:00),
Chamorro Time Zone (UTC+10:00)

Oops I posted the wrong map.

> There are nine time zones in Russia, which currently observe times ranging from UTC+03:00 to UTC+12:00. UTC+05:00 is not used.

2:23 AM

@tchrist What do you have in Atlantic Time Zone? besides Eastern Daylight time

Not used?!

Strange that the US and Russia would have the same number. I guess it's Mercator's fault.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Huh? Atlantic Time is not Eastern Daylight, how silly!

@tchrist um. Atlantic Standard Time and Eastern Daylight time are the same.

Same GMT offset, I mean.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That’s a different thing.

2:24 AM

@tchrist Wake Island Time Zone (UTC+12) doesn't count as American?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 A causa de unas cuantas islas nuestras como las Vírgenes y Puerto Rico además.

You cannot call Eastern Daylight “Atlantic Time”. That’s just wrong.

@Cerberus they forgot how the Polynesians got to Madagascar

So it seems Yukon standard time has been dead longer than I've been alive, which makes me wonder why I thought it was a thing.

Huh:

> France uses 12 different time zones, the most of any country in the world.

@Mitch Ohh yes, and to Somalia. I once read they didn't even stop in India, they sailed right on.

@terdon Pourquoi huh?

2:28 AM

@Cerberus What the hell is Noah’s Flood Zone?

@Cerberus what's with the 'Noah flood zone'? That seems to put the whole map in question.

The French like to be the best of everyone, and they have many colonies.

Jinx!!

Beacher.

@Mitch Nonsense, it is entirely reliable.

The other map somehow forgot to include Biblical events.

2:31 AM

Antediluvially.

Never mind

Thousand years ... before?

Probably thousands of years.

I don't know before or after what.

Religious doctrine does not interest me.

Yeah, looked it up, it's a thousand years.

@Cerberus The flood. Obviously.

It's K years ago. Hence the a.

Oh.

I thought a was short for years.

2:35 AM

what religious doctrine simultaneously believes in Noah's flood AND a human population older than 10,000 years?

@tchrist Umm. And you'd be right too. Sorry, I was thinking of Mya.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 The little religion that could?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Everything about religion is arbitrary. It is useless to try and make sense of it.

@Cerberus What? No. There is a system to it. There is usually some logic. The logic is based on false underlying ideas and facts, but there is still some reason.

No branch of Christianity that I'm aware of treats Noah's Flood as a factual event except the strict creationists

And they calculate the date of the creation in Genesis to be 6000 to 10,000 years ago

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It is defective and not worthy of your consideration.

@Cerberus It is still a curiosity.

Where did you find that map?

2:52 AM

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 What? It's 5775.

@Mitch He’ll never leave you alone, you know. GDF hypocrite.

Check your inbox.

This is the bounty you’ve won.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's too random for me to be of much interest.

How come its randomness makes you uninteresting?

I Googled images for "human migration".

google.com/…

@Cerberus Considering how much Creationism is poisoning American society, and creeping into other countries such as the UK and Canada, it interests me to know about what the threats are.

3:03 AM

@tchrist Hah, that's a nice ambiguity.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 That is a fair point. But are the crazies really infecting Canada?

At least in England, they do not stand a chance...

@Cerberus Let's say, the local crazies are watching the success and failures of the US crazies and copying the winning tactics.

But surely they are a tiny group, and irreligion is increasing, right?

That doesn't mean the path towards pan-atheism is smooth. There are bumps on the road.

So that map comes from a blog of a very confused person who doesn't appear to represent any kind of Christian sect.

Sure, it is always good to be vigilant.

Seth

3:34 AM

Isn't there a word for when a sentence repeats the same thing twice, but differently? For e.g. I just found myself about to write something like "overly broad and under specific". I seem to recollect there was a name/word for this, but cannot remember for sure..

3:44 AM

@Seth It is a kind of tautology.

But perhaps you mean something more specific.

Seth

Tautology works, although if there is something more specific I wouldn't mind knowing :)

@Seth Pleonasm.

> the use of more words than are necessary to express an idea; redundancy.

