Merijn

I’m just going to go ahead and say it right up front here: if you had certain expectations in May/June about how the pandemic was going to end in the US (or was even thinking it was over), you need to throw much of that mindset in the trash and start again because the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has changed the game. I know this sucks to hear,¹ but Delta is sufficiently different that we need to reset and stop assuming we can solely rely on the vaccines to stop Covid-19 from spreading. Ed Yong’s typically excellent piece on how delta has changed the pandemic’s endgame is helping me wrap my head around this.

But something is different now — the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.

In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.

And a reminder, as we “argue over small measures” here in the US, that most of the world is in a much worse place:

Pandemics end. But this one is not yet over, and especially not globally. Just 16 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated. Many countries, where barely 1 percent of people have received a single dose, are “in for a tough year of either lockdowns or catastrophic epidemics,” Adam Kucharski, the infectious-disease modeler, told me. The U.S. and the U.K. are further along the path to endemicity, “but they’re not there yet, and that last slog is often the toughest,” he added. “I have limited sympathy for people who are arguing over small measures in rich countries when we have uncontrolled epidemics in large parts of the world.”

Where I think Yong’s piece stumbles a little is in its emphasis of the current vaccines’ protection against infection from Delta. As David Wallace-Wells explains in his piece Don’t Panic, But Breakthrough Cases May Be a Bigger Problem Than You’ve Been Told, vaccines still offer excellent protection against severe infection, hospitalization, and death, but there is evidence that breakthrough infections are more common than many public health officials are saying. The problem lies with the use of statistics from before vaccines and Delta were prevalent:

Almost all of these calculations about the share of breakthrough cases have been made using year-to-date 2021 data, which include several months before mass vaccination (when by definition vanishingly few breakthrough cases could have occurred) during which time the vast majority of the year’s total cases and deaths took place (during the winter surge). This is a corollary to the reassuring principle you might’ve heard, over the last few weeks, that as vaccination levels grow we would expect the percentage of vaccinated cases will, too — the implication being that we shouldn’t worry too much over panicked headlines about the relative share of vaccinated cases in a state or ICU but instead focus on the absolute number of those cases in making a judgment about vaccine protection across a population. This is true. But it also means that when vaccination levels were very low, there were inevitably very few breakthrough cases, too. That means that to calculate a prevalence ratio for cases or deaths using the full year’s data requires you to effectively divide a numerator of four months of data by a denominator of seven months of data. And because those first few brutal months of the year were exceptional ones that do not reflect anything like the present state of vaccination or the disease, they throw off the ratios even further. Two-thirds of 2021 cases and 80 percent of deaths came before April 1, when only 15 percent of the country was fully vaccinated, which means calculating year-to-date ratios means possibly underestimating the prevalence of breakthrough cases by a factor of three and breakthrough deaths by a factor of five. And if the ratios are calculated using data sets that end before the Delta surge, as many have been, that adds an additional distortion, since both breakthrough cases and severe illness among the vaccinated appear to be significantly more common with this variant than with previous ones.

Vaccines are still the best way to protect yourself and your community from Covid-19. The vaccines are still really good, better than we could have hoped for. But they’re not magic and with the rise of Delta (and potentially worse variants on the horizon if the virus is allowed to continue to spread unchecked and mutate), we need to keep doing the other things (masking, distancing, ventilation, etc.) in order to keep the virus in check and avoid lockdowns, school closings, outbreaks, and mass death. We’ve got the tools; we just need to summon the will and be in the right mindset.

1. In a tweet introducing his piece, Yong says “Many folks are upset & confused by the last month” and that’s right where I am with this. Maybe you are too. I’m expecting to get angry email about this post, calling it alarmist. But Covid is different now and thinking our same March 2021 thoughts about it isn’t going to help ourselves, our families, or our communities. The sooner we can regroup, the better.↩

Tags: Covid-19   David Wallace-Wells   Ed Yong   medicine   science   USA

a short demo of modern web annoyances #

Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario has covered Afghanistan for the past 20 years. In the Atlantic, she writes about the effect of the return to power of the oppressive Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban will have on the country’s citizens, particularly women and girls. Here she describes life under the Taliban in 2000 and 2001:

Perhaps the silence of life under the Taliban sits with me more than anything. There were very few cars, no music, no television, no telephones, and no idle conversation on the sidewalks. The dusty streets were crowded with widows who had lost their husbands in the protracted war; banned from working, their only means of survival was to beg. People were scared, indoors and out. Those who were brave enough to venture out spoke in hushed voices, for fear of provoking a Taliban beating for anything as simple as not having a long-enough beard (for a man) or a long-enough burka (for a woman), or sometimes for nothing at all. Shiny brown cassette tape fluttered from the trees and wires and signs and poles everywhere-a warning to those who dared to play music in private. Matches in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium had been replaced with public executions on Fridays after prayer. Taliban officials used bulldozers or tanks to topple walls onto men accused of being gay. People who stole had their hand sliced off; accused adulterers were stoned to death.

