Axodys 10C Edition

Gates said he was picking the top seven from the available vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. "Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven just so we don't waste time in serially saying 'ok which vaccine works' and then building the factory," he said.

Twenty five years ago I thought of Bill Gates as a villainous figure because of the whole Windows vs Mac/Open Source angle, but I haven't felt that way for a long time. At this point I'm just really glad to have someone with his resources and intellect doing everything he can to help the world.

Probably the most elegant state by state tracking dashboard and numerically efficient view of COVID-19 for the United States I've seen yet. I continue to be impressed by the visualization capabilities of the modern web even though this kind of thing is pretty ubiquitous. Source is available on Github as well.

Deaths are not a perfect proxy for total infections, since the fatality rate from the disease depends on the underlying age and health of populations; the availability of various treatments; and the capacity of different health systems themselves. But they remain one of the best available measurements to compare places right now.

This is one of the more useful graph/data combos I've seen yet for figuring out the current Covid-19 situation in a given state¹ because it shows deaths to date and current doubling rate. Projecting out a week from today (3/31/20) based on starting point and doubling rate I'm most concerned about New York (17,536), Michigan (2274), and Illinois (950) because they're all looking at an order of magnitude jump in deaths based on current trends. I'm really encouraged to see Washington has a doubling rate of 7 days currently- hopefully we're going to see clear signs in the next week of the doubling rates slowing down further throughout the country.

1. Or country, although I'm just focusing on the U.S. in this post.

Out of the box, Pixel Vision 8 is ready to play games, but why stop there? You can use the built-in tools to create 8-bit games with custom resolutions, sprites, sounds, and more. There is nothing quite like PV8 because it can be anything you want.

Pixel Vision 8, a fully customizable fantasy console that allows you to create, play, and share 8-bit games, is now free for the next few months thanks to the generosity of its creator. I've had my eye on this project for a while and I'm happy to get a chance to play with it further.

📚 Finished Sword of Kings today and really enjoyed it. It's the 12th book in the series though so I'm heavily invested. The pacing on this one was particularly good and the payoffs and callbacks to things setup in the earlier books were pretty satisfying.

On Sunday, Pastor Tony Spell said his Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge bussed people from five parishes in for the service, assembling the 1,000-person gathering despite orders to not hold gatherings of more than 50 people.

He says he plans to hold another one on Tuesday.

As of right now Louisiana is third behind New York and Washington State in total COVID-19 deaths with 83, and seems likely to move up the the total case rankings if they have enough testing capacity. What a terrible confluence of unnecessary peril and willful ignorance.

Farrar moved back to the US in the fall of 2017, bringing down the curtain on a career that spanned more than a decade and in which he won stages in all three Grand Tours. The then 32-year-old could have conceivably carried on for another year – at least – but by the time he finished his final race in Canada he had known for some time that he was ready to move on.

Joining the fire service had always been at the back of his mind, even when he was a young kid kicking ass on the track back home in his early teens, but when the wins started to flood in he understandably chose to follow one dream while the other was put on hold.

Tyler Farrar grew up in Wenatchee, WA so I always enjoyed following his pro cycling career from afar over the last decade or so. My interest in the sport has waned a bit in recent years though and I hadn't realized he had completely retired 3 years ago. Really cool to see that he knew exactly what he wanted to do next after wrapping up his cycling career, and that he's now working as a firefighter in Kirkland.

The U.S. Health Weather Map is a visualization of seasonal illness linked to fever - specifically influenza-like illness. The aggregate, anonymized data visualized here is a product of Kinsa’s network of Smart Thermometers and the accompanying mobile applications. Kinsa is providing this map and associated charts as a public service.

As of March 22nd Florida is showing a ton of red, indicating 3% more fevers than expected based on Kinsa's models for a typical flu season. Between data like this, minimal social distancing policies up to this point, and the demographics of the state, I think Florida is a ticking Covid-19 timebomb.

And then Rudy Gobert, who treated the coronavirus as a joke, tested positive, and sports stopped. It resulted in the most significant public acknowledgment in North America that this was an emergency, that the coronavirus outbreak was real. Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, tested positive, sure, in Australia.

But Tom Hanks testing positive doesn’t shut down movies, TV, the theatre and high school plays. Tom Hanks testing positive just shuts down Tom Hanks.

“Honestly,” said one sports executive, sounding drained. “Rudy Gobert saved America. He really did.”

It's amazing what can act as a tipping point. I think visibly ill Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg coaching yesterday with a bad regular flu during the Big 10 tournament may have factored in as well.

The factor that actually explains 2016, as some of us chagrined liberals insisted at the time, was Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic personal unpopularity. It turned out large portions of the public, even of the Democratic electorate, simply detested her. Sexism is obviously a very large reason, along with Clinton’s own mistakes and the media’s frequently unfair coverage of her. But the important thing is that Clinton’s toxic standing among wide swaths of the electorate was the gravitational force causing the phenomenon Bernie fans misread. Clinton hatred allowed Sanders to draw more than 40 percent of the primary vote, and Clinton hatred allowed Donald Trump to narrowly win.

This is unfortunate on so many levels, but it's the conclusion I've come to over the last couple weeks as Joe Biden's campaign has surged post Super Tuesday and Bernie Sander's has stalled.