Rolandt

Velo Lumino’s connector of choice has been the 2mm, gold-plated banana plug. Over ten years of experimenting with various connectors from classic spade-type terminals to MOLEX-type terminals, I settled on the 2mm banana plug as my all-time favorite connector for several reasons:

1. They’re slender and unobtrusive looking anywhere on the bike
2. The design of the “banana” shaped spring on the male end maximizes the contact area with the interior wall of the female barrel end for very reliable electrical continuity. The contact area is much greater than the contact area between a pair of spade terminals.
3. The tension of the spring is “just right”: there’s enough friction that the plugs never come loose on their own, yet they’re never difficult to disconnect and there’s little risk of ripping the wire out if the connector is pulled by the wire. There have been many a cyclist who’ve forgotten to remove the spade connectors on a SON hub before pulling the wheel out of the dropouts, only to wind up with torn wires!
4. Unlike spade terminals, they can withstand hundreds of cycles of connection/disconnection without diminished tension or compromised electrical contact (see this video my videographer shot demonstrating this).
5. The gold plating means they’re corrosion-proof.

The only downside to the banana plugs is that they cannot be crimped, they must be soldered. Some people don’t own a soldering iron, and even for those who do, soldering these little connectors can still be tricky. My 13 year old videographer shot a video of me demonstrating how to solder a pair of banana connectors and insulate them with shrink tubing. It’s fairly long at almost 12 minutes, and since I’m the type who can ramble on, I had to refrain from a few details in order to keep it under and hour! I will go over some points in finer detail here, using still shots from the video.

Before you get started, you will need a soldering iron. I use a Weller 40-watt iron that comes supplied with a stand and a sponge. You need a damp sponge to wipe the molten solder off the tip frequently, because the longer the molten solder stays on the tip, the more it oxidizes, and oxidized solder won’t wick onto its substrate. For a soldering tip, I prefer a flat screwdriver shape, such as the one that comes with the Weller. You will also need either a heat gun or a high-wattage hair dryer to apply the shrink tubing. You will also need a soldering stand (or jeweler’s stand) to hold the parts to be soldered in place. You can find these all over the internet:

First, strip just a couple of millimeters of insulation from the wire. Hopefully you’re using Velo Lumino’s premium wire with the super thin cross-linked polymer jacketing. It’s the highest quality wire I’ve found, and it snakes very well through tight passages such as in the fender’s rolled edge and through frame tubes. Twist the strands several times to create a tight bundle and prevent stray wires from splaying outward during soldering.

Clip the wire into the alligator clip and wick some solder into the exposed wire. This is called “tinning” the wire. Wires with pre-tinned ends fuse more quickly with the pre-tinned banana plugs when re-melted. You only want to wick a tiny amount, don’t go overboard. I’ll explain why later. The best way to do this is to touch the iron tip to the wire to pre-heat it (just a second or two), and while doing so, touch the solder to it. It should melt and wick almost instantly.

As soon as it’s molten and wicked, remove the iron.

Next, tin the banana plug. I’ll start with the female end. When you look closely at the female banana plug, you’ll notice that one end has a stop about 2mm into the barrel. That’s the “cup” end and it’s the end that accepts the solder. You want to fill the cup with solder about 1/2 to all the way full. This is a little trickier than tinning bare wire. If you use the same approach as tinning a bare wire, you will end up with an air bubble trapped in the cup and a little ball of solder on top, or you’ll end up with solder wicking down the outside of the barrel.

Instead, insert the cold solder into the cup FIRST, THEN apply heat to the outside of the cup until the solder starts to melt and fill the cup:

I love this shot because it illustrates a few things. First, note the flat end of the iron tip contacting the side of the barrel. This maximizes heat transfer, which would be less efficient if not impossible with a pencil-tip. Second, note the barrel isn’t placed all the way into the alligator clip. You want at least half of it sticking out the end to minimize heat transfer to the clip. If the clip acts as a heat sink (this is a phenomenon well known by frame builders), you might not conduct enough heat to melt the solder. Lastly, you can see the solder already beginning to melt and fill the cup. Now’s a good time to pull out the cold solder and remove the heat. You only need the cup partially filled, but all the way is okay, too.

Next, get the tinned wire ready, and reapply heat to the solder cup.

As soon as it’s molten again, press the wire into the cup. As soon as it’s in, remove the heat and hold the wire steady until the solder solidifies. This should take just a few seconds. (Note the photo below is not of the same female plug shown above, but the male plug, but the process is identical):

The soldering is done. Now apply the shrink tubing. The 6″ long shrink tubing sold by Velo Lumino is the optimal diameter for the 2mm plugs and is enough for four pair of banana plugs. Cut a 2cm piece for the female end, and a 1cm piece for the male end. This leaves enough shrink tubing to extend beyond the solder cup and a few additional millimeters along the wire. Getting back to my comment earlier about not applying too much solder when tinning the wire: soldered wire is brittle and will snap if bent back and forth. The farther the solder wicks into the wire (a function of time and amount of solder applied), the longer a section of wire will be brittle. This is why you only apply a tiny amount when tinning, and it’s also why you remove the heat as soon as the tinned wire is inserted into the cup of molten solder. Having the shrunken tubing continue over the wire past the solder junction is essential for providing rigidity to the soldered area to prevent bending.

For the female plug, hold the 2cm long tubing in place with one hand such that it overhangs just slightly (0.5mm, max) off the end:

While holding it steady, shoot it with the heat gun (or hair dryer), aiming for the end opposite your fingers first (for obvious reason). As soon as the far end shrinks, you can let go and move your fingers further along the wire away from the connector so as not to get burned. (If you don’t hold it in place initially, and just hit it with heat, the blast of air from the heat gun will blow the tubing away from where it should be). Hit the rest of the tubing with the heat gun, rotating the wire to distribute the heat evenly so as to avoid hot spots that might melt it (although, my 1500W heat gun has never melted the shrink tubing). Think roasting marshmallows over a fire.

For the male end, position the 1cm piece of tubing just aft of the barrel spring:

Hit it the same way with the heat gun, being careful not to burn your fingers!

All done! (Apologies for the blurry video still).

You can see plenty more examples of soldered and insulated banana plugs in the Velo Lumino gallery.

mkalus shared this story from Michael Kalus.ca.

With the shut down of a large part of the public life in Vancouver I noticed two major changes.

1. The air quality improved
2. My neighbourhood is much quieter due to less cars.

But that wasn't the only thing. I no longer have drunk people hang out on the beach at night or have the pubs trash their empties in the middle of the night.

So I decided to go for a "sound walk" and record usually busy places to capture how the sound scape in the city has changed. There is still ample hammering and people revving their engines, but much less so than you would expect with the weather we have.

Note that the video only has stills of the locals. I decided against shooting video as I wanted people to concentrate on the audio instead of the visual changes.

If you just want to listen to the audio there is also a soundcloud version.

I recommend listening with headphones for the best experience.

I traded in three aging MacBooks today, after spending a good part of Sunday wiping the hard drives of my 2012 Mac Book Pro, a 2013 Mac Book Air and my workhorse and faithful travel companion, the 2015 Mac Book. In many ways the 2015 is a collectors item, but having had two battery replacements and an aging processor, I decided to buy the new Mac Book Air, fully loaded.

With the trade ins I'm paying less than the price of the entry level Mac Book Air and getting a new Mac that is actually for me, better than the current (last year's model) Mac Book Pro.'

So what's it been like yesterday and today with no Mac Book to work on, and only my new Samsung Galaxy Chromebook to use? Not much difference. I kinda get the same feeling I get when I "cheat" on my iPhone and use the Android based One Plus 7t Pro McLaren  I have. That feeling is, sorta like, there's not much difference but I do miss iMessage. 

