Blog: #covid-19

• Zeynep Tufekci on the new Covid strain — astute as always, and yikes (though my feel for plot points thanks to my reading of apocalyptic novels had me expecting a twist like this)
• Robin Sloan on newsletters having seasons — I love this idea and plan to swipe it for my own newsletter, and also see what other projects it might work for (boundaries are good, and I miss publishing a magazine where the issues provided those constraints)
• Bryan Braun on using URLs to build database-free web apps — another idea to keep in mind
• McKay Coppins on the most American religion — I thought this was a decent take
• Boston Dynamics robots dancing — pretty soon they’re going to start learning jiu jitsu and then they’re going to escape

Reply via email or via office hours

• Jim Butcher on scenes and sequels — good writing advice
• Justin E. H. Smith on whether birds are dinosaurs — which is apparently a somewhat heated debate? (I had no idea)
• A raycasting engine made in Factorio — one of the wonders of the Internet
• Tyler Hobbs on flow fields in generative art — hoping to use this technique someday
• FAQs on protecting yourself from Covid aerosol transmission — recommended

Reply via email or via office hours

• Hundred Rabbits on their tools ecosystem — several of their philosophies here appeal a lot to me, and I love how constraints (electricity, etc. in their case) lead to interesting ways to solve problems
• Brandur on small, sharp software tools — how to avoid getting cut on all the extra complexity (from using many small tools together)
• Carolyn Barber in Scientific American on how Covid can wreck your heart even if you haven’t had any symptoms — a bit terrifying if I’m honest, but obviously still important to be aware of
• Doug Belshaw with a quote from Joseph Tainter on the Ik of Uganda — the societal differences are striking (it’s basically everyone for themselves, starting at the ripe old age of three years old)
• Ratko Jagodic on his VR research using the forearm for both input and display — promising and exciting

Reply via email or via office hours

• Jennifer Jacobs’ interview on the Future of Coding podcast — this is the area of HCI I’m most interested in
• Muse — an intriguing spatial canvas idea
• RFC8890, on the Internet being for end users — hear, hear
• Steven Johnson on the spark file — great idea
• The microCOVID Project — a layman’s method for quantifying Covid risk (probably not extremely accurate but interesting nonetheless)

Reply via email or via office hours

• Jose-Luis Jimenez on Covid-19 being transmitted through aerosols — important piece
• Kapow! — cool idea to easily turn shell commands into HTTP APIs (thanks, Richard)
• Tom MacWright on ideas for reinventing the web — interesting thoughts (not sure how feasible in practice, though)
• Robert O’Callahan on some of those ideas — also interesting thoughts
• Tom MacWright again on React and the modern web — somewhat in the same vein because why not and I am a minimalist at heart

Reply via email or via office hours

Recommended: Zeynep Tüfekçi’s article We Need to Talk About Ventilation from The Atlantic, on the importance of air flow in fighting Covid.

Reply via email or via office hours

Yesterday I found out that one of my coworkers (not on my direct team, but in my division) passed away from Covid on Friday. She’s the first person I actually know who has died from it. Unsettling and surreal and very sad.

Reply via email or via office hours

Our stake has thankfully decided that given Utah’s current COVID-19 numbers, it’s too early to start church meetings up again. Which seems wise to me. Prudence and patience are what we need here.

Over the past week or so, by the way, I’ve come to realize that we as a family are probably going to need to self-isolate for another year or so while we wait for a vaccine. It’s a long time, but also not that long. Someday this will all be safely tucked in the past. (I should add that I don’t for one second think that COVID-19 isn’t going to leave a permanent mark on the world. The pre-COVID world is surely dead; the world in its wake can’t possibly look the same. But I feel confident that the need to self-isolate will eventually end, at least until the next pandemic.)

This may not comfort others the way it comforts me, but I occasionally think about World War II (I was reading Anne Frank’s diary before the pandemic), more particularly how people wanted the war to end but had no idea in the moment how long it was going to last. It took six years and so many lives, but it did end. As did the 1918 pandemic. This too shall pass.

Reply via email or via office hours

Erin Bromage’s The Risks - Know Them - Avoid Them piece on COVID-19 is a good explanation of what it takes to get infected. (I found it useful, for example, to know that walking past someone in the grocery store is fairly safe.)

It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope can also be predicted. We have robust data from the outbreaks in China and Italy, that shows the backside of the mortality curve declines slowly, with deaths persisting for months. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, it is possible that we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That’s what’s going to happen with a lockdown.

As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I’ve said before, if you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover.

I agree — reopening seems completely premature to me based on the curve.

Reply via email or via office hours