![]() ![]() Robert Burns's Highland Mary is said to have been treated using charm-stones when she lay dying at Greenock in 1786. Such stones were used within living memory (1971) to cure sickness in animals and humans. It is likely that Scottish painted pebbles, which have been dated to the period 200 AD to the eighth century AD (the Pictish period) also functioned as charm-stones, often known as cold-stones. The Brooch of Lorn is an example of a charmstone set into a very elaborate brooch in the late 16th century, and worn by clan chiefs. They were credited with healing or quasi-magical powers, and often worked through water that the charmstone had been dipped into, which was considered efficacious against various ills of both humans and farm animals. Scottish charm-stones are typically large smooth rounded pieces of rock crystal or other forms of quartz. Typically, references to American examples use the single word charmstone, while references to Scottish ones break the term as charm-stone or charm stone. They are thought to have been regarded as having some religious or magical function, including being talismans, amulets or charms. ![]() Typically they are elongated or cylindrical and have been shaped by grinding or other human activity, and may be perforated and/or grooved. Hunt MuseumĪ charmstone or coldstone is a stone or mineral artifact of various types associated with various traditional cultures, including those of Scotland and the native cultures of California and the American southwest. The crystal ball, which weighs 200g, is mounted in a gilded copper or bronze frame with trefoil decoration and a hanging loop. It was dipped in drinking water or hung from the neck of a cow. As I write this on 4th March, 2020, the world is on the cusp of a global COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-Cov2 virus.The "Archer-Butler Luck Stone", once owned by the Butler family of Garnavilla, near Cahir, County Tipperary, Ireland, was traditionally invoked to protect cattle from disease. Every news report is dominated by alarming, and ever-growing cumulative counts of global cases and deaths due to COVID-19. Dashboards of global spread are beginning to light up like Christmas trees.įor R users, an obvious question is: “Does R have anything to offer in helping to understand the situation?”. In fact, R is one of the tools of choice for outbreak epidemiologists, and a quick search will yield many R libraries on CRAN and elsewhere devoted to outbreak management and analysis. ![]() This post doesn’t seek to provide a review of the available packages – rather it illustrates the utility of a few of the excellent packages available in the R Epidemics Consortium ( RECON) suite, as well as the use of base R and tidyverse packages for data acquisition, wrangling and visualization. This post is based on two much longer and more detailed blog posts I have published in the last few weeks on the same topic, but it uses US data. Obtaining detailed, accurate and current data for the COVID-19 epidemic is not as straightforward as it might seem. Various national and provincial/governmental web sites in affected countries provide detailed summary data on incident cases, recovered cases and deaths due to the virus, but these data tend to be in the form of counts embedded in (usually non-English) text. There are several potential sources of data which have been abstracted and collated from such governmental sites. ![]()
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