Calculus Made Easy and Memorable

I made a website to help people learn calculus. I have taken a 1910 book Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson that has already been digitized and put on the web in a nice format at https://calculusmadeeasy.org/. This was created by nadvornix and other volunteers. This edition has added some memorisation reminders to the text.

The book is famous for being accessible to teenagers. Some of the text has dated in the century since. Martin Gardner created a new edition in the 1980s with some of the text deolded and some extra background chapters. Making similar updates might improve this book some more.

Orbit is a tool that tests your knowledge of text you just read. And then retests you on a regular basis. This vastly increases the amount you remember for very little extra time or effort. Some of the evidence that timed repetition aids recall is given in this essay 

Calculus made Easy and Memorable is on the web at http://calculusmadememorable.org/ and the code is here. 

Why put a new more memorable calculus book online? ‘1 million students take a college-level Calculus 1 course in the United States, at an average cost of $2,500. And then 40% of them fail.’ That is 1 billion loss a year in one country from failing one course. Anything that helps reduce that rate could be a boon.

A Patreon for Materials

Prizes are a really good way of funding science but are not used enough. All sorts of prizes from longitude to private space have speed up technological development in their area.

Kaggle is an interesting example of current innovation incentivised using prizes. Kaggle defines a metric over a dataset and people try an build models that predict that well. This is then tested over another dataset to prove your predictions are the best. For not very much money a large number of very skilled people work on a defined problem for fun, kudos and the possibility of profit.

1. Typical Kaggle competition lasts 3 months, offers $25,000-100,000 in prize fund and attracts around 1000 specialists

2. At least top 10% of those specialists, ~100 persons are of prime quality, many others 'just' good.
   

Could a similar thing be done for discovering materials with properties we want? There are all sorts of problems that could be solved with materials with new properties. There are commercial incentives to develop many useful materials already. A more efficient solar panel or energy dense battery could have such commercial value lots of people are working on making them already. But some properties of materials are known to be useful but not commercialised yet to have huge competition or budgets trying to create them.

If we agree prizes are a useful incentive. And that we need new materials with useful properties how might a kaggle for such prizes work?

Kaggle has test datasets unknown to competitors held out to prove later which prediction model is best. For a materials version proving specific qualities in the lab would, initially, be too expensive. Relying on the scientific peer review process, of quality journals, would probably be enough initially. Occasionally issues in published materials research comes to light. But that happens in kaggle competitions too. And with prizes fairly low the incentives for shenanigans are not huge. Use a paper being published by a high quality journal as proof that a material has the defined property.

How long would the competitions be open for? The millenium prize for solving known big hard maths problems are open ended. Kaggle competitions are shorter a few month time periods. The time needed for journal papers to be approved and the difficulty of making materials means a year is probably more practical. Having a year competition timeline makes it more open to tinkerers than big grand ambitious challenges. I think 'A prize to someone who makes a wire room temperature superconductor at atmospheric pressure' is too ambitious. 'A prize to someone who publishes the warmest superconductor in a substance that can be turned into a wire by December 2022' is more practical. Competitions for improvements of a defined characteristic over a period of a year or two seem to be the best prize incentives to me.

How much would the prizes be for? Using journals keeps the cost of running the competitions low. But also means huge amounts of money cannot be involved. Also unlike kaggle a company putting up a dataset is not paying the prizes. The prizes would just be donated by people who can see that creating a product with these properties would be useful for improving our lives. As such a Patreon like model where donations are collected would probably be best. Stripe lets foundations setup as non profits set up these sorts of donations. Prizes would probably be in the 100K to -> 1 million range but initially to prove the concept would be much lower. 

What would be a good initial material quality to test this Patreoned Kaggle for materials idea on?

Assurance Contracts to Provide Ireland with the Grid Scale Battery Storage?

My last post was 

€100 off Electricity Bills or an Investment in Batteries?

where I argued that it was better to invest much of this money given back by the government in the electricity grid in the form of utility scale batteries.

These batteries would be a public good making island of Ireland electricity cheaper, greener and more reliable. They would improve things for everyone in Ireland. Batteries are non rival in that everyone benefits if we build them. They are non excludable as anyone who uses the grid is helped. And battery storage is currently not provided nearly enough of. There isn't any in Ireland yet and even if quite a large amount of battery storage added to the grid extra storage would still help.