Beyond the lack of iMessage and FaceTime, working on the Chromebook, before it was a Pixelbook, has been a rather regular thing, but I always had the Mac Book to fire up. All this said, the new Mac Book Air arrives this week, but with so much of what I've been doing the past 12 years or so resting in the cloud, I'm far better off than someone who has been so dependent on their PC and can't live without it.

Consumer spending has shifted dramatically since most people have to stay at home. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby and David Gelles show by how much:

All of the charts in this article are based on a New York Times analysis of data from Earnest Research, which tracks and analyzes credit card and debit card purchases of nearly six million people in the United States. While the data does not include cash transactions, and therefore does not reflect all sales, it provides a strong snapshot of the impact of the virus on the economy.

The article also includes breakdowns for the main categories above. The only reason restaurants and entertainment aren’t down more is because delivery services and at-home streaming slightly offset the dip.

Tags: coronavirus, New York Times, spending

I think these are all good suggestions, and more importantly, they represent a way of thinking that is based on more than just ways to get content to people. Here they are (quoted):

• Check in with your students regularly
• Help your students' families get connected
• Choose tools that are mobile-friendly and/or can be used offline
• Try to keep online lessons asynchronous vs. synchronous
• Double down on project-based learning
• Maintain extracurricular communities
• Partner with community-based organization

What I like about this list is how it treats individuals as individuals, takes care to support them, and places learning into the broader community and social contexts students findthemselves in.

TikTok has joined the elite club of Google Play Store apps with 1 billion installations.

The short-form video app has surged in popularity last year and, with people stuck at home with nothing, it has continued to surge over the last month. At the end of March, TikTok was one of the most-downloaded apps in the Play Store, second only to Zoom.

While TikTok was already gaining popularity, the COVID-19 pandemic has no doubt helped boost the app as bored teens and adults try to occupy themselves.

Along with its surge in popularity, TikTok has taken steps to reduce bandwidth consumption in Europe. European TikTok users are currently unable to watch HD content on the app to ease the strain on internet networks.

Other apps in the 1 billion club on the Play Store include Microsoft OneDrive, Google Assistant and Google Duo.

Source: Android Police

The post TikTok reaches 1 billion installs on the Google Play Store appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Dianna’s covidiary from Stanley Park:

Day three in the park: lots Lycra-clad roadies are mixed with the families, couples and casual riders who would normally be on the seawall. But nothing is normal these days, is it? Makes for an interesting and at times challenging mix, especially on the hill to Prospect Point where some folks wobble out of breath and others are laser-focused on speed.

I wondered how the combination of different abilities and goals (have a nice time with the kids versus ride six loops with heart at maximum) would affect the atmosphere. Some racers complained on websites about slow riders wandering all over the road and swore to avoid the park, and others pointed out that if you can’t work your way safely and quickly around a family group on a wide two-lane road, how are you enough ever going to navigate through a peloton?

In reality, today a few cyclists were clearly irritated at having to share the road with casual riders but most actually seemed a bit friendlier than usual. The seawall effect? People normally on the seawall are spreading their glad-to-be-alive-and-playing-outside attitude with the ‘serious’ riders. Could be a win/win.

Previously in this series:

• The “lost boarding pass” puzzle
• The “deadly board game” puzzle
• The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle
• The “largest stock profit or loss” puzzle
• The “birthday paradox” puzzle
• The “Spelling Bee honeycomb” puzzle
• Feller’s “coin-tossing” puzzle

I love 538’s Riddler column, and the April 10 puzzle is another interesting one. I’ll quote:

Over the course of three days, suppose the probability of any spammer making a new comment on this week’s Riddler column over a very short time interval is proportional to the length of that time interval. (For those in the know, I’m saying that spammers follow a Poisson process.) On average, the column gets one brand-new comment of spam per day that is not a reply to any previous comments. Each spam comment or reply also gets its own spam reply at an average rate of one per day.

For example, after three days, I might have four comments that were not replies to any previous comments, and each of them might have a few replies (and their replies might have replies, which might have further replies, etc.).

After the three days are up, how many total spam posts (comments plus replies) can I expect to have?

This is a great opportunity for tidy simulation in R, and also for reviewing some of the concepts of stochastic processes (this is known as a Yule process). As we’ll see, it’s even thematically relevant to current headlines, since it involves exponential growth.

Solving a puzzle generally involves a few false starts. So I recorded this screencast showing how I originally approached the problem. It shows not only how to approach the simulation, but how to use those results to come up with an exact answer.

Simulating a Poisson process

The Riddler puzzle describes a Poisson process, which is one of the most important stochastic processes. A Poisson process models the intuitive concept of “an event is equally likely to happen at any moment.” It’s named because the number of events occurring in a time interval of length \(x\) is distributed according to \(\mbox{Pois}(\lambda x)\), for some rate parameter \(\lambda\) (for this puzzle, the rate is described as one per day, \(\lambda=1\)).

How can we simulate a Poisson process? This is an important connection between distributions. The waiting time for the next event in a Poisson process has an exponential distribution, which can be simulated with rexp().

# The rate parameter, 1, is the expected events per day
waiting <- rexp(10, 1)
waiting

##  [1] 0.1417638 2.7956808 1.2725448 0.3452203 0.5303130 0.2647746 2.6195738
##  [8] 1.2933250 0.5539181 0.9835380

For example, in this case we waited 0.14 days for the first comment, then 2.8 after that for the second one, and so on. On average, we’ll be waiting one day for each new comment, but it could be a lot longer or shorter.

You can take the cumulative sum of these waiting periods to come up with the event times (new comments) in the Poisson process.

qplot(cumsum(waiting), 0)

Simulating a Yule process

Before the first comment happened, the rate of new comments/replies was 1 per day. But as soon as the first comment happened, the rate increased: the comment could spawn its own replies, so the rate went up to 2 per day. Once there were two comments, the rate goes up to 3 per day, and so on.

This is a particular case of a stochastic process known as a Yule process (which is a special case of a birth process. We could prove a lot of mathematical properties of that process, but let’s focus on simulating it.

The waiting time for the first commentwould be \(\mbox{Exponential}(1)\), but the waiting time for the second is \(\mbox{Exponential}(2)\), then \(\mbox{Exponential}(3)\), and so on. We can use the vectorized rexp() function to simulate those. The waiting times will, on average, get shorter and shorter as there are more comments that can spawn replies.

set.seed(2020)

waiting_times <- rexp(20, 1:20)

# Cumulative time
cumsum(waiting_times)

##  [1] 0.2938057 0.9288308 1.0078320 1.1927956 1.4766987 1.6876352 2.5258522
##  [8] 2.5559037 2.6146623 2.6634295 2.7227323 2.8380710 2.9404016 2.9460719
## [15] 2.9713356 3.0186731 3.1340060 3.2631936 3.2967087 3.3024576

# Number before the third day
sum(cumsum(waiting_times) < 3)

## [1] 15

In this case, the first 15 events happened before the third day. Notice that in this simulation, we’re not keeping track of which comment received a reply: we’re treating all the comments as interchangeable. This lets our simulation run a lot faster since we just have to generate the waiting times.

All combined, we could perform this simulation in one line:

sum(cumsum(rexp(20, 1:20)) < 3)

## [1] 6

So in one line with replicate(), here’s one million simulations. We simulate 300 waiting periods from each, and see how many happen before the first day.

sim <- replicate(1e6, sum(cumsum(rexp(300, 1:300)) < 3))

mean(sim)

## [1] 19.10532

It looks like it’s about 19.1.

Turning this into an exact solution

Why 19.1? Could we get an exact answer that is intuitively satisfying?

