MIT Technology Review, the alumni magazine for what is regarded by people worldwide as the finest engineering and science school… in East Cambridge, titled its March/April 2020 edition “… | Continue reading
ARINC (Collins Aerospace) is gathering up all of the COVID-19-related NOTAMs that it can find: Right now the list is 330 pages long! I wonder if this is a good way to determine the world’s le… | Continue reading
The model of coronaplague with the best graphics says that Massachusetts, home to 2% of Americans, will suffer 12% of total COVID-19 deaths (8,219 out of 68,841, through August 4, 2020). How sure c… | Continue reading
A friend in Holland in is his 60s and therefore beginning to enter the real risk window for COVID-19. When I call to check on him, he is usually out in the busy square of his university town. ̶… | Continue reading
While the rank-and-file righteous were posting on Facebook their hopes for continued exponential growth through November in American deaths, journalists were publishing their hopes for dramatic nea… | Continue reading
“Some Countries Are Taking Social Distancing More Seriously Than Others” (Bloomberg) contains some fascinating data collected by Google. They can figure out whether or not people in any… | Continue reading
Is everyone sick of seeing friends and co-workers compressed into a portion of an already-small monitor? The only good video conference experience that I have had was back in 2000 in Australia. A u… | Continue reading
How did the U.S., which spends 17 percent of GDP on health care, corresponding to every American working one day per week to pay for health care, manage to run out of capacity from a bad season of … | Continue reading
“The Ancient Computers in the Boeing 737 Max are Holding Up a Fix”: A brand-new Boeing 737 Max gets built in just nine days. In that time, a team of 12,000 people turns a loose assembla… | Continue reading
“High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2” (preprint on cdc.gov): Results show that the doubling time early in the epidemic in Wuhan was 2… | Continue reading
A friend has escaped with his family to Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park and quiet summer playground of the rich (notably the Rockefellers). The airport was busy for a time pumping… | Continue reading
Bernie Sanders, my personal favorite candidate among the Democrats, has dropped out of the primary race. I wonder if this will actually hurt the Democrats. If there is no contest at all, who will p… | Continue reading
A year ago I asked, “If programmers are anti-social, how did they end up in the bustling hives of Silicon Valley?”: People often are drawn to computer nerdism partly because they prefer… | Continue reading
Back on March 29, we looked at the Massachusetts forecast for coronaplague. Science said that “Nearly as many people in Massachusetts will die as in Florida” (I forgot to write down the… | Continue reading
March 20, 2020 Facebook posting from a wealthy (via marriage) Democrat: Civil liberties, covid-19,Trump, and November election on my mind. Her friend responds: As much as I want this whole Covid-19… | Continue reading
I’m a big believer that viruses are smarter than human beings. We haven’t been able to do anything about the common cold (nearly 1 billion cases per year in the U.S.), despite the enorm… | Continue reading
One of my flying connections co-owns five liquor stores (“package stores” in the local argot) here in the Boston area. His family has been doing this for four generations, which tells y… | Continue reading
The Wuhan-on-the-Hudson fiasco continues to unfold. They have all of the economic suffering of economic and societal shutdown and all of the exponential growth that was seen in countries that made … | Continue reading
Pre-plague, our government was trying to put billionaire Robert Kraft in prison under the theory that it is legal to pay a woman by the month (half his age!), but not legal to pay a woman by the ho… | Continue reading
What numbers do Americans care most about right now? I would love to know the following: what percentage of people in the Boston area are already infected with coronavirus (settle the Oxford v. Imp… | Continue reading
For decades the government has been telling people that smoking cigarettes is bad for their health. For about a decade, the government has been telling people that smoking marijuana is good for the… | Continue reading
What are the most relevant movies to watch in coronalockdown? Let’s exclude movies whose connection to the coronaplague is too obvious, e.g., movies about epidemics. My suggestions: Make Way … | Continue reading
In “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19” (NEJM) a group of physicians ponders the big question that we were predicted to have to deal with right around n… | Continue reading
“Navy will remove 2,700 sailors from aircraft carrier hit by coronavirus” (NBC): The Navy plans to move 2,700 sailors from the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to quarters in Gua… | Continue reading
