The U.S. has reached 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases. Let's take a moment to honor the heroes who helped get us here. pic.twitter.com/YtzcHYuFcT
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 28, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Preserve Your Quarantine Nature Walks with a DIY Herbarium
Pressed plants can be your journal of the pandemic.
A pretty record of daily walks under isolation measures.
EVEN IN THE ERA OF COVID-19, Elaine Ayers is usually at the park by 7:00 a.m. When her goldendoodle, Franklin, has gotta go, he’s gotta go—“He’s still a baby even though he’s like a hundred pounds,” she says—and they head out for short walks several times a day in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown. She doesn’t see many people at the moment, but as they head home, she marvels at their leafy neighbors. Ayers, who teaches in the museum studies department at New York University, studies 18th- and 19th-century botanical specimens, but lately she has become especially attuned to their more contemporary counterparts—native plants thriving under an overpass, cherry blossoms painting the parks pink, weeds shoving up through the concrete. “When I go on these walks to take my dog out to pee, I’m really noticing what’s around me kind of for the first time and I’m appreciating it more than I ever have,” she says.
A few weeks ago, with the realization that social distancing isn’t going away any time soon, and that she likely won’t teach her current crop of students in person again, Ayers was feeling “lonely and disconnected and sad, and in need of a little beauty.” She poked around her house for a notebook to write in. Most of them were locked in her office in New York, nearly 100 miles away, but she found a few well-loved ones, around a decade old and stuffed with pressed plants. At the time, she had been in the habit of making pressed specimens to commemorate big life events, from going to graduate school to weathering a breakup. Upon rediscovering her old specimens, she wondered if, in the midst of a pandemic, collecting and pressing plants might be a soothing exercise and a useful record of how people are interacting with nature.
Jot down the species name, and where it was found.
Inspired by the 19th-century habit of sending pressed plants through the mail, Ayers launched the Quarantine Herbarium as a digital scrapbook of weeds, flowers, herbs, or leaves that people find, press, and photograph. So far, 20 participants from Philadelphia, California, England, and elsewhere have shared 50 specimens, and Ayers is expecting images of 30 more plants in the coming week.
Historically, botanical specimens were often collected, pressed, and mounted by women and indigenous people, who “don’t show up in the scientific record even though they were trading all of these specimens through the mail and customs houses,” Ayers says. Part of her project involves poking at the concepts of expertise and authority. Participants don’t need to have deep botanical knowledge. Anyone can press a plant. …
My body is a castle
Scientists only became aware of SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, late last year. Most of our immune systems, meanwhile, have still never heard of it. For now, we have to rely on our bodies—rather than a vaccine or targeted medication—to fight off the virus.
The good news is: Evolution designed the immune system to do just that. The bad news: Its response isn’t always predictable. The immune system is complex in its own right, and varies tremendously from person to person. This makes it hard to know how and when to intervene when it’s overwhelmed. In order to slow the spread of Covid-19, it will be crucial to understand exactly how the immune system tackles the disease.
Scientists have the basics of the immune system down pat. With any new viral infection, the body first deploys T cells, which find and kill infected cells. T cells are in limited supply; if there’s still an infection after they’re depleted, the body will unleash a fever to make the environment uninhabitable for the virus. After about a week, the adaptive immune system kicks in, using B cells to make antibodies that can flag sick cells for annihilation even faster. Those antibodies stick around after an infection is over, in case of a future invasion.
If you’re thinking “Man it’d be helpful to see that as a comic strip,” don’t worry. We’ve got you.
Embiggenable.
But for all we know about the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, there’s still a lot we don’t …
Dear mainstream media: You don’t have to ‘both-sides’ Trump’s bleach injection suggestion — it’s bad for you. The end.
You probably saw Donald Trump’s ridiculous, false and deadly claim last week: that ingesting chemical cleaners could cure humans of the coronavirus. At a White House press briefing on Thursday (4/23/20), the president said:
I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute—one minute—and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it [coronavirus] gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.
He also suggested that exposing patients to bright lights could help cure them, once again confusing what works on surfaces like tables with the inside of a human body.
