COVID-19 vs. New York Daily Average Cause of Death. Fantastic little visualization of how this Coronavirus went from nothing to dominating.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

Between conflicting mask advice, all the politics, and advice from doctors conflicting with that from microbiologists, is there any COVID-19 information that we can trust? Scoop: Netanyahu shared fake video as proof of Iranian virus cover-up

... Several hours later, Netanyahu's office realized the video had nothing to do with Iran, or with the coronavirus crisis. It was a clip from “Pandemic," a 2007 Hallmark Channel mini-series.

[ related topics: Politics virus Video ]

Houseguest was using the shop to make a tobacco pipe, so I figured I'd make one at the same time to play with techniques. Olive, walnut and maple.

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

So the news this morning was that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp (R) is claiming that he didn't know that COVID-19 could spread by asymptomatic people until yesterday. I don't know what rock he was hiding under, but that sort of wilful denial of something that's been all over the place (and that we learned from the first cruise ship situations) is, at best, gross incompetence.

Meanwhile, US Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have introduced legislation "To authorize the imposition of sanctions with respect to the deliberate concealment or distortion of information about public health emergencies of international concern, and for other purposes." Unfortunately, those sanctions don't appear to American politicians who seem to have deliberately buried their heads in the sand for short-term political gain.

Speaking of American politicians who seem to have deliberately buried their heads in the sand for short-term political gain, I think it's worth going back and pointing out again that that disgusting Tim Morrison retcon claiming that Trump didn't disband the CDC pandemic response3 team is easily debunked by going back and reading news articles from the time. Or just looking at Twitter from two years ago:

When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why.

Top White House official in charge of pandemic response exits abruptly

(Also, it's not like Republicans have a lock on fucking up pandemic response, a reminder that Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to help California be more prepared, and Jerry Brown fucked that up.)

Anyway, your cheery news for the morning is that excess mortality rates are skyrocketing in Europe, suggesting that the mortalities attributed to COVID-19 are low.

Yikes.

Bonus: Partisan divisions on COVID-19 exist in Canada but they're deeper — and more dangerous — in the U.S.

[ related topics: Politics Music Health Movies moron Current Events California Culture Machinery Fashion Race Real Estate ]

I kinda got a good feeling from donating my shop stash of N95 masks, but it feels like I'm getting more good vibes from mailing out all the old web cams I've accumulated over the years...

Great Twitter thread on the horrors of the EARN IT act

Black Illustrations. Free stock art of black people for your next digital project.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Economics ]

Navy dismisses USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier captain who spoke out about coronavirus response

So the first diagnoses of COVID-19 on the ship were March 24th. The letter was written March 30th and published March 31st. The captain has been relieved because he "showed poor judgment" in sending the letter to a group of 20 or 30 people, one of them might have been the leaker and leaking the letter “would be something that would violate the principles of good order and discipline.”

Sounds like a bureaucracy that sat on their collective hands for nearly a week is firing this dude to cover up their own incompetence.

[ related topics: Aviation Machinery Aviation - Helicopters ]

RT Ben Williams @bmwmtesq Replying to @JenKirkman

I remember them saying “we survived Obama. You’ll survive Trump.”

Turns out they were wrong.

RT Kyle but Thursday ⠈⠜ @KyleMisner

Boomers calling me millennial like I earned a degree in smart phones and social justice🤷🏼‍♂️

[ related topics: Law Enforcement ]

I LOLed, but maybe it's just that I'm stuck here with two cats while Charlene is out of town. Cats — The Butthole Cut Trailer (YouTube video).

Via MeFi

[ related topics: Video ]

When the grandkid (4+) says he can't come for a visit because of the Corona Virus. He said it like he understands it.

Everyone has the things that make something "sink in". This was Nancy's.

[ related topics: virus ]

Next time you're looking for something to watch: Crossing Africa and the Sahara by Truck

This "video" documents a journey made across Africa and the Sahara Desert in 1959/60. It uses color slides shot during the journey and shows how images from the past can be given a new lease of life. This is not a journey I would care to make today.

[ related topics: Movies Invention and Design History Television Machinery Video ]

Drivers Give Riders Wearing Helmets Less Room on the Road

Bicycle helmet wearing is associated with closer overtaking by drivers: A response to Olivier and Walter, 2013

[ related topics: Current Events Sports Pedal Power Bicycling ]

New York Post, January 26: Schumer calls on Feds to declare coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency.

Republicans: ‘Nobody Expected’ the Coronavirus Pandemic. So Joe Biden Is Nobody?

One example of a major Democrat who took this seriously would be Joe Biden, who, as the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, is arguably the major Democrat. Biden wrote an op-ed on January 27 warning that Trump had left the country unprepared to handle the coronavirus outbreak, and proposing steps to counter it. One of his main advisers, Ron Klain, wrote an op-ed making similar points five days before that.

Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans

An unclassified briefing document on the novel coronavirus prepared on Feb. 3 by U.S. Army-North projected that “between 80,000 and 150,000 could die.” It framed the projection as a “Black Swan” analysis, meaning an outlier event of extreme consequence but often understood as an unlikely one.

In other words, the Army’s projections on Feb. 3 for the worst-case scenario in the coronavirus outbreak are, as of this week, the absolute best-case scenario—if not a miraculous one.

Public Health Emergency was declared on January 31st, but the National Emergency wasn't declared until March 13.

