Covid, flu, and the fight against airborne viruses

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Covid research has given us some unexpected insight into the flu: Contrary to what most of us have believed since forever, we’re not likely to catch the flu by touching contaminated surfaces. Yes, the viruses for flu and Covid can both survive on surfaces for some time, but the experiments demonstrating that used industrial strength amounts of virus–more than you’d find in real life–and that skewed the results. What’s more, a lot of the viral particles the experiments found were no longer infectious. It was viral RNA, which is “more like the corpse of the virus” than like the virus itself according to Emmanuel Goldman, of Rutgers University. 

Goldman was the first person to challenge the hygiene theater that had people sanitizing their groceries, washing their hands, and singing “Happy Birthday” to make sure they’d washed long enough. 

Or maybe it was only in Britain that people sang “Happy Birthday.” It was recommended by our then-prime minister–what was his name?–as a way to know you’d scrubbed for twenty seconds.

To be fair, that was relying on the medical advice available at the time. If he’d been marginally competent in other ways, I might forgive him.

Of course, I might not, but that’s a different post, and one I don’t plan to write. We could’ve skipped both the hand washing and the singing. Like Covid, the flu is airborne, and that’s how we’re most likely to catch it. During the first year of the pandemic, when people were still taking masks seriously (in spite of the people who hadn’t figured out that their noses were part of their breathing apparatus and that their chins weren’t), flu transmission went down to almost nothing.

Irrelevant photo: An azalea, now blooming indoors.

All that Covid-inspired hand washing did do one thing for us: It improved food safety.

Having called time on hygiene theater, Goldman is now pointing us toward a way out of the pandemic: 

“Respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu spread primarily indoors, so we need a safe virus-killing reagent that can be pre-deployed in occupied spaces. As it happens, we already have one.

“Triethylene glycol (TEG) is an air sanitizer that has been shown to be safe for humans to breathe at low concentrations. It’s also been found to kill viruses on surfaces and in the air at those same low concentrations. Given the science, regulatory agencies should fast-track approval of TEG-based air treatments.”

Will they? No idea.

A UK government study evaluates its safety this way: “There is some evidence that repeated exposures to a glycol-based aerosol may result in respiratory tract irritation, with cough, shortness of breath and tightness of the chest. However, it is not possible to extrapolate the findings to other workplaces/settings or to longer-term exposure impacts, without further research.” 

It’s generally used to make theatrical fog. That’s what the bit about “other workplaces” means.

 

A Report from the Department of Covid-Fighting Gizmos

This is going to sound like I’m wearing the proverbial tinfoil hat, but a gizmo that uses no batteries and no wires can detect the presence of Covid in air. It uses a “magnetostrictive clad plate composed of iron, cobalt and nickel, generating power via alternative magnetization caused by vibration.” I have no idea what that means, although I could define every last one of the words–or I could if I looked up magnetostrictive. Why bother when I still wouldn’t follow it? That’s why I’m quoting. 

I can’t give you a link on this, because it came as a download. The article’s title is the poetic “Batteryless and wireless device detects coronavirus with magnetostrictive composite plates.” If you ask Lord Google nicely, he may lead you to something at least vaguely related. 

Exactly what you do with the contraption once you have it is up to you. I imagine sending it into a roomful of people on the back of a small, dog-shaped robot and waiting for it to report back before I go in. If it’s not safe, I’ll just go home, thanks.

Why’s the robot dog shaped? To add a bit of charm to my tinfoil-hat look.

*

Another invention allows you–or if not you, at least someone–to watch viruses die as they try to make their way through masks. 

I know. I prefer a book myself. Or TV. Or, hell, social media if I get desperate. But still, the thing’s out there and someone wants to use it.

What does it do? It gets viruses to light up when they die, and by doing that they tell us that very few viruses get all the way through multilayered FP2 masks. That’s reassuring, but the process can also identify what materials are most effective at killing viruses. In other words, we don’t need the dog-shaped robot for this one. People who design masks will find it useful. The rest of us can give it a miss.

 

Coordinating information on long Covid

Worldwide, some 100 million people are believed to be living with long Covid, and a new questionnaire is trying to get a better picture of its impact, giving researchers better information. 

Existing questionnaires don’t cover the full spectrum of its symptoms. It’s not just fatigue; it can also be vomiting, incontinence, erectile dysfunction, hair loss, and so much other other fun stuff. The new questionnaire breaks the symptoms into 16 categories and uses a single scale to measure their severity, nad it can be “e-migrated, translated, and cross-culturally validated,” which I think means it’s set up to be translated into hundreds of languages. Accurately. Taking into account the cultural context in which it’ll be used. 

So far, it’s been approved for use in 50 countries.

 

New drugs in the works

A couple of Covid drugs look promising. Others are in the works, but let’s not spread ourselves too thin. We’ll look at two.

One of them is already used to treat a liver disease (primary biliary cholangitis, in case anyone asks), so its safety has already been tested and its patent has expired, which means it doesn’t cost a fortune. What’s more, it’s easy to store, it’s easy to ship, and it can carry a tune even when a symphony orchestra’s playing an entirely different one. It never loses its temper. What’s not to like?

Dr. Fotios Sampaziotis, of Cambridge University, explained it this way: “Vaccines protect us by boosting our immune system so that it can recognize the virus and clear it, or at least weaken it. But vaccines don’t work for everyone—for example patients with a weak immune system—and not everyone have access to them. Also, the virus can mutate to new vaccine-resistant variants.

“We’re interested in finding alternative ways to protect us from SARS-CoV-2 infection that are not dependent on the immune system and could complement vaccination. We’ve discovered a way to close the door to the virus, preventing it from getting into our cells in the first place and protecting us from infection.”

The timing’s good on this one, because the virus has out-evolved the antivirals we’ve relied on. And because it works on the human cell rather than aiming at Covid’s spike protein, it should be variant-proof.

It’s done well in small clinical trials and will be going into larger ones.

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Another drug, in an earlier stage of development, also promises to be variant-proof. It’s called an ACE2 decoy, and it works by luring the virus to itself, so it ignores the cells’ ACE2 receptors, which is the normal route for infection. Once it’s done that, it takes off the top of Covid’s spike, which inactivates it.  

It sounds ugly, but there’s a microscopic war going on in there all the time. 

The drug could potentially be used against other coronaviruses, which enter human cells the same way. It hasn’t been tested in humans yet but they’re moving it in that direction.

Does Exeter Cathedral have the world’s oldest cat flap?