It’s worth taking a step back for a second and pausing on the fact that the person in charge of the United States thinks injecting bleach might be a good idea. Trump has consistently spread false information about the pandemic, claiming in February that it would be gone by April due to the warmer weather, and insisting that “we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.” …
The U.S. Is Now Resorting to Plan C
Americans are not going to wait for sufficient testing. So what happens then?
Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, has faced harsh criticism for lifting emergency restrictions on retail stores—and inexplicably including tattoo parlors among the establishments that could reopen. But Kemp isn’t the only governor who’s been second-guessed. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has permitted the playing of golf, albeit without carts and with strict social distancing between golfers, while she has extended her state’s stay-at-home order through May 15. Her fellow Democrat, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, has committed to reopening northern parts of the state well before he does New York City.
These efforts are a microcosm of the dilemma now facing governors and mayors across the United States. The tug-of-war between President Donald Trump, who is plainly eager to lift restrictions, and his scientific advisers, who want Americans not to die, has yielded a list of modest-sounding criteria that states are supposed to satisfy before lifting stay-at-home orders. Titled Opening Up America Again, the document calls on states to wait for the trend in new-case counts, or, alternatively, in the percentage of COVID-19 tests that come back positive, to decline over a 14-day interval—not fall to zero, just decline—before easing up on their stay-at-home orders. States are also urged to show their capability to protect health-care workers and test even asymptomatic patients.
But many of these standards are unlikely to be met anytime soon, and red and blue states alike are starting to probe which restrictions can give.
Kemp’s decision was hasty, and even Trump criticized it. Eighty percent of the public still support social distancing, according to a recent Kaiser poll, and the same proportion said they could follow stay-at-home orders for at least a month longer. Still, even Democratic governors of hard-hit states recognize that a full lockdown cannot remain in place indefinitely. Inevitably, decisions about whether a given activity can begin again will not be based on science alone. …
SOMEWHAT RELATED: Ten reasons why a ‘Greater Depression’ for the 2020s is inevitable
Ominous and risky trends were around long before Covid-19, making an L-shaped depression very likely.
After the 2007-09 financial crisis, the imbalances and risks pervading the global economy were exacerbated by policy mistakes. So, rather than address the structural problems that the financial collapse and ensuing recession revealed, governments mostly kicked the can down the road, creating major downside risks that made another crisis inevitable. And now that it has arrived, the risks are growing even more acute. Unfortunately, even if the Greater Recession leads to a lacklustre U-shaped recovery this year, an L-shaped “Greater Depression” will follow later in this decade, owing to 10 ominous and risky trends.
The first trend concerns deficits and their corollary risks: debts and defaults. The policy response to the Covid-19 crisis entails a massive increase in fiscal deficits – on the order of 10% of GDP or more – at a time when public debt levels in many countries were already high, if not unsustainable.
Worse, the loss of income for many households and firms means that private-sector debt levels will become unsustainable, too, potentially leading to mass defaults and bankruptcies. Together with soaring levels of public debt, this all but ensures a more anaemic recovery than the one that followed the Great Recession a decade ago.
A second factor is the demographic timebomb in advanced economies. The Covid-19 crisis shows that much more public spending must be allocated to health systems, and that universal healthcare and other relevant public goods are necessities, not luxuries. Yet, because most developed countries have ageing societies, funding such outlays in the future will make the implicit debts from today’s unfunded healthcare and social security systems even larger. …
5 Work Perks (That Are Actually A Trap)
What would you rather have as an employee benefit: on-site daycare, or on-site shiatsu massages? According to most U.S. companies, that answer is obvious, because while workplaces that offer ample parental support, health care or just the promise they won’t crunch their workers into an early grave are few and far between you can’t throw a molotov cocktail without hitting some start-up luring in naive talent with glamorous perks like inter-office Segways or monthly yoga retreats. But some of these trendy benefits aren’t just flashy distractions to keep workers from realizing their dental plan is just a coupon for a tube of Colgate, they’re late-capitalist cons that wind up costing employees more than they benefit from them. For example…
5. Unlimited Vacation Time Tricks Employees Into Taking Less Time Off
While unlimited paid time off is still a novelty, ever since places like Netflix and LinkedIn started offering the perk more and more Silicon Valley and startup firms are telling their young employees not to worry and take all the time off they want. But in reality, unlimited vacation time is like the gym subscription of employee benefits in that your taskmasters are counting on the fact you won’t use it nearly enough for it to pay off.