Via

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Photography Health Invention and Design Law Current Events Fashion New York ]

Acting Navy secretary blasts ousted aircraft carrier captain as 'stupid' in address to ship's crew

A defense official familiar with Modly's remarks offered his opinion of Modly's address, saying the acting secretary "should be fired. I don't know how he survives this day."

As of Monday, 173 of the ship's crew have now tested positive for coronavirus and 61% of the crew have been tested, according to a Navy official. Approximately 2,000 have been evacuated from the ship and moved ashore.

ecNav Unloads on Carrier Captain:

According to the Daily Caller, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly flew to Guam Monday “and delivered a fiery speech to the sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt after their captain was fired over a leaked letter pleading for those infected with coronavirus.” Fiery indeed: he says Captain Brett Crozier was either “too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this” and calls his letter a “betrayal.” CNN has confirmed the story.

[ related topics: Politics Music Aviation Machinery hubris ]

After a long legal struggle, Seattle band Thunderpussy is granted a U.S. trademark

Kerr filed an appeal that was placed in suspended animation as the USPTO waited for the Supreme Court to decide two cases about other trademarks that had been rejected for violating the Lanham Act: one brought by an all-Asian band named The Slants, the other from a clothing company whose name is an acronym for the phrase Friends U Can’t Trust.

The Lanham Act is a broad federal law governing trademarks, and specifically prohibits ones deemed “disparaging,” “immoral” and “scandalous.”

[ related topics: Intellectual Property Music Animation Law Copyright/Trademark Clothing Seattle ]

Every once in a while I run across a vocal performance that I'm all "yeah, I've gotta listen to this in slow motion to figure out what he's doing". Via MeFiReddit:

And for all of those people who put their hearts out there for two people on a dance floor and a few bystanders walking by the camera with beers in their hands...

Southern Voice Band - Let's Get It On (cover) (YouTube video)

From that Reddit thread: Josh Weathers does I Will Always Love You in the style of Whitney Houston, partially for the singing, but also because whatever that dude is doing with his stage presence has the audience eating from the palm of his hand.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Theater & Plays Video ]

[ related topics: Photography Space & Astronomy ]

One of the things that this crisis has done is driven all the nails in all of the coffins of any notion that there's anything to the notion of "meritocracy". Most recent is National Economic Director Larry Kudlow saying "... I don’t believe anybody would have predicted the exponential rise of this...".

I mean, sure, you can ignore the century or so of public health scholarship, and the thousands of epidemiologists, and the people who responded to SARS, and the transition team that briefed the current administration...

But when you're ignoring a million tech bros on Medium? Dude, that's a little too far.

CNBC Transcript: National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow Speaks with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Today

[ related topics: Health Economics ]

I vaguely came awake at 5:30 or so this morning to the sound of the shower running. Long story, but for a moment I thought I was gonna get recruited into shooting some sunrise video. Apparently my houseguest had just finished uploading this... https://soundcloud.com/rosalind-parducci/big-fish-little-lies

[ related topics: Sports Video ]

Some Swedish Hospitals Have Stopped Using Chloroquine to Treat COVID-19 After Reports of Severe Side Effects

This is despite the fact that the drugs have achieved mixed results in scientific studies. One study suggested it provides no additional benefit to patients who are already receiving care and being treated with antiviral drugs.

Another from researchers in France that has been widely cited by those in favor of using the chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine found the drugs dramatically lower viral load in COVID-19 patients. However, it has been criticized for its poor design, The Financial Times reports.

A paper published last week went even further, disputing its claims and finding no evidence of antiviral clearence or clinical benefit of using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to treat COVID-19.

There are quite a few of the usual alt-medicine blogs still pushing it (although they usually can't keep "chloroquine" (Aralen) and "hydroxychloroquine" (Plaquenil) distinct), which is surprising, because Donald Trump's financial interest is in Sanofi the maker of Plaquenil (Edit: Snopes says it's not a substantive investment).

Trump’s ‘Hail Mary’ drug push rattles his health team

Trump’s focus on the drugs — driven by his faith in scant evidence that they work to speed recovery from Covid-19 — has increasingly warped his administration’s response. Health officials have been told to prioritize the anti-malaria drugs over other projects that scientists believe have more potential to fight the outbreak.

[ related topics: Drugs Politics Health Graphic Design ]

Acting secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly resigns after calling ousted aircraft carrier captain Brett Crozier 'stupid'

[ related topics: Politics Aviation hubris ]

[ related topics: Photography Star Trek ]

John Prine, Legendary Folk Singer, Dies at 73 of complications from COVID-19.

If you don't think you know John Prine, well, what rock have you been living under for damned nigh 50 years, but aside from his almost novelty songs, he's behind a hell of a lot of hits and has cast a long shadow on the music scene.

Kacey Musgraves sings "Burn One With John Prine" to John Prine

'Cause I ain't one to knock religion

Though it's always knockin' me

Always runnin' with the wrong crowd

Right where I want to be

And I ain't good at being careful

I just say what's on my mind

Like my idea of heaven

Is to burn one with John Prine

[ related topics: Religion Interactive Drama Music Movies moron Current Events ]

Holy shit are we bad at electing politicians. Richard Blumenthal, Senator (D-CT) who's backing an anti-encryption bill, complains that Zoom doesn't have end-to-end encryption.

Senator backing anti-crypto bill calls out Zoom’s lack of end-to-end crypto

[ related topics: Cryptography ]

Georgia Tech Filtration Engineers Offer Advice on Do-It-Yourself Face Masks

A new website (www.research.gatech.edu/rapid-response) has been created to bring together recommendations and templates for making face masks. The website provides guidance for making unsewn, sewn, glued, or 3D-printed face masks.

