We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean *actual* cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts. We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population. […]

The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc). Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. (Keep in mind that for many patients, hospitalization lasts for *weeks* — in other words, turnover will be *very* slow as beds fill with COVID19 patients). By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled. (This says nothing, of course, about whether these beds are suitable for isolation of patients with a highly infectious virus.) […]

[T]he doubling time will start to slow once a sizable fraction of the population has been infected, simply because of herd immunity and a smaller susceptible population.

{ Liz Specht | Continue reading }

The median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days, and 97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days of infection.

{ Annals of Internal Medicine | Continue reading }

related { How the drug industry got its way on the coronavirus }

photo { President Xi Jinping of China, right, was briefed at the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan on Tuesday. The hospital was built in a matter of days in February to treat coronavirus victims. | NY Times }

If you can smell what someone had for lunch — garlic, curry, etc. — you are inhaling what they are breathing out, including any virus in their breath. […]

After numerous people who attended a Buddhist temple in Hong Kong fell ill, the city’s Center for Health Protection collected samples from the site. Restroom faucets and the cloth covers over Buddhist texts tested positive for coronavirus, the agency said. […]

A study of other coronaviruses found they remained on metal, glass and plastic for two hours to nine days.

Whether a surface looks dirty or clean is irrelevant. If an infected person sneezed and a droplet landed on a surface, a person who then touches that surface could pick it up. How much is required to infect a person is unclear.

Coronaviruses are relatively easy to destroy, Professor Whittaker said. Using a simple disinfectant on a surface is nearly guaranteed to break the delicate envelope that surrounds the tiny microbe, rendering it harmless.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Franco Fontana, Houston People, 1985 }

Indonesia official says ’strong sperm’ can impregnate women in swimming pool

Mastercard is pioneering new payment technology that identifies commuters by the way they walk

Study finds parrots weigh up probabilities to make decisions

There is evidence that the spring Daylight Saving Time transition acutely increases motor vehicle accident risk

How artificial shrimps could change the world (a kilo of farmed shrimp is responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef, study)

Does tapping beer cans prevent beer loss? A randomised controlled trial

People are turning to YouTube and Facebook to learn how to do DIY fecal transplants

About 40% of US adults are obese, government survey finds

A quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots

This phone uses AI to block you taking naked selfies

“Instead of using a short, complex password that is hard to remember, consider using a longer passphrase,” the FBI said. “The extra length of a passphrase makes it harder to crack while also making it easier for you to remember.”

The Effect of Country Music on Suicide

The Shell oil and gas company invited me to London to advise them on millennials and climate change but they didn’t think they needed to get me to sign an NDA. Whoops!

Secret passage dating to 1660 is found inside U.K. parliament. An exclusive walkway once used by royalty was rediscovered inside the landmark building, along with some graffiti from Victorian laborers. [NY Times]

The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) is a large area in which radio transmissions are heavily restricted by law to facilitate scientific research and the gathering of military intelligence.

The vast majority of light pollution is from cities: street lights, industrial zones, parking lots. But sometimes, it’s from something else.

There’s a reason so many memories with computers are blue

Sun Dayong designs wearable shield to protect against coronavirus outbreaks After an epidemic is contained, he thinks the bat-like shields could be upgraded with Google Glass technology, or simply be used as a “unique private mobile space for people.”

The Homeric Question

Kazuhisa Hashimoto, Creator Of Famous ‘Konami Code’ Gaming Cheat, Dies

Types of interchanges and their efficiency ratings.

