It's pi day. Surprisingly, so far no mention of the Raspberry Pis in orbit.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fuk-en....

IANAL, but I believe your interpretation of "except in Cases of Impeachment" is incorrect.

It is not saying that pardons issued by an impeached president are invalid. (Pity! Think Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, etc.)
Nor is it referring to pardons issued by a president after his removal from office by impeachment. That would just be silly -- he isn't president anymore.

I believe "except in Cases of Impeachment" means that pardons can't grant immunity from the impeachment process itself.

• Example:

After a judge has been pardoned for accepting bribes, he can no longer be prosecuted by a court for his grift, but he can still be impeached and removed from the bench for it. Surely that's what it means?

If we were to even consider such an absurd and unnecessary idea...

What does "Universal" mean in this proposed scheme, anyway? As far as I know, Ecuador, Norway, and Chile are all parts of this same universe -- would they all participate identically in this new scheme? But Norway needs to move one direction, while Chile moves the other, and Ecuador just laughs at the silliness! Or would the scheme be complicated still further by the addition of a latitude/hemisphere-specific factor too?

The current DST scheme is already stupid, of course. But at least it has the advantage of not pretending to be universal. Many northern hemisphere countries use it, as do a tiny set of southern hemisphere ones. Countries at low latitudes (E.g. Ecuador) or those spanning an exceptionally wide range of latitudes (e.g. Russia) don't bother with the silliness. Even then, DST still creates silly unnecessary complications -- ever tried scheduling a recurring teleconference with participants in the US, Russia, Ecuador, and Chile? Good luck! Now imagine the complexity of that same scheduling task when some countries spring forward ten minutes every month, some fall back, and some scratch their bemused equatorial heads in bewilderment, marveling at the silliness of it all.

And I definitely don't want the job of designing airline schedules, in this new world order!

Great idea!

Let's take a system that's already too complicated (and unnecessary BTW), and make it even more complicated.

"These days"? This is nothing new...

Consider the deliberate destruction of the Library of Alexandria. Begun by pagan Romans, continued by Christian Romans, and finally finished off by Muslims in 642 AD (allegedly ordered by Calph Omar).

But it goes back further:

Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered a book burning in 213 BCE.

Further still:

In Egypt in the 15th century BCE, Pharos Thutmose and later Amenhotep II systematically removed images of the earlier Queen Hatshepsut, in an almost-totally successful attempt to obliterating her from the historical record.

I'm sure it goes back further too. If we had accurate records of paleolithic times, I'm sure we'd find that caveman Ogg attempted to destroy all record of his rival caveman Zok, by erasing cave-paintings depicting him.

Sadly, this is a steady-state feature of human history. Nothing new.

True, WHO guidelines are based on 1m, while CDC guidelines are based on 6ft (close to 2m), and many governments have issued widely varying guidelines of 1m, 1.5m, 6ft, or 2m. I don't think that means that one is "right" and all the others are "wrong".

These are different points along a risk-tradeoff continuum. Even 2m is not 100% safe of course, but I'd personally rather be 1m upwind of an infected individual than 3m downwind of one! "Acceptable" distance is a function of risk tolerance (both personal and societal), as well as both aggravating and mitigating factors, exposure time, ventilation, indoor vs outdoor, etc.

When viewed societally rather than individually, "acceptable" risk is also a function of the local infection rates and available medical care capacity at the place and time -- keeping the society as a whole below the R=1 threshold is critical -- or aiming to get it there is R is still >1.

When viewed individually, risk tolerance may be higher or lower. My wife has cancer. If I get infected, she probably will too. Obviously, my personal "acceptable" risk is lower than society's as a while. Luckily I can work remotely, but I feel for those with similar high-risk loved ones who must physically enter a workspace where distance is based on someone else's arbitrary measure of risk tolerance.

All other factors being equal, the reduction in risk with distance is super-linear (exponential, I think?), so a little extra distance beyond the bare minimum goes a long way, and the WHO guidelines very clearly state that 1m is a minimum, not a recommended distance.