After the Taliban fell in 2001, Addario observed women returning to public life:

I photographed the defeat of the Taliban in Kandahar in late 2001, and returned to the country with my camera at least a dozen times in the subsequent two decades. From Kabul to Kandahar to Herat to Badakhshan, I photographed women attending schools, graduating from universities, training as surgeons, delivering babies, working as midwives, running for Parliament and serving in government, driving, training to be police officers, acting in films, working — as journalists, translators, television presenters, for international organizations. Many of them were dealing with the impossible balancing act of working outside the home while raising children; of being a wife, a mother, a sister, or a daughter in a place where women were cracking glass ceilings daily, and often at great peril.

Now those women, especially those involved in politics or activism, are in danger now that the Taliban have seized power in Afghanistan again.

Tags: Afghanistan   Lynsey Addario   photography   religion   sexism

I work for a part of a state government agency that does highly technical, scientific work. The agency pays for licenses for every employee, from managers down to entry-level, to use a sophisticated Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that includes developer tools, with which most of the agency’s various record-keeping software apps have been developed over the past 25 years. The majority of those apps have been developed by “citizen developers,” IT’s term for non-IT personnel. 

A few years ago, a crucial app used by my group was corrupted and became unusable. As a “computer guy” (I had some experience with Access and MySQL), I was assigned to learn the software and attempt to repair the app and make it usable “in my spare time.”

Since the software had gone through several updates over the years and the version in which the original app was created would no longer run on updated computers, I decided to recreate the app in the current version, which I did. The new version worked better than the original, and everyone from the Manager on down started asking for new features. Another six months went by, and the scope of the project ballooned and I dutifully expanded the capabilities of the app as requested.

When we were about to go live (app had been tested, training materials created, etc), the IT department got wind of it and refused to let us upload the app to the server. Their reasoning?

IT Department: You’re not a developer. Only IT develops apps.

We lobbied for two years while every function of the app had to continue to be done on paper, which for a highly technical workplace that collects a lot of data, was a nightmare. Eventually, after much lobbying by my manager, IT relented and decided that we could use the original version of the app (which would not run on the current version of the software) if it were repaired, but using the “new” version was still forbidden. 

In a meeting where I, my manager, a high-level administrator, and a representative from IT were all present, I outlined the scope of the app, what it was used for, and why it was critical for productivity. The IT rep (an extremely arrogant person who had been blocking all progress on our project from day 1) outlined the process for getting the app up and running: My group would outline the requirements, it would go through an approval process with management, then IT would prioritize it along with their other projects, and then they would build it from scratch without any input from technical staff. 

Me: “We have a fully built, operational, tested app. We don’t need you to build it from scratch.”

IT Rep: “You’re not a developer. Only IT develops apps.”

When we asked about the timeline for the development of the app, he replied, straight-faced:

IT Rep: “We might be able to start on it in about two years.”

My manager was skeptical of my reports about interactions with this person, but the meeting opened his eyes. He had a private meeting with the agency director and suddenly we were cleared to upload the app to the server.

That was 14 years ago and the app has been through several upgrades and with many added features, and has probably saved taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost productivity. 

---

Has the client from hell ever been within your own workspace? 

The post You’re not a developer. appeared first on Clients From Hell.

A triple dose of classic FPS action

Microsoft heeft de installatie van Windows Subsystem for Linux op Windows 10 vereenvoudigd. Het uitvoeren van een enkel commando is voortaan voldoende om WSL te installeren. Dat werkt met Windows 10 versie 2004 en latere versies.

Dr. Brytney Cobia treats Covid-19 patients at the Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, Alabama, a state that ranks last in the US in fully vaccinated adults. In a recent Facebook post, Cobia shares that people are willing to get vaccinated after having to watch an unvaccinated member of their family die from Covid.

I’ve made a LOT of progress encouraging people to get vaccinated lately!!! Do you want to know how? I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same. They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.

Heartbreaking.

Tags: Brytney Cobia   Covid-19   medicine   vaccines

This is a video of Deadpool and Korg reacting to the Free Guy trailer. And, oh, what a coincidence Free Guy also happens to star Ryan Reynolds and Taika Waititi who play Deadpool and Korg respectively. What are the odds? I actually don't even care that this is an ad because it's basically the first X-Men and MCU crossover and entertaining is entertaining. Ryan Reynolds is basically a promotional God at this point and it's a little surprising he wasn't also wearing a Wrexham AFC baseball cap while talking on a Mint Mobile phone. Keep going for the video. Yes, they're shilling a movie, but don't let that ruin your enjoyment of fun things.

I can a client who would always start our meetings by talking about their life for half an hour, as if we were old friends (we weren’t) – I didn’t mind, because I charged for meetings, and if this was how they wanted to spend my paid time, so be it.

Over time, I noticed that if that half hour was mostly complaint, when it came to reviewing my work they were WAY more critical than if they shared positive stories.

From that point on, I started interrupting them the moment their life talk turned to negativity, saying “I forgot to mention, I have something coming up right after this, could we turn to the project?” Turns out, if they didn’t have a chance to click over into complaint, then meetings went a lot smoother generally. Talk about “one weird trick,” but in this case it absolutely worked. 

The post Positive/negative state of mind appeared first on Clients From Hell.

astounding demo running entirely on a Commodore floppy drive with the Commodore 64 unplugged #

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

In 1715, a significant chunk of Rembrandt’s masterpiece The Night Watch, including a 2-foot-wide swath from the left side of the painting, was lopped off in order to fit the painting in a smaller space. (WTF?!) Using a contemporary copy of the full scene painted by Gerrit Lundens and an AI program for getting the colors and angles right, the Rijksmuseum has “restored” The Night Watch, augmenting the painting with digital printouts of the missing bits. The uncropped Rembrandt is shown above and here is Lundens’s version:

I’m not an expert on art, but the 1715 crop and the shift of the principal characters from right-of-center to the center appears to have radically altered the whole feel of the painting.

With the addition especially on the left and the bottom, an empty space is created in the painting where they march towards. When the painting was cut [the lieutenants] were in the centre, but Rembrandt intended them to be off-centre marching towards that empty space, and that is the genius that Rembrandt understands: you create movement, a dynamic of the troops marching towards the left of the painting.

(via @john_overholt)

Tags: art   artificial intelligence   Gerrit Lundens   Rembrandt

Patrick Stewart, displaying the Shakespearian acting chops that landed him the role of Captain Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation, appeared on Sesame Street in 1996, performing a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy with the letter “B”. Stewart never doesn’t give it his all when acting.

Tags: Hamlet   Patrick Stewart   remix   Sesame Street   TV   video   William Shakespeare

Perhaps the most consequential day in the Earth’s recent history was when a massive asteroid struck the planet 66 million years ago. It resulted in earthquakes, tsunamis, fireballs raining from the sky, volcanoes, atmospheric heat shocks, wildfires, global winter, and the extinction of 75% of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs. This video by Kurzgesagt leads us through what happened that day, minute by minute.

This video reminded me of Peter Brannen’s eye-popping description of this event from his book The Ends of the World:

“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”

These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.

“The pressure of the atmosphere in front of the asteroid started excavating the crater before it even got there,” Rebolledo said. “Then when the meteorite touched ground zero, it was totally intact. It was so massive that the atmosphere didn’t even make a scratch on it.”

Unlike the typical Hollywood CGI depictions of asteroid impacts, where an extraterrestrial charcoal briquette gently smolders across the sky, in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next. As the asteroid collided with the earth, in the sky above it where there should have been air, the rock had punched a hole of outer space vacuum in the atmosphere. As the heavens rushed in to close this hole, enormous volumes of earth were expelled into orbit and beyond — all within a second or two of impact.

“So there’s probably little bits of dinosaur bone up on the moon,” I asked.

“Yeah, probably.”

Tags: dinosaurs   Earth   Kurzgesagt   Peter Brannen   video

#

solar eclipse occurring mid-flight
by NiceCasualRedditGuy pic.twitter.com/542lixqPOw

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) June 9, 2021

This is a solar eclipse captured mid-flight. I'm not sure what it does for the flat Earth movement, but it's doing a whole lot for the Godamn the World is Stunning movement. It's almost as beautiful as the time I witnessed a giraffe peeing and then another giraffe bend down and start licking it. Ah, the majesty of nature.