Making electricity cheaper would also be fairly progressive as on lower incomes a bigger proportion of your income tends to be spent on electricity. But many have argued that this €200 million should be spent on other public goods like welfare payments rather than electricity. I am arguing here if we spend the money on electricity batteries is a better way to spend it on infrastructure rather than on an electricity bill. 

The Hornsdale Power Reserve cost €57m in 2017 and now would be much cheaper per kwh as the price of batteries keeps dropping. Let us say we need to get €57m from this grant to build a battery system for Ireland. How could we collect this money? The government could have not given out the cheques, except to those in receipt of social welfare, but the government have already said they will.

One way is an assurance contract. Kickstarter is this, where the money is collected from people but it is held until the €57m is gathered, so if not enough money is gathered to build the battery no money is taken. We would need to trust the collector will keep our money safe until the needed amount is gathered. And that the organiser will actually build the battery with the money if the required pledge level is reached. 

The free rider problem is the largest issue though. Why would I pay if someone else is going to pay for me and I get the cheaper green energy anyway?

In this case the government (or another grid battery organiser) have to get the money voluntarily. One way to do this is a Dominant Assurance Contract (DAC). They would create a website saying

Give us your €100 electricity rebate and we will create a battery storage device that will make electricity in Ireland greener, cheaper and more reliable by adding battery capacity to the grid. The minimum we need €57m and that will add 129 MWh and 100 MW* but a stretch goal is adding more capacity if we get more money. If we do not get €57m in pledges everyone who did pledge will get €120 for their €100 pledge back.

*this is the 2017 Hornsdale value we would get more now.

There are some issues here. Governments don't offer dominant assurance contracts like this. They don't like the risk of having to pay back money. Though the paper linked to calculates how low this risk is. I do not know who other than the government people would trust enough to give money back if the pledge was not met and to actually create the battery if it was.

Secondly a public good like a bridge people don't make money from (unless it is a toll bridge). This battery would generate income. I think people pledging that this income would in a large part be reinvested in another system to making electricity cheaper, greener and more reliable again. 

Who else would pay into such a scheme? The large tech companies are building large data centers here and have promised to add to the grid to make up for the extra electricity. They haven't actually protected the grid but by expanding battery storage they could do this. Also they don't want an unreliable grid so it is in their interest to expand battery storage use in Ireland. 

People want to reduce their carbon usage. Home batteries to supply electricity are one way to do this. But grid scale solutions are a lot more efficient per euro spent. Also many who want to reduce carbon output dont have the €4000ish needed for a home system but will be able to spend the €100 or slightly more.

An assurance contract to gather up peoples €100 to spend on a grid scale solution. What do you think?

 

€100 off Electricity Bills or an Investment in Batteries?

 

€200 Million spent on utility scale battery storage could make electricity cheaper and more environmentally friendly in Ireland for the future.

Australia and California have installed battery storage recently, so the technology is not unproved. They allow energy to be stored from wind, solar and hydro sources and used later. This means that the most polluting forms of electricity never have to be turned on. Offices and homes do not use much electricity at night. If we can store energy at night to use when demand is high it means wind can be a greater proportion of the grid and we don't have to use as much non green energy.

Also because the energy is stored when it is plentiful and cheap and used when it is rare and expensive the costs of producing energy overall drops. These batteries pay for themselves pretty quickly. In 2017 they "built the Hornsdale Power Reserve, for a capital cost of A$90 million" but since then it "saved South Australian consumers over $150 million." 

Based on a cost of 'The 2020 starting point of $345/kWh' this €200m would provide about 2/3 of the 666 megawatts. That is about 2/3 of Moneypoint. Or over twice Turlough Hill. Batteries supply energy for about 4 hours. But it will be clean energy from Ireland growing renewable energy production.

These are also very fast to build. '63 days between grid contract and completion'. So it is not like it would take years to bring this extra energy into the grid as it would with new power stations or even wind farms. 

Instead of giving everyone €100 off their electricity bill using that money to improve our grid to have greener and cheaper electricity is a better use of that money.

Scam Coins in Dublin

 There is an ad on Dublin bus for a scam crypto coin called Floki.

Floki is the name of Elon musk's dog. Though it has nothing actually to do with him. As Gizmodo put it "Cryptocurrency scammers often target fans of Elon Musk on Twitter, who seem to be some of the easiest marks on the planet". I am not linking to the Floki website or twitter here because that risks encouraging the scammers.

