Jane Coaston writing in Vox:

‘Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), a libertarian House representative and frequent critic of Donald Trump’s presidency, announced his intention on Tuesday to launch an exploratory committee to examine a run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

…Conservatives (and libertarians) are divided on the potential of Amash’s run, with some arguing that Amash could take valuable votes away from Democratic nominee Joe Biden and help Donald Trump. The actual research on third-party voters is a little complicated. Because so few Americans vote third party, it’s often hard to say if they have a real impact on the outcome of the race. But it’s certainly a get for the Libertarian Party. Candidate Jacob Hornberger told Reason Magazine that an outside candidacy could help the Libertarian Party. “When these people come in from outside the party, it provides a prestige factor.”…’

Dana Milbank writing in The Washington Post:

‘In conventional usage, sarcasm, from the Greek “sarkasmos,” or sneer, means to use irony in a cutting way — often enthusiastically stating the opposite of what one means. But like all pioneers in the field of comedy, Trump has shifted the boundaries so that “sarcastic” means, roughly, “a term applied retroactively to something I wish I hadn’t said.”
For example…’

Janice Wood writing in PsychCentral:

‘Researchers found that while there were few differences in the amount of individual foods that people ate, overall food groups or networks differed substantially between people who had dementia and those who did not have dementia.

“Processed meats were a ‘hub’ in the food networks of people with dementia,” said Samieri. “People who developed dementia were more likely to combine highly processed meats such as sausages, cured meats, and patés with starchy foods like potatoes, alcohol, and snacks like cookies and cakes.

“This may suggest that the frequency with which processed meat is combined with other unhealthy foods, rather than average quantity, may be important for dementia risk. For example, people with dementia were more likely, when they ate processed meat, to accompany it with potatoes and people without dementia were more likely to accompany meat with more diverse foods, including fruit and vegetables and seafood.”…’

Lee Moran writing in HuffPost:

‘Two conservative groups that are working to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election released online ads Friday attacking the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Lincoln Project, of which conservative attorney George Conway (the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway) is a prominent member, released this video asking which kind of American its viewers would like to be ― one, like Trump, who demands, or one who makes sacrifices.

Republicans for the Rule of Law, meanwhile, shared a minute-long video of Trump musing during Thursday’s task force briefing about injecting disinfectant to combat the virus. Trump claimed Friday he was being sarcastic.

“50,000 people have died. This is our president,” read the text at the start of the clip. It ended with the words: “Unfit. Unwell. Unacceptable.”…’

Oliver Darcy writing in CNN:

‘It looks like President Trump is going into hiding — from the press, that is. Facing an avalanche of controversy over his bizarre comments on sunlight and dangerous comments regarding disinfectants, the President held a record short briefing Friday evening (sans Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx), abruptly ending it after 22 minutes of statements without taking any questions from the press.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer called Trump “chicken” and said he was “probably afraid” of the grilling he was all but certain to face over the “flat lie” he told the day before regarding disinfectants. Later in the night, Anderson Cooper, who argued Trump was guilty of “Soviet”-like spin for pretending his comments were sarcastic during a bill signing, said he “cut and ran” because he knew he’d face hard questions.

CNN and other news organizations, including Axios which broke the news, reported Friday eveningthat there has been an effort among White House aides to stop holding daily coronavirus briefings. And the schedule released for Saturday shows no briefings scheduled…

The move comes after Trump even started receiving criticism from Fox. When he tried to claim that he was merely being sarcastic with his disinfectant remarks, anchors like Neil Cavuto and Bret Baier pushed back. “Wow, that is a little unsettling,” said Cavuto. “Got to clarify this. The president was not joking in his remarks yesterday.” And Baier said Trump “clearly stepped in it” and did not appear to be joking…’

Igor Derysh writing in Salon:

‘Trump claims China would “own” the U.S. if Biden wins, but he’s on the hook for millions — and the due date is 2022…’

Rob Beschizza writing in Boing Boing:

‘Someone carrying a “Sacrifice the Weak” sign was spotted at one of the lighty-attended “reopen” marches that cable TV is hyping as the rebirth of the Tea Party.

