Tell-Tale Tongue, Holloways Brand Pills, 1956 via
Is the Virus on My Clothes? My Shoes? My Hair? My Newspaper? - Tara Parker-Pope on The New York Times
Staying safe when you come in from the big world.
tl;dr: If you’re not leaving the house much, and not coming in contact with infected people, then social distancing, mask wearing and handwashing should be fine. And even mask-wearing is unnecessary if you stay outdoors and can keep your distance.
Julie and I do not wear masks on our daily walks. We live in a quiet suburb, and it’s easy to keep 20 or more feet away from anyone we encounter.
An Austin school district deployed 110 buses equipped with Wi-Fi to neighborhoods and apartments where home Internet is least likely. The idea is the bus parks near students' homes - Andy Jechow on KUT90.5
I’ve done something counterintuitive to ease news anxiety: Turned on news notifications on my phone.
Yes, on.
If the news notifications look like the usual baloney, then I know there’s no crisis requiring my immediate attention.
I used the same principle immediately post-9/11 with the technology available at that time. I had my clock radio tuned to wake me up with news radio. If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no reason for me to rush to look at headlines.
Caleb, a young man whose life is going nowhere, finds escape and purpose on YouTube. First of a new podcast series by The New York Times.
One: Wonderland - Rabbit Hole
The podcast producers are nonspecific about where Caleb’s story ends, but it seems to be far-right extremism. Shocking because he seems like a pleasant young man. And Caleb even supported Obama. Not in a deep or informed way, but Caleb thought Obama seemed like a good guy, and that it spoke well for the US to have an African-American President.
I see my past self in Caleb.
“Rabbit Hole,” a narrative audio series with tech columnist Kevin Roose, explores what happens when our lives move online.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interviews from quarantine with the New York Times Daily podcast and discusses why she voted against the pandemic bailout bill – because it devotes hundreds of billions of dollars to propping up share prices for megacorporations who don’t need it, and not enough to struggling people, who do.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Progressivism and the Pandemic
She uses the phrase “rugged capitalism for the poor and unfettered socialism for the rich,” which she attributes, possibly incorrectly, to Martin Luther King.
AOC’s primary subject is the future of progressivism and the Democratic Party after Sanders dropped out of the Presidential race. She sees support for Biden as minimizing harm rather than necessarily doing good, but is prepared for a better outcome (same for me).
She also discusses the difficult task progressives face – Democrats need affluent middle-class suburban white votes to win elections, but those voters are often put off by the progressive agenda.
Nearly a half century after the OPEC oil embargo almost brought the US to its knees, we’re now the worlds largest oil producer rather than consumer, and Trump is trying to jack up oil prices.
That’s normally Presidential suicide, but Trump is trying to protect the US oil industry.
Oil be back - Donald Trump’s big bet - Checks and Balances
A wise economic strategy for the US would have to carefully balance protecting the oil industry while encouraging clean energy production, such as solar. But Trump doesn’t do subtle – his only move is smashing things with a hammer and grabbing gold and power for himself and his cronies.
In this prophetic science fiction story from 2015, a cooking blogger keeps up a cheerful attitude and makes do while self-quarantining with her family during a global pandemic. Excellent story and a fast read: “So Much Cooking,", by Naomi Kritzer on Clarkesworld.
And from a few days ago, Kritzer follows up: “Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality. Some interesting discussion by Kritzer about the themes she explores in the story, how fans and friends are reacting today, what the author got right and wrong about the pandemic, and how the fictional characters' quarantine struggles maps to reality.
Inspired by “So Much Cooking,” on my next grocery run, I’m going to go out and buy a couple of vacuum-sealed cans of Maxwell House or Chock Full o' Nuts coffee. Just in case the good stuff gets hard to find.
I’m also going to think about what more I can be doing to help neighbors and the community. Confession: So far, not much.
Thanks, Cory.
Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: The health insurance industry is thriving during the pandemic. With Sanders and Warren out of the race, the companies are freely gouging patients and spending on stock buybacks without fear of Medicare for All.
Meanwhile, doctors are getting pay cuts.
Carnival kept sending out cruise ships while knowing it was risky. And the chairman of Carnival is on Trump’s back-to-work council. Rearranging dreck chairs - David Pell on Nextdraft
Armed far-right groups are behind anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and elsewhere. They love Trump and Trump is cheering them on. Martyrdom and dumber - David Pell at Nextdraft.
ME: I have 300+ podcast episodes in my queue. I will never listen to them all!
ALSO ME: This looks like an interesting podcast. I’ll subscribe now!
Comic-Con Cancels 2020 Event, Sets 2021 Return - Erik Pederson on Deadline.com.
Disappointing but not surprising, and the right decision.
John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82.
Siobhan Roberts writes The New York Times’s obit for mathematician and “Magical Genius” John Conway, most famous for inventing the computer Game of Life. Cause of death: COVID-19
Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, said that when the game went viral on the internet, “with addicts programming it at home and at work — one quarter of the world’s computers were playing it.”
Conway’s colleague, Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen, said there are two kinds of geniuses in mathematics and physics, ordinary geniuses. Ordinary geniuses just seem to be people who work hard.
“But then there are the magical geniuses,” he added. “Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John — he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius.”
Also:
Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”
People like Conway seem to be to be the truly blessed people in the world. They work hard at what they do, they excel at it, and the work is pure joy to them. We’re all advised to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – it will all be play to you – but very few people can achieve that.
I became fascinated by Conway’s game around 1983-84 or so, and wrote a program in the computer language Basic to play it on an early IBM PC. Each turn took a half-hour!
China Police Censor Tales of Post-Coronavirus Renewal.
New York Times journalist Paul Mozur finds signs of a nation opening up on the streets of the big Chinese city of Hefei, population 8 million.
He also finds xenophobia, and police censorship that’s both laughably clumsy, and effective.
Mozur was expelled from China, along with other Western journalists, shortly after.
Some people say we need to open the economy soon and if a few thousand people – or hundred thousand people – die because of it, well, that’s a small price to pay.
People who espouse this view should be asked whether they themselves are taking greater risk to help others. Are they volunteering at a food bank, blood bank, or working front lines in essential retail service?
If not, they should be invited to shut the fuck up.
In any war, there are always chickenhawks – people who, from a place of safety, advocate ruthless sacrifice BY OTHER PEOPLE. I’ve noticed over the decades that these people are never themselves combat veterans. Somehow when it was their turn to stand in front of unfriendly strangers with guns, these brave warriors had other things to do.
Donald Trump, aka “Captain Bonespurs,” is of course the chickenhawk-in-chief.
Dr. Tony Fauci: From One Pandemic to Another - Epidemic.
AIDS activists in the 1980s were surprised to find a champion in a civil service doctor, Anthony Fauci.
And for people who lived through that crisis, the coronavirus pandemic gives them a terrible sense of déjà vu.