PS: It could be Mr. Moderator...

It could be...

Like you said, one day the kids will have nightmares of being maskless in skool, in front of their peers...

As if they were naked or something...

☮

PS: Adam, could it be that they (the students you saw) clean forgot that they had the masks on? Soon, not wearing a face mask will feel to some people like forgetting to put on their pants.

PS: OK Alarmist, I understand your assumptions now. I thought I might have been missing something obvious. As a math problem, this may have been too easy for something like John Derbyshire's "math corner", but, OTOH, when you make it into an engineering problem, you get to the more complexities of the real world and real problems.

The Social Distancing Swingset problem - put it on the Putnam Test. Or, the physicists can work on it as the last frontier, that and that dark matter bit.

I like Lone Ranger style and Bazooka Joe style, just to make fun. It's unbelievable, the people wearing them in cars by themselves.

PS: That's a good one, "Covidiocracy", Mr. Anon. I don't get tweets and don't look at facebook, so I guess I've not seen any personal friends with avatars or selfies while wearing masks. That's totally stupid, and yes, just some kind of display of, what, compliance, I guess?

People were 2 machines away from me on each side at the gym. Both were wearing masks! I would have passed out wearing one, as the machine I was on gave me an extra good workout. At least neither of these 2 said a word about it. (I probably would have told them "hey, I can't understand you with that mask on, sorry.)

PS: The face diapers are to dehumanize the herd.

I think the masked selfie photos are some sort of virtue signaling. Perhaps some people really like following nonsensical orders. It will also make it really easy for BigSister to find the wrongthinkers in need of reeducation and punishment.

I rode through town the other day and saw two different college students walking all by themselves with diapers on. No one else around. I guess all those lockdown drills in skool made them more compliant.

☮

PS

@Mr. Anon, I went for a walk with my wife to town today, and as we started to come across more people, she donned the mask. After a few minutes she was gasping for air while trying to talk to me, I suggested she either stop talking to me or take the mask off, because I wasn’t going to carry her home (the walk was her idea). My maskless face horrified people passing us in the tunnel under the rail tracks ... I hope it was the lack of mask and not my face. I also pointed and made fun of the people sitting in their cars alone wearing masks. I full expect to find my maskless mug on wanted posters any day now. I might need to reconsider my stance on masks, but I’ll probably go with a Lone Ranger version.

@Mr. Moderator, I ignored the lateral distance ... that was intended to be a simplifying assumption. I also ignored the minimum distance constraint, content to deal with distance on average, like the senior citizens seem to do when cutting in front of me at the market. I also assume the kiddies pumping hard will stir up the air more than enough to make up for all the viridae they are pumping into it.

PS @The Alarmist

The worst is those people who have avatar pictures of themselves wearing masks for their twitter or TEAMS account. WTF? You're taking a selfie of yourself to put up on the web - why the Hell are you wearing a mask? It's almost as if the mask is now part of their identity. It's sick.

A while back I went to a social gathering in meat-space at a local watering hole with some co-workers (A retirement party). We hadn't actually seen each other in person in months, as we are all telecommuting from our home COVID bunkers. I don't discuss politics at work, but I have a pretty good idea of which side of the divide people lie (if a guy talks about something he heard on NPR or The Daily Beast then you can guess what his politics are). I noticed that the suspected liberals were all religiously wearing masks; the people I know to be conservatives were not.

PS "When the food stops coming, they won't know what to do, just hang out and die, I guess."

All part of the plan, Mr. Moderator. Bill Gates (praise be unto him) says that there are too many people.

BTW, while out for my daily walk, I was passed by a guy - 20 or 30 something I would guess - who was out for his daily run. He was sprinting at a fair clip..........while wearing a mask. I was also passed by a gent in a minivan, all by his lonesome, and also wearing a mask.

Covidiocracy.

PS: Oh, yeah, Alarmist, you did bring up the “con mucho gusto” part already and I don’t know why I thought you’d given me a distance in meters.

This is fun.