One trick to get a foothold is to vary one of our inputs: rather than looking at 3 days, let’s look at the expected comments after time \(t\). That’s easier if we expand this into a tidy simulation, using one of my favorite functions crossing().

library(tidyverse)
set.seed(2020)

sim_waiting <- crossing(trial = 1:25000,
         observation = 1:300) %>%
  mutate(waiting = rexp(n(), observation)) %>%
  group_by(trial) %>%
  mutate(cumulative = cumsum(waiting)) %>%
  ungroup()

sim_waiting

## # A tibble: 7,500,000 x 4
##    trial observation waiting cumulative
##    <int>       <int>   <dbl>      <dbl>
##  1     1           1  0.294       0.294
##  2     1           2  0.635       0.929
##  3     1           3  0.0790      1.01 
##  4     1           4  0.185       1.19 
##  5     1           5  0.284       1.48 
##  6     1           6  0.211       1.69 
##  7     1           7  0.838       2.53 
##  8     1           8  0.0301      2.56 
##  9     1           9  0.0588      2.61 
## 10     1          10  0.0488      2.66 
## # … with 7,499,990 more rows

We can confirm that the average number of comments in the first three days is about 19.

sim_waiting %>%
  group_by(trial) %>%
  summarize(num_comments = sum(cumulative <= 3)) %>%
  summarize(average = mean(num_comments))

## # A tibble: 1 x 1
##   average
##     <dbl>
## 1    18.9

But we can also use crossing() (again) to look at the expected number of cumulative comments as we vary \(t\).

average_over_time <- sim_waiting %>%
  crossing(time = seq(0, 3, .25)) %>%
  group_by(time, trial) %>%
  summarize(num_comments = sum(cumulative < time)) %>%
  summarize(average = mean(num_comments))

(Notice how often “solve the problem for one value” can be turned into “solve the problem for many values” with one use of crossing(): one of my favorite tricks).

How does the average number of comments increase over time?

ggplot(average_over_time, aes(time, average)) +
  geom_line()

At a glance, this looks like an exponential curve. With a little experimentation, and noticing that the curve starts at \((0, 0)\), we can find that the expected number of comments at time \(t\) follows \(e^t-1\). This fits with our simulation: \(e^3 - 1\) is 19.0855.

ggplot(average_over_time, aes(time, average)) +
  geom_line(aes(y = exp(time) - 1), color = "red") +
  geom_point() +
  labs(y = "Average # of comments",
       title = "How many comments over time?",
       subtitle = "Points show simulation, red line shows exp(time) - 1.")

Intuitively, it makes sense that on average the growth is exponential. If we’d described the process as “bacteria in a dish, each of which could divide at any moment”, we’d expect exponential growth. The “minus one” is because the original post is generating comments just like all the others do, but doesn’t itself count as a comment.¹

Distribution of comments at a given time

It’s worth noting we’re still only describing an average path. There could easily be more, or fewer, spam comments by the third day. Our tidy simulation gives us a way to plot many such paths.

sim_waiting %>%
  filter(trial <= 50, cumulative <= 3) %>%
  ggplot(aes(cumulative, observation)) +
  geom_line(aes(group = trial), alpha = .25) +
  geom_line(aes(y = exp(cumulative) - 1), color = "red", size = 1) +
  labs(x = "Time",
       y = "# of comments",
       title = "50 possible paths of comments over time",
       subtitle = "Red line shows e^t - 1")

The red line shows the overall average, reaching about 19.1 at 3 days. However, we can see that it can sometimes be much smaller or much larger (even even more than 100).

What is the probability distribution of comments after three days- the probability there is one comment, or two, or three? Let’s take a look at the distribution.

# We'll use the million simulated values from earlier
num_comments <- tibble(num_comments = sim)

num_comments %>%
  ggplot(aes(num_comments)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 1)

Interestingly, at a glance this looks a lot like an exponential curve. Since it’s a discrete distribution (with values 0, 1, 2…), this suggests it’s a geometric distribution: the expected number of “tails” flipped before we see the first “heads”.

We can confirm that by comparing it to the probability mass function, \((1-p)^np\). If it is a geometric distribution, then because we know the expected value is \(e^3-1\) we know the rate parameter \(p\) (the probability of a success on each heads) is \(\frac{1}{e^3}=e^{-3}\).

p <- exp(-3)

num_comments %>%
  filter(num_comments <= 150) %>%
  ggplot(aes(num_comments)) +
  geom_histogram(aes(y = ..density..), binwidth = 1) +
  geom_line(aes(y = (1 - p) ^ num_comments * p), color = "red")

This isn’t a mathematical proof, but it’s very compelling. So what we’ve learned overall is:

\(X(t)\sim \mbox{Geometric}(e^{-t})\) \(E[X(t)]= e^{-t}-1\)

These are true because the rate of comments is one per day. If the rate of new comments were \(\lambda\), you’d replace \(t\) above with \(\lambda t\).

I don’t have an immediate intuition for why the distribution is geometric. Though it’s interesting that the parameter \(p=e^{-t}\) for the geometric distribution (the probability of a “success” on the coin flip that would stop the process) is equal to the probability that there are no events in time \(t\) for a Poisson process.

Conclusion: Yule process

I wasn’t familiar with it when I first tried out the riddle, but this is known as a Yule process. For confirmation of some of the results above you can check out this paper or the Wikipedia entry, among others.

What I love about simulation is how it builds an intuition for these processes from the ground up. These simulated datasets and visualizations are a better “handle” for me for grasp the concepts than mathematical equations would be. After I’ve gotten a feel for the distributions, I can check my answer by looking through the mathematical literature.

D'Arcy Norman offers a startling statistic from the University of Calgary: "Since we launched Zoom as a campus platform on March 13, 2020, there have been 36,439 meetings conducted by our community. That's a lot of meetings, and indicates the scale of the potential limited by the bad technology we've had to endure up to this point (I'm looking at you WebEx, Connect and Skype). And 3 reports of ZoomBombing (so far). There may have been others, but we have only 3 reported cases at this time." This post describes their attempts to counter the ZoomBombing, though instead of the focus on security, I'd like to know what happened in the remaining 36,436 meetings where (so far as we know) ZoomBombing did not happen. Indeed (and I've expressed this elsewhere) I wonder how much of the Zoom security scare is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) manufactured by its competitors.

"When schools are closed," says Yong Zhao, "we should not simply accept the default answer of going online. Instead, we need to consider what we want to achieve through converting schooling into online, that is, why do we want to move online?" It's a good question. The trend has been to simply place classes and courses online. But arguably, online is not really suited to that, and online could potentially do more than is possible offline. In particular, one-size-fits-all doesn't work as well online. "When making decisions about what forms of online education to use, it is advisable to examine the evidence of effectiveness of specific configurations of each program and the measured outcomes rather than accepting or rejecting a program or model simply because it is online."

mkalus shared this story from Price Tags.

Whether cities like Oakland calls them ‘Flow Streets’ or ‘Slow Streets’, they’re part of a larger movement to reallocate street space for the priorities of a pandemic.

Initial reporting suggested Oakland was going to call these calmed avenues ‘Flow Streets’ – a nice name, but apparently not what was intended:

Oakland will slow down a whopping 74 miles of streets to vehicular traffic starting this weekend to give pedestrians, joggers, and cyclists more room for social distancing.

It’s part of an emergency measure called “Oakland Slow Streets,” an effort to give residents more space to walk, run, and cycle safely through neighborhoods as shelter-in-place orders remain in effect. …

Note: This won’t be a total closure to cars, according to East Bay Times, but instead a way to “publicize roads to be especially alert of cyclists and pedestrians.” Local traffic and emergency vehicles will still be allowed on the roads.

