I really did almost forget that I intended to post daily. I was staring at a piece of fabric, thinking how to solve (with my minimal skills in sewing) a couple of niggling design issues in this face mask I’m making. Have I mentioned I’ve picked up handsewing in a big way?? I’ve done two (spec) tops, which I’ve cannibalised for other things, because I’m still getting a hang of the design logic. Curse a discipline that’s developed centuries of practice for a reason, that i actually need to learn the foundational stuff just so i can get to the good stuff. on the other hand i’ve figured out enough basics to make myself a skirt in 2 hours of a solidly interminable work-related meeting (work experience stuff rather than the actual work title i’m in) because i realised belatedly with MCO my butt’s gone bigger and i just cannot be arsed, pardon the pun, to buy something online and hope for the best, and i had a small get-together with colleagues (shaded semi-outside area with 100% full outdoor ventilation, fully spread out).
ah, but even such outings will probably be a thing of the past again. twitterjaya in the last couple of days have been raging at the consequences of the our politicians’ irresponsibility - today marked the highest number of daily new cases yet, and even the news of trump possibly getting the consequences of his actions wasn’t quite sufficiently entertaining (though it was, but im sure as the leader of his country, he’ll get better treatment than his fellow citizens. the way the same irresponsible idiots that’s brought my country to this current situation will be too).
mind you, the anger is warranted though perhaps belated (but who knows, us malaysians have a bad habit of waiting and seeing) — as far as im concerned, people with any modicum of informed sense have warned the policy reversal in our treatment of migrants - from no detention in pandemic season to a sudden thirst of rounding them up - would bite us in the ass. of course, we didn’t actually care in the last two or three months of flares because it only happened to those people, you see. now that the inevitable leakage of vectors occurred, oh now we’re mad. viruses don’t give a shit what human civilisational labels we’ve given ourselves, they only care about our physiological traits and sociocultural habits that made it easier for them to flourish.
and why do you keep raving about this huh? i mean, aside from my general amateur-level understanding of epidemiology? you don’t have to be a Hari Seldon and invent psychohistory as long as you have any sociological and psychological sense of how people function, as well as human history. but i feel like there are generally, for this conversation, two kinds of people: those who understand the disciplines that makes engineers and thus can tell you the breakdown of how mechanical and physical things work, but no understanding on how humans in a society might use them; and people who understand everything in human relations, and style themselves as macchiavellian, without understanding the constraints introduced by the systemic and environmental factors. i at least aspire to be the third: the one who could at least grasp a little of both. maybe that’s why i like epidemiology so much, since u do need to have the ability to understand the mechanics of a system and the insight on how that gets expressed in a community of people.
also, as it’s becoming more evident, this isn’t a linear pandemic, but more a stochastic one. i’ve been telling ppl to read the latest piece by zeynep tufekci, and yes, i always do this, but seriously read this piece:
highlighting the measure of dispersion i think will be critical because it’s a measure that’s better suited for human understanding since so much of it is risk assessment based on sociocultural and environmental design factors. you don’t need maths, you just need your eyes. anyway, read the goddamn thing, or at least the twitter thread discussion.
This is pretty awesome thread! It would explain all this clubbing I've been doing in Belgrade lately and (hopefully) not catching the virus. Might be also a fact that my peeps really give zero crap on what's going on with Covid so when they igore it it can't happen to them LOL (I literally heared this sentence in the public bus today).