I think Gower Street is much better. Piccadilly is just a big shop. Gower Street is slightly smaller by shelf space, but it is full of nooks and crannies which give it an atmosphere of wonder.

I actually think it has worse variety than a comparable Waterstones - for whatever reason they stock extremely large quantities, rather than a large variety.

Well first we must distinguish between “non-coding” and the pop-science concept of “junk” DNA. While the most interesting thing about DNA is its ability to code for genes, that is not the only thing it does.

Most of our DNA has some kind of function. That could be coding for RNA that isn’t supposed to be transcribed. It could be structural, like telomeres and centromeres. It could be about regulating transcription or replication.

All the same, human DNA is much more prone to accumulating dead genes than bacterial DNA due to our generation time. We can carry around a bunch of pseudogenes or ancient viruses that managed to get themselves added to our genome. Selection pressure is much less and much slower when it takes 20-40 years to reproduce as opposed to 20-40 minutes.

You’re thinking of “life” as if it were a soul, some chemicals gain a “spark of life” and then they are alive.

It’s more helpful to think of life as being those things which reproduce. This isn’t a perfect definition either, of course.

You have a primordial soup full of basic organic chemicals. Some bits of RNA, some proteins, some sugars. These chemicals are already undergoing natural selection, as more stable ones survive longer, but they aren’t undergoing evolution because there is no “descent with modification”. Maybe some chemicals, through chance, form a very simple precursor to a cell which dramatically increases their survival. They can absorb small molecules while protecting themselves from the environment. Great. Does not mean they are alive. Can that structure divide into two parts which can then both grow and divide again? That’s what makes something alive.

Well, assume mules and hinnies are functionally infertile. Breeding is zero reward, but not zero risk. As well as the risk of injury, there is the risk that a male mule mating with a fertile female will result in a miscarriage of an unviable foetus rather than the young you actually want. There is also a smaller risk than a female mule mating with a fertile male will cause him to be unable to successfully stud for the fertile female you want to breed him with, although this is a lesser concern.

From this logic it would follow that in species which don’t use the Y chromosome to determine sex, like birds or crocodilians, we would expect to see different patterns.

Disease isn’t black and white. The extreme options are “you don’t feel sick” and “you die”. There are a whole spectrum of options between those two.

A vaccine that is providing a lot of protection will dramatically reduce your symptoms, and might stop you feeling sick at all.

A vaccine that is providing some protection might cause you to be sick for 50 hours instead of 52 hours, and be in slightly less pain during that time.

No, not at all. Human-to-human transmission is not a biological component, like a human leg, but a biological process, like movement. There are many different things that go into human-to-human transmission, but it comes down to getting into the body, reproducing, and getting out again. There are many different ways to achieve those things. The flu is spread very differently to HIV, which is spread very differently to malaria, which is very different to Legionnaire’s Disease.

Edit: although to clarify, Legionnaire’s Disease isn’t usually spread human-to-human, and malaria is debatable. Cholera would be been a better example of a waterborne disease that enters through the digestive tract.

Ah, gotcha.

So I think there are three issues wrt. sensory sentiment.

1. we’re sheltered by our humidity and the Gulf Stream, so we aren’t toughened against cold the way that Minnesotans (for example) are. We don’t wrap up as warm as those people do. I don’t own thermal underwear or insulated trousers, for example.

2. our homes are generally poorly insulated. Right now it is 12 degrees in my house. The walls, loft, and floor are not insulated and the curtains have limited thermal properties.

3. humid air takes longer to warm up. If you are drying laundry inside then you need to run the heater for longer to feel warm.

Suspect if you dropped a British person moaning about the cold somewhere dry and cold, they’d still moan about the cold. We like a very narrow temperature range!

No, I don’t think so.

Firstly the UK’s humidity is one of the reasons why winters are relatively mild compared to Poland (for example).

The reason the UK struggles when snow falls is because we’re not so cold that snow is inevitable. People, business, and the government mostly aren’t prepared for snow and ice.

I’m in London which is one of the warmest parts of the country (southern + eastern + urban heat island) and we haven’t got anywhere close to -10. Our coldest nights might have got as low as -5 but every day has been above 0 except maybe Monday. I’d guess you’re probably in Scotland or Northern Ireland, maybe NW England or North Wales?

If we were like Canada, Northern Europe, or inland US, then local government, railway operators, and motorists would always be prepared for low temperatures and would react accordingly. The UK is not.

I will say that this week’s snow was met by the best response I can remember. There was a big snowstorm about ten years ago (maybe 2010?) that made normal life very difficult. By the time I left the house for work Monday morning, the main roads were clear, the pavements were gritted, trains were running as normal, and most Tube lines were partially open.