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I can’t prove that Exeter Cathedral has the world’s oldest cat flap–no one seems to collect worldwide data on cat flaps–but it has one that was built sometime between 1598 and 1621. Or if not built, cut, since the hole doesn’t actually have a covering.

How authoritative are those dates? Dunno. Multiple sources use the same dates, but they could all quoting each other. Still, the door that the hole was cut in looks old enough to convince me, so let’s go with it.

The cat flap was to allow the cathedral cat (not the one in the picture, you understand) to get into the cathedral clock and catch the mice and rats drawn there by the animal fat that greased the clock’s workings. This may be the origin of the nursery rhyme “Hickory, dickory, dock/The mouse ran up the clock.”

Absolutely and completely relevant photo: The Exeter Cathedral cat door–with cat demonstrating that it’s still in working order.

The cathedral kept a series of cats on the payroll in the medieval era, spending 13 pence a quarter on each one in turn, which doubled for a few years in the fourteenth century. Maybe they had to add a second cat when the first one was overwhelmed. Maybe the first one took on an apprentice or insisted on a friend staying for a lifetime’s worth of suppers. The evidence is scant but tantalizing.

 

Want to buy Evelyn Waugh’s old house? 

From there, let’s go to the news: If you were in the market for an eight-bedroom, six-bathroom mansion, you’re too late to bid on the one Evelyn Waugh once owned. (He’s the guy who wrote Brideshead Revisited.) It came with a few small snags that looked like they’d keep the price down.

The asking price was £2.5 million, and yes, that’s down. In 2019, it sold for £2.9 million, and I’ll drop a hint here for the mathematically impaired: That’s more than this year’s asking price. The 2019 buyer was  a company controlled by a former BBC executive, Jason Blain, and it financed the deal with a £2.1 million bank loan, but the bank lost its sense of humor when the company that bought the mansion defaulted on the loan. 

To be fair to the BBC, Blain has also worked for Sony Entertainment. He seems to have a history with, um, I guess you’d say payment problems. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel took him to court when he paid only (only!) £508,500 of the £1.24 million he owed for an eight-month stay. The penthouse he was renting went for £4,725 a night, and his bill included £30,110 for valet parking and £25,497 for room service. 

I’ve seen enough movies to vaguely imagine how a person could rack up that kind of a bill on room service, but valet parking? Where were they parking that car? In a neighboring country? 

Never mind. Let’s talk about the sale’s snags instead. At some point after the 2019 sale, the mansion was rented to someone or other for £250 per year (I’d love to know the story there; all I’ve read is that they call themselves “Evelyn Waugh superfans”), and whoever they are, they’re refusing to leave and won’t let anyone in–no buyers, no real estate agents, and no photographers, so we won’t be able to go online and poke our snoopy old noses into the virtual rooms to see what we couldn’t have bought anyway. 

As the auctioneers explained the situation,  ““The property is occupied under a Common Law Tenancy at a rent of £250 per annum. A notice to quit was served on the occupant on 19 August 2022 and a copy of such notice was affixed to the property gate on 22 August 2022. Prospective purchasers should take their own legal advice regarding this and will be deemed to bid accordingly.”

I believe that means, “Don’t blame us when it all goes wrong.”

When the place was auctioned off, it sold for a mere £2.16 million. The occupants are still refusing the leave.

 

How much can you manage to spend on a train ticket?

British trains are expensive–complaining about the impenetrable pricing structure is a recognized indoor sport–but I can’t account for how much one passenger managed to spend.

The passenger was a drag queen who was booked for a private performance in Bangor but who lived in London. To be clear, that’s the Bangor in Wales, not the one in Maine. It would cost more to get from London to Bangor, Maine, but you’d need something more than a train ticket.

But back to business: She did what anyone would do and booked a train ticket–a first class ticket, which isn’t what anyone would do, but who could resist? I can only assume the client was paying but it’s not like I know that. It was supposed to include a Christmas dinner, even though this was well before Christmas. The British don’t believe in confining Christmas dinner to Christmas day. Christmas dinner, like the wine that was supposed to come with it, is a liquid, and it leaks into the surrounding month. The ticket cost £589. 

How could the ticket cost that much? It wouldn’t have been easy. After I’d stashed my credit card safely in the other room, I went online to see how far I could push up the cost of a similar ticket. A last-minute (you pay a lot more for a last-minute ticket) round trip came to £153.40. That doesn’t seem to have been first class, although I tried to upgrade myself in two different ways, and nothing mentioned Christmas dinner. Maybe I lack imagination, but I couldn’t get close to £589. 

Never mind. She paid a shitload of money for her ticket. I paid nothing for mine, but then I didn’t go anywhere.

On the way out, first class service was canceled and she was decanted into the ordinary cars. On the way back, the whole train was canceled, but not until two minutes after it was due to leave. 

She took to Twitter, which did at least shake loose a response from the train company, Avanti West Coast. It said, “We’re sorry to hear about this customer’s experience and we’re happy to look into their complaint. . . Our new timetable is based on a robust and sustainable roster for our people without reliance on overtime . . . ” and so forth, for at least two paragraphs of blither.

Merry Christmas. Would you like a side of cranberry sauce with that?

 

Could artificial intelligence write that?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about whether artificial intelligence is ready to replace writers. A new chatbot is–they say–impressing people with how fluent it is. Fluent enough that a Guardian columnist had it write the opening of his column and it produced a credible if boring paragraph. 

Academics report that it can give correct answers to questions they ask their students.  

It has certain limitations, as the columnist (once he took over for the chatbot) pointed out. It can’t see why a kilo of beef doesn’t weigh more than a kilo or compressed air or why crushed glass shouldn’t be a health supplement. It reproduces the biases of its human trainers and makes up facts, but then humans do the same things–more of them every day, it seems–so maybe it shouldn’t lose points for that. 

Humans, though, will bump up against the real world periodically, and that will give them a chance to correct some of their bullshit. Or we can hope it will. Mentioning no names, but I’m still waiting.

As time goes on, the chatbot will probably make fewer ground glass-type errors, but the bias it inherits from its humans is likely to continue. I also wouldn’t look for its prose to lift off the page and make us smile, and I wouldn’t expect creativity. Still, it could have written Avanti’s response to the passenger’s complaint as effectively as the human who (presumably) wrote it. Or more so, since it wouldn’t be bothered by any residual sense of shame. 

 

What about those pesky humans, though?

