SOCIAL DISTANCE SQUARED

THE Weekend Australian Magazine carried the opinion piece on Gladys Berejiklian, the sorry tale of a strong woman blinded by love, The Power and the Passion.

I dispute that Lady Macbeth belongs with the same literary trope as Anna Karenina and Miss Julia. Her fatal flaw was her manipulative ambition, not her disregard for status barriers (a la Lady Chatterley?).

One thing I’m sure of, the current (?) premier of NSW will ever be compared to famous female mathematicians like Hypatia of Ancient Alexandria or Shakuntala Devi of post colonial India. For a week she used her numerous announcements of easing COVID restrictions as an attempted distraction.

From October 16 outdoor dining in NSW has been able to operate with a social distance area of 2 square metres as long as patrons could be tracked by a QR code system, as opposed to the 4 square metres per patron for indoor food consumption.

The area of 4 square metres was easy to compute for anyone who had mastered primary school mensuration. This corresponds to a square with a side of 2 metres.

The new dimensions of a 2 square metres rule has to be a little more problematic, or as oft echoed in cliched newspaper headlines, “The numbers don’t add up.” There is an infinite range of rectangles (Calculus’s area under a curve) with an area of 2 square metres: 1m X 2m, 1/2m X 4m, 1/4m X 8m, etc.

It is difficult to imagine how the new restrictions could effectively mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Each new scientific announcement suggests that the infectious droplets can travel further and stay longer.

If the NSW social distancing regulation refers to the area of a square, then its side would be root 2, which is ironically an irrational number – a distance of 1.41421356237...metres.

No reporters or state politicians, however, ventured to ask the Liberal premier, south of our border, about the etymology of a square root.

WILLIAM ROSS, Cranbrook.