It really is important to emphasize that these streets are not ‘closed,’ and never were intended to stop all vehicle traffic.  But even in Vancouver, the Beach Avenue reallocation is being termed by some as ‘closed’ – as though any restriction on cars is all that matters.  It’s a bias we’ll see a lot more in the fight to defund and eliminate any City progress for bikeways, greenways, safe streets, traffic calming, road diets – call it what you will.  For opponents, It comes down to the same thing: streets are for cars, and the rest are dispensable frills.

In the meantime, the move to flow or slow streets is, ahem, picking up speed.  From the New York Times:

With roads cleared of traffic because of the coronavirus pandemic, some cities across the country have repurposed streets into car-free zones, giving pedestrians and cyclists extra room to spread out and practice social distancing.

Cities including Boston, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif., have closed streets to through motor traffic. Others are extending sidewalks to make more space for pedestrians looking to stay at least six feet apart. And some municipalities are considering adopting similar measures. …

Jonathan Berk, a proponent of new urbanism, applauded the efforts in Boston and beyond and said they allow residents to see their cities in a new light.

“I’m hoping that as we continue over the next few weeks and months to allocate more now-empty streets to people, it will show people the benefits of a less auto-centric urban environment,” he said in an email. “Showing urban residents what’s possible when you have this ‘blank canvas’ of street space to utilize for walking, biking, running, playing games with neighbors and just enjoying as a new, public neighborhood open space.”

So far, Vancouver has done only one reallocation – Beach Avenue from Stanley Park to Hornby.  As more neighbourhoods will want their own versions, and health authorities continue to emphasize the need to ‘stay home,’ the question then is: what’s next?

Click here to download video: Beach reallocation

We’ve now spent a month at home, and it felt like a more settled week. Although settled does mean no significant personal time for E nor me between work, our daughter and the household. I don’t see a real way of altering that until day care or school opens up again. Work wise it is busy, and ramping up rather than slowing down. Our PM expressed what I already concluded earlier: we’ll be in this situation for quite a while, and the summer won’t be a normal one. I expect to work throughout the summer, which is ok as it provides needed continuity for ourselves and our colleagues. On that front, we landed another new project this week.

This week I

• Had promised myself to take Monday off, but it didn’t work out that way due to my own fault.
• Had a conversation about how to create a password manager for people with low literacy skills, and whether a password manager is actually needed, or rather a different design for services that require logins.
• Did a session on microsubsidies for energy poverty
• Had a conversation on how to have better insight in how our exploratory work for a client is causally linked to their list of new projects
• Had a MT meeting with my partners
• Worked on the EU High Value Data project and had an extended team discussion adapting the methodology based on first batch of results
• Had the weekly meeting with a client’s team
• Discussed progress of our work on an open data publishing platform for a client
• Did another batch of March invoicing
• Worked in the garden quite a bit, and noticed the apple tree is finally starting to blossom
• Added 150kg new sand to Y’s sandbox
• Re-installed the irrigation system in the garden and on the roof terrace
• Spent the weekend outside in the garden, having our Easter brunch/coffee moment with Y’s grandparents on video

Trees blossoming in front of the ‘smurf houses’ around the corner.

Y showing off her newly acquired cycling skills on camera for her grandparents

Instagram users can now finally send direct messages with the desktop version of the social media platform.

The Facebook-owned social app made the announcement on Twitter, and notes that the feature is available for users around the world.

Instagram first started testing the feature in January after a small number of users reported seeing the option. A leaker previously revealed that Instagram started working on developing the feature towards the end of last year.

*Sliding into your DMs*

Now you can get and send Instagram Direct messages on desktop, no matter where you are in the world pic.twitter.com/CT2SwuxHTv

— Instagram (@instagram) April 10, 2020

Sending a direct message through a web browser works the same way as it does on the mobile app. Once you log into your account, you will see the new direct message icon on the right side of your screen.

From there you can access all of your existing conversations and send and receive messages. The web version also lets you send a direct message straight from someone’s profile.

Source: Instagram

The post Instagram now lets users send direct messages on its desktop platform appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Here’s the latest advice, in The Sun:

But what does “stay home” mean?  Not go outside?  Not take discretionary walks or bikes?  Not ‘travel’ – which is unclear too.

Adrian Dix and Bonnie Henry clarify:

Henry and Dix reminded people that while all B.C. parks are closed, they can still go for walks or ride bikes with family in their own neighbourhoods, while keeping a safe physical distance of at least two metres from others.

Precision, when giving advice on a critical issue to everyone, is important, not just quibbling.  When does a walk or ride turn into travel?  Does it matter, if social distancing is practiced?  What about stopping, to find a bathroom, to get a drink of some kind, to talk briefly with a friend or give directions?

Is this kind of stopping acceptable:

A friend in Yaletown noted that yesterday there were few people on Davie, a typically busy shopping street, nor even in Emery Barnes Park.  Most people outside seemed to have gravitated to the seawall and adjacent parks, like Sunset above.  After all, there’s almost nothing else to do if you live in a downtown apartment.  No coffee bars, gyms, theatres, restaurants.  And no backyards.  This is for many what it means when told they can take “walks or ride bikes with family in their own neighbourhoods.”  But is this okay?

If the answer is yes, but only for people in the neighbourhood, does that mean only the forty thousand or so in the West End?  Should they not trespass into False Creek, or vice versa?

See how fast it can get silly.  And yet, we still need guidance.

A further question that isn’t a quibble: Is two metres separation the right length for cycling.  It probably isn’t.

From Anne C. M. Hyman, president of the Potomac Pedalers

…your respiratory signature is not just a stationary, six-foot sphere around you, but it turns into a comet-shaped trail while you’re at speed. The majority of your signature is still around you in your sphere, but you’re moving fast enough that your sphere starts trailing behind you, where you used to be.  (Full column here.)

After two weeks of quarantine in an apartment, I’m going outside on these first warm days of spring.  But I want to be safe and to respect others.  I’ll wear a mask.  But am I doing the right thing when I cycle the seawall, stop at David Lam, get a coffee at a food cart?  (And then try to find a bathroom!)

I need to know.  Precisely.

Michael Alexander sends this post from the Riley Park Farmers Market:

The ancient ones have the first half hour of the Saturday market to themselves. But there were a lot of them. The entry line stretched from the market entrance back to Queen Elizabeth Park at 29th Street, around the corner and halfway down that block.

The line did move very quickly. And, unlike the first weekend after the markets were declared essential services, customers were socially distanced throughout.

Obviously, a sidewalk can’t accommodate a queue like this as well as walkers.  But in this time of physical distancing, it’s about width as well as length.  The ‘six feet separation’ we all know about – but when lined up we tend to think it’s the distance between those in front and behind.  We also need width, and no standard sidewalk is fully sufficient for even pedestrians passing each other.

While in this case, the boulevards and adjacent lawns are available, in many cases it’s only the roadway that provides the needed width.  The priority is clear.

image from MaxPixel, public domain, CC0

“We Make Zero”. When I saw that headline on a recent CBC article about the economic impact of CoVid-19, I thought it might actually be a recognition of how very little of western economic activity is actually involved in producing anything useful.

I was disappointed. It was just a quote from a guy in the tourist industry saying how much his company was expected to earn this year. Tourism is one of the industries hardest hit by the disease, so it’s hard not to sympathize.