Their banner read ‘Sacrifice the weak, reopen TN,’ and was spotted in the background of a news report by WKRN reporter Elizabeth Lane. Their sentiments were echoed on marginally-less offensive placards elsewhere at the same protest, with one woman toting a sign saying ‘Trust God for safety not man.’ Another woman who appeared to be along with her held a sign taking aim at ongoing efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine, which said: ‘Natural immunity over man-made poison.’

To think conservatives made the sanctity of life the centerpiece of their political lives, to the point where abortion may soon be made inaccessible to many women in America, only to discard whatever vestigial moral pretenses lurk in their belief system so they can get some ice cream….’

Xeni Jardin writing in Boing Boing:

‘Winter is coming.

As a number of states rush forward to reopen their economies, Director Robert Redfield of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday a likely second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire, because if it hits in the winter as predicted, it will coincide with onset of flu season.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield told the Washington Post today. … “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” he warned….’

Jackson Ryan writing in CNet:

‘Fomalhaut b was discovered 16 years ago but then it disappeared. How? Scientists think it may have been an incredibly rare cosmic collision….’

Via CNN:

‘Dozens of grocery store workers have died from the coronavirus, despite masks, temperature checks and capacity restrictions to keep them safe. So far, supermarkets have resisted the most draconian policy: banning customers from coming inside.

However, some worker experts, union leaders and small grocery owners believe it has become too dangerous to let customers browse aisles, coming into close range with workers. Grocery stores are still flooded with customers, and experts say it’s time for large chains to go “dark” to the public and convert to curbside pickup and home delivery for food and other essential goods….’

David Masciotra writing in Salon:

‘No Democratic governor, even one with considerable power and influence like California’s Gavin Newsom or New York’s Andrew Cuomo, can afford to gamble with the health of his or her people by alienating Trump. But a prominent U.S. senator — perhaps Chris Murphy of Connecticut or Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — or even Joe Biden himself, must level with the country about what anyone outside Trump’s cult following can see with their own eyes. The president is sick. It’s time to talk about it.

A recent profile in the New Yorker of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quoted a staffer as claiming that behind closed doors McConnell has described Trump as “nuts.” Democrats should demand to know if the Republican Senate mastermind truly believes that the president is impaired, and force McConnell to choose between yet more lies and the future of his country.

Democrats should also get over their concerns about angering Trump supporters. Anyone who continues to applaud Trump’s weird and reckless disregard for humanity at this point is beyond the limit of rational persuasion. Trump supporters live in a hallucinatory dreamscape under the authority of a maniac. Let them have their anti-social distancing rallies, and allow them to believe that Barack Obama invented COVID-19 shortly after he was born in Kenya….’

Marina Koren writing in The Atlantic:

‘The response to the pandemic has created a collective aversion to previously innocuous behaviors and settings…

“I was like, Why am I reacting this way? What’s happening?” [he] recounted to me recently. “And then I realized: Oh, I’m actually reacting to each time they touch their face.”…’

Josh Marshall writing in Talking Points Memo:

‘…[S]amplings of data from New York, Spain and Italy suggest a pattern in which the true scale of mortality tied to the COVID19 Crisis is roughly twice that recorded in the COVID19 death tolls we see each day, and sometimes much higher….’

Rachel Matlow writing in The Walrus:

‘When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she didn’t want chemo. Instead, she tried every other potion under the sun…’

Neuropsychologist-writer  Paul Broks, in Aeon:

‘Medieval mystics starved the body to feed the soul. Understanding this perfectionist mindset could help treat anorexia today…

I am prepared to speculate that disgust will eventually prove crucial to understanding the anorectic mindset, medieval and modern. …With eating behaviour at its evolutionary root, physical disgust elaborates biologically and culturally to shape mental attitudes towards the body of a kind that, in vulnerable individuals, sets body and mind in conflict. The holy anorexics’ quest was spiritual purity, whereas their present-day counterparts are driven by a warped notion of physical perfection. But in both its medieval and modern forms, anorexia is a self-destructive expression of ‘mind over matter’, a way of asserting mental over physical selfhood. Self-loathing and shame, derivatives of disgust, are the main drivers….’