Seth

Ooh interesting. Thanks @terdon

4:00 AM

@Seth You're welcome.

4:30 AM

@ivanhoescott That’s a meta-question and does not belong here in comments. Therefore, I will not answer it here. I will, however, formally request that you stop stalking me and nitpicking at anybody who ever disagrees with you. Please find some other side to help-vampire and bicker with. Constantly calling people on the carpet for anonymous votes or, if you can figure out who it is, anything else, is both incredibly annoying and counter to the way things are done here. If you do not like the way we do things, there are other places you can go. — tchrist 2 mins ago

I’ve had enough of this asshole.

I will not publicly expose myself to his assholeness again.

No more votes where he can see my name.

Let the mods handle him pal.

I don’t know how they can/could.

He’s a pest, sure, but I don’t see anything for a moderator to do here. It is a community thing.

They'll look for a way :-)

It could be just me.

Don't let it bother you.

Let it go for now

4:37 AM

I let Mitch talk me into resurrecting my lighting rod post, and I wish I had not.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

I want no revenge.

Honestly.

I just don’t want the attention.

Ok, just forget about it.

I’ll try. I certainly will never answer him again.

Live and learn

4:42 AM

I’m always falling for trolls.

I hate it.

It takes a lot of practice ;-)

5:25 AM

I was very sad to see the Economist use the words exponential or exponentially something like 7 times in this week’s issue.

But I was not sad because they were using them wrong.

I was sad because they were using them right: it’s in their three articles on the Ebola catastrophe.

economist.com/news/international/…

That’s just one of them.

> This is the terrifying thing about exponential growth as applied to disease: what is happening now, and what happens next, is always as bad as the sum of everything that has happened to date.

> While doubtless imperfect, plausible model-based extrapolations such as a recent one from America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest, in the absence of intervention, that there could be 1.4m cases in west Africa in the next three months.

With a 70% mortality rate.

And still doubling.

The article paints an extremely grim forecast. There are a whole lot of if's for how to contain this, but I can get the idea that the editors don’t hold much hope that we will even come close to doing so.

And therefore, the future is unknown but tragic.

It isn’t a simple mathematical function, either. It is not always well-behaved.

Indeed.

Basic reproduction number

The online article has inferior typography. What looks like Ro is actually 𝑅₀.

Not that that looks so nice here, either.

> Trying to be precise about how bad things could get, absent that effort, is not possible. This is not just because the actual number of cases is not well known. The rate at which cases give rise to subsequent cases, which epidemiologists call Rο, is the key variable. For easily transmitted diseases Rο can be high; for measles it is 18.

> For a disease like Ebola, much harder to catch, it is lower: estimates of Rο in different parts of the outbreak range from 1.5 to 2.2. Any Rο above 1 is bad news, though, and seemingly small differences in Rο can matter a lot. An Rο of 2.2 may sound not much bigger than an Rο of 1.5, but it means numbers will double twice as fast.

> And Rο is not a constant. It depends both on the biology of the virus, the setting of its spread (city or country, slum or suburb) and the behaviour of the people among whom it is spreading. Over the course of the crisis the second two factors are bound to change as the virus moves to different places and as people start to adapt.

> Given high rates of mutation, which bring with them the possibility of evolutionary change, it is possible that the first could change, too. Peter Piot, one of the researchers who first identified the Ebola virus in 1976, stresses that the course of an outbreak does not always follow smooth curves; it can stutter and flare up.

1.4m cases.

In epidemiology, the basic reproduction number (sometimes called basic reproductive rate, basic reproductive ratio and denoted R0, r nought) of an infection can be thought of as the number of cases one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period, in an otherwise uninfected population. This metric is useful because it helps determine whether or not an infectious disease can spread through a population. The roots of the basic reproduction concept can be traced through the work of Alfred Lotka, Ronald Ross, and others, but its first modern application in epidemiology was by...

Think of it like a convergent or divergent series.

𝑅₀ < 1 will die out. 𝑅₀ > 1 will not.

I had no idea measles was that bad. No wonder we get vaccinated.

Hmm...interesting article, thanks.