But I keep dreaming that at some point we’re going to wake up and realize that a very large percent of so-called economic activity on this planet — activity that is substantially destroying the air, water, land and soils and rendering the planet unable to support life for all species — is of absolutely no value to anyone. This activity is measured by GDP, which really measures nothing more than the despoilment of our planet, and certain not the welfare of any species including ours. Despite its calculation, it is substantially just a surrogate for resource use — a chart over any time period tracking GDP against the amount of resources we extract from the planet, the vast majority of them non-renewable, shows a perfect correlation. GDP has nothing to do with economic or social wellbeing; it is simply a measure of the rate at which we are plundering the earth.

As the first wave of this pandemic flattens, there is much discussion about how severe the economic impact of our curtailment of “Work” activity in the interest of social distancing will be. There is essentially no discussion about whether all this “Work” activity was or is necessary in the first place, and whether it really produces much of value. When it comes to producing things of enduring and essential value to the planet or even to members of our own species, the CBC headline pretty much says it — We Make Zero.

But surely, you are probably saying, we couldn’t just stop doing all this economic activity without a disastrous impact on human welfare. Remember the Great Depression? It was ghastly. People would starve. Institutions would crumble.

Such is the compelling Story of Work, which is essentially the Story of Progress, that we tell ourselves. Indeed, this myth is so powerful that many retirees’ lives — rid of the sense of tremendous importance of their Work — are filled with depression and feelings of worthlessness and boredom. It is so powerful that some would be prepared to let 1% of the planet — 80 million people — die horrible deaths, rather than drastically reducing economic activity through social distancing to prevent it.

It is so powerful that those who are unable to find, or convince themselves that they have, Meaningful Work, are actually getting sick, getting addicted, and, as Atul Gawande movingly explains, dying of despair, in the millions.

Because the myth is so powerful, and almost universally believed, it is very likely that we will have one, or a whole series of, severe economic recessions in the coming months and years. This is because things are worth exactly what we think they are worth, and when people think stocks are worth a multiple of current annual profits, and that real estate values will plunge because there will be less money to spend on it because less Work is being done, stock prices and real estate prices will plummet, and those whose net worth is completely dependent on their investments, pensions, and the value of their homes — notably the Working poor — will find themselves suddenly with a negative net worth, no money to repay their mortgages and other huge debts, no job, and quite conceivably no home, and no food. Meanwhile the rich will mostly keep their jobs, and suffer huge short-term paper losses on their investments, but not really suffer at all.

All because of a myth that has been relentlessly hammered into all of us our entire lives. One that is simply untrue. There is more than enough food in this world, though the vast majority of it is factory-produced, unhealthy, massively ecologically destructive, horrifically cruel, and the cause of most of the debilitating, awful chronic diseases that kill 90% of us and are increasingly shortening our healthy life-spans and bankrupting our health care systems. There is more than enough of everything. And, even more incredibly, to those who buy the myth of Progress, there is no need for anyone who doesn’t want to, to have to Work.

So let’s take a look at this myth.

Suppose you want to set up and run a bank. You get a charter, which prevents too many competitors also setting up banks in your area, and indemnifies you from personal liability for just about any consequences of your bank’s activities. You also discover that if you really screw up, provided you get big enough that people and companies depend on you, you will be fully bailed out by government.

Now, you get to take people’s deposits, and pay them 0.5% interest on them. With your charter, you get to loan out many times your deposits (the government has your back) to people and corporations. You’ll probably only get ten times your interest cost with your corporate loans (the government has their back too). But you’ll earn an average of 16%, that is a 3200% profit multiple, on what you’re paying your depositors — on personal loans ie mortgages, consumer loans, care loans, lines of credit, and credit cards. This is entirely legal, and thanks to new laws that make declaring bankruptcy almost impossible (you can go after the families and will beneficiaries of anyone who doesn’t pay promptly), it is essentially risk-free.

You would have to be a complete moron, or a delirious psychopath, not to make scads of money as a banker. So the cash is piling up. Maybe you’re feeling a bit guilty, with your 7 or 8-figure income, dividends, bonuses and stock options. You expand of course, and your new bank towers in the most expensive locations in major cities do eat a bit into your cash flow, but they’re pretty solid investments as long as the economy keeps growing endlessly. You diversify into trust, securities and insurance businesses, which similarly are substantially guaranteed by the government as long as you are big enough. You really do have a licence to print money. You start to hire prestigious people with salaries close to your own because it looks good (especially to your shareholders) to have investment bankers, hedge fund managers, vulture capital experts, currency and commodity traders and other wheeler-dealers on your payroll. Not to mention armies of lawyers, accountants, auditors, advisors and consultants, with huge staffs of menial workers supporting them.

All of this counts as GDP in the myth of Progress. What does it actually produce of value to people? Zero. These are all what David Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs, which he lists, somewhat sarcastically, in five categories:

• Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, drivers
• Goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
• Duct tapers, who ameliorate preventable problems, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags don’t arrive, online and telephone “help” desks
• Box tickers, who use paperwork or gestures as a proxy for action, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
• Taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who don’t need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

My experience in the corporate and government world suggests that these five categories are just the tip of the iceberg, and that most “senior executive” jobs are also Bullshit Jobs created by the self-serving rich to justify their mostly arbitrary, misinformed and utterly unproductive “executive decision-making” activity. A huge proportion of menial low-paying jobs have not been eliminated solely because employers and governments intuitively understand the need to keep the Working class — the Precariat-become-Unnecessariat — distracted and in thrall to the economic system. The bloated and utterly dysfunctional health care and education “industries”, which are among the largest providers of Work in our society, are hence needed to support the physical and mental malaise the entire system creates, and to baby-sit the children whose struggling nuclear parent(s) can’t look after and teach them because they have to Work. And don’t even get me started on the even more useless security and incarceration “industries”.

It would be nice to believe that this pandemic would give us the chance to rethink our myths, once we start to discover that most of the Work we’ve had to stop doing to socially distance ourselves really wasn’t economically or socially necessary in the first place. But we won’t, of course, rethink any of this. We’re too busy planning how to get everyone back to Work before the “economy falls apart” and another Great Depression sets in.

But we can dream. What if we could take this not-so-golden opportunity to eliminate all the Bullshit Jobs? Here’s what I think would have to happen:

1. First, of course, we’d have to have a guaranteed annual income for everyone, at a level that would allow anyone to live comfortably without having to Work. We would have to jettison the Puritan Work ethic that suggests (without evidence) that no one would Work if they weren’t “forced to” and that large financial incentives are necessary to “encourage” people who aren’t Working to Work.
2. Then, there would have to be a great reckoning on wealth. Incomes and levels of wealth of more than, say, ten times the guaranteed annual income are probably not affordable under this new system. That means pay cuts of 90-99% for the 1%, or else taxes to achieve the same end result (90% tax rates are not at all unprecedented and historically have not “discouraged” people from Working). Still, the 1% would be far from hardship.
3. There would likely have to be a huge and recurrent debt amnesty to reset the majority of citizens’ balance sheets to where the guaranteed annual income would suffice thereafter (and likewise reset the majority of nations’ balance sheets via the IMF). This would probably be the most contentious adjustment, though in David Graeber’s book Debt he outlines several historical precedents, sometimes called “Jubilees”, for it. It would of course be seen as “unfair” to those who had stayed free of debts, and to “creditors” whose careful investments would suddenly be worthless (though their might be tax credits or other adjustments to compensate those for whom this “balance sheet rebalancing” caused particular hardship).
4. So then, only those who wanted to Work would do so, for which they could be compensated to a maximum of perhaps 10 times the guaranteed annual income. Who would do so? I think you’d be surprised. I think there’d be an absolute explosion in the volume of small entrepreneurial and volunteer activities. Completely non-hierarchical, and necessarily small-scale and local. Because the end of Bullshit Jobs would free up an astonishing amount of people’s time, and because people like to do things for themselves and each other. I imagine much of this time would be contributed free and much of what was produced would be given away or sold at cost (driving down the prices of comparable high-markup “brand name” goods and services). I imagine the role of money, credit, and investment in our day-to-day lives would become marginal, because there would be relatively little need for it. There would be less “innovation”, but to the extent that’s about hugely expensive cures for exotic diseases, or self-driving cars, I think that’s a reasonable sacrifice.
5. I’d bet that energy use, for doing Bullshit Jobs and driving to, from and for Work, would plummet. I’d bet that the skies would get much clearer and that carbon emissions would drop substantially. I’d bet that with time freed up to learn (eg how to garden, how to cook, how to make things yourself), and time freed up to think, we might well see the end of factory farming, and a sharp decline in chronic illnesses caused by our dysfunctional food system.