Dahlia Lithwick writing about what would be unprecedented power grab in Slate:

‘At his coronavirus press conference on Wednesday, President Donald Trump issued a stunning threat-slash-promise-slash-constitutional fantasy. Complaining that Democrats were blocking his judicial appointees, the president said that the Senate should either end its current pro forma session and come back to Washington amidst a pandemic to approve his appointees or officially adjourn so that he can make recess appointments. “The Senate has left Washington until at least May 4,” Trump said. “The Constitution provides a mechanism for the president to fill positions in such circumstances, the recess appointment it’s called. The Senate’s practice of gaveling into so-called pro forma sessions where no one is even there has prevented me from using the constitutional authority that we’re given under the recess provisions. The Senate should either fulfill its duty and vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments.”

 
“If the House will not agree to that adjournment,” he continued, “I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress. The current practice of leaving of town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty that the American people cannot afford during this crisis. It is a scam what they do.”

Trump is likely referencing Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution, which provides that the president can “on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” Does he have the power to actually do this, though? According to this 1964 article from the New York Times the Senate Parliamentarian issued an opinion in that year, regarding presidential authority to adjourn Congress: “The answer is yes—but only under, certain unusual circumstances. These conditions are so limited that a President has never exercised the power to adjourn Congress.” …’

Ezra Marcus writing in mic.com:

‘Depictions of American federalism gone haywire have a storied history in near-future science fiction. In Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2015 novel The Water Knife, southwestern states militarize their borders, raise armies, and wage war over shrinking water resources. Neal Stephenson’s epic 2019 novel Fall depicted a country divided into a coastal democracy and a tyrannical heartland theocracy called “Ameristan.” In the 1981 film Escape from New York, Manhattan is a Supermax prison surrounded by towering walls. When Americans imagine a dystopian future, the idea of regions fractured by conflict looms large.

 
The coronavirus pandemic has brought these concepts out of the realm of fantasy. In the absence of a cohesive federal response to the crisis, states have taken it upon themselves to form regional blocs. Powerful blue state regions, including the West Coast and the Northeast, have taken the lead.Imagine, for example, if more governors follow the lead of South Dakota’s Republican leader Kristin Noem, who is just one of eight governors nationwide who have refused to issue stay-at-home orders. Will a coalition of like-minded obstinates form to counter the coastal leaders? …

 
If Trump demands that states re-open, and the West Coast states refuse, a conservative-minded Mountain West Economic Development Zone incorporating Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming could jump at the chance to follow White House orders. So might a neo-confederacy of Gulf states, aligned with conservative Midwest bastions like Indiana. It could become like regional musical chairs, with millions of Americans suddenly living under vastly different scenarios than those in neighboring states.

And then, say if coronavirus were to flare up in the newly reopened states, the West Coast bloc could conceivably close its entire Eastern border to limit exposure to new cases. Picture thousands of cars backed up on I-80, as the California Highway Patrol takes the temperature of every driver coming in from Nevada. There could be regional caste systems based on levels of herd immunity and the availability of routine serological testing, with immunity passports required to go to work or cross state lines…’

Via Ars Technica:

‘If it’s like related viruses, it could cause seasonal outbreaks for years….’

Xeni Jardin writing in Boing Boing:

‘During a totally unhinged coronavirus briefing that was a verbal abuse session and campaign rally, impeached and manifestly unfit U.S. president Donald Trump said “When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total.”

TRUMP:
When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be… It’s total and the governors know that.

That’s it, folks. That’s the blog post.

Nothing matters….’

Something that at any other point in history would be considered infamously momentous barely rates a notice now. 

Via Boing Boing:

‘Ray Harryhausen was a pioneer of stop-motion animation who won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 1949 for his work on Mighty Joe Young with Willis H. O’Brien.

He was created the infamous skeleton sword fight from 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, and also worked on similar big-monster classics like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Clash of the Titans. As you can see in the video, it’s an impressively meticulous body of work!…’

Utterly delightful. The stuff of my childhood nightmares. 