The recommendations resulted from consulting with a team of experts in materials, chemical and mechanical engineering, filtration processes, and production design. “We have also interacted with relevant stakeholders, including hospitals and manufacturers, and studied the peer-reviewed literature to make recommendations based on scientific evidence,” said Lively.

In case you're building your own masks in the time of COVID-19.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Theater & Plays Law Current Events Work, productivity and environment Graphics Graphic Design Education ]

Submitted without judgment: Calaveras County Sheriff: Hit-And-Run Suspect Found Tied To Telephone Pole At Scene Of Alleged Crime

The incident happened last Friday around 4:30 p.m in Valley Springs. The Calaveras County Sheriff’s office said 29-year-old Thomas Bechtold was arguing with 47-year-old James Leslie at the intersection of Nall Street and Westhill Road. Bechtold reportedly got into his vehicle and hit Leslie, knocking him unconscious. Bechtold then drove off from the scene.

Three hours later, the sheriff’s office got a report that the suspect had been dropped off at the same intersection. Deputies found Bechtold “battered with his hands tied behind his back and tethered to a telephone pole.”

[ related topics: Heinlein Phreaking ]

Whoah! Excess road capacity kills people. (I mean, drivers kill people, but we have to look at this as a systemic thing...)

Fatal crashes surge despite sharp drop in traffic across Minnesota

Oh my, I have just discovered the extortionate scheme that is multi-document PDF. I may end up sending Adobe money to recover someone's data. PDF truly is where documents go to die.

[ related topics: Currency ]

Hamilton fans, it's happened: The Zoom Where It Happens.

Just putting all my COVID-19 notes in one place: The viral study about runners Spreading Coronavirus is not actually a study. (Also)

If you wanna know why stopping travel from China was racist bullshit rather than actually effective: Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show

Fauci: I don't think we should shake hands 'ever again'

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Invention and Design Television New York ]

Sheriff: Woman put porn-stuffed Easter eggs in mailboxes

Deputies arrested Abril Cestoni, 42, who told them she was putting the eggs in the mailboxes to educate people, the report said. They found a bag full of pornographic material inside the car.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Automobiles ]

So a lot of people are forwarding around that New York Times editorial on "On Coronavirus Lockdown? Look for Meaning, Not Happiness"? Yeah, when Pharrell Williams has a hit with "Meaning", call me.

[ related topics: Invention and Design New York ]

French police turn back private jet of holidaymakers from UK — Party of 10 flew into Marseille-Provence airport to be taken by helicopter to luxury Cannes villa

The men, aged 40-50, and women, aged 23-25...

[ related topics: Aviation Law Enforcement Aviation - Helicopters ]

So the assclown that endangered the Senate is at it again: Rand Paul, Thomas Massie slam Kentucky Gov. Beshear over quarantine plan for Easter churchgoers

[ related topics: Politics Current Events ]

COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In 'Disconcerting' Move

He acknowledged that some families were not aware their relatives were put on the drug, saying that "for the most part," he consulted with each nursing home resident prior to giving them on the tablets.

While the "overwhelming majority of them are awake and alert and can actually have a conversation," Armstrong said some suffer from middle stages of dementia. In some cases, he did not discuss prescribing the tablets with anyone at all before doing so. He said it is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. "It's not required," he said.

Ignoring the fact that the "study" design is total crap, Cassandra, Irredeemable Pudgy Nobody @ChrisWarcraft points out that "We hanged Nazis for doing this."

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Sociology Graphic Design ]

Annals of Internal Medicine Letters: Effectiveness of Surgical and Cotton Masks in Blocking SARS–CoV-2: A Controlled Comparison in 4 Patients

This experiment did not include N95 masks and does not reflect the actual transmission of infection from patients with COVID-19 wearing different types of masks. We do not know whether masks shorten the travel distance of droplets during coughing. Further study is needed to recommend whether face masks decrease transmission of virus from asymptomatic individuals or those with suspected COVID-19 who are not coughing.

In conclusion, both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.

[ related topics: virus Nature and environment ]

Been rolling rocks around all day. No cave with a dude in it yet.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Working on my shaping technique

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Washington, Oregon and California announce Western States Pact

COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities.

We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business.

At some point we're gonna have to have a discussion about where the capital goes, and presumably as the Eastern Seaboard states join the new union we're gonna have to decide what's happening with the territory in-between, but in the absence of a federal government the states are eventually going to form a new one.

Edit: Several eastern states have announced a 6 state working council. If the rest of New England signs on, that's 13 states. So time loop or the writers are completely out of ideas.

[ related topics: virus Invention and Design moron Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment California Culture Community ]

CNN chyrons offer persuasive rationale for why CNN should stop airing Trump's coronavirus grievance sessions

I Tripped on the (Polyamorous) Missing Stair

We are a group of women and nonbinary folks who have experienced relational harm from Franklin Veaux, a man who has been recognized as a leader and spokesperson in polyamory and has a pattern of using his social capital to cause harm. This site holds our stories.

This movement grew out of the 2019 “Polyamory #metoo” callout of Franklin, and this site is managed by several of the people he harmed.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

So in the months ahead, as we start to unroll all of the social changes we've made to slow the spread of COVID-19, we should look at all the lives we've saved through other means and figure out how we can rebuild our daily living in ways that don't mean four million premature deaths around the world annually.