Humans, it turns out, are more likely to send hate-tweets when the weather turns nasty. The best available explanation is that we’re at our nicest, or at least our least horrible, when the temperature’s between 54 F (that’s 12 C) and 70 F (21 C). Outside of that, we get crabby.

The study tracked 75 million tweets from 773 US cities and found that the pattern held even in high-income areas, where people would be at least somewhat insulated from heat and cold. It couldn’t trace the demographics of hate tweeters but it could trace their targets: primarily members of the Black, Latino, and LGBTQetc. communities. 

Women aren’t on the target list. (Are women a community? Is any demographic group?) I’m not sure if that indicates a hole in the study’s design or a startling sociological insight. Seventy-five years of life experience (admittedly, I didn’t spend all of it on Twitter) says it’s a flaw in the study’s design.

The study–or at least the article on it–didn’t mention rain, snow, or other storms.

 

Your feel-good story for the week

A girl named Madeline (age not specified) sent a letter to her county government saying, “Dear LA County, I would like your approval if I can have a unicorn in my backyard if I can find one.”

The letter found its way to the department of animal care and control, and its director (or someone else on her behalf) sent Madeline a metal tag stamped “Permanent Unicorn License,” along with a fuzzy unicorn–white with pink ears, purple hooves, and a silver horn. The country did set some conditions though: Any sparkles or glitter sprinkled on the animal have to be nontoxic and biodegradable and the unicorn has be fed watermelon at least once a week.

Long Covid and the vaccines: do they give us any protection?

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I come bearing a shred of good news about long Covid. Or at least it’ll look good to you if, like me, you worry about the prospect of long Covid. This comes from two doctors, Sarah Ryan and Lawrence Purpura, who’ve worked extensively with it. I’ll skip the details on their experience–just follow the link if you’re interested. It’s shortcut week here at Notes. In fact, the shortcuts are so short that I’m going to quote them interchangeably. They’ll never know–and if they do I’ll take no shortcuts in apologizing.

They say the long Covid cases they’re seeing have been less severe than the ones they used to see. They attribute that first to the omicron variants attacking the upper respiratory system, where they don’t cause as many of the heavy duty symptoms–lung complications, increased heart rate, lightheadedness, and chronic fatigue–and second to the vaccines being somewhat protective against long Covid. 

No, the vaccines don’t protect us completely, but “studies show that even one dose of a COVID vaccine reduces the odds of developing long COVID by seven to 10 times.”

Break out the ice cream so we can celebrate, will you? Or at least an M&M.

Irrelevant photo: Fields after a December frost.

Who’s most at risk? An article in Cell “identified four factors that correlate with greater risk of long Covid—type 2 diabetes, prior infection with Epstein-Barr virus, level of Sars-CoV-2 RNA detected in the blood, and the presence of autoantibodies.”

A different study sees being female as an increased risk. That same study saw people’s risk decrease by 30% if they’d have two doses of vaccine.

How likely are people with Covid to get long Covid? No one has a good answer to that. There’s no one definition of long Covid, which makes it next to impossible–or maybe that’s completely impossible–to compile statistics. 

Still, they estimate that something like 1% to 5% of Covid patients will go on to get moderate to severe long Covid. At twelve weeks, around 25% of them report fatigue, 25% report insomnia, 20% report increased heart rate or dizziness, and 15% report neurocognitive deficits–things like short-term memory problems. Some of those symptoms will be very mild to some disabling.

A different study came up with 1% of people who had Covid but weren’t hospitalized coming down with long Covid, 6% of people who were hospitalized, and 32% of people who ended up in intensive care units.

Many people will have what Ryan and Purpura call “profound recovery” in three to six months; 10% will have symptoms that go on for more than a year. An even smaller percentage will still have symptoms after a year and a half. 

So the news is far from an all-clear, but in a bad-news situation, this is good news.

 

Other long Covid news 

I’ve been stacking up articles on long Covid but never seem to get back to them. But here we are in shortcut week, so let’s do a few quick summaries and then run:

  • Covid’s associated with increased liver stiffness–a possible sign of liver injury–months after infection. Note the hesitancy in there: associated with; a possible sign. Nothing definite, just something worth looking into more.
  • Covid can affect the brain profoundly even months after infection.
  • A different study, from the early stages of the pandemic (I hope that’s significant), linked Covid to impaired reasoning, speed of thinking, and verbal abilities, comparing what they saw to the effects of sleep deprivation. The severity of the symptoms matched the severity of the infection.
  • A small study found Covid can damage the DNA in cardiac tissue. Compared to the 2009 flu, “Covid has led to more severe and long-term cardiovascular disease.”
  • Covid’s associated with increased chances of long-term brain problems, including strokes, cognitive and memory problems, depression, anxiety, and migraines. And if that doesn’t make you anxious, tremors, involuntary muscle contractions, epileptic seizures, brain fog, hearing and vision abnormalities, and balance and coordination problems–basically symptoms like the ones that come with Parkinson’s. Vaccines reduce the chances of having any of this joy land in your life by about 20%. Keep in mind, though, that a group of people who’ve had Covid are more likely to face these problems than a group that hasn’t, but that doesn’t mean all of them will.
  • Covid was associated with an increased chance of stroke and heart attack. If the study’s correct, over the course of a year, for every 1,000 people who had Covid, you’d expect to find five extra strokes, three extra heart attacks, and twelve extra cases of heart failure.  

Those last two studies show a pattern but don’t show cause and effect so let’s not go off the deep end with them. 

 

Is Covid no worse than the flu?

The claim that Covid’s just like the flu translates to “Don’t get hysterical.” So an article from Australia has given us a comparison of the two. 

Between the beginning of 2022 and August 28, Australia had 44 times as many Covid cases as flu cases and 42 times as many Covid deaths. 

That makes the death rate from Covid lower, right? It looks that way to this number-phobe, but it also misses the point. The absolute numbers are higher. If you find yourself in the group of people who died, you’re not going to be consoled by the percentages. 

Okay, strictly speaking, if you find yourself in that group you’ll be dead and unlikely to care anymore, but still, you see my point: Some 1,700 people were hospitalized with the flu between the start of the year and some date in September–pick a number, any number, because here at Notes we don’t really care. Compare that to a single day in July 2022 when 5,429 people were hospitalized with Covid.

 

Life expectancy

I kind of ditched our good news theme there, didn’t I? Sorry. I had some, I spent it all in one place, and now it’s gone. To hell with it, let’s do more bad news. It’s cheaper.