Paul Ratner writing in Big Think:

‘A team of astrophysicists has found evidence that a collapsing magnetic field causes gamma-ray bursts.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful and brightest explosions in the universe….’

Ryan Mandelbaum writing in Gizmodo:

‘Back in 2016, a telescope spotted a supernova flaring so brightly that it far outshone its own galaxy. The exploded star continued emitting radiation for more than 1,000 days, unleashing more energy than any supernova previously documented. But that’s only the start of the story.

The supernova, named SN2016aps, was unlike any supernova on record, lasting for so long that postdocs became professors while still studying it. Not only was it a big show, but it was also a massive one, with five to 10 times the mass of a typical supernova. It was one of the largest stars ever seen to explode. Researchers hope it will help them understand some of the universe’s early epochs….’

Nicole Lafond writing in TPM:

‘Some of President Trump’s closes allies would like him to stop talking now.

And they’re saying it publicly.

While the New York Times cited several unnamed sources in this new report on Trump’s coronavirus briefings, there were also a handful of familiar names who spoke on the record urging Trump to stop participating in the daily pressers. Several White House allies, campaign members and Republicans lawmakers told the Times that Trump’s appearance is hurting him more than helping him.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a close ally and golf partner of the President, told the Times that Trump “sometimes drowns out his own message” and said he has encouraged Trump to decrease his appearances to “a once-a-week show.” Other Republican senators were willing to openly cringe at the daily briefings on-the-record as well: Sen. Shelly Moore (WV) said they tend to go “off the rails a little bit” and Sen. Susan Brooks (IN) criticized the length.

But the TV President is unlikely to be swayed. Administration officials told the Times that he’s expressed to aides he enjoys the free air time, which is unsurprising for a president who tweets about the “ratings” of his pandemic mitigating press conferences as thousands of Americans die of the virus…’

Via Stanford University:

‘Our goal is to learn and predict which geographical areas will be most impacted by coronavirus based on how you are feeling.  This information will be used to inform local and national responses, such as redirecting medical resources or improving policies and public guidance.  Given the 9-10 day delay between onset of symptoms and hospitalization, and the 20% hospitalization rate of patients, tools like this will be necessary to truly track and fight the spread.

Your involvement will hopefully help save lives….’

Cristina Cabrera writing in TPM:

‘President Donald Trump reportedly has been privately suggesting an eyebrow-raising solution to the COVID-19 outbreak consuming the nation: Let it keep doing that.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that during a Situation Room meeting on the pandemic in March, Trump asked White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”

Two unnamed sources told the Post that Fauci was stunned by the question.

“Mr. President, many people would die,” the doctor reportedly told Trump.

Other unnamed officials said that Trump has “repeatedly” (in the Post’s words) asked the same question in the Oval Office.

Trump reportedly began mulling over the idea after hearing about the United Kingdom’s now-abandoned “mitigation” strategy that would let COVID-19 spread throughout the country with few movement restrictions imposed on the population in the hopes of building a “herd immunity” against the virus.

However, a study by medical advisers to the British government found in mid-March that the strategy would “likely result in hundreds of thousands of deaths,” prompting the U.K. to drop the plan.

The same study also predicted that 1.1 to 1.2 million Americans would die if the strategy were adopted in the U.S….’

Tom Nichols writing in The Atlantic:

‘There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump. And his spiritual poverty, like an overdrawn checking account that keeps imposing new penalties on a customer already in difficult straits, is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most.

I do not mean that Trump is the least religious among our presidents, though I have no doubt that he is; as the scholar Stephen Knott pointed out, Trump has shown “a complete lack of religious sensibility” unique among American presidents. (Just recently he wished Americans a “Happy Good Friday,” which suggests that he is unaware of the meaning of that day.) Nor do I mean that Trump is the least-moral president we’ve ever had, although again, I am certain that he is. John F. Kennedy was, in theory, a practicing Catholic, but he swam in a pool of barely concealed adultery in the White House. Richard Nixon was a Quaker, but one who attempted to subvert the Constitution. Andrew Johnson showed up pig-drunk to his inauguration. Trump’s manifest and immense moral failures—and the shameless pride he takes in them—make these men seem like amateurs by comparison. 

And finally, I do not mean that Trump is the most unstable person ever to occupy the Oval Office, although he is almost certain to win that honor as well. As Peter Wehner has eloquently put it, Trump has an utterly disordered personality. Psychiatrists can’t help but diagnose Trump, even if it’s in defiance of the old Goldwater Rule against such practices. I know mental-health professionals who agree with George Conway and others that Trump is a malignant narcissist.

What I mean instead is that Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival.

Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent, and do not corrode the will and decency of those who gaze on them….’

Via Red State:

‘Thursday night CNN held a virtual town hall, hosted by noted radiology expert Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper, in which viewers could submit coronavirus questions to Robert Redfield, CDC Director. The questions were captured in a chyron, and finally it looked like a question we all wanted asked on CNN would be asked.

“Is Stage-4 TDS considered an underlying morbidity?”

How did that get past the screeners?

If you’re not aware, TDS is referring to Trump Derangement Syndrome, an extremely serious mental condition permeating the nation’s mainstream media newsrooms, the staff of The Bulwark, Rick Wilson, and Expert Something Tom Nichols. Every day that Trump serves as POTUS seems to worsen the condition….’

Via Today:

‘Since face coverings can be worn without disrupting much of daily life, experts predict they will be worn until a vaccine is developed and deployed….’

Hunt Alcott et al at Stanford.edu:

‘We study partisan differences in Americans’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republicans and Democrats engage in social distancing and other efforts to reduce disease transmission. We develop a simple model of a pandemic response with heterogeneous agents that clarifies the causes and consequences of heterogeneous responses. We use location data from a large sample of smartphones to show that areas with more Republicans engage in less social distancing, controlling for other factors including state policies, population density, and local COVID cases and deaths. We then present new survey evidence of significant gaps between Republicans and Democrats in beliefs about personal risk and the future path of the pandemic. …’ ‘

Ezra Klein writing in Vox:

‘Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness….’

Via Digg:

‘European starlings are astonishingly good at mimicking sounds. This intrepid wildlife rehabber taught it to say words related to its introduction to North America….’

Thomas Goetz writing in Wired:

‘A new survey finds that a startling proportion of Americans remain confused or misinformed about the local public-health advice….’

Via Washington Post:

Plug in your zip code and find out if your region can handle a projected surge based on an assumption that 2 out of 10 adults are infected. 

Almost 17 million adults, or 6.5 percent of the U.S. adult population, live in communities where covid-19 patients could overwhelm hospital beds, needing more than all available.

76 million adults, or 30 percent of the U.S. adult population, live where patients could overwhelm intensive-care beds.

125 million adults, or 48 percent of the U.S. adult population, live where virus patients could overwhelm the supply of mechanical ventilators. Those breathing machines are among the key hospital resources that can help patients facing death when the disease attacks their lungs.

A pharmacotherapy specialist who has consulted on infectious disease treatments for decades writing in The Conversation:

‘… I am both exhilarated and worried as I watch the unprecedented pace and implementation of medical research currently being done. Speed is, of course, important when a crisis such as COVID-19 is at hand. But speed – in research, the interpretation and the implementation of science – is a risky endeavor….’

Aaron Rupar writing in Vox:

‘…The idea of more states moving toward a mail-in system ahead of November’s election is gaining steam amid the coronavirus pandemic. The dilemma Wisconsin voters faced on Tuesday between staying safe at home or heading to polling places to vote is one most states are interested in helping their citizens avoid. Trump, however, has other, more self-interested concerns.

Not only is the president leading Republican efforts to prevent federal funds from being used for mail-in efforts, but the briefing on Wednesday revealed he really doesn’t have any good reasons for his position.

Trump was pressed on the point during the White House coronavirus task force briefing by CNN’s Jim Acosta. Acosta referenced claims the president made the day before about why he thinks mail-in voting is bad — “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” Trump said — and asked him to back it up.