Things like reducing automobile capacity and dedicating those streets back over to bicycle and pedestrian traffic, in the ways that Oakland is doing, have the ability to hugely improve quality of life, and reduce imposed externalities.

Air quality improves by up to 40 per cent in cities that took action on COVID-19, University of Toronto researcher finds

Marc Cadotte, a professor in the department of biological sciences at U of T Scarborough, looked at the air quality index (AQI) for six COVID-19-affected cities (Wuhan, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Milan, Seoul and Shanghai) that implemented emergency measures in February. He then compared the AQI for those cities to the same month in 2019, finding that all six showed a significant reduction in air pollution concentrations this year.

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Automobiles Education Pedal Power Hong Kong Bicycling ]

Tax change in coronavirus package overwhelmingly benefits millionaires, congressional body finds

The provision, included by Senate Republicans, would cost taxpayers approximately $90 billion in 2020

[ related topics: Politics ]

Science Early Report: Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period Stephen M. Kissler, Christine Tedijanto, Edward Goldstein, Yonatan H. Grad, Marc Lipsitch. Science 14 Apr 2020: eabb5793 DOI: 10.1126/science.abb5793

Abstract It is urgent to understand the future of severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. We used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for betacoronaviruses OC43 and HKU1 from time series data from the USA to inform a model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We projected that recurrent wintertime outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2 will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave. Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded. To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. ...

Bloomberg: Harvard Researchers Say Some Social Distancing May Be Needed Into 2022

RT Ed Conway @EdConwaySky:

Here is the story of today's @ONS mortality statistics in a single chart. The worst week for UK mortality (all causes) since records began.

The blue area shows the minimum and maximum mortality each week since 2010.

The red line shows you this year so far.

[ related topics: Photography Television Mathematics ]

“There’s gotta be something wrong about anything that you do, otherwise it’s just plain old cliché.” Tim Capello https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-tr...the-lost-boys-sax-man-1842774832

RT real curves are flat 🇵🇷 🇲🇽 @daguilarcanabal

it's only urban planning if it's in the Urbana region of Illinois. otherwise it's "sparkling land use phrenology"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Real Estate ]

Seen on Olive St: "you're one in a melon!"

[ related topics: Photography ]

Derek Lowe, In The Pipeline: Coronavirus Vaccine Prospects

[ related topics: Archival ]

I've been a "digital native" since the mid-'80s, getting online with BBSes early on, getting into an international community via FidoNet, being a part of Chattanooga On-Line in the '90s, and then being a "blogger" before that term was formed (my "blog" has been continuously updated since early 1998).

One of the things I'm fascinated by is how we evolve social expectations and norms based on new technologies. How we assimilate the new communication mechanisms into our lives, and adapt. And, especially, how "kids these days" grow up understanding how we can change our behaviors.

So I give you RT Angie Maxwell @AngieMaxwell1:

Found the kid playing with her dog instead of Zooming with her teacher. She told me not to worry. She took a screenshot of herself “paying attention,” then cut her video & replaced it with the picture. “It’s a gallery view of 20 kids, mom. They can’t tell.” She is 10. #COVID19

and RT Alice JB @DrAliceJones:

My 6yo just saw how many emails I have to do something about. He suggested just replying to all of them with 'go away, never contact me again'. He's available for all of your business/PA needs.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Weblogs Invention and Design Chattanooga Pop Culture Community Video Dogs Woodworking ]

RT xingcat @xingcat

Since every McKinsey plan is "lay off 75% of your workforce and sell off the assets to rich people," I'd say the pandemic is already a McKinsey plan in action.

Quoting Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla

REUTERS: Cuomo hires @McKinsey "to develop a science-based plan for the safe economic reopening of the region that can thwart expected pressure from President Donald Trump to move more rapidly .."

https://www.reuters.com/articl...usa-governors-excl-idUSKCN21Y01V

Most amusing are the replies from outraged management consultants trying (unsuccessfully) to refute this assertion.

[ related topics: Health Bay Area Economics ]

Coconut Oil’s Health Halo a Mirage, Clinical Trials Suggest

Clinical trials don’t support the public’s positive perception of coconut oil, a recent systematic review and meta-analysis suggests. The study, published in Circulation, found that compared with other vegetable oils, coconut oil increases low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C)—the “bad” kind that ups cardiovascular disease risk—while offering no improvements to weight, blood glucose, or inflammation markers.

The Effect of Coconut Oil Consumption on Cardiovascular Risk Factors — A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Clinical Trials https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.119.043052

[ related topics: Health ]

There is a "Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales" data set. I do not see such a thing for the United States. Anyone know where to find a simple "mortality, all causes, by week" list?

Jira just offered me the option to try a new interface, and I'm like "well, it can't be worse than the old one..."

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

[ related topics: Photography ]

RT Danielle Baskin @djbaskin

Once lockdown is lifted and we’re no longer on Zoom, I’m walking around with a tiny mirror above my face so you can continue to stare at your own face while we’re talking.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Just saw someone on FB saying that they made a mask out of cheesecloth, and it's great because it doesn't fog up, and I'm like "we're all gonna die, aren't we?"

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Fascinating little dive into the astroturfing campaign that's behind the anti-social-distancing demonstrations

Happy 2020-04-20

Maybe now we can stop killing people with hydroxychloroquine studies? More deaths, no benefit from malaria drug in VA virus study

With 368 patients, the study is the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for Covid-19.

