Does anyone have hands-on experience of cordless hair and beard trimmers please?

Making decisions based on on-line reviews is becoming less useful because so many companies pay for good reviews.

It also pisses me off when the article starts with headlines like, "The 25 best hair & beard trimmers"
 
How the feck can you have 25 best ones?

I had a similar problem recently.

I was looking for a coffee grinder - my conclusion was any online review site that starts like "The 25 best -product type-" actually means "Here are 25 products I can give you an affiliate link to and earn money if you buy something"

Luckily for what I was looking for there are dedicated coffee nerds to be a bit more impartial - maybe a barber/hairdresser forum might help with yours?

[Science Wife did not approve so she has answered it herself below]

I've just been watching a news item about a car crash victim who had a hands and face transplant. Part of the story warned that he would need anti-rejection drugs for the rest of his life.

Now I know that the human body constantly renews it's cells, so why wouldn't the spare parts eventually become his?

The body renews by cells dividing.

So a transplanted hand cell will divide and still have the same signature as before and hence still need anti rejection drugs.

The cells that are right by the "joins" will blend into each other but cells divide at different rates, some cells might take 10 years before they divide for example, so there's a limit to how much this blending can happen.

Science Wife did not approve so she has answered it herself below

All cells contain a unique pattern of proteins on their surface. This acts as a 'signature' that your body uses to recognise your own cells from foreign cells (e.g. bacteria). If you body identifies a 'non-self' cell it will activate your immune system and kill the cell - this is the same idea with transplants.

The body itself repairs and grows by cells dividing (they don't really 'renew' - when cells get too old they self-destruct in a process called apoptosis). When the transplanted cells divide the two new daughter cells will contain the same protein signature as the oriignal parent cell. This means the body will always recognise them as non-self.

There will however be some blending between the patients own cells and the transplanted cell as they divide near each other.

Beside that there are many different types of cell. Some cells divide very rapidly (like the upper layer of skin), but others (like nerve cells) don't divide at all. This means there will always be some non-self cells in the tranplanted organ, hence the need for immunosuppresent drugs for the rest of their life.

It's been going long enough we can have retrospectives from the start. This story is quite interesting though

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55622386
Coronavirus: How the UK dealt with its first Covid case

Is this "go to a website & book" peculiar to Leicestershire, or a new thing?

I was under the impression we all had to wait in line until they contacted us.


I had no idea either Tony but my eldest daughter saw a discussion about it on social media and alerted me.

I would advise looking on your local health service website and searching Covid 19 vaccination.

Where I live they have put out a message that if you fit into those categories then you can contact them to make an appointment rather than wait for an appointment.

I'm in neither so I don't know whether they've got a handful of spots or loads of them, but it does suggest a few places at least are actively trying to get people to do it themselves rather than having to wait for the invite.

A 14yo boy shot and stabbed by a group of 14 - 16yos in a residential street in broad daylight.

Has this kind of thing always happened, (If it has I can't remember it) or is it a recent phenomenon?

Shot might be less likely because of the availability of weapons - but the general sentiment, yes.

Difficult to differentiate between any acutal increase or decrease in behaviour because obviously it can just reflect an increase or decrease in detection of such behaviour. It can also be coupled with more general police behaviour. At certain stages of history their might have been a view that they would discount children as suspects because they just didn't believe it, and at other stages of history they might care less about if they got the actual person as long as it was pinned on someone.

Separately to that this covers the topic  a bit,
https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2013/11/confessions-of-a-boy-murderer/

The first paragraph from that is is this, "In 1892 a sixteen-year-old boy named John Wise joined his friends on an excursion to Weymouth. On reaching the chosen destination, a stone’s throw from Portland Prison positioned high on a rocky peak, the boy spun round and pushed Lawrence Salter off the cliff. At the coroner’s inquest into the boy’s death Wise explained his reason for committing murder. He simply said, ‘I did it to be hanged.’"

So they must be legal if they are renting them out.

Only where there are trials of them.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/london-host-uk-trial-escooters-transport-for-london-b72225.html

They are all over Nottingham

https://www.transportnottingham.com/projects/escooters/

You have to ride em on the road Stu?

Seems dangerous and unnecessary to me.

They're all being ridden on the pavements - hundreds of 'em.

I knew I'd heard something about only being allowed to ride one if it was rented.

I read the regulation they're using in Nottingham that allowed them to run the trials - there's nothing about it being related to the hired ones; they basically just legally re-defined them as bicycles for the trial period.

There might be city regulations on top of that and terms and conditions when you hire them that make a difference, but I would have thought the main basis of only using the hired ones is that this trial is temporary. If you buy one then it's still only legal to use them on the road, within the same boundaries as the trial, and once it get's to March 2022 they're going to be illegal again (unless they change the law at that point).