“I think there is a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some. There’s evidence that’s being compiled just like it’s being compiled in the state of California, where they settled with Judicial Watch saying that a million people should not have been voting. You saw that? I am telling you, in California, in the great state of California, they settled and we could’ve gone a lot further. Judicial Watch settled where they agreed that a million people should not have voted, where they were 115 years old and lots of things and people were voting in their place.”

…Judicial Watch is a right-wing nonprofit led by staunch Trump loyalist Tom Fitton. The settlement Trump referred to is a January 2019 agreement between the organization and Los Angeles County that required the county to remove inactive registrations from the voter rolls. By definition, these people hadn’t voted — that’s why their registrations were inactive. Yet Trump has somehow spun this into an unfounded claim about a million people casting illegal ballots….’

Charlie Sorrel writing in Cult of Mac:

‘You can’t usually train Face ID while you’re wearing a mask, because the iPhone doesn’t recognize that you are even showing it a face. Just like how Portrait mode on the camera sometimes refuses to lock on, if you simply don a mask and try to train Face ID, it will fail.

What you need is a way to trick the Face ID training app into recognizing you. The trick, according to students at the Xuanwu Lab, is to wear half a mask. If you fold the mask — any kind of mask will work — in half, vertically, then the iPhone will see the other half of your face. It takes some finessing, but once it locks on, you’re good to go.

Step one is to fold your mask in half and stand in front of a mirror. The mask should cover the parts of your face that it will cover when you’re wearing it normally. This includes (half of) the tip of the nose. Use the mirror to get everything right, then open up the Face ID section of the Settings app on your iPhone: Settings > Face ID & Passcode. If you only set up one Face ID appearance, then tap on the button to add an alternative appearance. If you’ve already added an alternative, you should reset Face ID and begin over.

Now, proceed as usual. If the app doesn’t recognize your face, move the mask to occlude your face a little more. Then, gradually reveal it again, until the app’s scanner locks on. Finally, move your head as instructed to scan your new masked appearance.

If you have trouble holding the mask in place (it shouldn’t move relative to your face), keep your head still and move the iPhone instead….’

Noam Levey writing in The Los Angeles Times:

‘Although President Trump has directed states and hospitals to secure what supplies they can, the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.

Officials who’ve had materials seized also say they’ve received no guidance from the government about how or if they will get access to the supplies they ordered. That has stoked concerns about how public funds are being spent and whether the Trump administration is fairly distributing scarce medical supplies….’

Stephanie Lee writing in BuzzFeed:

‘an emerging body of data suggests that there are probably a significant number of infected people who don’t have symptoms but are likely to be transmitting the virus. Since they may not know that they’re sick, they may be taking fewer precautions than people with symptoms.

Researchers still don’t know how common these cases are or how much they are driving the pandemic. On Monday, the director of the CDC told NPR that the number of asymptomatic individuals “may be as many as 25%.”…’

John Gray writing in The New Statesman:

‘The deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an otherwise stable equilibrium: the crisis through which we are living is a turning point in history. 

The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient….’

Via Boing Boing:

‘President Donald Trump said on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control will soon officially begin recommending the public use of non-medical, non-surgical grade masks to slow the spread of COVID-19.

“You don’t have to do it. … I don’t think I am going to be doing it,” Trump said about wearing a face mask, during his announcement that the CDC now recommends people wear face masks.

“We’re healing,” the president added, without evidence….’

The novelist, writing in Wirecutter:

‘As it turns out, my notebooks—with their pressed flowers, theater-ticket stubs, different colors of sand glued onto the page, the shells, old photographs that have tumbled out of drawers—are like that red wheelbarrow, beside the white chickens, upon which so much depends. William Carlos Williams, as poet and medical doctor, would have appreciated what neuroscientists call the efficacy of writing on paper. Besides offering a sense of control, paper and pens and anything else we take to it helps us make sense of things. Students who take lecture notes by hand retain and understand the information more deeply than those who take notes on computers because something beautiful and mysterious happens when we relinquish speed to the human pace of thought, physicalized on the page.