More deaths, no benefit from malaria drug in VA virus study

[ related topics: Health virus Current Events Gambling ]

Meet the minds behind the bizarre, truth-bombing Steak-umm Twitter account

How, in the time of Covid-19 we're seeing some brilliant brand definition.

[ related topics: Gambling ]

Shadow forwards along this Reddit "what anime is this?" (video) that may be the most unexpected... dang it, I can't put searchable terms here without spoilers...

[ related topics: Video ]

County of Santa Clara Identifies Three Additional Early COVID-19 Deaths

The Medical Examiner-Coroner performed autopsies on two individuals who died at home on February 6, 2020 and February 17, 2020. Samples from the two individuals were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, the Medical Examiner-Coroner received confirmation from the CDC that tissue samples from both cases are positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19).

Additionally, the Medical Examiner-Coroner has also confirmed that an individual who died in the county on March 6 died of COVID-19.

(WaPo: Autopsies find first U.S. coronavirus death occurred in early February, weeks earlier than previously thought

[ related topics: virus California Culture Gambling ]

The Dangerous Rise of COVID-19 Influencers and Armchair Epidemiologists

Dr. David Dunning — of the Dunning-Kruger Effect — on the alarming relevance of a 20-year-old study

[ related topics: Current Events ]

A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity’s show helped spread the coronavirus

First, the authors provide evidence that there was a difference in how Hannity and Carlson covered the coronavirus outbreak in February and early March. Second, they present data from their poll showing that Hannity viewers were less likely to follow social distancing rules than Carlson viewers. Third, they used data on television viewership and the coronavirus to show that higher rates of Hannity viewership relative to Carlson viewership were correlated with higher rates of local infection and death.

It seems pretty clear, from the first section, that Carlson took this way more seriously than Hannity. On February 25, Carlson warned that the virus could kill as many as a million Americans. On February 27, Hannity said it was less dangerous than car crashes or the common flu.

Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago: Misinformation During a Pandemic Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, David Yanagizawa-Drott

[ related topics: Politics Technology and Culture virus Invention and Design Current Events Work, productivity and environment Television Automobiles Education Economics ]

When you're trying to talk someone through installing TeamViewer, and you suddenly realize the Zoom meeting you're in has all the capabilities you were gonna use TeamViewer for...

Special Report: Former Labradoodle breeder tapped to lead U.S. pandemic task force

Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”

[ related topics: Health Sports Child-Freedom Race Dogs Real Estate ]

So a common theme with the astroturfing campaign is that the human lives lost from the economic downturn we're going through, and will continue to go through, are worse than those we'd see with COVID-19. Let's dig into that a little bit.

American Journal of Public Health: Impact of Business Cycles on US Suicide Rates, 1928–2007 (doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2010.300010) suggests that death rate due to suicides during the Great Depression went from 18 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000. So given the same rate of increase in suicides from such an economic situation at the current population, we could expect to see 13,000 additional deaths.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare that to COVID-19 deaths. Especially since looking at overall mortality rates suggest that the official statistics on COVID-19 related deaths are super low (eg: Santa Clara County death data shows 20% increase in March, suggesting more coronavirus victims than previously known — The numbers show a significant uptick in fatalities compared to a year earlier, including a 17% rise in the number of people who died at home.

The EPA has been hedging their bets on "statistical value of a life" for years, but it's a good back of the envelope, and inflation adjusted it comes out to about $9.6M in 2019 dollars, so call it an even $10M. Just pulling numbers that have come out, assume 70% of the population is susceptible, 1.8% death rate, that's a little over 4 million people, so $40T. Now unless Remdesivir is a miracle, or something else comes along, that may be inevitable, but unless we flatten the curve it's not unreasonable to assume that that death rate would double.

We're now learning that there are likely a lot of super-negative long-term health effects, and no indication of what immunity rates look like.

Of course we know a lot more about psychology and economics now, and with a well-coordinated Federal response we can mitigate a lot of those issues.

But, of course, "well-coordinated Federal response" and the fuckwit clowns in the Executive branch right now...

All because a small minority of cosplayers with expensive props are pissed off about missing out on their free iced tea refills.

[ related topics: Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Television Mathematics Clowns Economics ]

Well, I've had my hopes dashed before, but a truck just went by stringing a cable of some sort up on the utility poles, and I asked, and they said "this is for Sonic". So fingers crossed on fiber? Probably not a less sucky CPE than this 5268AC, though. Sigh.

[ related topics: Machinery ]

Okay, now the virus is just fucking with us: French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients. Smokers who actually get COVID-19 still die more frequently, but they're less likely to get it...

A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications

SARS-CoV-2 epidemics raises a considerable issue of public health at the planetary scale. There is a pressing urgency to find treatments based upon currently available scientific knowledge. Therefore, we tentatively propose a hypothesis which hopefully might ultimately help saving lives. Based on the current scientific literature and on new epidemiological data which reveal that current smoking status appears to be a protective factor against the infection by SARS-CoV-2 [1], we hypothesize that the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) plays a key role in the pathophysiology of Covid-19 infection and might represent a target for the prevention and control of Covid-19 infection.

https://doi.org/10.32388/FXGQSB.2

[ related topics: Drugs Health virus Invention and Design ]

Quora: William Morrison's answer to "When the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor, was the US already at war with the British or did the Civil War start because of that?"

... Down south, Santa Anna had taken advantage of all the confusion to raise an army and seize control of Alamo. Why a saintly old lady with no record of mob violence would have felt the sudden urge to muscle in on the car hire game like that remains unclear even to this day ...