Many Ethereum, Bitcoin and even some stable coin fans actually believe in their utopian visions for cryptocurrency. And they could be right. This coin is just a scam though. I talked to the creators and all they could claim was selling NFTs and a game to earn coins was going to happen in the future. Which is like saying the pyramid that doesn't exist yet when put on their pyramid will make it valuable.

You've wasted years of your life sitting through the "you can lose money" warnings at the end of banking adverts. And yet when this crap is advertised without a warning? What is the point of advertising standards if this apocalyptically dumb scam is allowed to sit on the side of buses. 

1917 as a pure cinema film

Stephen Fry once said that Hamlet was the best character in a play because he does nothing but talk. And Lassie is the best movie character because she doesn't talk just does action.

1917 is a great Lassie movie as there is very little talking.

Another feature it has is a simple physical journey. Apocalypto and Mad Max road fury are A-> B films (though Mad Max goes back to A). The very start of 1917 sets up the A->B task. Lots of descriptions of the film talk about the hidden edits but I think the pure simplicity of the story is really engaging.

1917 is a great pure film and I should have seen it in an Imax when it came out.

Foxconn Automation Reducing Employment

Around 2016 there was large interest in how factory automation was going to lead to mass unemployment. And this was one of the reasons given for why Universal Basic Income would be introduced.

But have the predictions of then happened? Foxconn was one of the big companies in the news about this at the time.

iPhone manufacturer Foxconn plans to replace almost every human worker with robots

Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'

Foxconn had 837000 workers in 2016 30% less now would be 587,000 employees. Instead Foxconn in 2020 employed around 1.29 million people.

There could be more going on here. Mergers could increase the size of the company. But on the raw figure nothing like the 30% reduction in staff happened. 

Solar Power in Ireland Price Comparison

 There is a good article about Solar power in Ireland here

'It is expected that about 600-700 MW of new solar will come on-stream as a result of this renewable energy support scheme... In sunnier Spain, auctions for solar can get it on the grid for about €24 per megawatt-hour; the equivalent cost in Ireland is three times higher, at €73. "

All else being equal I would rather make electricity in Ireland than rely on abroad. But how much of surcharge should we be willing to pay for purely local generated power? We get coal from Colombia for our coal plants. At three times the price we might be able to mine it here but we don't.

Colombia is relatively uncorrupt place compared to Saudi or the Russian. Which we also rely on for energy. But still not great. Countries could turn off the supply or up the price no matter what a contract says. Could we trust North African countries not to turn off the power at the whim of some dictator?

Columbia is 46th in the worlds most democratic countries index. This index seems a reasonable proxy for likelihood of keeping contracts. Russia is 124th and Saudi 156th. The North African countries Tunisia 54th, Morocco 96th, Algeria 115th. These seem presently to be a bit more trustworthy, contract wise.

Solar power seems so spread out that it would be hard for a dictator to corner the marker and increase the price drastically. There is just more desert and it is easier to put solar farms on there there is locations and the skills needed to mine oil and gas. As such I don't think the argument that we should have solar farms in Ireland even if they are much less efficient because of political stability issues in other countries as that compelling. 

Solar Power in Ireland

 Is it worth installing solar power in Ireland? Or is it more efficient to build the solar power someplace with more kilowatt hours per panel per year and transport the electricity from there?

BORD GÁIS ENERGY ANNOUNCE NEW DEVELOPMENT OF 11 SOLAR FARMS

"Obton’s aim is to expand their portfolio and solar energy products here to reach a total capacity of 1 Gigawatt (GW) by 2026, their venture will see the total value of its portfolio and projects here reach an investment of €750m in the sector.

The eleven solar farms will have the capacity to generate up to 118MW of power and are a part of the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme (RESS).

These facilities will be located in 8 counties and will include sites in Wexford, Waterford, Cork, Longford, Galway, Offaly, Meath, and Tipperary."

There are three questions here. 1. Amount of power gotten  2. Losses in transmission. 3. Cost per kwh
1. Ireland does not get much sunshine

these counties get about 2.7KWH. In Morocco this figure is double

2. Transmission losses. Ireland to Morocco is about 4000km. Losses per 1000km are about 3%. Which is small enough to make transmission feasible.

3. Cost. Median wage in Ireland is €36,095 and in Morocco is about €6000. Engineers are going to be a lot more similar than this. But much of the standard cleaning and basic maintenance of panels will be much cheaper in Morocco. Land in the Sahara is much cheaper than in Ireland so the land costs will also be less.