The Covid pandemic lowered life expectancy worldwide. Or at least in the 29 countries included in one study. That leaves out a bunch, but close enough for our purposes.

Predictably, the losses aren’t evenly distributed. Countries with the most effective responses bounced back to pre-pandemic levels relatively quickly. Countries where the response was less effective may have what the study calls “a protracted health crisis.”

It’s another piece in the argument that Covid’s not just the flu in fancy clothes. Flu in the second half of the twentieth century caused smaller, less widespread drops in life expectancy. 

 

The new variant on the block

The new variant that’s emerged in China is BF.7, which is short for something more complicated, which we don’t need to bother with. It’s more infectious than earlier variants, has a shorter incubation time, and is better at infecting people who’ve already had Covid. The symptoms aren’t that different than we’re used to: fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, and fatigue, but some people end up with vomiting and diarrhoea.

It’s been found in several countries other than China but doesn’t seem to be spreading as quickly in them, although (as I write this, in mid-December) it’s not clear why.

A US tradition invades Britain, and other news

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The British are (generalization warning here) touchy about cultural imports from the US, and some people are downright sniffy about them. Halloween? I can’t get through the fall without someone telling me that not all that long ago kids wouldn’t have dreamed of going door to door asking for candy. So it’s interesting no one has yet felt the need to remind me about Black Friday’s roots in the US, although it was brought over far more recently than Halloween candy. Maybe that’s because it involve shopping, bargains, and adults, so it slots into the culture with fewer rough edges. But an import it is. 

Irrelevant photo: I almost remember the name of this, but that’s not quite enough. It’s a flower, and I didn’t grow it.

 

Black what?

The Black Friday tradition started in the 1950s, and it wasn’t until 2010 that the US shipped it to Britain. If you’re in the mood, you can blame Amazon for either the introduction or the delay. I’m always happy to blame Amazon–for anything. Still, it wasn’t until Asda joined the mayhem, in 2013 (or 2014 on other websites), that Black Friday really took off in Britain. 

The tradition–for you few happy souls who have no idea what I’m talking about–is that stores slash their prices massively on the day after Thanksgiving (that’s always a Friday), and when shoppers get a whiff of those bargains they go mad. Periodic post-Black Friday headlines in the US involve crowds breaking down doors or trampling innocent grannies in their frenzy to get to the discounted whatevers before they run out. 

What’s it like in the UK? Well, now that Black Friday’s safely in this year’s rearview mirror, let’s check in with a study by the oddly named British consumer group Which? that (or which) nibbled the numbers behind some 200 supposed Black Friday discounts and came back with the news that 86% of the items were either cheaper or no more expensive in the six months before they went on sale. To put that in simpler terms, they weren’t a bargain. A full 98% were either cheaper or no more expensive at other times of the year. None–0%–were cheaper on Black Friday alone.

Don’t you just love a deal? 

Some retailers raised their prices just before Black Friday so they’d be telling the truth when they claimed to have cut the price. 

Which?’s retail editor, Reena Sewraz, said, “It’s rarely the cheapest time to shop and you’ll probably find the things you want are the same price or cheaper as we head towards Christmas, the New Year and beyond.”

 

The history of Black Friday

If I’ve taken the fun out of bargain hunting, let’s talk about where the name Black Friday came from. 

Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey tells us that the most widespread explanation is this: The shopping day after Thanksgiving is when stores count on crossing over from the red (debt) into the black (profit). But Hawley’s Small and Unscientific etcetera also reports that this isn’t the only tale around.

An alternative explanation, from no less a source than the Britannica, is that it originated in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when the police used the phrase to describe the chaos created by masses of suburban shoppers descending on the city to start their Christmas shopping. 

It wasn’t a compliment.

But we can go back further than that and trace the history to the 1951 edition of that rivetingly titled magazine, Factory Management and Maintenance, which wrote about workers’ habit of calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving. 

“‘Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis’ is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects,” it said in an editorial. “At least that’s the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the ‘Black Friday’ comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick —and can prove it.” 

The editor recommended using the day as a bargaining chip in union negotiations, since employees were taking the day off anyway. 

“Shouldn’t cost too much,” he (and odds are a 1951 editor was a he) wrote.

For all you would-be union negotiators out there, there’s a lesson in this: If they’re happy to give you something you didn’t think to want, be suspicious. 

 

Another way to invade England

In France, a group called the La Mora Association is recreating one of the ships William the Conqueror sailed in. They plan to sail it across the channel in 2027, more or less the way William the C did in 1066.

William came over with (probably) 14 vassals–that’s vAssals–who brought an average of 60 vEssels each. Probably. One chronicler says W the C had 3,000 ships. Modern estimates are in the neighborhood of 700, 800, or 1,000. Still, that’s a lot of floating boatage.  

The ships would have been Viking-style longships–those long, narrow things with both a sail and oars, not to mention a dragon head. At least mostly. The Bayeux Tapestry shows a few, but it doesn’t show all 700, not to mention 3,000.  

Whatever they looked like, the ships carried something like 7,000 men and 200 horses, plus armor, weapons, shields, bacon (no, bacon was not used as a weapon; yes, bacon is the beginning of a new category), hard-baked bread, cheese, dried beans, and wine. Plus water and feed for the horses. 

The men were a mix of knights, foot soldiers, and servants. It would’ve taken a lot of servants to keep an army functioning. And a lot of beans.

When the recreation of W’s ship sails, it will leave the weaponry, the horses, and most of the men behind, along with the other 999 ships. And its crew will set a different tone than W’s did.

“We want this to be a symbol of Franco-British friendship,” the association’s president said.

Is he aware of how that worked out last time? 

Well, yes. He even knows about Brexit. But he thinks the ship can, “in the wake of Brexit . . . reunite our two countries,” although my best guess is that the rhetoric comes after the fascination with building an eleventh-century ship, using historic techniques, on the basis of not much more than a picture in a 230-foot-long tapestry and some reproductions of viking ships in a Danish museum. 

 

And in another story very marginally related to ships . . .

Want to vote on the word of the year? You’re too late, but Oxford Languages did open the contest to the public–sort of–so you had your chance.

Having learned from the Boaty McBoatface fiasco (or glorious success, depending on your point of view), in which the public voted in their gazillions to name a serious research ship Boaty McBoatface, forcing the serious research organization sponsoring the contest to publicly overrule them, this contest’s sponsors gave us three choices and only three choices:  metaverse, #IStandWith, and goblin mode. 

Zzzzzzzzzz.