[ related topics: Games History Automobiles ]

Your hilarious revisiting of the '80s of the day: Journey-Separate Ways (Heller Quarantine Edition) Side by Side (Vimeo video)

[ related topics: Video ]

A friend suggested a Facebook game of 10 video games that were influential in your life, 1 per day, and explain why. Consider yourself tagged if you think this'd be fun...

Day 1: Lunar Lander

Probably the first video game I think I played. My Dad worked at GE Power Transformer in Pittsfield, Massachussetts, and whenever we went to see him there it was always "stop at the gate, wait for him to come out", so what happened inside those buildings was a huge mystery.

One day, or weekend, the entire Pittsfield GE operation had a huge open house. There were demonstrations of big arcs in the high voltage testing lab. Cool technology over in whatever the naval/submarine/whatever group was. My Dad's workplace was a cube farm, though I liked to think he bounced back and forth between there and the high voltage labs, but in the cube farm there was a CAD system, and on that CAD system there was a lunar lander game.

Simple cartesian X/Y motion controlled by a joystick, no rotation.

At some point, his friend John Hammond brought over an early programmable HP calculator. It had the little mag strips you slid through the slot to save programmers. It too had a "lunar lander". This one had a display of three numbers, altitude, fuel, and speed, and the game was to select various different burn intensities to hit altitude 0 with some minimal speed, and still have fuel left.

And then he brought home from work a KIM-1. This had a 6 digit LED display and a 20 key keypad (and a whopping 1K of RAM, though filling that meant a lot of data entry), and a half-hour of mashing in hexadecimal codes from a book got me a similar lunar lander, but in real-time! 4 digits of altitude, 2 digits of speed, hit 0-9 for burn intensity, the 'F' button to toggle the fuel-left display.

And I could change it. If I understood the assembly language listing, I could change the acceleration, or starting fuel, or fuel consumed per burn unit...

And that was my first introduction to programming.

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It should, at this point, be obvious to everyone that the "Commander In Chief" is a senile dotard surrounded by enabling idiots, but the various news networks keep airing his "press conferences", and yesterday's was a doozy. There are already attempts to walk it back as satire or sarcasm, but you can See the full video and transcript of Trump suggesting disinfectant might be injected as a coronavirus cure.

"So I asked Bill a question some of you are thinking of if you're into that world, which I find to be pretty interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said, that hasn't been checked but you're gonna test it. And then I said, supposing it brought the light inside the body, which you can either do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're gonna test that too, sounds interesting. And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that. So you're going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we'll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it goes in one minute, that's pretty powerful."

Obviously, America, please don’t put bleach inside yourself like the president says:

... I know it seems counterintuitive, but given the choice to listen to a plastic bottle or the president of the United States, I beg you: Listen to the plastic bottle.

Now I, of course, recognized this immediately because I'd heard about the FDA warnings Danger: Don’t Drink Miracle Mineral Solution or Similar Products

The FDA warns you not to drink sodium chlorite products such as Miracle Mineral Solution. These products can make you sick.

Because I'd run across the shysters preying on members of the parents of autistics communities, and figured that he'd just run across ads preying on the vulnerable on Breitbart. But no, apparently it's even more targeted than that: Revealed: leader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus 'cure' wrote to Trump this week

Mark Grenon wrote to Trump saying chlorine dioxide ‘can rid the body of Covid-19’ days before the president promoted disinfectant as treatment

Bonus, laughing because the alternative is crying: Sarah Cooper on Twitter shows us how to medical.

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being watched

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Petaluma from Quarry Heights this morning

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Tara tried to tag me in a link to... probably one of these articles... but Facebook decided it was not appropriate. So I'm gonna post a bunch of them. And in my defense, no, it wasn't me that trained this neural network, I've got a full list right now...

This neural network was fed 10,000 dicks to learn how to draw one

Designers built an AI penis detector to protest Google’s prudish doodles

Someone taught an AI to draw dicks after feeding it 25,000 doodles of penises

This AI Can Draw Human Penises Full-Time, Thanks To Google

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Day 2 of the 10 Video Games that were influential in your life (or however it was phrased) challenge. The playing along was super fun on day 1, love to see more!

Gotta pick a side scroller, and Choplifter is one, if only because it was also one that subverted the "shoot everything that moved" paradigm. My dad bought some sort of surplus European Apple ][+ board, and a family friend, Les Polgar did similarly, with the intent of altering them to work with NTSC rather than PAL video. In practice this meant that when they got together to work on this project, Les would bring a sherry, and they'd sit and sip and chat while I re-soldered the components to make them work with NTSC rather than PAL.

So the computer came together in a plywood case, with Shugart 40 track floppy drives (we could read disks written with Apple floppies, but could get a few more K of storage by poking a location in DOS and write those extra 5 tracks, even though other people couldn't use them).

When it came to coming up with a joystick, I hit up Radio Shack. I didn't have a good understanding of how pull-up resistors worked, so rather than a pull-up resistor with a normally-open switch, I used a normally-closed switch and tied it to Vcc, depending on the internal resistance to function as a pull- down (because this is what worked when I was poking wires into the I/O port). This was great for some things, but tends to be super electrically noisy on polled I/O, and however Choplifter did its I/O polling meant that it didn't register button presses.

So I played a (pirated) version of that game for quite a while before I discovered that, whoah, there was more to the game than luring the tanks away from the refugees, then landing and picking up the refugees, but you could actually shoot the tanks.

Mind. Blown.

I also discovered pull-up resistors.

