COVID news: 199 new cases in NSW in the past 24 hour period. It’s dropped below 200, but may still be statistical fluctuation. At least it’s not growing rapidly, although secondary indicators show that our health system may be beginning to struggle. There are outbreaks in several hospitals, with dozens of medical staff now in isolation. And for the first time our contact tracers have been unable to do 100% follow-up of suspected COVID exposure contacts within 24 hours. If the contact tracing system starts failing, there will be more potential cases circulating in the community without isolating during their infectious period, and things could go south quickly.
Every day this past couple of weeks has felt like teetering on a knife-edge. All we can do is maintain distancing from all our friends and family, stay at home, and hope tomorrow’s news is better.
In a more positive piece of news today, Telstra (our major telecommunications carrier) has announced that from now on all payphones will no longer be “pay” phones – they are going to be free of charge. All calls to Australian land lines and mobile phones made from a public phone will be completely free. We still have around 15,000 public phones in Australia, because of a government requirement of Telstra to maintain infrastructure to allow convenient access to communication for all Australians. Public phones have become more scarce in major cities (although I know of several within walking distance of my home), but are still common in rural towns and Outback communities. In a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of civic generosity, Telstra has decided that they can afford to write-off the $5 million a year it takes to maintain the public phones, and simply allow anyone to make calls for free. I tried to find out if any other countries have made this move, but Google was particularly unhelpful with any search query I tried, so I don’t know.
I spent time today writing and making Darths & Droids comics.
But this evening I had a special ethics lesson, as part of the NSW Primary Ethics volunteer teaching that I would normally be doing eevery Wednesday morning at a local school. Those classes have not begun this term due to the Sydney COVID lockdown and schools being closed, so Primary Ethics has organised a series of Zoom classes for the volunteer teachers, led by a staff member who runs a class form the new high school ethics curriculum.
So tonight I joined a class of 16 teachers, and we answered questions based on the high school ethics topic of “The Meaning of Life”. A big question! This is a brand new topic, which hasn’t been trialled in high schools yet, due to the course only starting this year, and being interrupted by COVID. Obviously we weren’t going to actually come up with an answer to the meaning of life – the class was structured around pondering questions like: “Can there even be any simply definable meaning of life?” “If we could know the meaning of life, would it change how we behave?” and, my favourite, “Why did the aliens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy go to such great lengths to try to find the meaning of life?” (really a proxy question for: Why do we try to figure out the meaning of life?)
It was fun, and it gave me some cool ideas for tackling a similar topic in my own online ethics classes.
Random photo I took while out walking around the neighbourhood yesterday:
New content today:
here the main communication company is being allowed to remove pay-phones that have less than 100 minutes of use per month. those that remain are still not free – I think you need to get a card from the post office to use them.
The meaning of life questions are nice – a lot of people spent a lot of time to find out the answer to the big one, I never thought about why and what would happen if we did find it. There is a short sci-fi story that stated the universe was a simulation that got shut down once people figured it out, so maybe not look so hard for the answer…
Sounds a bit like Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God”.