COVID-19 origins

Support for the idea that something resembling SARS-COV-2 might have been circulating in the region before the pandemic began also comes from another intriguing observation, the low incidence of COVID-19 in South-East Asia, particularly in Vietnam.

A great piece on lab vs zoonotic COVID-19 origins

If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.

Subway station redesign

stations were re-designed to include open-air waiting areas so MTA customers can head underground only when they know a train with capacity is arriving.

Bardcore

With time to burn during ye olde pandemic, practitioners of a musical genre called bardcore have been taking pop songs and medieval-izing their lyrics and tunes.

High quality online teaching

Harvard’s star CS professor built a distance-learning empire. We only need a handful of gifted teachers to sweep away all the mediocrity. there’s real returns to scale if you use the technology correctly.

Subantarctic life

John Priscu’s search for life that thrives under ice took him to subglacial lakes at the South Pole. Now he has his eye on Mars and Europa.

And there are sessile animals under the ice:

The researchers think it’s likely that the drift of this marine snow has been flipped on its side, so that the food source is moving horizontally instead of vertically. The researchers determined that there are productive regions 630-1500 km away. It may not be much, but it’s possible that enough organic material is riding these currents to feed these creatures. That’s an extraordinary distance, given that in the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep near Guam, marine snow produced at the surface has to fall 11 km down to reach the seafloor. To reach the animals on this Antarctic rock, food would have to travel as much as 133x that distance—and it would have to do so by floating sideways.

Twitter Hacking Spree

by combining the 2 dumbest things in tech, twitter & bitcoin, this has created a singularity of stupidity.

Individuality information theory

This information theory of individuality offers a very general way to think about biological units. They hope it will inspire algorithms that could allow you to extract figure from ground, organism from environment. Such algorithms could be applied to streams of data collected over time to pinpoint correlations of information that signify the emergence of individuals.

Within this theory, individuals can be cells, tissues, organisms, colonies, companies, political institutions, online groups, artificial intelligence or cities — even ideas or theories. What we’re trying to do is discover a whole zoo of life forms that extend far beyond what we have conventionally called living,

Subtropical NYC

Annually, the city gets about the same amount of rain as it has over the last few decades, but it comes in deluges, instead of steady, moderate downfalls

2022-01-30: It’s interesting to visualize the amount of sun in Europe and the US:

Car-free NYC

The huge subsidy of free parking in NYC needs to stop. article is nicely visual to make the point how the city could look like instead.

2021-11-12: Curbed as a very nice breakdown of various topics like garbage, delivery, safety etc.

we tried to imagine what a comprehensive transformation would produce on a generic Manhattan block, to the extent that one exists. We chose Third Avenue between East 33rd and 34th Streets because of its concentration of terriblenesses and virtues. It is congested, dense, torn up, noisy, and lively. Lined by towers and tenements, plied by trucks and fed by tunnels, it’s a short walk from offices, hospitals, and trains. Yet we also embraced its frenzy. Our goal was not to impose the serenity of a provincial Dutch city or to streamline the block into anodyne efficiency. New York without friction wouldn’t be New York.

COVID Risk Chart

opening a kissing booth at a covid test site is the best. More seriously, there’s this:

To help households estimate and manage risk, I’ve made the following table, listing risks for 19 activities, all relative to the first: accepting delivery of and eating a pizza, paid for online.