In “State-by-state model of hospital bed and ICU demand” I wrote: The biggest question mark for me is their forecast of ventilator usage (19,000 best-estimate for peak; 40,000 worst-cas… | Continue reading
On the one hand, the U.S. health care system is kind of lame. It consumes a ton of money. New York State spends $160 billion per year on its Department of Health, $8,000/year for every resident, mo… | Continue reading
Happy April Fools’ Day! Are the biggest fools those who frantically stocked up on hand sanitizer? What did it turn out to be useful for? Before the coronaplague hit, we had about 8 ounces lef… | Continue reading
A serial entrepreneur friend forwarded an email from a local 8th grade teacher: I have decided to take up a new hobby as a way to get outside and stay healthy and I thought why not try to run again… | Continue reading
On March 26, I asked “Number of new COVID-19 cases worldwide is declining now?” I’ve been updating that post daily with numbers from WHO and Massachusetts. Neither sequence seems … | Continue reading
How are things looking in ? Should caravans of Americans be heading south? A pillar of our political faith is that everyone who lives in Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador needs to come to El Nort… | Continue reading
The U.S. is #1 when it comes to running prison colonies (countries ranked by incarceration rate), which just happen to be ideal environments for spreading coronavirus. Pre-plague, a convicted felon… | Continue reading
… for a nice oil painting. What do you all think? The guys who sold it to me seemed happy with the trade, but they refused to give me a receipt. | Continue reading
Email received by a friend who runs a retail business (or what’s left of it) from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue: 830 CMR 62C.16.2: Sales and Use Tax Returns and Payments Status: Eme… | Continue reading
I’ve heard of a few friends of friends with COVID-19. One of my students at Harvard Medical School believes that he had it, but was unable to get tested. Last night I learned, for the first t… | Continue reading
Some data nerds at University of Washington, specifically within the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, have prepared a state-by-state forecast of coronaplague peak and hospital bed/ICU d… | Continue reading
“Oregon’s Virtual Charter Schools Are the Definition of Social Distancing. The State Shut Them Down Anyway.” (Willamette Week) is kind of spectacular. One potential concern for school d… | Continue reading
Sweden is geographically close to and tightly connected via commerce and tourism with some of the world’s coronavirus hotspots, e.g., Italy, Spain, and Germany. Yet the government in Sweden h… | Continue reading
… they’ll get it while shopping at Whole Foods instead, according to my friends there. Last night I managed to FaceTime with some friends who live in Greenwich Village. They’re lo… | Continue reading
The Gates Foundation’s main message is “All Lives Have Equal Value” (secondary message: send $billions in Microsoft profits over to Africa without it ever being taxed!). Bill Gate… | Continue reading
“Shelter in place” orders may be a bit unpleasant for the typical American suburban family or those Americans wealthy enough to have their own apartments. But what about for densely pac… | Continue reading
As noted in “About 2.5 percent of Boston hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients”, it is tough to find out the information that is most relevant to a worried individual, i.e., how f… | Continue reading
Tokyo 2020 has fallen victim to coronavirus. What happens to all of the T-shirts and other gear printed with “Tokyo 2020”? Will these be valuable collector’s items for those with … | Continue reading
Quite a few Boston-area businesses have shut down their physical offices. Employees of Amazon, for example, are working from home. Towns and cities, however, can’t close down their respective… | Continue reading
The last four World Health Organization Coronavirus disease situation reports, 63-66, show an almost flat number of new COVID-19 cases worldwide each day: 40,78839,82540,71249,219 Almost, but not q… | Continue reading
Previously from the U.K.: March 16: unless you retreat into a cave, you’re going to die at some point over the next two years (Imperial College epidemiologists predict a best case of 250,000 … | Continue reading
Working with third-year medical students involves much struggling with SQL, R, and data, but also chatting about the topics of the day. This year it is coronavirus, of course. Of the nine M3s that … | Continue reading
Now that the grim reaper seems to be among us, is it time to move away from the 12 states that assess estate taxes? Massachusetts, for example, deprives heirs of 10-16 percent of the value of their… | Continue reading
Friends who work at Boston’s biggest hospitals (MGH and Brigham and Women’s) get the information that the public would surely love to have, i.e., what percentage of hospital beds are oc… | Continue reading