Week 53

Monday 23 March 2020

• Well, this pandemic is something.

  I’m a bit bored of the “I went to the supermarket and they had sold out of eggs” stories. It did occur to me that “the wisdom of crowds” has been discredited suddenly, and in fact supermarket queues are somewhere where the wisdom of crowds never holds – usually the least popular queue is the best. But then I waited behind an unlucky man who took a long time to scan his groceries on the self-checkout machine – as long as it took the several people in the next queue. Also, it may be that I don’t know what the “the wisdom of crowds” actually is, and I’m just guessing, like people do about “the law of large numbers”.

  Queueing while maintaining a safe distance from other humans is awkward – people just think you’re standing there.

  I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts. It’s reassuring to see other veteran from-home workers report that they, too, have been unproductive recently. There is some pandemic related public transport information work to do – this blog post from TransportAPI mentions some efforts I ought to duplicate – but I’ve not done much.

  I haven’t touched Supermarket Market, and now supermarkets’ grocery delivery websites are being hugged to death it seems wrong to be further adding to the load by scraping them for prices.

• Remember I moved house last week. I’ve some plants now, and have set up all the direct debits, and some kind of broadband (which I might write a whole blog post about). I “need” to buy a vacuum cleaner, a bicycle, a potato masher and a cheese grater, but going out for such inessential items feels increasingly like the wrong thing to do. Maybe some bicycle, potato masher etc shops are still open, but maybe they shouldn’t be.

• Started to watch Spooks. One of the people in it is Tom from Succession, who is also called Tom in Spooks. Also, a Sontaran looking guy, and lots of other familiar faces. It’s preposterous, and that’s OK.