March 2020 – microblog

Locked down in London.

Ok, official UK govt advice still seems to be that I should trek across London (via public transport) with my pre-school girls to bring them to their nursery (located @ImperialCollege where I work).

Comments?

Trump is a narcissistic idiot who only cares about the Fed & how he wasn’t wrong about Google (he was). He makes Pence seem reasonable; Birx, Fauci &c on the US coronavirus team actually seem like experts.

So why isn’t Boris and the UK giving us similar information?

Imperial College (my employer)
The University & Colleges Union
Hertz
A yoga studio in New Jersey
The Royal Astronomical Society
My gym
Deliveroo
Several politicians in San Francisco, where I lived 20 years ago
Cubitts Opticians
The Institute of Physics
The International Astronomical Union

As Europe shuts down, Britain takes a different, and contentious, approach

Helen Ward, a professor of public health at Imperial College London, said the government’s advisers should disclose more of their thinking. “We don’t know the evidence [for] its decisions”.

‪Apparently @imperialcollege starting this Monday “we will be delivering all teaching remotely.” Unfortunately they haven’t yet bothered to tell those of us actually doing the teaching. ‬

Just had a wonderful rendezvous with old friend and present-day Bohemist @PeterZusi, made possible by the otherwise unpleasant #USSstrike. We haven’t seen each other since University — only our friends know how long that is (a long time).

Unconscious bias: Walked into the men’s room at the V&A museum. The walls were pink, so I immediately walked back out to check that it was really the Men’s room — even though the first thing I had seen was a row of urinals.

I was one of the first customers at the excellent new Guillam coffee house. If you’re around South Kensington in London, I definitely recommend it—one of the best places for a drip/filter coffee around (& espressos too).

“The beauty of science is that all the important things are unpredictable. The optimistic view in me is that nature is designed to make the universe as interesting as possible.”

Lovely interview by Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) with Freeman Dyson on his eschatological musings.

Come hear me give today’s @ImperialUCU #UCUstrike teach-out talk on “The Random Universe” — cosmology, Bayesian probability, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more. Monday 2 March at noon in the @ICunion Metric Room. http://ucu.imperial.ac.uk #UCU