We might want to keep Irish money in Ireland. But if we are getting close to twice the power for less cost that gives us lots of the spare money to keep in Ireland.
Tunisia will sell solar electricity at 0.036 Euro per kwh . Irish Electricity unit price 21.24c per kWh. There is of course an issue with when the sun shines and electricity reliability. Though if we are going to have a percentage of our electricity from solar surely it should be from a much cheaper source even if that is further away?

Opening Up with Adults Unvaccinated.

 I argued here Vaccinate the old fast that the old had such higher Covid fatality rates that it was worth trying to vaccinate as many of them as fast as possible as possible.

But what happens to adults 18-50 if they are unvaccinated. The risk of being hospitalised is about 3% across this age group. 

There are about 1.5 million Irish people in this age group. 3% of this is about 50,000 people who would be hospitalised if we all got it. Though herd immunity might drop this a bit.

The Irish Hospital system went pear shaped in January at '1,846 people with Covid-19 in hospital' which means 50k even if spread out a bit would be really bad for fatality rate of hospitalised cases. Even just for non covid cases if the hospitals are overrun you won't get the other treatment you might need. And we shouldn't traumatise medical workers with the awful conditions that many sick people at once would cause.

All this means I don't think we can have really high rates of covid even in healthy 18-50 years olds without causing so much lack of care that death rates would rise sharply. And we have to make sure we keep the rates low until vaccination rates are much higher in this age group.

FDA Vaccine Approval

 If you do a search on twitter for unapproved vaccine you will find loads of people saying some version of

A: I will not take an unapproved vaccine

The FDA explains why and how it uses Emergency Use Exemptions for Vaccines here

What will they do when the vaccine gets full FDA approval? 

I can imagine three responses.

1. Then I will be reassured and take it

2. That will increase my chances of taking it but I am concerned still about B,C,D...

3. No I am concerned about B,C,D...

3 is strange as if B,C,D are actually your worries then why say full FDA approval is your worry initially? I have asked a few people who expressed A what they will do after full approval. Not one of them has said 1 or 2 only some version of 3. That looks more like they are using FDA approval as an excuse rather than an actual real criteria they believe.

BMI and Covid Hosptalisations

I keep reading people saying that an alternative to covid vaccinations and social distancing methods are healthy eating and  exercise to reduce BMI. How much would these actually help?

According to the CDC not that much. Body Mass Index and Risk for COVID-19–Related Hospitalization. Graphs here the effect of obesity is greater in those under 65. But even then it seems to be about 20%

Which is not a huge amount. Vaccines reduce hospitalization rates by over 80%. And that is if diets actually could reduce your BMI from obese to recommended levels.

Give Children Votes

Demeny voting is giving children votes to be used by their parents, until the children reach voting age. The interests of children are not always represented well in democracies and giving their interest some weight might lead to better policies.

Older people vote more often. And thus their policy preferences are more likely to be followed than those held by young people. No one under 18 votes so their policy preferences get very little attention.

You could argue that because children know so little and don't work we should not get their opinion on policies. Giving their votes to their parents gets away from this objection though. 

But why would you think parents know what policies are best for their children? We trust parents to pick food, bedtime, schools, clothes etc for children and in comparison to them picking a political candidate occasionally is minor. 

If giving children votes would result in more money for schools, less money for pensions etc then the people who want less money for schools and more money for pensions will stop it happening. Which means we should argue on the morality of giving them votes not the particular policies that are likely. Women supported alcohol prohibition more than men did. But women's voting was still the right thing to do even if some policy choices they initially supported were wrong.

The Irish birth rate is 1.75 kids per child. Below the replacement rate of 2.1. The extra .1 is because some small number of people won't make it to the age of having kids. No country that has ever dropped below 2.1 replacement level has ever risen back up again. Extra parental leave, free childcare, increase children support, free children medical care and loads of other things have been tried but none seem to have increased birth rate much. And they are all much more expensive than votes for kids.

Needle Phobia and Covid Vaccinations

Between 10-20% of adults are really scared of needles. Anti Vax people are really hard to persuade. But anti needle people might be easier. And a fair number of people claiming to be vaccine skeptics might just be shy to admit a fear of needles is a big factor.

"Avoidance of influenza vaccination because of needle fear occurred in 16% of adult patients"  Soon we will have enough vaccines for all adults but if 10-20% of them do not get vaccinated due to Trypanophobia thats a lot of unnecessary deaths and it makes reaching community immunity levels impossible.

