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In Singapore, tape is being used as a sort of architectural element to denote closure of public spaces and promote & enforce proper social distancing practices. The @tape_measures account on Instagram is documenting instances of this practice around the city.
(thx, sam)
Stuck at home during the pandemic, filmmaker Nicolas Heller decided to hold a contest on Instagram to find the person with the best New York accent.
It would be impolitic to say that the New York accent is the signature American accent. You could argue, though, that the New York accent is the accent of the current crisis. It’s there in the burly roundness of the words coming out of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s mouth, or the acidity in the tone of Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the way President Trump scrapes all of his syllables together. (Senator Bernie Sanders’s howling woof counts here, too.)
For New Yorkers, that’s made the conversation around the coronavirus feel as local as the pandemic’s actual impact. Watching the news can feel like watching quarrels between grouchy neighbors.
In this climate, the #BestNYAccent challenge was even more reassuring. A reminder of local resilience and stubbornness in the face of global trauma. A monument to history and place standing firm against titanic winds. A middle finger to life’s cruel dice roll.
From Juliette Kayyem at The Atlantic: After Social Distancing, a Strange Purgatory Awaits. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot over the past few weeks and nodded vigorously along to this whole piece.
Over the past week, I’ve been informally contacting friends and colleagues in a variety of fields — sports, travel, architecture, entertainment, arts, the clergy, and more — to ask them how their world might look after social distancing. The answer: It looks weird.
We will get used to seeing temperature-screening stations at public venues. If America’s testing capacity improves and results come back quickly, don’t be surprised to see nose swabs at airports. Airlines may contemplate whether flights can be reserved for different groups of passengers — either high- or low-risk. Mass-transit systems will set new rules; don’t be surprised if they mandate masks too.
It’s like our timeline has split and an alternate reality awaits us on the other side of the quarantine. All sorts of activities that were considered normal and we did without thinking will now require deliberation.
On dating apps, people will specify (with varying degrees of accuracy) whether they’ve had COVID-19. Casual making out will come to seem reckless. A handshake? Have those test results ready. A friendly hug? I don’t even know your last name.
Our attitudes and outlooks may change in disappointing ways. We will be home a lot more. We’ll also use shaming, against friends and others whom we judge to be taking needless risks, to cultivate better voluntary behavior.
The simplistic idea of “opening up” fails to acknowledge that individual Americans’ risk-and-reward calculus may have shifted dramatically in the past few weeks. Yes, I’d like to go meet some girlfriends for drinks. But I am also a mother with responsibilities to three kids, so is a Moscow mule worth it? The answer will depend on so many factors between my home and sitting at the bar, and none of them will be weighed casually.
I’m wondering — how many people are aware that this is going to be our reality for the next few years? There is no “normal” we’re going back to, only weird uncharted waters.
A list of magazine stories that inspired entire movies (like Hustlers, Spotlight, Argo, Adaptation, The Fast and the Furious (!!), and Boogie Nights).
Advice from a scholar who studies distrust of science on how to talk to coronavirus skeptics. “We reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications.”
Using traditional instruments, a Japanese Buddhist monk named Kossan performs delightfully earnest covers of rock songs. So far, he’s done Queen’s We Will Rock You, Yellow Submarine by the Beatles — both embedded above — Teenage Lobotomy by the Ramones, and a song by Japanese punk bank The Blue Hearts. The Queen one is my favorite, I think. (via open culture)
Directed by Halina Dyrschka, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint is a new feature-length documentary on the groundbreaking abstract artist Hilma af Klint.
Before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Klee made a name for abstraction in visual art, another artist had already beat them to their discovery. But until very recently, her name was absent from the history books. Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) painted her first abstract canvas in 1906, four years before Wassily Kandinsky, originally thought to be the movement’s pioneer. It would be more than a century before she would receive the same acknowledgment and acclaim as her male peers.
The film follows the recognition af Klint’s work received due to the 2018 show at the Guggenheim, which was one of my favorite exhibitions from the past few years.
The trailer is above and the film opens “in virtual theaters” in the US on April 17 through Kino Marquee — check for your local theater here. (via colossal)
Singapore had a seemingly very organized & thorough response to the Covid-19 pandemic and still had to lock the country down. How does that inform our thinking going forward?
A great review of Halt and Catch Fire, still an underrated gem of a show. “One of my favourite things in the show is how the characters age, how they escape their old loops, how they become more themselves, and where they end up.”
How long does the SARS-CoV-2 virus last on surfaces? The answer is complicated and depends on several factors. “We really don’t want people to think there’s a binary threshold between when things are dangerous and when they’re safe.”