When these companies loudly declare that they offer unlimited time off, what they’re really whispering in their employees’ ears is: How many days do you think you’re worth? And, surprise, it turns out that the same work environment that fosters the kind of hustle culture in employees to push 60-hour weeks and still find the time to pick up their CFO’s drycleaning, those same go-getters don’t want to risk finding out which number of days puts them in their ‘lazy’ pile in their boss’ fickle brain. As a result, early research is already showing that employees with unlimited paid time off request even fewer vacation days than the traditional PTO pittance U.S. employees receive.
But not only does the unlimited vacations cost employees time off, the system also devalues the very concept of it. After all, unlimited is the opposite of precious, right? So perked up employees have admitted that their generous masters tend to expect they keep answering calls and responding to work emails even when they’re enjoying their decadent day two out of two of their so-called bottomless vacation high.
Most insidious of all, it makes it mathematically and legally impossible for employees to cash out unspent vacation days when switching jobs (in the states where that’s possible), which just happens to have become a real money drain for the kind of start-ups that stock their office pool with nothing but burnt-out Millennials. From that perspective, unlimited PTO might just be the most disruptive thing those exploitative paradigm-shifters have ever done since they’re trying to prove infinity and zero can be the same thing. …
UNRELATED: Stupid Ways Humanity Is Screwing Up The Planet
“Let’s build a civilization,” we said. “It’ll be great and also easy,” we said. Then we plunged blindly into this whole mess, altering nature in ways none of us could have imagined. Just an oil refinery here, a coal mine there, and before we knew it, we killed the Bramble Cay melomys. (Guess what kind of animal that is. You’re wrong.) Well into the 21st century, these changes keep getting weirder and more unpredictable. For example …
5. Our Hair Is Disfiguring Pigeons
Is there anything better than passing a warm spring afternoon feeding pigeons in the park? You know, aside from sex, video games, corn dogs, and everything else that is better than that? Well, unless your hair care routine is particularly religious, it’s likely that you’re hurting those little buddies more than you’re nourishing them.
Have you ever noticed that most pigeons are missing a toe or two? So did a group of concerned researchers in France. What’s going on there? Weird aviary beauty fad? Retaliation from the pigeon mafia? Nope. It’s strands of human hair. They tend to be floating around on the ground where pigeons gather because it’s also where people gather, so they get all tangled around the pigeons’ li’l toesies. Pigeon wings are uniquely ill-suited for untying millimeter-thin lengths of fiber, so they just keep wrapping tighter and tighter until the toe in question succumbs to necrosis and peaces out.
“Well, those layabouts should get proper jobs and quit pecking up our scraps to begin with,” you might say if you have an especially high tolerance for animal mutilation. But that’s our fault, too. We killed off the vegetation they would otherwise eat to build our condos, forcing them to adapt to scavenging food on the nasty, hairy ground. If there’s any upside here, it’s that at least these birds get to taste the glory of a Cheeto before it kills them. In that sense, we’re kind of all in the same sodium-rich, trans-fatty boat. …
UNRELATED: Georgia Puts Its Own Laws Behind A Paywall, Supreme Court Says Shut Up
Georgia is known for a good many things. They have peaches, charm, naked cowboy burglars. But, one thing you can add to the bad list is trying to put their state laws behind a paywall. Yes, Georgia claimed to own the copyright for the Official Code of Georgia Annotated and sued Public.Resource.org for publishing it online. It’s the type of move that comes straight out of the Evil Villain Handbook, or at least we think it is, as Georgia is charging us $9.95 a month to read it. Fortunately for any citizens of Georgia that are looking to abide by laws, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision (surprisingly bipartisan as both Ginsberg and Thomas were among the dissenters) that no legal document could be held under copyright. As Chief Justice John Roberts puts it:
“Officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of-and therefore cannot copyright-the works they create in the course of their official duties.”
