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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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The fact that fluids diffuse/disperse is fundamental to my baseline understanding of the physical world. In that what I intuit about physical reality without exercising any thought. I wonder what went wrong for anyone to mask outdoors ever at all and not see the futility of it.

Basically everyone has experience with dispersion in air from people breathing out via seeing visible breath in cold weather or seeing/smelling smoke from someone smoking. The former is generally visible about 1-2 feet away at most while the latter is quite noticeable several feet away. I'm not sure if it's obvious whether viral transmission is analogous to the first, the second, or neither. My layman's understanding is that smoke goes a lot further than viruses because the relevant particles are a lot smaller/lighter, but that's not obvious and I've seen tweets explicitly using the intuition of smelling smoke far away as a justification for outdoor distancing/masking.