The Atlantic’s Ed Yong has written his second long article about the Covid-19 pandemic about what happens next and what a roadmap to dealing with the next phase of the crisis might look like.
As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”
The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”
This animated gif from XKCD is the pitch perfect tribute to John Conway, who died of Covid-19 at the age of 82. Conway was the inventor of the Game of Life and an all-around brilliant and creative person.
Yet another gem from the Kid Should See This: a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf that combines live action, animation, and creative typography.
Fashion icons painted as skeletons by artist Bradley Theodore. More from Colossal, Theodore’s Instagram, Maddox Gallery, and Artsy.
Aided by Toshi Omagari, who wrote Arcade Game Typography, Vox’s Estelle Caswell explores the origins and history of 8-bit arcade fonts. From the description of the book:
Video game designers of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s faced color and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible creativity. With each letter having to exist in a small pixel grid, artists began to use clever techniques to create elegant character sets within a tiny canvas.
As the creator of a tiny pixelated typeface, I find this stuff infinitely fascinating.
YouTube channel Great Big Story (which is a frequent source of videos for kottke.org) recently asked eight filmmakers in eight different countries to report in on how they, their families, and their communities are doing during the pandemic.
Our daily routines have been disrupted, and many of us have been separated from friends, family and work. We checked in on eight households to see how they are feeling, how they are passing the time, how they are keeping connected to others, and what they are looking forward to in a post-pandemic world. From Beijing, China, to Mashhad, Iran, to Melbourne, Australia, here’s how we’re all working through this thing, one day at a time, together.
They’re asking viewers to donate to the UN’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization. Google is matching $2 for every $1 donated, so please join me in donating if you are able.
See also Pandemic Stories from Around the World, sent in by kottke.org readers.
Informative thread about Wuhan emerging from lockdown. People are getting tested to be able to travel & return to work, most are still afraid to go out to eat/shop, ppl are buying cars to use instead of public transport.
Director Sarah Polley complains about the awful, trope-filled movie we are all living through right now. “So much heavy handed foreshadowing. The apocalyptic footage from Wuhan, the super villain American president, the whistleblower dying…”
The British Library has digitized some of their 17th & 18th century globes into 3D models that you can explore and spin online (and in VR). These are seriously cool at fullscreen.
During the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’, expanding European geographical and astronomical knowledge fuelled the demand for maps and sea charts. It also inspired experimentation in the art of globe-making, and the first half of the 16th century saw the production of several models, both hand-painted and printed.
Printing made it possible to produce globes in greater numbers at lower cost so they could be more widely distributed. The printed globe, terrestrial and celestial, soon became established as the standard type of globe, sometimes called the ‘common’ globe, and the methods of manufacture changed surprisingly little from the mid-16th century until the 20th century.
The one at the top of this post is my favorite: Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Celestial Globe from 1602. (via @john_overholt)
In Sunday’s newsletter, I asked people to share what they’ve been up to during the pandemic and how their families and communities are coping. I’ve collected all those responses on one page and will be sharing excerpts over the next couple of days here and in the newsletter.
The government response in Australia:
The government — a fiscally conservative centre-right party that used the promise of a national budget surplus as its main platform - very quickly recognised the scale and severity of this situation and have since released a $130 billion ‘jobkeeper payment’ that gives $1500 every two-weeks to employees who can’t work due to COVID-19. It’s directed at employers who then nominate their employees to receive it (the idea being that this will keep workers linked to their business and speed up a recovery). It’s part of a larger national strategy — that’s still emerging — around the idea of putting the economy in ‘hibernation’. The large irrelevance of party politics over the last three weeks has been one of the more interesting observations.
A hotel owner in Mali tries to keep his business & employees afloat:
For our part, we are trying to stay in business and keep all of our staff. Their wages are currently our number one priority. We have survived a few crises in our day — clients kidnapped in 2011, coup d’etat in 2012, ebola in 2014-15, persistent threat of terrorism since 2015, and last year we were evicted and forced to move to a new location (we lost most of our rooms in that move) — so it would really be a shame if this was the one that finally did us in.
Frustration in Brazil:
Even though my city and my state are taking the appropriate measures, like closing stores, schools and asking for people to stay home, some fellows still don’t understand what the problem is. Some think that, since the death rates are low, there is no problem at all. They don’t seem to understand that what is at stake is the collapse of the health system. This is a little infuriating, since we’ve been talking non stop about this for almost a month. At least my neighbors are as worried as me and my family. I live in an apartments building with many children (I have an 8 year old daughter myself) and we managed to organize a schedule so only one child (or more if they’re from the same family) at a time time can use the playground.
