Request to reopen Omicron thread for policy and economics discussion

[kyphysics]

Just my .2 cents (on a locked thread that was not created by me - but that I commented in):

The reason for the lock was that an existing thread is already up and running in the biological/medical section. My thought was that the Lounge version could be multi-purpose and extended beyond biology.

For example, as news of lockdowns over fears of Omicron have started, one angle of discussion can be along the lines of public policy. Related to that is economics. I have an interest in these areas and find it a bit weird to discuss them in the biology/medical Omicron thread, where the focus is more on the medical side of things.

I wouldn't mind that thread being reopened for non-medical/biology (or just expanded) discussion.

 

[Astronuc]

Related to that is economics.

and policy, which evolved or devolved into a political discussion.

We had a discussion of "Coronavirus containment efforts"
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/covid-19-coronavirus-containment-efforts.983707/

The thread had to be heavily moderated due to the injection of politics, personal opinions on policy, and conflicts. Staff thought it better to narrow the discussion to the science (medical, biological) matters.

 

[berkeman]

One issue we had early in the Covid pandemic was that there was a lot of misinformation and politics being discussed in GD threads, and we can't allow either one of those. So we responded by trying to keep the Covid discussions confined to scientific topics in the Biology/Medical forum, which seemed to work pretty well.

It might be possible to have an Omicron variant thread in GD, but I would be a bit skeptical.

 

[Frabjous]

Until there is some data, I am more interested in if any physicist has ever used omicron as a variable name. For example O=1.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Paul Bachmann introduced big-O notation. Knuth referred to it as Omicron in a paper...
O and o in Latin and Greek are the same symbol. So that seems to have limited is use.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omicron