But hey, after its snooze-making fashion, it is democratic. 

The inescapable holiday post

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It’s the time of year when countries that are, historically speaking, steeped in Christianity go slightly mad decorating, baking, eating, giving, getting, and spending more money than they can afford to do all of the above. Or at least the two I’ve lived in do.

In Britain, it’s also the time of year when wearing a hat modeled on a Christmas pudding is an almost reasonable thing to do.

What does a Christmas pudding look like? A dumpy, brown half-sphere, which the hat maker will have dressed up with a couple of holly leaves on the theory that they’ll make the hat look less brown and dumpy. We could argue about whether that works, but the greenery will at least signal that the hat’s a Christmas pudding, not some random brown half-sphere.

That last paragraph, in case you’re wondering, hints at why this is not a fashion blog.

Marginally relevant photo: This is not a Christmas pudding, it’s the Christmas shih tzu, tucked safe in his bed, visions of roast beef filling his head.

Wherever  you are, if you celebrate Christmas I wish you a merry brown hat. And if you celebrate something else at this time of year, I wish you a different kind of hat and a good holiday. And if–just to cover all possibilities–you don’t have a holiday right about now, one will come along eventually, so I wish you a good one of that.

I’ll be back with you just before the new year and as strange as ever. May all your holidays be decorated with bits of greenery.

Drugs, denials, and British politics

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It’s always fun when you can wring a denial out of a politician, and the denials are rolling in: Unspecified people who do equally unspecified work at Chevening–an estate used by Britain’s secretary of state–reported finding “suspected class A drugs” after parties thrown by Liz Truss, the lettuce who became prime minister but was then secretary of state.

Lettuce? Well, yes. Her tenure as prime minister was so short that a lettuce publicly outlasted her. She’ll never live it down. 

What kind of class A drugs? Something that registered as cocaine when it was tested with a swab that changes color when it gets high. Or, more accurately, when it comes into contact with cocaine.

Irrelevant photo: This is from our recent cold snap.

Is cocaine legal in Britain? Nope. Possession carries a sentence of up to seven years or an unlimited fine or both, and in July the government launched (or anyway, announced; I can’t swear that they did any more than that) a crackdown on casual users. 

Casual users? Yes. Those are the kind of users who have passports, because it was going to confiscate them. That’s a more fitting punishment for a high-end user than jail time, which is a better fit for the low-end, no-passport, no-invite-to-Chevening kind of drug user.

An unspecified insider says cocaine’s used widely in Whitehall (“Whitehall” being shorthand for British government offices) and around Parliament. And you know how it is: These are important people. You can’t just toss them in jail when they do something illegal.

During the ten minutes when Truss was prime minister, one of her spokes-salads said cracking down on illegal drugs was a priority. 

Cleaners report finding white powder at no less a residence than 10 Downing Street after two of the parties that were held during lockdown back when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Johnson outlasted many lettuces as well as a head of broccoli, and although several barbers are rumored to have attempted damage control on his hair he outran them all. 

No one’s saying either Truss or Johnson put the powder up their own personal noses. In fact, Johnson’s said not to have been at either of the No. 10 parties that left powder behind. But it does raise questions about the culture around them and what’s tolerated at high levels and not at lower ones. 

So what about those denials? 

When the Guardian, which broke the story, asked for a comment, Truss’s spokes-salad said, “If there were evidence that this alleged activity had occurred during her use of Chevening, Ms Truss would have expected to have been informed and for the relevant authorities to have properly investigated the matter. As it is, the Guardian has produced no evidence to support these spurious claims.”

A spokescomb for Boris Johnson said, “Boris Johnson is surprised by these allegations since he has not previously been made aware of any suggestions of drug use in 10 Downing Street and as far as he is aware no such claims were made to Sue Gray or to any other investigators.

“It was a feature of Mr Johnson’s premiership that he strongly campaigned against drug use, especially middle-class drug use. His government made huge investments in tougher policing to help roll up county lines drugs gangs, which cause so much misery. He repeatedly called for harsher punishments for the use and distribution of class A drugs.”

A spokesdriver for No 10’s current U-turn expert said, “The Guardian has provided no evidence to support these claims. If there were substantive claims, we would expect these to be reported to the police.”

So there you go. Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

Larry the Cat refused to comment but is alleged to have a serious catnip habit. As for me, I don’t usually post in the middle of the week, but this was too much fun to ignore.

What the census tells us about Britain, Christianity, and brussels sprouts

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The most recent census from England and Wales brings us the news that less than half the people who answered the question called themselves Christians. In some circles, that’s raising the question of why the country still has a state church. In others it’s causing the hysteria scale to be reworked so it can accommodate the ensuing shock, horror, and newspaper headlines.

Does the change have a real-world impact? We-e-ell, other surveys report that 46% of young people have never sung a traditional Christmas carol and 47% think midnight mass is out of date. Even more shockingly, 38% can’t stand that essential element of the British Christmas meal, brussels sprouts. 

Yes, today’s headline was clickbait. The census didn’t ask about brussels sprouts. Or Christmas carols. I had to call in subcontractors to get my hands on that data.

But let’s extend the hysteria scale upward by 7 points anyway. The country’s going to hell in a combine harvester. You could measure in months the time that elapsed between the day young people first pushed away their brussels sprouts and the day Rome fell.

Irrelevant photo: A begonia in warmer days.

What accounts for the falling number of Christians? It’s not that other religions are taking over. The number of people belonging to other religions has grown slightly, but not enough to account for the drop. The real impact comes from the number of people checking the No Religion box–it was the second most common response, rising from a quarter in the last census to a third in this one.

An interesting but statistically insignificant percentage of the population–0.6%–checked the Other Religion box. 

What does Other Religion mean? Well, No Religion, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh all got prefabricated little boxes of their own, but since there’s too much variety in the Other Religion category to fit inside one small box, the people who checked it could go one to describe themselves any way they wanted. That means we get people who are spiritual and others who are spiritualists. We get people who are mixed religion. We also get (in order of popularity) pagans, Alevis, Jains, Wiccans, Ravidassia (I’m not sure that’s a plural; the question reduced Lord Google to tears), shamanists, Rastafarians, and Zoroastrians.

Some of those are traditional religions and some (bias alert for the remainder of the sentence) are things people make up as they go along. To be fair, though, traditional religions might well have gotten their start the same way. If you do something for a few thousand years, or even a few hundred, it takes on a certain sobriety that a few decades just can’t match.

