@Robusto a couple days someone on MuseScore posted "don't judge me, this is not my theory, I'm just passing it on: what if the Corona virus was invented by the government to see how much control they have over you".
Meaning to say, these people are incurious even to the fact that there is more than one country in the world. They think there is "the" government. Of "the" country.
I commented as much, adding that if "the" government invented the virus, how come they're failing so hard at fighting it. In an election year, no less.
BTW quiz time. How many of you Murkins have lived through the last toilet-paper crisis? Ca. 1973. When Johnny Carson made that stupid joke that caused a nationwide shortage of toilet paper that took two years to fully recover from.
The northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) is the only mockingbird commonly found in North America. This bird is mainly a permanent resident, but northern birds may move south during harsh weather. This species has rarely been observed in Europe.
This species was first described by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturæ in 1758 as Turdus polyglottos. The northern mockingbird is known for its mimicking ability, as reflected by the meaning of its scientific name, "many-tongued mimic". The northern mockingbird has gray to brown upper feathers and a paler belly. Its tail and wings have white patches which...
Go down to the audio, and I'll be damned if the text of the song ain't in Russian.
@Robusto You want a ten-day course of (=brand-name Augmentin with) 850mg amoxicillin combined with 125mg clavulanate, NOT just the normal seven-day course of 500mg amoxicillin. That's because ENT stuff digs in too deep.
Is this sentence correct? <<Then, as Mary starts daydreaming about what to do with Tom’s heritage considering that her future husband would be the heir, Edward feels disgusted because of her behavior and he decides to not marry her anymore>>
"Here is why" or "this is why"? Are they the same?
@Curio You shouldn't use 'the' for any of them. They are all abstract nouns.
> "The main themes in the film are the concept of love, marriage, family and morality"
If you use 'the' for any of them, then that refers to a specific marriage. Then You'd be talking about "the concept of the morality" which is incongruous. Which morality? And the concept of that particular one? Sounds weird.
@Cerberus The climate girl? Is that like Grammar Girl? Tank Girl? Girls Gone Wild On Florida Beaches Then Got Coughed On?
> The first formal process for curbing the spread of infection by detaining travelers from an affected region until their health was proved was instituted in what is now Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 1377, against the bubonic plague. (This temporal buffer was originally 30 days, but when that proved too short, it was extended to 40 days, or quaranta giorni, from which we derive the word “quarantine.”)
Forty seems to be a magic number throughout civilization. Noah's flood lasted forty days and forty nights.
The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years.
> The number 40 is found in many traditions without any universal explanation for its use. In Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other Middle Eastern traditions it is taken to represent a large, approximate number, similar to "umpteen".
Wikipedia
See, this is what inflation gets you. In ancient times forty was synonymous with "a lot." Now we use gazillions.
Moscow used to be called the city of forty times forty churches. Now that's obviously using "forty" in the Biblical sense of "many", so many times many. But surprisingly enough the actual figures documented are not far behind, ranging between 800 and 1500.
We don't need the NYT or the Wikipedia to tell us that. We can just read this chat.
I should remind you we also invented social distancing.
And pineapples.
Give us some time and we will even invent magpies before anyone else does.
@Cerberus Yes, she says "you gave me back my childhood!"
> Scientists believe the end of the Cretaceous period came with a “rock larger than Mt. Everest traveling twenty times faster than a bullet” slammed into the Gulf of Mexico leading to a 1,000ft tall tsunami and a “blizzard of meteorites”. Scientists believe the end of the Cretinous period will happen when Americans will stop believing in endless growth on a finite planet.
> Though Wuhan has a population of 11 million residents, population estimates for the surrounding province placed the full lockdown at 60 million residents. This made China's action the largest quarantine in history.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in link text in answer, link at end of answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (142): "Place" or "venue"? by morgan on english.SE
I am trying to determine when the phrase "going viral" was first used. Similarly, when did the phrases "viral video" and "viral marketing" get their start? I have looked online at various sites, but none really address this question (other than saying "recently").
I was at an Model UN conference and often notes like the following get passed. As I'm not a native speaker, I assume that this has to do with some pronunciational issue. Can you please explain what's so funny about this sentence? (Djibouti seemed to be often used in such context.)
If Bangkok ...
@RegDwigнt Never before has an Old-Testament-style retributory plague on one wayward demographic so coincided with Darwin's blade to winnow the collective gene pool of the stupid.
I have seen it spelled COVID-19, but I have also seen Covid-19. In addition, I believe I have seen CoViD-19, capitalising only the first letter of each word from which it was abbreviated (for it isn't an initialism). Which type of capitalisation is to be preferred, and which is acceptable?
@CowperKettle you're three months too late with that question.
@tchrist there's quite a few things I can't do from home. So I collect them over the course of one week, then deal with them all at once at the office.
@RegDwigнt If we just let the epidemic run its course, it will kill 40 million people. But if we take strict measures, it might kill more becaue the economy will collapse.
There's much less to do overall, but on the flip side some customers make sure to send us FYI emails informing us how they are required to remain operational by the government. Critical infrastructure. Power plants and communications. Defense and space.
@Cerberus I didn't comment on your question. I commented on your user name.
@Cerberus have you been on ELU before?
@CowperKettle anyway, back to that. You're talking about social immunity. Which is a very sensible approach in many cases, and a not-so-sensible one in many others. In the case of corona specifically, it has been both widely considered and even widely implemented, notably by the UK, who've held out the longest but are now backpedaling like madmen.
For one, the population starts complaining that they don't want to play guinea pigs for the government.
For two, your statistics start looking all skewed. Because you only test people who're already showing symptoms or even dying.
So there may well be 10 million infected in the US, and indeed 8 million of them may have recovered by now. But we never tested them, so we don't know. We're only counting the dead.
And so you get the situation where one country's mortality rate is somehow miraculously ten times higher than that of the country next door.
Like, the UK only has 8k cases to Germany's 33k. But there's 500 deaths in the UK vs only 100 in Germany. And that is all that people see and they start getting very cross.
And so the social immunity experiment bites the curb.
As one final remark, population density plays a huge role. Like, even for the European part of Russia it's less than 30 people per square kilometre. And for the rest of the country, it might as well be zero.
But the population density in, say, Germany is almost ten times that of the European part of Russia. And that of the Netherlands is twice that of Germany. And that of the Holy See is four times that of the Netherlands.
So naturally, some approaches will work for some that won't work for others, and vice versa.
As soon as there's a single person infected in the Vatican (which there is), there's your social immunity right there. Everyone is infected and you don't need to do anything.
Well of course there is. Because it takes a really smart person to know that "rich in vitamin C" is not worth buying because your body cannot stockpile it. Anything that it doesn't use, it disposes of immediately.