Now, if you wanted to get pedantic about it, and why not, we’ve got all day here, you would point out that Georgia wasn’t actually looking to copyright their laws, only the annotated version provided by LexisNexis, which the state pays them to produce. The problem is that the state doesn’t publish any official version of the law other than the one provided by Lexus Nexus. It’d be like if Moses refused to show you the Ten Commandments unless you paid to hear the book of slam poetry he had attached. …
The Anti-Mask League: lockdown protests draw parallels to 1918 pandemic
California has succeeded in flattening the curve of infections, but will it learn a lesson from a similar pandemic a century ago?
People wait in line to get flu masks to avoid the spread of Spanish influenza on Montgomery Street in San Francisco in 1918.
San Francisco seems to have done a good job of flattening the coronavirus curve. Initially perceived as an overreaction, the shelter-in-place order issued on 16 March now seems prudent in light of the sustained public health crisis that New York has endured.
San Francisco has seen roughly 1,450 confirmed coronavirus cases and 23 deaths but the city wasn’t always so good at heeding the advice of experts.
A century ago, the influenza pandemic hit San Francisco harder than any other major US city, with 45,000 infections and 3,000 deaths. As NPR’s Tim Mak pointed out in a 19 April Twitter thread, protests in late 1918 and early 1919 helped turn a manageable public-health situation into a disaster – courtesy of a now-forgotten movement known as the Anti-Mask League.
A San Francisco pedestrian passes graffiti encouraging masks during the coronavirus outbreak.
It began after the initial wave of infections in the fall of 1918 died down, the approximate juncture where California is now vis-a-vis Covid-19. But instead of flattening the curve, hostility to commonsense measures on grounds of personal liberty turned that curve into a double hump. Cases spiked in October, and mask use became mandatory, but only for four weeks. As of 21 November, they were no longer required.
Seemingly clear of danger, the city reopened, and a populace weary from the first world war and the widespread destruction of the 1906 earthquake and fire jumped back into the conviviality of life. Predictably, this led to a second wave of illness and death, and the city became convulsed by debates over the efficacy of masks and whether their use should be compulsory or not. …
Too Much Efficiency Is Hazardous to Society
Decades of streamlining everything made the U.S. more vulnerable.
The global quarantine, an optimist might argue, is pushing us toward a more web-mediated world. Millions of people who had seldom, if ever, used videoconferencing before March are now doing their jobs without a long commute, taking classes without getting on a school bus, or consulting a doctor without first sitting in a waiting room full of sick people. These changes are, by some standards, a form of efficiency. Yet the pandemic has forced them on us even as their benefits have yet to be firmly established. Who can predict not just test scores but long-term outcomes of remote learning? And who can say whether a physician’s physical presence and touch are truly irrelevant to protecting a patient’s health?
If the coronavirus pandemic does ultimately make our lives more efficient, it will be ironic. For decades, even before Silicon Valley championed the “disruptive technologies” of the web, leaders in business and government alike have declared war on allegedly wasteful spending. Overlooked is the fact that too much zeal for lean operation has pitfalls of its own. In practice, the pursuit of efficiency has often resulted in the consolidation of smaller companies and facilities into larger ones; in greater congestion as more people are packed into smaller spaces, whether in office towers or aboard commercial airliners; and in the tight coupling of deliveries and other business processes in ways that, at least when all goes well, speed up production and reduce warehouse inventories. But consolidation, congestion, and tight coupling may also make our economy less efficient in the long run—and our society more vulnerable to outside shocks such as the coronavirus. Efficiency, in fact, can be hazardous to our well-being, and a strategic amount of inefficiency is crucial in keeping society healthy.
Consolidation has long been a feature of American economic life, and corporate mergers and acquisitions are routinely justified as saving money and creating other efficiencies. Unsurprisingly, mergers have reshaped even nonprofit health care, as formerly independent hospitals have joined into larger systems. Writing in The New York Times in February 2019, the health-care economist Austin Frakt disputed hospital chains’ claims that consolidation had lowered costs and improved health outcomes.