Disappointingly, we didn’t get enough Jedis in this census to show up in the statistical summaries. In 2001, almost 400,000 people claimed to be Jedi Knights, but that was in response to a campaign claiming that if enough people identified it as their religion the government would have to recognize it. The claim was as complete and utter bullshit, but it was a lot of fun. 

 

Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland census seems to have made a distinction between people who were brought up in a religion and people who still belonged to it. When religion’s a flash point, the religious community you come from can still define you, even it you leave the religion behind.

So Northern Ireland has a population that’s: 42% Catholic, but when you include people who were brought up Catholic you get 45.7%. The population’s 43.5% Protestant, including those who once were, and the category breaks down into Presbyterian, Church of Ireland, Methodist, and an odds and ends box of other Christian denominations. 17.4% checked No Religion, and 1.3% checked Other Religion.

In case anyone’s interested, the laws of copy editing say you should never start a sentence with a numeral, but I couldn’t be bothered turning that last one inside out to get the percentage away from the leading position.

The No Religion category has grown In Northern Ireland too. Ten years ago, it was 10.1%, and 9.3% of the population was brought up in no religion, up from 5.6% ten years ago.

 

What about nationality, though?

In a country (Britain) made up of nations (Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland, England, and at least arguably Cornwall), it’s always worth asking what nationality people consider themselves. In the ten years since the last census, the number of people calling themselves British went up 206% and the number calling themselves English went down 76%. The number calling themselves both went up 67%. 

That sounds drastic and fundamental, and it’s not impossible that the shift says something about how people see themselves, but it’s more likely to say something about the way the questions were asked.

The number calling themselves Welsh went down 7% and the number calling themselves Welsh and British went up 23%. 

For people who identified themselves as Cornish or Cornish and British, we have to throw percentages out the window because the information was compiled by a different source: they went up from 80,000 to 100,000 and from 5,000 to 9,000.

People could, and did, also choose Non-UK Identity (9.7%) and a mix of that and UK Identity (2%). 

 

How the questions were asked

An article in the Conversation asks whether (or more accurately, states that) the way the questions about the languages people speak are worded in a way that makes the information–well, not entirely useless but not accurate either. It asks about people’s main language, which it defines as the language they use most naturally, but the article points out that multilingual people speak two or more languages naturally. How are they to choose between them?

People who listed English as their main language weren’t asked what other languages they speak, because, hey, who cares, right? People who listed something else were asked, but they could only list one language. As we all know, anything more than that is just showing off.

We can assume, then, that the questions were put together by someone who speaks one language naturally but thinks they speak French because they can say say, “La plume de ma tante est sur la table.”

 

But what happened to Scotland?

The census was postponed in Scotland because of Covid. I know: We had Covid south of the border too. But postpone it they did, and if the results are in yet I haven’t found them. The closest I’ve been able to come is return rates. Once I woke up from the nap that induced, I made myself a nice cup of tea and felt very British. Even though someone who genuinely was British wouldn’t bother feeling that way and the census didn’t ask about it.

Who Elizabeth I really was: a conspiracy theory from English history

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If you’re in the mood for a good conspiracy theory–one that’s unlikely to boost your blood pressure–then come with me to Tudor England. Or to nineteenth-century England. Or to Bisley, in Gloucestershire, next May Day. Or last May Day. We’re dealing with a tradition here, so it doesn’t matter what year we show up. 

Let’s start in Bisley. It’s easier to get to than Tudor England. 

On May Day, instead of picking a May Queen and dressing her up with a flowery crown, Bisley picks a boy and dresses him up like a Tudor-era girl. 

We can link that to the nineteenth century because that’s when Bram Stoker–the guy who wrote Dracula–wandered into Bisley one May Day and couldn’t help asking why the boy was wearing out-of-date skirts. 

This being the nineteenth century, the boy didn’t say, “I’m nonbinary and what’s it to you, nosyface?” before going merrily on his whaleboned way. Or awkwardly, given what it must’ve been like to move in those clothes. Instead, villagers told Stoker a local legend.

 

If you get as far as the end of the post, you’ll discover that that this photo is entirely relevant, and Li’l Red is, as you can see, horrified.

The legend

The story starts when Elizabeth I was 9, or in another version of the tale 10. (People may not have been able to imagine being nonbinary back then, but numbers could.) Either way, she wasn’t yet Elizabeth the I, so let’s call her Elizabeth the 0, or just plain Elizabeth. 

Whatever we call her, she, her governess, and her guardian were sent to Bisley to get them away from the plague that was rampaging through London. But you can’t fool fate, can you? According to the legend she died there, although not necessarily of the plague.

Exit Elizabeth.

That created something of a problem for the governess and guardian, since their job wasn’t just to educate her and keep her out of trouble but also to keep her alive, and Daddy–a.k.a. Henry VIII–could be unforgiving. So they did what any rational pair of babysitters would do and found the nearest red-headed kid of roughly the same size–who just happened to be a boy named Neville–and swapped him for the defunct princess.

You believed every word of this until I said his name was Neville, right? Anyone would. And so, of course, did Henry when he came to visit. Aristocratic parenting not being a hands-on activity in that period, he couldn’t tell the difference. Even when the kid said, “Hello, Father. I’d like to be called Neville from now on. Have hormones been discovered yet?”

Liz-Neville and their two puppeteers stayed out of London for a year–time enough, presumably, to turn a village boy into an intimidatingly well-educated princess.

Eat your ‘eart out, ‘Enry ‘Iggins. 

 

Spreading the tale

That–minus a few embellishments–was the tale Stoker was introduced to, and he did what writers do, which was to put it on paper and push it as far out into the world as he was able, which may not have been all that far since I only heard the tale recently. But never mind, we are where we are and we’ve heard it now. He included it in his book Famous Imposters.

 

The Evidence

Every good conspiracy theory needs evidence, and this one reminds us Elizabeth never had children and never married. It reminds us she wore heavy makeup, wigs, ruffs, and large clothing that kept people at a distance so they wouldn’t notice that she had, oh, say, a five o’clock shadow.

She trusted either very few doctors or only one (the number depends on which website she was relying on at the moment, or possibly which one I was) and she insisted that there be no post-mortem on her body, even though she’d be dead by the time they performed it.

And at least one contemporary had the impression that Liz and her former governess and guardian had some secret promises between them. 

It relies, silently, on people who have trouble accepting that one of England’s most famous monarchs had no Y chromosome.