For Decades, Cartographers Have Been Hiding Covert Illustrations Inside of Switzerland’s Official Maps reading

{ Ormond Gigli, Girls in the Windows, New York, 1960 |Jean-Paul Goude, Chanel Egoiste commercial, 1990 }

Most estimates suggest 80% of COVID-19 cases are mild and feel roughly like a flu. Estimates I have seen suggest that roughly 10-15% of cases will be more significant and may necessitate hospital visits (see also) with 1-3% potentially needing an ICU. The concern of many governments is the peak number of cases that occur in a given moment. […]

The reported death rate has hovered around 2% but may in reality be 0.2% to 1% depending on country and healthcare system. Many estimates tend to indicate an overall expected mortality rate of ~0.5% globally. The current existing fatality rate is biased upwards by Wuhan cases dominating the mix (which are closer to a 3-4% death rate and make up most cases). It is possible the virus is being undertested for in China / rest of world driving the real death rate down (as many more people are infected than is reported). […]

R0 value: The spread rate of the virus seems to be well over 2 and likely ~3. This means for every person infected at least 2 to 3 more get the disease.

{ EladGil | Continue reading }

Experts think there may be many people with no symptoms at all, or such mild ones that they never bother to seek medical attention. Because those cases have not been counted, it’s not possible now to know the real proportion of mild versus severe cases. […]

After viral infections, people generally develop antibodies in their blood that will fight off the virus and protect them from contracting it again. It’s reasonable to assume that people who have had the new coronavirus will become immune to it.

But it is not known how long that immunity will last. With other coronaviruses, which cause the common cold, immunity can wane.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The best estimates so far suggest that Covid-19 kills about 1% of people it infects. That number may go up somewhat or fall significantly; either way it could add up to a dreadful toll.

If 60% of the world’s population is ultimately infected, as suggested by Gabriel Leung, chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, a 1% fatality rate would kill almost 50 million people — similar to the 1918 Spanish flu. If that falls to 0.1%, it could still be roughly 10 times more fatal than the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, which killed several hundred thousand in its first year. […]

The most severe period of initial infection could soon be fading. Respiratory diseases flourish in the cold season and taper off as the weather warms up. That should cause infection rates to slow in the northern hemisphere, while continuing at a lower level in tropical regions and spiking in temperate parts of the southern hemisphere where winter will be setting in. When a new year rolls around, the bulk of the disease will shift back to the northern hemisphere, to begin the cycle again.

Subsequent Covid-19 seasons probably won’t be as serious. Those who survive viruses should be immune from reinfection (though there have been reports of people being diagnosed with Covid-19 for a second time), and as the share of survivors in the population rises, it gets harder for a disease to spread. […]

In a best-case scenario, it’s even possible that vaccines may be available in not much more than a year.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

The only path to flattening the curve for COVID-19 is community-wide isolation: the more people stay home, the fewer people will catch the disease. The fewer people who catch the disease, the better hospitals can help those who do. […]

Get a flu shot, if you haven’t already, and stock up supplies at home so that you can stay home for two or three weeks, going out as little as possible. […] Here’s a handy, one-page guide on what you need.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

related { CoronaCoin: crypto developers seize on coronavirus for new, morbid token }

Enter Spotify, a platform that is definitely not the answer. In fact, it only exacerbates such conundrums. Yet for now it has manipulated the vast majority of music industry “players” into regarding it as a saving grace. As the world’s largest streaming music company, its network of paying subscribers has risen sharply in recent years, from five million paid subscribers in 2012 to more than sixty million in 2017. Indeed, the platform has now convinced a critical mass that paying $9.99 per month for access to thirty million songs is a solid, even virtuous idea. Every song in the world for less than your shitty airport meal. What could go wrong? […]

Indeed, Spotify’s obsession with mood and activity-based playlists has contributed to all music becoming more like Muzak, a brand that created, programmed, and licensed songs for retail stores throughout the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the company prioritized workplace soundtracks that were meant to heighten productivity, using research to evaluate what listeners responded to most. […]

Spotify playlists work to attract brands and advertisers of all types to the platform. […] We should call this what it is: the automation of selling out. Only it subtracts the part where artists get paid.

{ The Baffler (2017) | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

{ Thanks Thomas! }

Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued. […]

Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.

Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it’s considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.

“Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all,” Riehl explained in the talk. “So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we’re just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable.”

All of the melodies they’ve generated, as well as the code for the algorithm that generated them, are available as open-source materials on Github and the datasets are on Internet Archive.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

Americans spend an average 2.5 days per year searching for lost items and $2.7 billion a year replacing them. […]

Although 40% of Americans believe getting older causes them to forget where they place their valuables and household items, Millennials are generally twice as likely to misplace items over Boomers and a third more likely to lose items compared to Generation X.

{ PR News Wire | Continue reading }

David Silver [the creator of AlphaZero] hasn’t answered my question about whether machines can set up their own goals. He talks about subgoals, but that’s not the same. That’s a certain gap in his definition of intelligence. We set up goals and look for ways to achieve them. A machine can only do the second part.

So far, we see very little evidence that machines can actually operate outside of these terms, which is clearly a sign of human intelligence. Let’s say you accumulated knowledge in one game. Can it transfer this knowledge to another game, which might be similar but not the same? Humans can. With computers, in most cases you have to start from scratch.

{ Gary Kasparov/Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Kelsey Bennett }

Curiosity - the drive for information - is often perceived as a dangerous trait. This is exacerbated by the perception that when something is forbidden, curiosity towards it increases. […]

This research demonstrated the so-called “forbidden fruit effect”, in which unavailable options elicit curiosity – the desire to know more – even when people were completely aware that the forbidden option did not differ from other options in terms of expected outcome, uncertainty (hidden values), and visual salience.

{ OSF | Continue reading }

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with U.S. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. He and his administration tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile. According to the theory, those leaders would then avoid provoking the United States, fearing an unpredictable American response.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

The author finds that perceived madness is harmful to general deterrence and is sometimes also harmful in crisis bargaining, but may be helpful in crisis bargaining under certain conditions.

{ British Journal of Political Science | Continue reading }

black smoke shells fitted with computer chips { Cai Guo-Qiang, Wreath (Black Ceremony), 2011 }

Frustration grows in China as face masks compromise facial recognition [Thanks Tim]

Victims thought they were paying millions to free hostages. But the ‘minister’ who asked them was a fraudster in a mask

Romantic kissing is not a human universal

The scent of a romantic partner can improve sleep

This study did not detect any effect of daily caffeine intake on sleep duration

Women’s bust size and men’s courtship solicitation

The effect of touch on tipping: an evaluation in a French bar

Apple Pay accounts for about 5% of global card transactions and is on pace to handle 1-in-10 such payments by 2025

Amazon wants to patent paying with a selfie [2016]

Samsung, which makes both handsets as well as 5G network equipment, told investors on its own call that it expects its 5G business in South Korea to “shrink somewhat compared to last year.”

Scientists testing a small but random sample of donated blood ready for transfusion have discovered that 70 percent contained traces of Xanax [Thanks Tim]

How to donate a piece of your brain to science—while you’re still alive

A newly discovered virus has 74 genes, out of which 68 are completely unknown to science.

List of unsolved problems in philosophy [Thanks Tim]

An interactive museum dedicated to words and language is opening on May 31, 2020, in Washington, DC

The 50 Most Drug-Addled Albums in Music History

Cy Twombly, a retrospective, 1994 [PDF]

Emoji Mashup Bot — Tries to create new emojis out of two (or three) random emojis. Tweets every 60 min.

Ideas for a website

#churchsecurity [Thanks Tim]

[Thanks Tim!]

[Thanks Rachel!]

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software.

The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican.

But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. […]

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. […]

The program had limits. America’s main adversaries, including the Soviet Union and China, were never Crypto customers.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

related { How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails }

When privately owned land vanishes under the water, who does it belong to?

The problem is a result of the state’s rapidly changing landscape. About 80 percent of Louisiana’s coast is privately owned. But, under an old law, as coastal erosion and sea level rise turn the land into open water the area becomes property of the state, including the mineral rights underneath.