Trypanophobia is classed as a phobia with a known process of medical treatment. The steps to get over it seem to be three types
1. Cognitive behavioural therapy, hypnotherapy and other psychological techniques 

2. Nice relaxing location. comfy seats etc for where the injections happen.

3. Topical cream to reduce pain on the injection site.

These are described here, here and here.

Tech people think there should be an app for everything. But in this case it might work. A Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) app that gradually helped people get over their fear of needles might really help increase uptake of the vaccine. There are loads of CBT apps out there. If you know a good one that deals with needle phobia please comment.

There will be vaccinations for covid that do not need needles in the medium term. But for the moment getting people over their fear is needed. 

The needle phobia apps I can find I can find are aimed at kids to explain to injections to them. Rather than steps to get adults over a fear of needles.

The vaccinations created and tested in under a year are amazing. And we are going to get a lot more of them soon. Helping people get over the common fear of needles is an important step if we want to get as many people vaccinated as possible.

Road Deaths in 2020

 During the pandemic people drive less. I would expect that to mean fewer deaths caused by driving. But that didn't happen in the US or IReland.

In the US deaths per KM are up significantly

For the first time since 2007, preliminary data from the National Safety Council show that as many as 42,060 people are estimated to have died in motor vehicle crashes in 2020. That marks an 8% increase over 2019 in a year where people drove significantly less frequently because of the pandemic. The preliminary estimated rate of death on the roads last year spiked 24% over the previous 12-month period, despite miles driven dropping 13%. The increase in the rate of death is the highest estimated year-over-year jump that NSC has calculated since 1924 – 96 years.

In Ireland 

In the period January - December 2020 there were 137 fatal collisions resulting in 148 fatalities on Irish roads. This represents eight more fatal collisions and eight more deaths (+6%) compared to provisional Garda data for the full year of 2019

There is an in depth comparison between 2019 and 2020 here but nothing in it jumps out as obviously hugely different to me. It could be the low total number of deaths in Ireland means this was just unlucky. "There were 1,407 fewer serious and minor injury collisions recorded in 2020," This 25% decrease in accidents implies the increase in deaths was unlucky.

But other countries do seem to have reduced deaths. 

The UK does seem to have had the expected decline

There were 1,580 reported road deaths, a decrease of 14% compared to the previous year. There were 131,220 casualties of all severities, a decrease of 16%. The reduction in casualties is broadly in line with the fall in motor vehicle traffic of 14% over the same period

France had the expected reductions

A total of 2,550 people died on the roads of mainland France, a drop of 21.4 percent from 2019...

Overall car deaths fell by more than average in 2020, which the agency said was due to motorists aged over 75 cutting down on trips more than the rest of the population. 

Germany Road Deaths declined as expected

In 2020, 2,724 people died in road traffic accidents in Germany. Based on provisional figures, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) also reports that this was a decline of 322, or 10.6%, on 2019 (3,046 fatalities).

Spain

The number of people dying in 2020 from car accidents fell by 870, or 21%

It looks like most countries did have drops in traffic deaths. The low numbers in Ireland mean that random events change the total more easily. The American increase is still quite strange though.

Rewild Irish Hills

We should not pay to keep sheep on the high hills of Ireland. 

Hill sheep are not very good money earners by themselves. The wool is more expensive to shear than its worth. The sheep have quite a hard life. And their meat is already not worth much. Hill sheep is kept going by subsidies and causes environmental harm. The subsidies are about 10 euro per sheep. The number of sheep increased after 1973 when we joined the EEC. If we paid the farmers not to keep the sheep the hillsides would rewild. Larger trees and bushes would regrow which would absorb carbon.

The Success Sequence and Happiness

 There is an interesting series of posts by Bryan Caplan here about how the success sequence helps avoid poverty. This sequence is

1. Finish high school.

2. Get a full-time job once you finish school.

3. Get married before you have children.

Helps you avoid poverty. "97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence”—that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order—are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34)."

The posts argue if the sequence is cause or effect, really something that can be advised and other things. 
But what struck me about it was how these three also correlate with happiness. Telling people how to avoid poverty might seem like a conspiracy by the Capitialist Man. Telling people how to get happy seems less sinister. Though of course there are all sorts of cause and effect stuff here. And poverty and happiness are really closely related so it could be that it is just the same thing being measured and the only difference is the framing.

Would these three mean you were happier even apart from the poverty effect?

Full time job: "Many studies have tried to quantify the adverse effect of unemployment on well-being using survey data on life satisfaction. For example, the raw difference in average life satisfaction between unemployed and employed workers aged 20–60 years in the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984–2011 amounts to 1.3 points on a 0–10 scale." 

Finish high school: People who finish secondary education are happier.

Too Educated to be Happy? An investigation into the relationship between education and subjective well-being by Erich Striessnig this paper goes into how married people are happier as well.

Get married before you have children:
'The difference in quality of life between the lowest and highest education group is as big as the difference between someone being married compared to being single.' from the paper above. 
A longitudinal observational study conducted in Germany between the years of 1984 and 2000 showed more conclusive results, where people who married eventually were generally happier and more satisfied than people who remained single.

The success sequence seems a pretty good way to be happy.

Zero Covid Ireland and Trips Abroad

 It might not be possible to have zero covid Ireland because too many people have to come into and out of the country. How many trips into and out of the country are necessary? This is an attempt to get some figures together because I have found no figures being actually argued just people saying 'Ireland is not New Zealand'

Irish born people living abroad coming home for sick relatives, funerals etc. Close to a million people born here live abroad. Say 10% have to return in a year that would be 100K.

Foreign born people having to go home for sick relatives, funerals etc. CSO data on Foreign born people is at Total is 393,959 people. 400K say. How many would have to travel? Say 10% a year or 40K.

Lorry Drivers About 150K Lorry journeys take place into Ireland each year. How many individual drivers? Say 10k I'll ignore drivers for the moment but they are an issue.

Border travel. About 25K people cross the border to work. But I will assume an all island approach for the moment. I did some NI calculations in this post

No quarantine or vaccine is going to be 100% effective. But it does not have to be just the number of cases coming in has to be kept low. For argument's sake say 1 per day can come into the country (not just a hotel) and later develop symptoms.  150K people having to come into Ireland per year. Or about 400 a day. 10 day quarantine means you'd need 4000 hotel spaces. Even after 14 days in quarantine about 5% of those infected could still develop symptoms later. At 400 per day where 1% of people carried an infection would be 4 people. 5% of those would be one person every 5 days would do quarantine and still have an infection after it finished. Requiring those coming in to be vaccinated might change these odds significantly to the better but not in an easy to calculate way yet.

New Zealand has a high foreign born population. 1.27 million live there who were born outside NZ. They also have a lot of people born there abroad who might need to come home about 14% which is only slightly lower than Ireland.

Back of the envelope if 10% of people have to go home per year. And we have a long quarantine that is enforced. We could keep cases introduced to quite a low number. 

Zero Covid Ireland Possibilities for Northern Ireland

Setting up a border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is really difficult. The length of the border and number of crossings is huge. 23,000 to 30,000 people commute across the Irish border to work.

But if a border on the island is not possible there are alternatives.

1. Quarantine for all people coming into the island.

2. Quarantine for all people coming onto the island from outside the UK. Scotland seem to be moving toward this option.

3. People coming into NI have to be vaccinated. The UK is vaccinating very fast and by the time this lockdown ends they could have enough people vaccinated that this sort of restriction becomes possible. Vaccination is not as effective as 14 days of quarantine. But even that is not 100% effective. 

Zero covid does not mean stopping every case it just means keeping levels low enough that outbreaks can be shut down quickly. These options might not be as effective as full quarantine but they could be effective enough. And at that time NI might have enough vaccinated that outbreaks are easier to control.

Things I got wrong

 Here are some of the things I predicted or asked for on this blog and I was wrong about

1. I thought Covid combined with flu this year would be really bad. It turns out everyone is so careful about covid that there is very little flu. I still think the flu shot should be free for all though in normal years.

Ireland should make the Flu Vaccine Free for All 

2. I was suspicious Manna drone delivery did not have realistic demonstration videos. But now they do 

Dinner. Is. Here. pic.twitter.com/SJAf4243BX

— 🚁 Manna Drone Delivery 🚁 (@MannaAero) December 2, 2020

Drone Food Delivery 

3. I thought in 2011 we would have self driving cars by now

How much would a driverless taxi cost?

4. I thought DIY ventilators would help in a pandemic (in 2006). But stopping disease spread is actually the important thing

Homemade ventilator

There are loads more I got wrong but those ones jump out at me now.