Given the context, this conversation must take place via some video-chat or chat service, like Line, Discord, Zoom, etc.
With Japanese annotation here.)
Matsu: Were you listening to the radio this morning?
Kay: All that talk about COVID-19 pandemic overshoot? Terrible. Horrible!
Bee: Yeah. Scary. Things could go out of control and the contagion could overshoot our society's ability to control it!
Hal: Ahem.
Bee: What?
Kay: Are you going to complain about semantics again?
Bee: Yeah. You're always complaining about what people say. Well, how about you just try to understand what they mean?
Hal: I'm all for people trying to understand each other, but sometimes the words you choose to use don't help those who are trying to understand.
Kay: So the virus overshoots our ability to control it. How can you misunderstand that?
Hal: What does the word shoot mean?
Matsu: Like when you shoot an arrow or a gun?
Hal: Right. Shoot implies a shooter. Who is shooting the virus at us?
Bee: Now you're talking conspiracy theories again.
Hal: Actually, I was talking about anthropomorphizing the virus.
Kay: Anthrotransmogrifying?
Hal: Heh. Good one.
Bee: Don't you mean personification?
Hal: Did somebody draw pictures of the virus as a person?
Matsu: I think I saw that on the Internet yesterday somewhere.
Hal: I wouldn't be surprised.
Kay: But what you mean is prosopopoeia.
Hal: Only if someone is trying to speak for the virus.
Kay: Do viruses have rights?
Hal: Arrggghh!
Kay: I think it's a legitimate question.
Hal: Overshoot. I am talking about overshoot, and I'm not going to let you guys derail me.
Bee: So the virus shoots over our protective walls.
Hal: No. That's shooting over. Or even overshooting, gerund form of the verb. Overshoot as a noun does not mean over walls. I am talking about the noun, "overshoot". Overshoot as a noun means a shot that goes over the target, missing it, like in archery.
Hal: And its opposite is undershoot, where the arrow doesn't even make it to the target.
Matsu: What about overshoot in engineering?
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| Graphic by Joel Rees and Wikimedia Commons user Krishnavedala. |
| Sine Integral function definition courtesy of Krishnavedala. |
| Reuse permitted under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 license. |
| See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sine_integral.svg. |
Hal: Excellent. Thank you! You pump sudden energy into the circuit, and the potential rises beyond the target, then you stop pumping the energy in and it undershoots, and then it rings like a bell.
Bee: Rings?
Matsu: Oscillates. Goes back and forth.
Kay: Is that an appropriate simile?
Hal: Actually, yeah.
Kay: So what are you trying to say?
Hal: Overshoot and undershoot are about our response.
Bee: If the government doesn't send enough medicine, that's undershoot, right?
Hal: Very good. Undershoot is the people dying from the under-responsive government's lack of action.
Bee: So what is overshoot? The bigger response, the better, right?
Matsu: Well, if the government tells everyone, even those providing essential services, to stay home, that would be overshoot, especially if you could be shot and killed without question for being outside your house.
Kay: I'd call that overkill.
Hal: That kind of response is overkill. The result of people dying from other causes because there's no hospitals to go to would be overshoot.
Bee: But it doesn't happen. No government is going to do that.
Matsu: I understand that, in Europe, things are almost that bad. I heard that police shot someone for being outside his house the other day.
Hal: And what happens is like, in Italy, people can't figure out what to do to stay alive. So they rationalize a way around the orders and go visit relatives.
Kay: Relatives? Why relatives?
Bee: Relatives are like family, so it's like staying home, isn't it?
Matsu: What the radio said is that people don't have to leave home to visit cousins in Italy.
Bee: How?
Matsu: Lots of homes connected to each other through the garden in the back courtyard or something.
Hal: So they run out of sugar or flour and go across the back way to their cousin's, stay for news and gossip and a drink or two, and maybe somebody puts on music, and then all the cousins come out and dance because everyone is under stress.
Bee: Sounds fun. ... Wait. That's a lot of exposure.
Hal: Exactly. Overshoot.
Kay: Well, so it rings, right?
Hal: Ringing requires some active counter-response to push the return to undershoot. No counter-response and the system goes into runaway overshoot, which is hard to recover from.
Hal: And, remember, undershoot also results in deaths, just like under-response.
Kay: No government is going to be that crazy, though, right?
Matsu: Japan has been that crazy before. So has Germany.
Hal: Most governments get a little out of control at times. The question is how soon enough people recover their senses quick enough, and whether enough can recover their senses at the same time.
Bee: So, what you're saying is that over-responsiveness produces overshoot, and under-responsiveness produces undershoot, and both can produce pandemic overshoot.
Hal: I'd call it runaway pandemic, not pandemic overshoot, but, yeah.
Bee: You could have said so ten minutes ago, and we could have been talking about something more interesting by now.
Matsu: So let's talk about something more interesting.
Kay: I've been working on a version of Conway's Game of Life that includes social distancing rules.
Hal: Okay, what specific rules are different from the usual rules?
Bee: We're still talking about the pandemic!
Matsu: Okay, Kay, tell me more about that old novel you've been reading. What was it?
Kay: Which one?
Matsu: The one about a virus-like micro-organism that eats plastic.
Kay: Oh. The Andromeda Strain.
Bee: I've read that. Hey. Talk about overshoot ...
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