This is, of course, just a dream. Human systems, and human beliefs, don’t and won’t change just because there’s almost certainly a much better way of doing things. But in these crazy times it’s sometimes useful to imagine how things might be, just to keep everything in perspective.

My thoughts are with all those struggling especially hard in this extraordinary time. We’re all doing our best (even the bankers, lawyers and politicians); the only thing we can do.

Stay safe, everyone.

The whole world is somewhat baffled by how Japan is handling the coronavirus aka COVID19 aka Sars-CoV-2. The Diamond Princess debacle in which inept Japanese officials turned a cruise ship into a floating incubator for the virus did not bode well. Early on in the crisis, several politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party expressed what was close to delight about the coronavirus disaster, stating that it would finally justify changing Japan’s constitution to a new one that gave the Prime Minister sweeping powers.

Japan has infamously under-tested, turning away most people who were not displaying already full-blown symptoms of coronavirus induced illness-–a fever over 37.5 degrees for four days, loss of sense of taste and smell, had been in contact someone diagnosed with the virus etc.– and has been extremely stingy in releasing information. Some suspect that Japan is hiding coronavirus cases and deaths in pneumonia statistics. Possible. Let’s assume that’s not true for the time being.

The Ministry of Health, which managed to get their own workers and medical staff infected on the Diamond Princess and then refused to test them, sending them back to work, where they infected others–doesn’t inspire confidence. The best they have done seems to be to warn people about the Three Cs (in Japanese 3の密. 密閉・密集・密接): closed spaces, crowds and close contact. Miraculously, avoiding an overlap of these three should keep you safe—until it doesn’t.

Despite having the first cases of coronavirus in January, the number of deaths in Japan remains very low, 108 today (April 12th) out of a nation of 126 million people

Yet infection rates are rising rapidly. The so-called lockdown that is supposed to reduce them is poorly planned, at best. It would appear that the Abe government cares more about saving face than saving lives.

This week I wrote a piece for the Asia Times– TB vaccines offers hope in Covid-19 war –about studies that show a correlation between low numbers of deaths in countries that had a universal tuberculosis vaccination program for decades–and coronavirus. The vaccine is called BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin). Infection rates also appear to be strongly impacted positively by the vaccine. The vaccine is nearly a hundred years old. It was developed by French physicians and biologists Léon Charles Albert Calmette and Jean-Marie Camille Guérin in the 1900s and first successfully tested in 1921. Some theorize that when the vaccine is given to very young children and/or infants, that it creates ‘attained immunity’ which helps the older generation (those most vulnerable) battle the virus. Personally, I sort of hope that it’s true, that BCG is the BFG (Big Fucking Gun) in the war against this pathogen, kind of like the iconic weapon in the first-person shooter DOOM. (It’s a video game). It has been suggested that the vaccine only works if given to very young children and that the strain of the vaccine matters as well. Could be.

NOTE: BCG vaccine has many strains (types). The BCG-Japan strain seems to be the one that actually works against the coronavirus. France uses the BCG-Denmark strain. If anyone reading this has access to materials about the BCG-Japan strain, please share them with me. I would like to know.

There are problems with the theory that BCG vaccine is a silver bullet (or a BFG). Correlation is not causation. France and England had a vaccination program but they have a high number of deaths. They also appeared to have inoculated their citizens when they were in their teens rather than as infant, and both countries use a different strain of the vaccine then the predominant one used in Asia. However, even if the BCG vaccination works/worked to prevent fatalities, is there any reason to believe it will work on adults? In the Netherlands and Australia clinical tests are underway. We shall see.

One of the joys of running this blog, with the help of others, since 2007, is that sometimes we are leaked good information that can be used to generate a solid news story. That is usually rare. The nature of the internet is that you tend to get lots of criticism, threats, accusations or wild conspiracy theories that can’t be verified. Comments are all read and edited before being posted. Many on-line sites have gotten rid of comments altogether. When I looked at the comments and letters today, I thought of doing the same….once again.

But then I read this letter below. It’s intriguing. The anonymous source asserts that they are a member of the medical community in Japan. I have edited it slightly for clarity and removed some possibly identifying details. Below the letter, I have added some notes and observations.

As the headline tells you, it is a conspiracy theory, of sorts. A “conspiracy” is usually defined as a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal. If the writer of this letter is correct, the steps Japan has taken so far are not completely harmful. Indeed, it could be argued that testing everyone is not a great idea and that it overloads the health care system. Japan’s approach to the coronavirus has had its merits.

“The Japanese Society for Infection Prevention and Control (JSIPC) updated their coronavirus manual on March 10.  

The tone is calm. “Japan is moving from containment measures to a period of spreading infection and we must adjust accordingly,” it says. Since March 6, Covid-19 testing won coverage under national health insurance – ergo, “as public money is being used for the coronavirus testing, it is necessary to carefully screen who gets tested.”

It gently chides anyone who seeks “needless” testing and urges medical professionals to prevent overcrowding at hospitals by instructing patients with light symptoms to stay home and avoid others.  

Critically, it points out that since there is no specific treatment for Covid-19, the priority must be treating the illness via its pathogen causes.

“The foundation of treatment is symptomatic therapy,” the manual reads. When signs of pneumonia are found, it suggests using all possible methods of treatment, such as giving oxygen and vasopressors as necessary. Above all, it reminds medical staff of the top priority: “Protect the lives of seriously-ill patients, especially in cases of pneumonia.”“

This makes sense on some levels. However, if you don’t know who has the coronavirus, how can you possibly contain it? The manual does note that Japan has moved beyond containment measures (水際対策) and must conduct a sort of triage.

And so we come to the letter. It was written in response to the article TB vaccines offers hope in Covid-19 war and mailed to Japan Subculture Research Center.

I don’t know if it’s true nor can I say it’s untrue. Don’t believe it. I have limited resources, so I’ve decided to crowdsource this. I would like to know what you, the readers, think. And if anyone has supporting data, I’d love to have it–links and documents appreciated. If you can refute it, please do. Sometimes, many minds are better than one.

Send all mail, thoughts, comments, evidence and refutations to japansubcultureresearchcenter @ gmail.com with the heading, BCG and Japan.

Some short notes and observations on the letter are at the end of the document.

＊＊＊＊＊＊

Dear Mr. Adelstein,

I’m ●●●● and I’ve just been reading your report into BCG.

You’ve got the half the story, and while there are clinical issues with the variables and the science, you’re on the right track. 

The other half is on the Japan side.

Have you noticed why Japanese aren’t talking about their immunity through BCG? There’s reasons for this. 

Japan has invested a lot of capital into developing and selling Avigan as a coronavirus treatment. They’ve put the weight of Japan Inc behind this, and [Prime Minister] Shinzo Abe is their pitch man. 

Did you notice the abrupt change in Abe’s policy around the end of February? That’s because Japanese researchers and doctors, including my colleagues, became aware at that time that BCG vaccines were possibly also working with the immune systems of most Japanese under age 70. NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and MHLW [Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare] policies prohibit researchers and doctors from speaking publicly about this. But this is well-known in the medical community here.