PS: Thanks for the kind words, Mr. Blanc. I am for some reason not cheered up, though. ;-}

PS: On your problem, did you assume one swing was in a fixed position? Otherwise with them both moving, I guess you may get the same average distance over the long term, but for a fixed duration of swinging time (till the other kids tell the teacher that you won't SHARE!), the average distance will depend on the periods of both swings, when they started, but also how much each kid pumps.

Crap, I thought it would be a very cool calculus problem, but with that last part about the energy added by each kid, well, that function can't be determined that accurately, and we are screwed.

Answer, Mr. Alarmist: Keep the kids OFF the swing-sets! We'd better be on the safe side.

PS: What is this, Alarmist, the John Derbyshire math group now? ;-}

I made an assumption that they could not stay swinging in unison. The swings are usually about 2 1/2 to 3 ft apart (OK, OK, .6-.9 meters or thereabouts) though, so not swinging in unison won't help, anyway, right?

So, they've got to pass each other at that minimum distance of that 2 1/2 to 3 ft no matter what,

There will be a different period for each due to either the chains being not exactly of the same length (you give ~ 8ft. - you Brits and damnable your old-timey metric system! but there are finite tolerances involved), but at I suppose what's gonna be off more is the distance to the kids' center-of-masses.

I'm not saying mass is a factor, as the period is nothing but the square root of the length (pivot point to center-of-mass) divided by g, but the difference in position of that center of mass is.

OK, those last 2 paragraphs don't matter anyway. Your problem, which I know I can do, if I get my mind back right, is for and average distance. Social Distance is about minimums. Once you get closer than 6 ft, those Kung Flu germies can just leap across, and bang, you're all dead. All that money spent on ADD drugs, down the toilet ...

PS

A set of two-and-a-half yard-long swings will on average meet the spacing requirement when not swinging in unison.* The key is for the kids to swing con mucho gusto. It also means less requirement for ADD drugs.

* Hint: Use polar coordinates to find the average distance of a point (swing1) on a circle from a fixed point (swing2) on that circle, which boils down to 4x the arc / pi.

;)

PS

My boss dropped into my office to chat, wearing a mask to show his compliance with company edict to wear masks in all meetings, and he kept it on as he started speaking. I looked at him and said, “You’re probably a bigger threat to me than me to you, so you don’t have to wear a mask in here if you don’t want to.” He actually looked relieved. The youngsters outside on the desk probably noticed our little act of rebellion, since the same invitation goes for them when they visit. I open the window to make them feel better.

It really is depressing to walk by other offices and see two people wearing masks and sitting two metres apart, but it is even sadder to see someone put on a mask to walk perhaps ten metres from his cube to talk to someone in another cube, who then also dons a mask.

This will only end when we convince enough of our peers, colleagues, family and friends that it is truly time for this kabuki to end.

PS I do hope that you are able to maintain your calm, Mr Mod, because visible compliance with plague panic regulations will be a marker of your obedience to the Biden/Harris regime. You surely don’t want you social credit score to plummet. Comrade Kamala is watching, citizen. You do not want her to be disappointed in you. As for the children, they’ll grow up in the same sort of conditions as children in the Soviet Union, East Germany, Cuba, and North Korea grew/grow up in.

PS: Yep, Mr. Anon, "people as sacks of contagion" is a good way to put it. It's even things too, like the playground equipment, another kid's pencil sharpener (I forgot about that part) that are pieces of contagion. Of course, they never were human, but perhaps this extreme sterilization of things keeps people even more apart and will help put them in a state where they are ready to stay in their little cubicles, errr, I mean "homes", all day long and have their lives on the computer.

When the food stops coming, they won't know what to do, just hang out and die, I guess.

PS The masks and anti-social distancing are dehumanizing. I think that is their real purpose. It is to induce people to distrust other people - to view them as nothing but sacks of contagion. The purpose of all of this is to demoralize and isolate people so that they accept the "Great Reset" being planned by the global super-class. I think it is more than that too - I think these people are just sadists.