Welcome to the Half-Science Café.
The destination of choice for anyone wishing to engage in meaningless, going-around-in-circles debate about the important issues of the day.
Like masks, for example. A topic guaranteed to bring out a whole rainbow’s worth of factless opinion and unlogic. The café is a place where customers can debate whether the mask issue is an epidemiology problem, or a fat-tailed risk problem, or a sociology problem, a psychology problem or a fluid-dynamics problem, an electrostatics problem, or, heaven forbid, a two-phase flow with a double evaporation somersault and a half twist problem. All the time forgetting that the real problem is a combination of all of the above, and where none of the individual pieces can be ignored.
The café has become a safe place where the person with the simplest message and the most trustworthy face wins. So that, now we’ve elected a Government of bare-face liars, when we try to work out who the most trustworthy face is, the preferred choice turns out to be, wait for it… Gary Lineker. With David Icke in second place, BoJo the Clown and his troupe of devolved jabbermonkeys in third, anybody with a recognisable professional qualification from the adjacent Half-Science University – someone with a ‘Dr’ at the beginning of their name for example – comes fourth, and anyone with a genuine desire to establish the truth gets to sit with a dunce’s cap on in the far corner facing the wall. But, hey ho, either way, visitors will be guaranteed to leave the café with a doggy-bag and a cunning sound-bite answer they can use should anybody question their subsequent mask choices back in the outside world.
The Half-Science Café is a place, too, where its possible to watch literary magicians weave their wit-filled hypnotic spell in such a dazzling way that we end up thinking cooking chickens and washing dishes are somehow equivalent to mask wearing. That the ability to put a chicken into a 190degC preheated oven for 20 minutes per pound, plus 20 minutes has some kind of analogous relationship to the problem of keeping 80nanometre diameter particles out of harms way when they’re sneezed out of a symptomless infected person. After, crucially, a couple of minutes of droplet evaporation time.
The staff here at the café love their work. They know the customer is always right. If the customer concludes that a lovable football commentator (7.6 million Twitter followers can’t be wrong) is the way to go, that’s clearly the way to go. Even if it only saves one life, why wouldn’t we all wear a mask, right? Never mind the fact that the advice turns precaution into precautionism (https://www.darrellmann.com/precautionism/). Which in turn means we’re a whisker away from extending the unlogic to mean we’ll all be wearing full NBC hazmat suits come the Autumn… because, guaranteed, that will save at least one life.
Here at the Half Science Café, we are also able to offer counselling to anyone that accidentally snaps out of their hypnotic trance and starts to experience one of those awful, stomach-churning moments when we realise – tragically – how all of this blather is utterly trivial compared to the real issue. The issue that reveals how we now live in a world in which there’s so little common sense and so little leadership, that no one even thinks to go and find the actual truth anymore. That not a single Government, not a single Chief Scientific Officer, not a single WHO executive has had the gumption to stand up and say, you know what, let’s get all the different domain experts – the epidemiologists, the risk analysts, the fluid dynamicists, the sociologists, the psychologists, those annoying two-phase flow geeks – together into a room and lock the door on them until they’ve either worked out what the proper questions to ask are, they’ve answered them, or worked out what information is still missing in order to come back and answer the question properly next week. Because, until that happens, were all forced to live in a Russian-bot guided world filled, courtesy of Cummings and his Nudge Squad, with empty safetyism-provoking slogans like this week’s stroke of anti-genius, ‘Hands. Face. Space’.
Really.
We’re all on Candid Camera now. Smile.