I did, a few years ago, run into Dan Gorlin, the author of Choplifter, out in Lagunitas.

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Influential video games, day 3: Taipan! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title)

I think you can draw a line through the old BASIC game Hammurabi through Lemonade Stand, Taipan, and on through Drugwars, even into modern resource management games (including cow-clickers). Probably making a stop in Chris Crawford's "Balance of Power" nuclear detente simulation along the way.

In essence, there's some sort of basic iterated function system, and a random number generator, and the game is about the player trying to optimize for the combination of the two of them.

Taipan, though, had a cool bug: There was a loan shark, Elder Brother Wu: You needed capital to expand your shipping operation, Elder Brother Wu might offer you a loan. You had to be pretty hard-up to take the loan, or you had to have discovered the bug: If you paid back Elder Brother Wu exactly the amount owed, the loan was wiped.

If you paid him back *more* than the amount owed, Elder Brother Wu paid you interest.

"Winning" the game involved making a million of whatever the currency was. It started printing gobbeldygook after a trillion (which, of course, also makes me think about how they were doing number bases).

A note about "Balance of Power": I remember installing this, complete with Microsoft Windows 1.whatever it was necessary to run it. I never really found it an interesting game, I think because the game kind-of assumed that as the player you understood the limits of Presidential and foreign policy power, and I didn't, at that time.

But the book about the design of Balance of Power was really cool, and had a prominent place on my bookshelf. In the 2000 era I had a chance to go to the first Phrontisterion conference on interactive drama, hosted at Chris Crawford's ranch outside of Jackson, Oregon, and I think that's where my fascination with games really either started to wane, or sank hard.

There were a bunch of really interesting game people there, and a bunch of novelists and fiction folks, and though it started as a round-table, after not terribly long the conference bifurcated into two groups: The traditional gamers, who were talking about more of the kind-of "on rails" notions that were making their way into gaming at the time (witness things like Half-Life 2, which doesn't really have a whole lot of user choice, and jumps through hoops to maintain a certain level of engagement such that if you want to do a fast play-through you let your health go down to 10% or so and the enemies suddenly can't hit anything), where the novelists were talking about player choice and complex psychological and sociological models for trying to build interactions, which is fun for simulation, but is it still story if your flawed hero can see his flaws and work out an actual solution to the story conflict?

Which, I think, was what Taipan! showed me earlier: There's only so much entertainment in optimizing non-linear systems, it's cool to find the bugs and the flaws in those systems, and at some point the map is not the territory: There's only so much the games can teach us about our larger influence on our communities and the cultures around us.

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Personal information from 900+ St. Louisan tipsters exposed on social media

A disclaimer that form submitters had to acknowledge before sending says, “I have been advised that this form and any other communication may be considered an open record pursuant to the Sunshine Law, Chapter 610 RSMo. St. Louis County may be required to release this form as well as other communications as a matter of law upon request by any member of the public, including the media.”

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Influential video games, Day 4: Bruce Artwick's SubLOGIC Flight Simulator

I know that by the time I saw Flight Simulator I'd already seen wireframe 3d graphics (I'd seen a CALMA CAD system, for one thing). I had likely done some sort of "plot wireframes of trig functions with orthographic projections" before this (one of my high school math teachers hated that I used the computer to do my homework, another of my math teachers (Shout out to Kevin O'Sullivan) harnessed that and had me write educational software for him; I may still have a printout of the code for a tutorial and quiz program to help understand parabolic equations), but this had the perspective divide in it and everything.

Yeah, it was way slow (after Microsoft acquired it, they did some tweaks to draw solid horizons), but suddenly there was 3d. On a home computer. A virtual world. And physical simulation.

With mountains in the background, and sometimes some disorientation while trying to find the runway...

Amazingly, it was probably another decade and a half before I got really comfortable using matrices for 3d graphics; my first ray-tracer (published in Dr. Dobb's Journal in the late '80s) did all of its transforms with high school algebra and trigonometry.

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‘Closing borders is ridiculous’: the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial coronavirus strategy

Anders Tegnell talks to Nature about the nation’s ‘trust-based’ approach to tackling the pandemic.

It'll be a few years before we get to do a post-mortem and see what the best strategy was to try to deal with COVID-19, and I'm mostly pretty happy with how California is dealing with it, but if you're enjoying the irony of Trump supporters saying "Sweden is doing it right!", this is an article to read.

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Influential Video Games, Day 5: Lode Runner

When it comes to games with built-in level design, everyone points to the brilliance that was Pinball Construction Set. Bill Budge did, indeed, squeeze just about everything out of the 6502 that it was possible to squeeze.

When it comes to games where influencing the behaviors of the Non-Player Characters is a large part of gameplay, sure, there's some Dig Dug, and, of course, the amazeballs that is Lemmings, but...

So Lode Runner was a Dig Dug meets Donkey Kong meets Lemmings game that included a level editor. Game play, and level design wasn't twitch based, it was about strategizing how you were going to trap and work around the enemies in order to gather all of the treasure.

And... The Apple 2 had this interesting quirk of how it did its video: In character mode, the screen had 280 characters horizontally, each character (eg: "A") was 7 pixels wide. In graphics mode, each "byte" in the framebuffer had 7 pixels, and one pixel that told which palette the odd and even pixels came from.

The problem is that computers freakin' hate to divide by 7, and when you're trying to squeeze all the performance out of a computer you don't want to divide by 7.

Developers for the Apple ][ addressed this one of two ways: Either they devoted a lot of memory to a lookup table to give them divide by 7 information or if they had an animated character, they drew 7 different frames of animation, one for each of the horizontal positions.