Private landowners have become more adamant about restricting access to water on their property in order to assert their claim to the minerals underneath it. But boaters often have difficulty figuring out where private property ends and public waterways begin. Since 2003, Louisiana law does not require landowners to post signs demarcating their property. The resulting confusion led the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, or BASS, to announce in 2017 that it would no longer host professional fishing tournaments in Louisiana tidal waters, where fishers risk being arrested.

{ NOLA | Continue reading }

{ Scott Kelly and Ben Polkinghorne, Signs of the Times, 2017 }

On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it was charging four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army with the 2017 Equifax breach that resulted in the theft of personal data of about 145 million Americans.

Using the personal data of millions of Americans against their will is certainly alarming. But what’s the difference between the Chinese government stealing all that information and a data broker amassing it legally without user consent and selling it on the open market? Both are predatory practices to invade privacy for insights and strategic leverage. […]

Equifax is eager to play the hapless victim in all this. […] “The attack on Equifax was an attack on U.S. consumers as well as the United States,” [Equifax’s chief executive] said. […]

According to a 2019 class-action lawsuit, the company’s cybersecurity practices were a nightmare. The suit alleged that “sensitive personal information relating to hundreds of millions of Americans was not encrypted, but instead was stored in plain text” and “was accessible through a public-facing, widely used website.” Another example of the company’s weak safeguards, according to the suit, shows the company struggling to use a competent password system. “Equifax employed the username ‘admin’ and the password ‘admin’ to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes,” it read.

Though the attack was quite sophisticated — the hackers sneaked out information in small, hard to detect chunks and routed internet traffic through 34 servers in over a dozen countries to cover their tracks — Equifax’s apparent carelessness made it a perfect target.

According to a 2019 class-action lawsuit, the company’s cybersecurity practices were a nightmare. The suit alleged that “sensitive personal information relating to hundreds of millions of Americans was not encrypted, but instead was stored in plain text” and “was accessible through a public-facing, widely used website.” Another example of the company’s weak safeguards, according to the suit, shows the company struggling to use a competent password system. “Equifax employed the username ‘admin’ and the password ‘admin’ to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes,” it read.

The takeaway: While almost anything digital is at some risk of being hacked, the Equifax attack was largely preventable.

{ NY TImes | Continue reading }

related { The End of Privacy as We Know It? }

related { The FBI downloaded CIA’s hacking tools using Starbuck’s WiFi }

Many New Yorkers are familiar with the iconic Waldorf Astoria, which sits on Park Avenue. But they might be surprised to learn that this is the second iteration of the luxury hotel. The original was located along Manhattan’s fashionable Fifth Avenue, and the structure took up the entire block between 33rd and 34th streets. But in late November 1929 — after the stock market had crashed and the slow slide into the Great Depression began — workers began demolishing it. […] The demolition of the old hotel, completed by the winter of 1930, made way for the construction of the ultimate expression of the city’s architectural ambitions: the Empire State Building.

{ CNN | Continue reading }

The original hotel started as two hotels on Fifth Avenue built by feuding relatives. The first hotel, the 13-story, 450-room Waldorf Hotel, designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh in the German Renaissance style, was opened on March 13, 1893, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street, on the site where millionaire developer William Waldorf Astor had his mansion. […]

On November 1, 1897, John Jacob Astor IV opened the 17-story Astoria Hotel on an adjacent site, and leased it to Boldt. The hotels were initially built as two separate structures, but Boldt planned the Astoria so it could be connected to the Waldorf by an alley. Peacock Alley was constructed to connect the two buildings,[21] and the hotel subsequently became known as the “Waldorf-Astoria”, the largest hotel in the world at the time.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay In The Air

On a strictly mathematical level, engineers know how to design planes that will stay aloft. But equations don’t explain why aerodynamic lift occurs.

There are two competing theories that illuminate the forces and factors of lift. Both are incomplete explanations.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }