[conspire] Known unknowns, unknown unknowns (was: Correction)

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

> On Mar 30, 2020, at 13:50, Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net> wrote:
> 
> On 30Mar2020 01:29pm (-0700), Deirdre Saoirse Moen wrote:
>> I'd been trying to find a scary site that I'd seen a week or so ago, and WaPo happened to link to it in the morning email. It's apparently partly what made 45 decide to extend the guidelines to StayInside™ to the end of April.
> 
> I don't know how far Mitchell and Webb spread to your shores, but I highly recommend re-branding this as "REMAIN INDOORS":
> 
> 	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnd1jKcfBRE

Indeed!

Speaking of UK things, there was a tweet earlier that made me laugh:

https://twitter.com/StephenMcGann/status/1244660008199032839

"Raab today. We're about three briefings away from the Downing Street cat [Larry] doing it, aren't we?”

We’ve talked about exponential growth, but there’s another math topic I think that people don’t get: combinatorial math, as featured in an LA Times article today:

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak

"Sixty singers showed up [on March 10]. A greeter offered hand sanitizer at the door, and members refrained from the usual hugs and handshakes.”

Dozens now have the disease and two are now dead. Who could have predicted that shocking outcome!

If someone had just implemented a counter that said, “If you come, there will be N disease vectors” and printed out the current factorial, I think they’d all be healthy at this point (except the initial vectors, of course).

Because 60! is 832,098,711,274,139,014,427,634,118,322,336,438,075,417,260,636,124,595,244,927,769,640,960,000,000,000,000,0 (okay, I messed up the count and got the commas off, but you get the drift) transmission vectors.

Deirdre