What’s not understood is whether BCG is protecting children in the same way. We don’t have enough scientific or anecdotal evidence to rule out tuberculosis vaccine in Japan with confidence, especially because of the large number of foreign workers and tourists from at-risk countries, or whether BCG is working properly in tandem with other vaccinations in Japan. In layman’s terms, the younger generation of children in Japan don’t have the same immune system as the older generation. While we have decades of data about the health of the older generation, we still have insufficient clinical data about kids who haven’t been alive long enough to build up a reliable data base. 

In the field of medicine, you can’t make a diagnosis or prescribe treatment based on anecdotes or hunches. We have to follow regulations and existing practices based on years worth of data and peer-reviewed studies. We simply can’t assume that BCG is protecting children from the novel coronavirus. Thus the medical community instructed Abe to protect these children as a preventive measure owing to the lack of available data on how their immune system would respond to Sars-CoV-2. 

This also gave Abe and the MHLW political cover. Instead of doing nothing, they had to do something (1) . Abe couldn’t publicly announce that BCG was protecting the innoculated population of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As you know, Abe is beholden to Keidanren (経団連・Japan Business Federation) and companies such as Fujifilm Holdings and their subsidiary Toyama Chemical, which manufactures Avigan (3). Who is going to buy Avigan if all they have to do is buy BCG? Why should Japan promote Avigan if most Japanese don’t need it? That is their reasoning. This is all about the sale of Avigan. (5)

This also explains why Japan was resisting international pressure to postpone the Summer Olympics. Abe and his panel of experts were assuming that BCG was protecting most of the population from the novel coronavirus. They had to cancel the games because of foreign pressure and the International Olympic Commission (IOC) (4), not because of any concerns about an overshoot of cases here in Japan. 

There’s another issue that the media are overlooking. Japan now has millions of foreign residents and foreign tourists who didn’t get BCG shots. They are the most likely groups to acquire the novel coronavirus and spread it through the population in Japan. But Abe couldn’t say that due to policies of boosting tourist arrivals and preparing for the Olympics. Even if you think he’s a racist xenophobe, you have to credit him for respecting the rights of foreign COVID patients. Look at what China is doing with Africans, and you’ll understand Japan’s official thinking on this.  

This also explains the Ministry of Health policy of keeping people away from hospitals (2). We don’t want people with colds, H1N1, ordinary coughs or sniffles to show up at hospitals demanding swabs, which also put health care workers at risk. They should stay home and rest anyway. MHLW set up a hotline for this purpose. If they didn’t, half of Japan would demand a test claiming to be sick. In most cases, patients with real COVID19 symptoms aren’t going to die anyways if they had their mandatory BCG vaccinations. Japan only wants to treat the most severe cases while protecting medical workers from infection. This is a reasonable policy. Most doctors support this, though some feel that we should be more proactive with outreach programs and advocacy on behalf of patients.  

Try to see things from our perspective. We are watching more than a hundred doctors and nurses die in Italy. We saw the same thing in Wuhan. This scenario is Japan would serve nobody. It’s not selfish for us to protect ourselves. It’s good public health policy, and Japan is doing the right thing. 

Please understand that the science isn’t black and white on this. Just because Japan made BCG shots mandatory doesn’t mean that every doctor gave them out, or that every parent took their kid to the doctor for the shot. Millions of people fell through the cracks and didn’t get vaccinated for TB, especially in the 1950s and 60s when Japan’s health care system was evolving. That’s why you are seeing numbers rise now, though on a much smaller level than in the U.S. or Italy. Most of the new cases now are people who didn’t get BCG shots. This is the common view of medical practitioners here. 

This is especially true of patients in areas such as Taito-ku, which is the closest thing in Tokyo to Skid Row in LA. Many of these new patients are homeless, or they were born into impoverished families who didn’t vaccinate their children. You will see similar stories in impoverished areas of Osaka and other cities. Look at the data and you will find it. 

You’re welcome to this information but ●●●

Good luck with your reporting. Ganbare. 

Notes:

(1) In February, Prime Minister Abe’s request that schools nationwide be closed down was greeted with great puzzlement at the time. He later said that he had not consulted with experts when making the decision.

(2) Japan has had a policy of discouraging testing. In fact, the Japanese Medical Association, the German Embassy and later the US Embassy criticized Japan’s low testing. Many opined that Japan wanted the numbers low to make the 2020 Olympics go forth as scheduled.

(3) It’s not clear how well Avigan, an anti-influenza drug does in fighting COVID-19 but Japan has offered to give it away to 20 countries that need it to fight coronavirus. It isn’t offering to give it away free to every single country in the world, so if you’re cynical you could see the giveway as free advertising, and/or free testing. Avigan was used to combat Ebola in the past.

(4) It would appear that after the Olympic Games were postponed that suddenly the number of Covid-19 cases jumped considerably. Correlation perhaps. Governor Yuriko Koike, who had been remarkably silent about the dangers of coronavirus, suddenly began talking about ‘a lockdown’ and the need for hyper vigilance with the pathogen only after March 23rd.

5) The Japanese government, including our friends at the Ministry Of Health, have conspired in the past to keep important medical data away from the public. The result was many innocent people being infected with AIDS and dying. Green Cross was the beneficiary and some of their executives were convicted of criminal negligence resulting in death. Government officials basically walked. See below and research more if you’re interested. Green Cross Executives receive prison terms in Yakugai (薬害エイズ) case.

When my friend Cynthia launched her podcast on belonging last month, something told me that I had something to contribute.

Find out whether I was right.

mkalus shared this story from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
300 years from now, a young mathematician looks up from a recent biography of Conway. 'What the hell is covid?'

Scott, who knows far far more here than I do, wrote a nice memoriam.

sillygwailo shared this story from Tannock.net.

For much of my life, I’ve used video games as a sort of “social separation mental health strategy” – when the world gets to be too much, I play video games with an intense focus: to help calm and center my mind, to let my subconscious process, to give me a chance to process emotions I’m not handling well. The general driver is anxiety and the need to keeps my hands busy but my mind calm. This is one of the reasons that I often look with bafflement at all the online games: why on earth would I want to play games with others? I play games because other people are too much!

On my iPhone, I keep exactly 3 games: Threes, Alto’s Adventure & Monument Valley. These three games satisfy key criteria for me:

1. They are low-stakes: there’s no death or violence, and you can just pick back up and go. In Threes, if you fail, just start over, Alto’s Adventure, just start snowboarding again, in Monument valley just try the puzzle again.
2. They’re quick-plays: it is easy to drop in and play for 5 minutes and hop out again, with no deeper context of story or complicated muscle-memory mechanisms.
3. they are visually quiet games: there’s not flashy things popping up with adrenaline-inducing urgency, everything is pretty calm, with in all cases, pleasing-to-my-eye visuals.

I should note here that Threes has a particular place for me: I probably spend 10 times as much time in that game than anything else – indeed it is sort of a meditative ritual for me: if I’m feeling particularly anxious, or have an upcoming stressful encounter, or am needing to quickly centre myself after a stress-inducing event, I play Threes – dark mode, sound off. And as I play, I can zero-in my focus until all else disappears except the game board. And then I’m ready to re-engage with the world.

Tangent on COVID-19

I’m fortunate, in this time of COVID-19, to be gainfully employed. Working for Telus Digital, on the platform team, which includes support and oversight of the infrastructure for telus.com means that we are really, really busy. I’m doubly fortunate to have space at home to work well, to have kids who’re slightly older and more independent so I can focus, and that Leah and I genuinely enjoy being together all the time.