Lode Runner was one of those games where, looking at it, that "aha" moment happened for me: It was really easy to see that it was laid out on a 40x20 grid (The Apple 2 had an additional graphics mode where the bottom 4 lines were text even when the top lines were high res graphics), the animation was all pre-shifted sprites.

The game play and puzzle solving involved using known NPC behavior.

And your friends could create levels and pass them around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72k1ZYp83tc

#VideoGameInfluence

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Preventing conscripted soldiers from killing themselves: Suicide Prevention Trigger Guard in Turkish Armed Forces

Editors Note- It is important to stress that these ‘Suicide Prevention Trigger Guards’ were intended to be used by units that were mainly composed of Turkish conscripts, and not the ‘Operating Forces’ so to say. That is, the units using these rifles aren’t the same infantry units that are operating in PKK-areas or currently in NE Syria and Idlib. The intent was to prevent suicides among those serving their required term of enlistment in these more rear-echelon garrison units.

Via.

Because that video of two doc-in-the-box urgent care physicians from Bakersfield trying to create more business for themselves is making the rounds (and what is it about Kern County, man?) and I need to be able to find these again:

Shoddy statistics and false claims: Dr. Erickson dangerously misled the public on coronavirus

ACEP-AAEM Joint Statement on Physician Misinformation:

The American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.

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Man it sucks that this election is coming down to one creepy sexual predator vs another one... Washington Post: The sexual allegations against Joe Biden: The corroborators.

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Influential video games, day 6: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Yeah, top-down dungeon crawlers are great. The idea of RPG-ishness was certainly around. And I was gonna toss Doom and/or Wolfenstein 3d in here, but as soon as I thought about Wolfenstein 3d, I had to think about grid-layout maps with first-person perspectives.

And as soon as I thought about that, I went back to Wizardry.

This was the era of Rogue. ASCII "graphics". Top-down dungeon crawling was just becoming a thing. And suddenly you were moving through a dungeon, first-person view. Those neurons for mapping had to come into play (or you had to have graph paper).

This was D&D come to life. Ish. Kinda. It was a dungeon crawler, but it was also the inspiration for me to try to do my first 3d hidden-line removal, figure out the math to try to draw this sort of an exploration in BASIC.

And when Wolfenstein 3d came out there was the moment of "whoah, doing the perspective divide once per vertical scan line is brilliant", and when Doom came out it was like "yeah, whatever, BSP trees are cool and you still only have to do the perspective divide once per vertical scan line".

Whatever the issues with gameplay, or the fact that almost everyone who finished it used a sector editor on the saved game to give themselves buffs (or did the "flip open the floppy drive real quick if the party dies to keep it from saving the deaths" thing), this was a 3d virtual world on a microcomputer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqhv_aldcoo&t=1m28s

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The flyover we really wanted: This American Hero Flew an Airplane Over Maryland in a Flight Path That Spelled “F— Covid 19”

On Tuesday around 4 PM, a Piper Cherokee took off from Harford County Airport near Churchville, Maryland. Over the next two hours, the pilot flew a complex path that took him as far west as Prettyboy Reservoir and back east as far as Perryville. When viewed end to end, his flight path, about 28 nautical miles end to end and about 191 nautical miles total, delivered a middle finger to the pandemic that continues to ravage the US and disrupt our lives: “FUCK COVID 19,” it read.

US says remdesivir shows 'clear-cut' effect in treating coronavirus. Slightly faster recovery time, minimal impact on mortality:

The results also suggested that people who were on the drug were less likely to die, although the difference was quite small. The mortality rate was 8.0 percent for the group receiving remdesivir versus 11.6 percent for the placebo group.

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Nature: Pseudoscience and COVID-19 — we’ve had enough already. Among the many problems, though, is that pseudoscience is deeply ingrained in the history of medicine.

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Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli Releases Free Backgrounds for Virtual Meetings: Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away & More

Zoom from a BDSM dungeon with these kinky new backgrounds from Kink.com

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Influential video games, day 6: Hard Drivin'

Of course there was Battle Zone, back in the day, for 3d using vector graphics. And Microsoft Flight Simulator (the successor to the SubLOGIC Flight Simulator) started to fill in the ground and sky colors. And there were driving games, from Night Driving on the Apple ][ to Pole Position on, but 1989's Hard Drivin' occupies a large space in my mind for a couple of reasons:

1. It marked a certain point in the evolution of arcade game controls. For a long time, one of the things that made arcade games special was that they could have special purpose controls you couldn't get on home machines. Trackballs, free-spinning knobs, massive throttle controls, all things that you didn't have on your 2600 or your home PC. A full-on driving platform? I mean, sure, these things have evolved, but force-feedback steering wheel...
2. Hardware accelerated graphics! This thing wasn't playing games with 2d or incremental fills of portions of the screen, that thing was refreshing the whole damned screen, and the camera and car could go anywhere. Drive off the top of the loop, and flying! And it used TI TMS34010 processors; I remember learning about rendering techniques by reading TMS34xxx assembly code in a couple of issues of Micro Cornucopia. This was not a game that translated well to home computers.

I was never a huge arcade game player, but I think I dropped a few dollars in the machine over at Hamilton Place Mall to play this thing on my way to and from buying computer books at Software Etc.

Of course by the time I was doing 3d video games, basic polygon filling had become a known science, and the tricks were about how we could light, shade and texture faster...

#VideoGameInfluence

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