As costs of health care have escalated, doing more with less has become a universal goal. Over the past two decades, the state of New York pressed for the elimination of 20,000 hospital beds. The pursuit of efficiency in the state’s health system was a bipartisan effort, originating in a 2006 report from a commission convened by Republican Governor George Pataki and continued by his Democratic successors, including Andrew Cuomo. The commission urged an occupancy rate of 85 percent, up from an allegedly wasteful 65 percent in 2004. Many of the hospitals closed during this wave of consolidation served the most economically troubled neighborhoods of New York City—neighborhoods that, in March and April, were disproportionately struck by the pandemic. Once COVID-19 threatened to overwhelm the New York hospital system, Cuomo was pleading with Washington, D.C., for additional beds. …
MEANWHILE: Mile-wide asteroid set to pass within 3.9m miles of Earth
Rock known as (52768) 1998 OR2 will pass by on Wednesday but ‘poses no danger to planet’
An image of asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 that will be passing Earth on Wednesday.
An asteroid more than a mile wide will pass by Earth on Wednesday while travelling at a speed of about 19,000 miles (30,578km) an hour.
The space rock, known as (52768) 1998 OR2, is expected to make its closest approach at 10.56am BST, when it will be just 3.9m miles (6.3m km) away – about 16 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Although the asteroid is classified as a potentially hazardous object (PHO), scientists have said it will not pose a danger to the planet.
Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, said: “This asteroid poses no danger to the Earth and will not hit – it is one catastrophe we won’t have. While it is big, it is still smaller than the asteroid that impacted the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.”
He said an asteroid was classed as a PHO if it is bigger than 500ft and comes within 5m miles (8m km) of Earth’s orbit. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
When councils were instructed to provide accommodation for their homeless population to protect them from coronavirus, Mike Matthews, owner of the Prince Rupert hotel in Shrewsbury, was one of the first to step in. The decision was part business decision to save his hotel, part philanthropy to help homeless people he admits he usually ignored. The new residents, including a former employee, feel it has given them some dignity back and offered them a rare feeling of family and safety. They also know this cannot be a permanent change to their lives, so what happens next?
Much of last month’s Paycheck Protection Program money was sapped up by big businesses and not the small businesses it was intended for, and though PPP Round 2 is more precisely targeted, women- and minority-owned small businesses are still struggling to get the support they need.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Here are some of the words Trump has said while in total command of his faculties at these coronavirus briefings.
Responding to reports that Americans might experience meat shortages as soon as this week, President Trump moved to force meat processing plants to keep operating.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Aggressive times call for aggressive Q&A sessions! Allana Harkin is here to answer all of your questions about quarantining. Have a question? Ask and it may be featured in our next episode!
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
まるに甘えに行ったはなですが、この時は舐めてもらえなかったようです。そんな時こそ、あれの出番ですよね！ Hana behaved like a baby to Maru. However, she was not licked by him.
FINALLY . . .
One of Geology’s Great Mysteries May Actually Be Many Smaller Mysteries
The “Great Unconformity” is a big chunk of missing deep time.
The discrepancy pops up in the Grand Canyon, where ancient rock abuts, well, less ancient rock.
GEOLOGY FORMS THE CONTEXT FOR many other fields, including archaeology, paleontology, climatology, and more, but that doesn’t stop this bedrock science from throwing a curveball here and there. In some outcrops around the world there’s a gap, a hint of time gone missing, a huge swath of geological data that should be there but isn’t.
It’s called the “Great Unconformity,” and it has long vexed geologists from Nevada to Scotland. Geology is often the study of layers, set one on top of each other for billions of years and compressed into sequences that provide geologists insight into how the Earth has evolved through the eons. Under the best circumstances, that sequence is more or less uninterrupted, but there can be gaps—sometimes big ones, like the Great Unconformity, which can be seen all over, from the Rockies to southern Africa to northern China. This gap spans one of the murkier periods in Earth’s history, before the Cambrian explosion, around 540 million years ago, when the diversity of life on Earth went wild.
Erosion is one natural process that wears layers away from the stack of geological deposits, but how so much was wiped out across such a wide range of places in one go has remained unknown. Even the unconformity isn’t uniform, ranging in scale from over a billion years of missing time to a mere couple hundred million. In the Grand Canyon, the timeframe of the unconformity jumps multiple times along its length.
According to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there’s evidence that this erosion didn’t all happen at once. There might have been many events involved—lots of little unconformities—the origins of which can be traced to about a billion years ago on the supercontinent Rodinia, a landmass three times as old as the supercontinent Pangea that broke up to form the world as we know it. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs. The other bird seems to be looking for something tasty to kill.
Ed. Yes, that’s a cut-and-paste of another day.