Legend has it that 300 years after the alleged swap, a local minister found an unmarked grave on the grounds of the house where Elizabeth and Co. lived, and it held a skeleton of a child in opulent Tudro-era girl’s clothing, but he reburied it someplace else and, conveniently, no one’s found it.

To date, Elizabeth’s grave hasn’t been dug up to demonstrate that its occupant is female.

 

Is there any chance this is true? 

I’d say the odds of it being true are roughly the same as the odds that I was swapped for a cat in infancy. 

Meow.

The future of mRNA vaccines

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Covid may end up giving us an unexpected gift–a real one, not some snarky, I’m-saying-the-opposite-of-what-I-mean gift. All the work that went into developing the mRNA vaccines for Covid may soon translate into a flu vaccine that works against all 20 known subtypes of flu. It’s still in the testing stage, but it’s looking promising, and since flu can turn from annoying to lethal without having to file paperwork, this is no small thing.

In animal tests, it reduced symptoms as well as protected the little beasties against death. 

To be clear: protection against death is good. It’s not as good as 600% protection against illness, as we know from the Covid vaccines, which miss that 600% bullseye, but it’s a hell of a lot better than having zero protection against death.

The flu vaccines that are around now are seasonal: they protect against the recent versions but if some new strain that jumps unexpectedly from a bird or animal, adapts to humans, refuses to file paperwork, and turns out to be as potent as the 1918 flu–well, they’re not up to the job.

The 1918 flu? That’s the one those of us over a certain age learned to call the Spanish flu because it didn’t originate in Spain and because it’s important to have someone to blame, however inaccurately.

Thoroughly irrelevant photo: a neighbor’s dahlia

The developers of the new vaccine are currently designing human trials, and with luck the vaccine will be available by 2024.

Yeah, so what else can the technology do?

Since you asked, mRNA technology makes the creation of multivalent (be impressed with that word, please) vaccines relatively easy. 

Multivalent vaccines? They’re the ones like that flu vaccine that fore-arm us against bugs with pandemic potential, even when we’re not forewarned. 

The vaccine we really need these days is a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and one is moving into the human-trial stage. Or it’s fixin’ to get ready to think about moving into the human-trial stage. It’s close. In animal trials, three doses not only protected against severe disease, it also protected against infection and decreased the amount of virus the vaccinated animals shed, so they were less likely to pass it on.

Now we come to the hazy part: The article I read introduced it as a vaccine against coronaviruses in general, but the rest of the article focused on it as a Covid vaccine. I’ll leave you to figure out what that means. I’m short on time and can’t trace this one through the convolutions of the internet. 

The article did say, “The vaccine candidate is a combination of a nanoparticle antigen . . . along with an adjuvant—an ingredient that boosts a vaccine’s effects . . . . The adjuvant formulation, 3M-052-AF, significantly enhanced the immune responses in the animals when combined with the antigen.”

I’d translate that for you but I’m in so far over my head that not even the tips of my fingers reach the air. It does sound impressive, though.

*

A Covid nasal vaccine is also in development, and it’s designed to piggyback on the immunity that previously vaccinated people carry. By coming in through the nose, it can work primarily on the mucus lining, which is where Covid likes to throw a housewarming party when it enters a body. If the vaccine works, it will be the emergency number you’ll want to call before the party starts, because you know what kind of neighbors Covid germs are. Loud music, fights, broken glass on the sidewalk. 

I could go on, but you get the picture.

In a trial, the spray protected previously vaccinated mice against both death and disease. It did zilch for unvaccinated mice. In hamster trials, it reduced transmission of the disease. It doesn’t use  live viruses, viral vectors, or adjuvants, and that may make the vaccine safer. 

Why? How much? No idea. Go do your own research.

So far, it hasn’t been tested in humans and the article I read was heavily spiced with the word may, so it’s not time to get too excited about this one. Although that hasn’t stopped me.

What about vitamin D and Covid?

Do vitamin D supplements protect against Covid? According to two studies, no. It makes sense that they would–vitamin D supports the immune system–but in a trial of 6,000 people vitamin D supplements made no difference in the number of either Covid or other respiratory tract infections. A second trial involved 35,000 people and tested vitamin D plus cod liver oil. Again, no noticeable difference emerged.

Both trials have their limits. In one, some people in the control group popped the occasional vitamin D supplement. In the other, most of the participants weren’t low on vitamin D at the start of the trial, so the real trial was with a much small group. And vaccines were rolled out during both trials, throwing the balance off. So don’t count them as conclusive, just suggestive.

The endless, depressing news about long Covid and (new word here) post-Covid

Having had Covid can–emphasis on can; it doesn’t always–leave people with nervous system  damage that messes with anything from their sense of smell to their ability to concentrate. It can increase their chances of having a stroke–not right away but eventually. 

It’s called neuro-Covid. Yes, folks, it’s another new word. Don’t say Covid hasn’t been generous with us.

A study that looked at the cerebrospinal fluid and blood plasma of people with neuro-Covid found an overblown immune response in the group with the most serious symptoms: impairments in the blood barrier that could have been caused by a cytokine storm; antibodies that had turned on the body’s own cells; and an overactivation of the microglia, which are immune cells responsible specifically for the brain. People with serious symptoms also had a smaller brain mass than healthy people, especially in the area responsible for the sense of smell.

“The virus triggers such a strong inflammatory response in the body that it spills over to the central nervous system,” Professor Gregor Hutter of the University Hospital of Basel said. “This can disrupt the cellular integrity of the brain.” 

The researchers are hoping to find a test that could predict long Covid and neuro-Covid before they strike, and to identify targets for drugs to attack–in other words, to identify the excessive immune response at an early stage so they can put the brakes on it. 

*

A different study shows that having multiple Covid infections increases the risk of long Covid and of other post-Covid health risks. This was a massive study–5.8 million people in the US Veterans’ Affairs database. Its limitation is that this is a population primarily of older white males, so diverse it ain’t. 

The study showed that, compared to people who hadn’t been reinfected, people with repeat infections are twice as likely to die prematurely and three times more likely to be hospitalized. Heart and lung problems were more than three times more common, and reinfection also contributes to brain conditions, kidney disease, and diabetes.

The risk could increase with each infection.

Are you depressed yet? Sorry. It’s not pretty out there and I would have to open the damn curtains. But since I have . . . 

*

Another study came at post-Covid brain problems from a different direction. 