The point of the trial is to see what effect it has, so you should feel free to complain about them being ridden on the pavements. But if the end result is a noticeable fall in car numbers without any significant impact on road (or pavement) safety then it might not make too much difference to their final analysis.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/thousands-of-israelis-tested-positive-for-coronavirus-after-first-vaccine-shot-1.9462478

Thousands of Israelis have tested positive for Covid after Pfizer vaccine.  I am not sure what this means, as false positives should not happen with a mRNA vaccine.   There are no details of whether they are sick or not, and it may just be a lot of Covid in the community at vaccine time and it takes a couple of weeks for immunity.
..

That link doesn't work (anymore, I assume) - I saw a Times of Israel article from previously talking about people getting sick after the Pfizer shot. That was emphasising that the vaccine doesn't start working for 8-10 days, I also recently saw some anecdotal criticism of "soaring" COVID infections in Israel so (unless that article had extra information) it seems to be primarily about the high number of infections (and high population density) in Israel.

Latest legal opinion appears to be that impeachment can't continue after the 20th. Wonder if enough republicans will help force it through before then versus those that will filibuster/delay?

My understanding is that impeachment will happen now - that's the Congress part; and that it's just the actual prosecution (the Senate part) that the question is about(?)

There seems to be a few experts or casual COVID professors on here. So can anyone have a guess at what the true death rate of this virus is yet ? My amateur stab in the dark is between 0.2 % and 0.3 % .

What is your definition of "true death rate"?

Do you mean case fatality rate?

[and]

...
The interesting bit will be late March when deaths could be below 100 a day but cases over 30,000 a day we saw in Dec, should the lockdowns be eased as deaths are lowish  and declining or kept as cases are high.
...

Obviously politics an always get in the way but in general government policy has never been about keeping deaths low (or cases low for that matter) - government policy has all been about keeping hospitalisations low.

In practice that usually means keeping cases low but in theory if we have high cases, low deaths and low hospitalisations then that would suggest less restrictions.

I would guess we're more likely to have high cases, low deaths and high hospitalisations though.

I make bread now and again anyway but I haven't made souffle for about 20 years so this was pretty much learning how to do it from scratch again

Click to see full-size image.

It wasn't perfect, I might have lost some points if it was a Bake Off technical challenge - but pretty pleased it worked so well after all this time.

...
I think you are a bit rude calling me disingenuous, as the death toll is truly shocking, and neither I nor the person I quoted said that the around 600k deaths we will see this year were just Covid deaths...

Easy now, you used an awful lot of words to explain how they're serious numbers when I was never disputing that and ended my post with explaining how a "low" number like a 13% increase is actually a "huge" number in the context given.

I was more expressing my opinion about his use of communication - his thread very much seemed to be criticising people using "dishonest" manipulation to dazzle people with numbers but he then ended his thread with "honest" manipulation to dazzle people with numbers.

But maybe he has more experience of this and knows that the only way to get the point across is to be dramatic.

Having tens of thousands of deaths from a global deadly pandemic doesn't particularly seem surprising or shocking to me, I apologise if I offended you, I didn't appreciate how sensitive and easily shocked you were.

[with]

...https://mobile.twitter.com/NickStripe_ONS/status/1340412018076110849

Given current weekly numbers of deaths, we can sadly assume that there are likely to be over 600k deaths registered in E&W this year There have only been 600k+ deaths registered in a single year once before – in 1918, the year of the “Spanish” flu pandemic

As people will point out, we have a bigger population than then, but we also have enormous advances in medicine, so if is still a bit shocking.  ...

I agree with the gist of his thread about misrepresenting statistics - but it's pretty disappointing that he chooses to end it like this.

This is just trying to dazzle people with big numbers.

The UK population in 1918 was a bit less than 40 million (so ignoring that includes Scotland) 600k deaths is 1.5% of the total
The UK population now is a bit less than 70 million so 600k deaths is 0.8% of the total.

So just brushing past that by saying  - but medical advances - seems a bit disingenious. Having approximately half the mortality seems like a pretty good measure to take into account medical advances.

Plus he ends up saying that the excess deaths is in the region of 70k  - this is a lot - but a 13% (ish) increase in deaths has decidedly less impact than saying 600 thousand deaths.

On the other hand -  -  -

...
The response, to stop a few hundred thousand people dying some years before their time, is utterly ridiculous from any perspective.
...

a 5% increase in excess mortality would make headline news and probably lead to an enquiry - so in this context 13% is pretty huge.

And this is with all the measures that have been taken.

It doesn't really matter the number of people or when they would have otherwise died - if your death rate is expected to change by 1 or 2% a year and then it suddenly tips into double figures, that will decimate your economy. Having a 13% increase instead of a 20/30/40% increase is really not something I'd see as an over reaction.

Why is it going up?

I saw a comment from some Republican politician piling in on how unseemly Trump is being - he said something along the lines of that every US election has irregularities because they're big and complicated affairs. But that they make barely any difference to the overall result.

I'm guessing Trump is hoping that if he casts a wide enough net he'll manage to get something that actually makes a difference somewhere that is really close but realistically I think he just wants a narrative to say that he never lost, it was stolen and even the courts were in on it.

To give an idea of how pointless most of the legal challenges are, one of them that has been thrown out was disputing about a stack of ballots which had a total of 56 votes in them.