Getting back to the WHO guidelines the parent post mentioned: Direct linear distance between individuals is not the only guideline WHO gives. They also recommend an overall density limitation of one individual per 10 square meters (see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.who.int%2Fpublicatio...). Seen in that context, average distance between individuals would be well over 2m, even while certain individuals are 1m apart. Given that, the WHO and CDC guidelines really aren't that different.

So, while 1m vs 2m is an interesting question too, don't get hung up on it to the point of distraction from the subject matter of the original post. Whatever "acceptable" distance is deemed appropriate for a PARTICLAR SITUATION, sphere-packing problems emerge.

Here's a pretty good article explaining the relative risks at various distances, as well as mentioning some national differences in government guidelines or rules. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fscien.... One interesting quote from it: "Scientists advising the UK government say spending six seconds at a distance of 1m from someone is the same as spending one minute at a distance of 2m. Being exposed to someone coughing is riskier. Being 2m away from a cough carries the same risk as someone talking to you for 30 minutes at the same distance."

To read these comments, you'd think that lat/long and plus codes are the only games in town.

In all the responses here, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned UTM coordinates. (Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system). In many ways, quite similar to plus codes, although not as compact to write. I won't describe them in detail, since wikipedia does a pretty good job.

UTM codes have a long, well established history. They've not been around for centuries like lat/long, but for long enough to have proved very useful in everyday use -- e.g. on topo maps.

When I first heard of plus codes, my first reaction was that they were just reinventing the UTM wheel -- although I must admit I'd prefer plus codes over UTM for everyday use because they are more compact -- which is largely because alphanumeric rather than largely numeric.

I like that plus codes have sub-fields for area-code/location, so the full code can be used to be globally unambiguous, or the more compact location field can be used alone as a shorthand in cases where the area is known implicitly -- e.g. for short-distance driving directions. I'm less fond of the existence of the alternate form, where the location portion is used in combination with a city name. I am sure that will be a source of confusion (as it obviously already has been in the comments on this forum!), and was a very bad idea IMO.

Hold it right there! What do you mean *IF*?

I think I speak for all my fellow dog people....

Perfect obviously has a dog. Wouldn't be perfect otherwise!

Ho, hum. Nothing new for me. Been working from home for the past 14 years.
.
My large-corporation employer has, over those years, alternated multiple times between periods of encouraging, discouraging, prohibiting and even mandating tele-work. Meanwhile, I've just continued to work from home all along -- sometimes with their support, sometimes with their disapproval.

My one saving grace being that my immediate management (the people who understand my job function, as opposed to the top-level corporate execs) have always been supportive. That has built tremendous loyalty in me, even when the upper execs' actions and policies are questionable IMO.

Well, it ended up taking 6.5 days, but we got the result last night. Negative!

My wife's respiratory symptoms are still present, but at least COVID19 has been eliminated as a cause.

Not yet. 6 days so far.

My wife has respiratory symptoms.
As a cancer patient, she's at very high-risk, if it is COVID-19.
We are in isolation while we await test results. We would have been in isolation anyway, even in the absence of her symptoms.
Her symptoms might not be COVID-19-related - she's susceptible to all manner of bugs due to her weakened immune system, and doesn't recover very quickly. And she's had respiratory symptoms multiple times before the COVID-19 crisis.
Was supposed to get test results within 72 hours, but the 72-hour mark came and went 4 hours ago, and still no results.

Waiting and hoping!

And incidentally, replacing indoor incandescent lighting with LEDs in, say, Siberia, conserves no power at all(*).
The LED generates less heat than the incandescent did, and the heating system compensates by generating correspondingly more heat. Same total energy consumption.

(*) Nitpickers: Don't take the fun out of my first-order approximation. Yes, I know I'm making all sorts of assumptions. E.g. Assuming both sources have equivalent heating efficiency. Assuming heating is running whenever the light is used. Assuming heating system is under closed-loop thermostat control, etc. Blah, blah. boring.

Is the real reason for this rule "a bid to support local software products"? (Protectionism)
Or, is the real reason more nefarious? Perhaps surveillance, spyware, backdoors, etc.

Anybody know?