But that’s not why my notebook comes with me everywhere. I take it with me because it helps me track the uncharted territory of the present moment. In this act of gathering—scrawls about things noticed on the way to a store, the playbill for my son’s brief acting career, glue-sticked to the page—I’m forced to slow down and tend to the parts that evoke a whole. Sometimes they plant the seed for an idea that I might write about later on. But mostly, I relish in the quiet engagement of pen on paper, my hand working with my brain to create something concrete and real, something that can’t be deleted in an instant after it is read….’

Kate Cox writing in Ars Technica:

‘The entire world is scrambling to mitigate the novel coronavirus pandemic. By now, a majority of US states are under some kind of stay-at-home order, with governors nationwide asking or requiring non-essential businesses to close and everyone to plant their butts at home as much as possible.

As the disease continues to march its way across the country and the globe, though—as of this writing, there have been more than 250,000 US diagnosed cases—officials, regulators, and we the work-from-home masses are all wondering: are we all actually complying with these new rules, or is it still chaos on the streets out there somewhere?

Google has unfathomable reams of data from billions of individuals worldwide, and it has pulled some of that location information together into community mobility reports to try to answer that question. Here’s the good news: by and large, trips to virtually everywhere that isn’t “home” have dropped a whole lot.

To make the reports, Google used location data from any account that has opted into allowing Google to store location history. The company’s services have billions of active daily users, so even if only a minority of users allowed location use, it would still create an enormous data set. Google broke down locations into six broad categories: Retail and recreation, such as malls, restaurants, and museums; grocery and pharmacy, which includes farmer’s markets and food warehouses along with supermarkets and drugstores; parks, including local, national, and state parks; transit stations; workplaces; and residential.

The reports, which so far go through March 29 (last Sunday), are broken down by country. For the United States, Google has also provided state-level reports which show data at the county level. While there’s a fair amount of variation, the trend across the board shows a huge drop in non-essential travel and significantly reduced travel in the grocery and pharmacy category as well. The “residential” category is also up across the board, showing that people are staying home.

The regional reports are more robust for urban centers than rural ones, simply because more densely populated areas have more data for Google to draw from. For example, Kings County, New York—better known as the borough of Brooklyn—has a population of about 2.5 million packed into its borders. That’s a large enough data set for Google, which found that Brooklyn residents are indeed making significantly fewer trips through transit stations and to retailers. Travel to workplaces is also down, likely due to a combination of people working from home where possible and being laid off or furloughed where not….’

Via Digg:

‘Covering 121 questions and 400 characters, this “which character are you” test from Open-Source Psychometrics Project isn’t your regular BuzzFeed personality quiz.

What it is instead is an extremely extensive test that gives you an understanding of which fictional characters you are most similar to with a level of detail uncommon for most personality quizzes. There are different versions of the test — the most comprehensive version requires you to answer 121 questions while the standard version only comprises 28 — but for each version, you answer questions about yourself by moving a slider between two adjectives and gauge where your personality falls on the spectrum. The test then matches your personal assessment with the personality profiles of different fictional characters, which are compiled from data from user surveys….’

‘So The Government Changed The Website…’

Juliette Kayyem writing in The Atlantic:

‘Quick, decide: If 20 percent of a city’s police department is infected or quarantined because of the coronavirus, how should the remaining officers decide which problems to take on? …

Also decide: Which patients should doctors and nurses prioritize for life-saving efforts if hospitals simply become overwhelmed? Who wants to write that policy? …

Then decide: Should schools even try to open anytime soon? …

On these and other ugly questions, recent experience suggests that the White House is unlikely to do anything more than provide broad guidance to states—and then leave the hard part to them. That’s no way to fight a 50-state disaster, but federalism is a convenient way for a president to let somebody else take the blame…’

Elizabeth Gibney writing in Nature:

‘The coronavirus pandemic has brought chaos to lives and economies around the world. But efforts to curb the spread of the virus might mean that the planet itself is moving a little less. Researchers who study Earth’s movement are reporting a drop in seismic noise — the hum of vibrations in the planet’s crust — that could be the result of transport networks and other human activities being shut down. They say this could allow detectors to spot smaller earthquakes and boost efforts to monitor volcanic activity and other seismic events….’