But, and probably this a big BUT – I’m constantly fielding a low-level of panic/anxiety/terror. First: I deeply suspect that the world I’ve known for 40 years has ended, and we’re seeing the rapid birth of a new world – where this sort of rotating shutdown/collapse of public society is the new normal, where variations of COVID-19 are like the flu, or colds: new variations coming regularly. And like – everything has to change to make this part of how we live. I hope I’m wrong.

Second: I am personally very worried about my ability to survive COVID-19 – I have a long history of being hit pretty hard by respiratory illnesses: Pneumonia, bronchitis, flu – anything that settles & impacts the lungs has for most of my life hit me unusually hard compared to those around me. I’m generally healthy yes. I’m taking precautions, yes – but my assumption is that everyone will at some point grapple with COVID-19 over the next year or two. I hope I experience a mild case, but until this happens, I remain wary and worried.

And on the Xbox

There’s one more game that I’m spending an additional amount of time with right now: Cities Skylines, a city-building game. I have turned all the “disaster” settings way down. And so it becomes this lovely, peaceful, slow-moving game where I build a town full of happy, employed, healthy people. They bicycle and walk and take transit everywhere. They live in dense, urban centres, or farming communities. Sometimes, I just turn the speed setting to medium and just kind of watch it for a while. And it is immensely satisfying – another low-stakes, low-context, drop-in/drop-out game to calm my nerves, to help me context-switch from work-mode to home-mode.

The post Peaceful Games in Turbulent Times appeared first on Tannock.net.

So wie Yahoo Flickr ruinierte, hat auch Microsoft die Skype-Übernahme gründlich versemmelt. Flickr hätte Facebook verhindert und Skype WhatsApp, aber beide wurden vom "Enterprise" versenkt. Um so mehr hat es mich überrascht, als wie nützlich sich Skype in Zeiten der physischen Distanz entwickelt hat. Erst gestern habe ich die alten Leute von Jitsi auf Skype umgestellt. Und was in Jitsi unfassbar schwierig war, ist auf einmal ganz einfach geworden. Eine Familiengruppe, in der jeder einfach auf das Kamera-Icon tippen kann und schon ist die Konferenz eröffnet. Und wenn man die Gruppe zusammentrommeln will, kann man einfach durchklingeln lassen. Dann verhält sich Skype wie ein Telefonanruf, und das können die alten Leute perfekt bedienen.

Junge Leute mögen darüber lachen. "Hey, Whatsapp mit der Jitsi-URL schicken und gut ist. - Wie, geht nicht? Dann einfach die URL kopieren und in Jitsi einfügen." Kinners, Ihr habt keine Ahnung, wie schwierig es ist, ausgetretene Pfade zu verlassen. Es gibt auch immer noch jede Menge Leute, die Dateien per Anhang verschicken.

Selbst die spontanen Konferenzen mit Leuten, die gar kein Skype haben, gibt es jetzt in Form von "Meet Now". Das funktioniert alles tadellos in kleinen Gruppen mit einer Handvoll Leute und mehr brauchen wir nicht.

Was ich völlig vergessen habe: In Office 365 Home oder Personal hat jeder 60 Minuten für den Anruf irgendeiner Telefonnummer auf der Welt. Das habe ich schon ewig nicht mehr gebraucht, aber das hilft natürlich, wenn man eine Nummer im Ausland erreichen will.

Kurz und gut: Ich habe Skype wieder aktiviert und ich fühle mich sehr gut damit. Das hätte ich nicht für möglich gehalten.

PS: Facetime ist auch super. Aber ein iPhone 6 oder ein iPad Air kann an Facetime Group Calls nicht mit Video teilnehmen:

To use Group FaceTime video calls, you need iOS 12.1.4 or later, or iPadOS on one of these devices: iPhone 6s or later, iPad Pro or later, iPad Air 2 or later, iPad mini 4 or later, iPad (5th generation) or later, or iPod touch (7th generation). Earlier models of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch that support iOS 12.1.4 can join Group FaceTime calls as audio participants.

Apple is currently offering several of its Apple TV+ original shows and movies for free.

The company announced the promo earlier this week, noting that the movies and shows selected are family-friendly. Considering people are spending much of their time confined to their homes as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, some free family-friendly content is welcome.

However, not all the freebies are actually family-friendly. The included titles are listed below:

• Servant – Thriller series from M. Night Shyamalan
• For All Mankind – Alternative retelling of the space race
• Little America – Anthology series detailing stories of immigrants in America
• Dickinson – Comedy series about poet Emily Dickinson
• The Elephant Queen – Documentary film about a mother elephant
• Helpsters – Kids series about a team of monsters who solve problems
• Snoopy in Space – Animated series about Snoopy becoming a NASA astronaut
• Ghostwriter – Kids series about four youngsters who team up with a ghost haunting a local bookstore

All of these are available for free. Typically you would need an Apple TV+ subscription to view these movies and series, which costs $5.99 per month in Canada.

To access the freebies, you’ll need an Apple device with the latest Apple TV app installed. Further, you’ll need an Apple ID to get the free programming. You can find the list of free Apple TV+ shows under the ‘Watch Now’ page in the TV app.

Source: CNet

The post Apple offering free access to select Apple TV+ shows for a limited time appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A totally confident prediction: those opposed to increasing density (any multi-family development), using road space for bikeways and greenways (Granville Bridge changes will be a target), reducing priority for cars (expect another fight over viaduct removal) and priorizing transit (why build SkyTrain extensions) now have a sure-fire argument: density whether in buildings or transit is how disease spreads.

Sprawl is safer.  Cars are safer.  Single-family homes are safer. Anyway, new development, especially the remaining need for workplaces, will be in lower density suburbs if not actually in our homes, but certainly not in concentrated urban centres.

So the last half-century when Vancouver led in designing and building livable high-density, mixed-use, less-car-dependent and more sustainable communities was just a diversion.

Fight the virus by returning to the Sixties!

This is an important debate, not just an argument, especially when governments will be under fiscal stress.  Budget slashing is a great time to reverse the hard-fought progress of what the last three generations of designers, developers, planners and aligned political leaders have achieved in building more livable and higher-density cities, with a priority on transit and active transportation, especially when considering the consequences of climate change.  One need only watch how easily the Trump administration is reversing that progress.

To begin with, let’s first call bullshit on the notion that the Covid virus is less controllable in highrise high-density environments than suburban ones.  Just ask: which cities have been the most successful so far at not only bending the curve but keeping it from escalating in the first place?

These ones:

Taipei:

Hong Kong:

Seoul:

Singapore:

Notice anything in common?

Stephen Quinn tweet:

Can I get on a BC Ferry?
No, stay home.
But the cabin on the Sunshine Coast is okay, right?
No, stay home.
So my sister in Abbotsford is making Easter dinne…
Stay home.
What about the Seawall?
Stay home.
Tennis?
Home.
So wait, you’re saying I should just stay home ?

Stephen, what do you mean by ‘home’?  Are you by any chance living in a place with a backyard, and you’re including that?  Or are you saying everyone should live all the time behind a door, in a room at a time, and not come out.

And go mad, slowly or quickly, but mad nonetheless.

Okay, time out for exercise, even just walking – but don’t go far.  Don’t travel to do so.

Okay, but what does ‘travel’ mean?  Obviously not using a boat or plane.  But maybe in a car within Metro Van?   Should someone from the West End go to Langley?  Tsawwassen?  Even Metrotown?

Perhaps you mean not beyond your part of the city – like Kits, Joyce, Dunbar.

Maybe just your neighbourhood – a few kilometers in radius, anchored by a grocery store.

Or only a few blocks on your street.

Or just your backyard.