Launching June 22nd.

anything and everything all of the time #

Juggling, from the usual angle, looks like a very hectic endeavor — balls and clubs and hands flying everywhere. But if you get an overhead view, as in this video from Taylor Glenn, you can see that often there’s very little movement in two of the three dimensions. The mastery of these small movements combined with the sweeping up-and-down motions creates a compelling illusion for ground-based viewers. The power of a different perspective. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: juggling   sports   video

We all know that the microwave oven was invented by Raytheon’s Percy Spencer in 1945. What this video presupposes is, maybe it was invented to thaw out frozen hamsters? And somehow James Lovelock, who formulated the Gaia hypothesis, is involved? (via @fourfoldway)

Tags: James Lovelock   Old Custer   Percy Spencer   physics   science   video

a headline I didn't expect to see in 2021 #

found by, uh, searching Google #

Luke O’Neil talked to dozens of people who were able to work from home during the pandemic about not missing the commute part of working in an office. A few of the responses:

No one’s stopping anyone who works from home from going out and riding in circles on the subway for 30 minutes before they go back to their desk.

I save roughly $100 a month now. I have time in the morning to take my dog for a long walk every day. I have time in the evening to cook dinner. Commuting is psychological torture and my physical and mental health is significantly better without it.

I love to drive 30 minutes to stare at a different computer

I can’t even calculate the savings in gas, wear on my car, etc. But I can tell you that with nearly two hours back in each of my days, plus the extra 40 minutes or so of making myself presentable to be in close proximity to others, I have been able to reinvest that time in myself. I have been eating better, I have time for the gym, I have time to give my dogs the exercise they need. I know this year has been mentally taxing on so many, but I’ve found these changes work so much better for me.

Tags: Luke O’Neil   working

This video from Veritasium is a nice explanation of the mathematician David Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, which illustrates that a hotel with an infinite number of rooms can still accommodate new guests even when it’s full. Until it can’t, that is. See also Steven Strogatz’s explanation of Hilbert’s infinite hotel and how Georg Cantor’s discovery of different types of infinities complicated the hotel’s hospitality. (via digg)

Tags: David Hilbert   Georg Cantor   mathematics   Steven Strogatz   video

a game where you try to opt out of everything #

This is a photo of a tiny tiny snippet of the universe, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Every object you see in the photo is a staggeringly massive galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars along with all sort of other things.

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is well over one hundred thousand light years across. We only see a pitiful portion of it. Although it contains several hundred billion stars in its expanse, we can only see a fraction of a fraction of them.

And even that doesn’t fully capture the essence of a galaxy, which also has planets, gas, dust, dark matter, and more. Galaxies are colossal objects, their true nature only becoming apparent to us a century ago.

I know I’ve posted photos like this before, but every time I see something like this, my mind boggles anew at the sheer scale and magnitude of it all and I just have to share it.

P.S. And Earth contains the only sentient life in the entire universe? Lol.

Tags: astronomy   Hubble telescope   photography   space

John's employer needed a small web app built, so someone in management went out and hired a contracting firm to do the work, with the understanding that once it was done, their own internal software teams would do maintenance and support.

Fortunately for John's company, their standard contract included a few well-defined checkpoints, for both code quality audits and security audits. It's the last one that's relevant in this case.

There are three things you should never build for your application: date handling logic, encryption algorithms, or authentication mechanisms. These are all things that sound simple on the surface, but are actually quite difficult. You will mess them up, and you'll regret it. What's remarkable here, however, is seeing how badly one can mess up authentication:

$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#password").val("");
 	$("#button").click( function() { 
	
		if($("#password").val() == "<?php echo $rowFromDatabase['admin_password']; ?>"){
			showAdminInterface();
		}
		else
		{
			alert('Password not valid :(');
		};
	});

}); 

What you see here is client-side JavaScript. When the user clicks the wonderfully named #button, we compare their #password entry against… <?php echo $rowFromDatabase['admin_password']; ?>.

Not only are they storing the administrator password in plaintext in the database, they're dumping the admin password in the body of the document. Anyone can just hit "view source" and log in as an administrator.

Obviously, this failed the audit. "But," the contractor said, "it's perfectly safe, because we disabled right clicks, so no one can view source."

Shockingly, this still failed the audit.

Client: Can you make it so when people land on our website, it’s, like, all black with stars coming out of the screen all whoosh whoosh (does the action) like in that screensaver?

Me: …

Client: With the music from Star Wars.

Me: …

Client: And it does that for, like, a minute, then stops and they have to click on one of the stars.

Me: Any star?

Client: No. No. A specific star that they’ll have to find–make it different every time.

Me: …

Client: Then when they find the right star, there’s like a massive explosion that the site spins out of (does the action), like in the old Batman series.

Me: For your company site?

Client: Yeah.

Me: The company that cleans up addicts’ used needles from parks and playgrounds?

Client: Yeah.

Me: No.

Client: …Well, you’re not much fun.

The post Not much fun appeared first on Clients From Hell.

18 out of 22 million comments were fake, 7.7 million from a single 19-year-old college student #

a stunt, but a good one #