To back up for a minute and state the obvious: The problem with studying brains is that as long as their owners are using them you have to accept some limits on the ways you study them. You only have access to certain information once their owners to die, which most people are reluctant to do, even in the interest of science. So this set of researchers created brain organoids–little clusters of brain cells the size of a pinhead. If the organoids object to being messed with, they have no way of letting us know, so it’s open season and the researchers infected them with Covid.

Sorry, guys. For the greater good and all that.

The researchers found that an unusual number of synapses were eliminated.

So what? Well, synapses are the social media of the brain. They allow the neurons to communicate with each other. In the normal wear and tear that goes on inside a brain, a number of synapses will be eliminated, which may explain why I can’t remember what I did five days ago, not to mention the fingering for an F chord on the guitar: The downsizing committee up there decided I no longer need to know those things and got rid of the relevant synapses in the name of efficiency. I might still want to know that stuff, but it’s austerity up there in my skull and something had to go. I should be grateful my brain didn’t ditch everything I know about commas, because, hey, that’s important.

I’m aware that that last paragraph implies that who- or whatever I am exists separately from my brain, but let’s stay out of that rabbithole while I remind you that austerity is what Britain’s government–or what passes for a government when it’s not tied up with more important business–calls cutting public services. Calling it austerity, though, makes it sound like it’s good for us. Think of it as the kale of the political world.

So what the researchers saw happening in the infected organoids was something like what’ll happen in austerity Britain 2.0, which is Sunakian austerity as opposed to Cameronian austerity. When the promised spending cuts kick in, it won’t just be the F chord that goes, it’ll be the smell of lilacs and where I put my car keys and the oomph I need to get from one end of the official looking letter that just came in the mail to the other so I can figure out if I’m being evicted or asked to serve as the next prime minister.

Did I lose you in that last paragraph? Sorry. I was having such fun–

I’ll summarize in a marginally sane way: In infected organoids, an excessive number of connections were downsized–or as serious people would put it, eliminated. That’s frighteningly like what happens in Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and schizophrenia. 

It’s true that our brains are bigger than organoids, and with luck, more complex. But post-mortems on Covid patients (post-mortems, I remind you, are carried out on people who are no longer using their brains), as well as brain imaging on live patients, show that the gray matter isn’t as thick in people who’ve been infected, which hints at a loss of synapses. 

Keep in mind that we’re still in the land of hints, though, not definitive conclusions, and also that I’m not clear on whether the post-mortems and scans were carried out on people who’d had serious cases of Covid or simply from people who’d been infected.

For the researchers, the next step is to look at whether various drugs will inhibit all that downsizing. 

Some of us living in Britain want to know if some drug can stop the government from downsizing services that have already been downsized so radically that they’re held together by nothing more than thread and newspaper headlines.

*

Will you forgive me if I toss in a bit of good news? Paxlovid looks like it decreases the odds of developing long Covid.

Pax-what? It’s an antiviral pill that reduces the chances of hospitalization and death in people who’ve been infected–and reduces the chances of long Covid by 25%.

That’s from a preliminary study–it hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, and its study subjects were (again) mostly older white males in high-risk groups, but the US National Institutes of Health plan to study the drug’s effectiveness on people who already have long Covid to see if it works after the fact.

How Twitter banned a meteor: It’s the news from Britain

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I don’t know if Twitter will still be twitting by the time you read this (or by the time I reach the end of the sentence), but back in the days when it was making gestures in the direction of policing its content it blocked an astronomer’s account because she’d posted a video of a meteor in the sky above Oxfordshire. She–or possibly the meteor–had somehow breached the guidelines on, ahem, intimate content. 

The ban went on for three months. She could’ve cut it down to twelve hours but she’d have had to delete the video and agree that she’d broken the rules, which she didn’t want to do. She did try contacting a human being at Twitter but couldn’t find one. 

As a gesture of support, other astronomers tweeted the video without getting banned. 

Irrelevant photo: A California poppy

Her account wasn’t unlocked until the BBC went public with the story.

Her experience isn’t unique. A US meteorologist was banned for posting intimate content– a video of combine harvesters working in a field at night. 

Is it something about scientists? Nope. A Facebook photo gallery got slammed for overtly sexual content in a series of pictures, including one of two cows standing some ten or fifteen feet apart in the field, one of ripples on a pond for selling adult products, and another of a high-rise office building.

Facebook did manage to apologize and put the gallery back online the next day.

Where the dead don’t just vote, they win elections

I know you’ve read entirely too much about the US elections, but this story hasn’t found the audience it deserves: 

Tony DeLuca, Pennsylvania’s longest-serving state representative, was re-elected in a landslide with more than 85% of the vote in spite of being dead. 

Okay, to report this responsibly: He died too close to the election to be replaced on the ballot and his election will trigger a special election. But the way politics are trending these days, voting for the dead may be a responsible political alternative.

From the Department of Inspiring Awards

I learned recently that obituary writers have an industry award called the Grimmy. The plural is the Grimmys. Yes, folks, in a bold and counter-to-everything-we-were-taught move, the Y doesn’t become an IE when they add an S. That in itself is worth an award. A Spelly? 

The Grimmys are awarded every two years by the Society of Professional Obituary Writers at their ObitCon. If you follow the link you’ll find a photo of the four most recent winners. Three of them have managed a smile.

Ever wanted to write a sentence that would echo through the ages?

The oldest known sentence in the oldest known alphabet was inscribed on a comb and says, ““May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” 

How’s that for immortal prose?

From the Department of Vocabulary Expansion

Four new measurements have been added to the metric system. 

The first is the ronnagram, which carries 27 zeroes after the first digit. It’s big–a billion billion. If that doesn’t help you get a sense of its size, having words for it may at least give you the illusion that of understanding it. 

Until recently, you couldn’t go higher than the yottagram, which has a chintzy 24 zeroes. You can see why this was a problem.

The second measurement is the quettagram, which is even bigger. Its first digit trails 30 zeroes along behind it and it’s a thousand times bigger than the ronnagram. 

The earth weighs six of ronnagrams, although how you get it on the scales is beyond me, never mind where you find a counter to rest the scales on. Once you solve that problem, though, you’ll find that Jupiter weighs two quettagrams.

The third measurement is the rontogram. which has 27 zeroes after the decimal point. Once you come to the end of that string, they crash into the wall of a digit with a solid value. 

The fourth and final measurement is the quectogram, which has to slog past 30 zeroes before it finds a solid number. 

To anyone with even the least mathematical competence, I apologize for those last two descriptions. 

The telegram is not part of this conversation. Kindly stop kidding around about this. Mathematics is serious stuff.