Life and Physics

I am on day 3 – or is it 4, I lose count – of a quarantine since coming down with mild flu-like symptoms on Tuesday.  For about half of that time I have been asleep, but the other half has seen a parade of infuriating posts on social media, many of which come from people who should know better.  The theme of the moment seems to be that anyone who has installed matplotlib and knows how to call numpy.exp() is getting the crayons out and making predictions by extrapolating trends from very little information.  It is dismaying indeed to see people who design parton showers for a living point at a scaling law and cry “we’re doomed” without asking what its region of validity is.  And if you think this comment is aimed specifically at you, you are wrong because everyone is doing this right now and I…