Religion vs. science in Mexico:
Local plazas that were the bustling hub of the city have been taped off, and crews in haz gear drive slowly up and down the streets disinfecting the steps around the (many) colonial churches. Most of these, for better or worse, remain open, and this week — Easter — threatens to [welcome] frightening numbers of religious observers, many of whom are failing to observe social distancing. (“It’s in God’s hands”, one friends and church-goer told me after I questioned why she was still attending and coming into physical contact with others. “No, it’s literally in yours,” I responded.)
A realization of privilege in London:
Overall, my impression is that our existing privilege has just been reinforced by the crisis. My wife and I are both still being paid our full salaries, but we’re not having to pay nursery fees, so we’re actually better off financially. We no longer have to commute or drop off and pick up the kids at nursery, which gives us more family time, and it’s wonderful to be able to finish working and just walk downstairs and play with the kids before dinner. Our street is terraced single-family homes with roof terraces, so yesterday the street had a terrace cocktail party in the late afternoon. Things are better in the UK than in the US (we have the NHS and the government is paying 80% of the wages of furloughed employees, for instance), but there are a lot of people who are going to have their lives thrown into chaos as a result of the pandemic and we’re quite lucky to not be among them.
No video chats with students in Nebraska:
More Urban schools aren’t prepared…you can pick up a packet once a week at school (same for every student per grade in the district) but there is no verification that it was done… so basically those students are done for the year. My nephews go to school in a less-tech school. The district doesn’t even let them web-conference with a teacher because “the teacher may see something that violates privacy”). Their mom (my wife’s sister) says they get little direction.
You can read more of the collected responses here.
In lieu of the NBA season, ESPN will televise a HORSE tournament beginning April 12. Among the competitors are Chauncey Billups, Chris Paul, and Paul Pierce.
“The Republican Party does not believe in free and fair elections, where free means equal access to the ballot and fair means equitable rules and neutral procedures.” They just want to win.
Loved this Fran Lebowitz interview about being quarantined in NYC. “The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone.”
Nicky Case, working with security & privacy researcher Carmela Troncoso and epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, came up with this fantastic explanation of how we can use apps to automatically do contact tracing for Covid-19 infections while protecting people’s privacy. The second panel succinctly explains why contact tracing (in conjunction with quick, ubiquitous testing) can have such a huge benefit in a case like this:
A problem with COVID-19: You’re contagious ~2 days before you know you’re infected. But it takes ~3 days to become contagious, so if we quarantine folks exposed to you the day you know you were infected… We stop the spread, by staying one step ahead!
It’s based on a proposal called Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing developed by Troncoso, Salathé, and a host of others. Thanks to Case for putting this comic in the public domain so that anyone can publish it.
Update: About two hours after posting this, Apple and Google announced they are jointly working on contact tracing technology that uses Bluetooth and makes “user privacy and security central to the design”.
A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing. Given the urgent need, the plan is to implement this solution in two steps while maintaining strong protections around user privacy.
Update: Based on information published by Google and Apple on their contact tracing protocols, it appears as though their system works pretty much like the one outlined about in the comic and this proposal.
Also, here is an important reminder that the problem of what to do about Covid-19 is not primarily a technological one and that turning it into one is troublesome.
We think it is necessary and overdue to rethink the way technology gets designed and implemented, because contact tracing apps, if implemented, will be scripting the way we will live our lives and not just for a short period. They will be laying out normative conditions for reality, and will contribute to the decisions of who gets to have freedom of choice and freedom to decide … or not. Contact tracing apps will co-define who gets to live and have a life, and the possibilities for perceiving the world itself.
Update: Security expert Bruce Schneier has some brief thoughts on “anonymous” contact tracing as well as some links to other critiques, including Ross Anderson’s:
But contact tracing in the real world is not quite as many of the academic and industry proposals assume.
First, it isn’t anonymous. Covid-19 is a notifiable disease so a doctor who diagnoses you must inform the public health authorities, and if they have the bandwidth they call you and ask who you’ve been in contact with. They then call your contacts in turn. It’s not about consent or anonymity, so much as being persuasive and having a good bedside manner.
I’m relaxed about doing all this under emergency public-health powers, since this will make it harder for intrusive systems to persist after the pandemic than if they have some privacy theater that can be used to argue that the whizzy new medi-panopticon is legal enough to be kept running.
And I had thoughts similar to Anderson’s about the potential for abuse:
Fifth, although the cryptographers — and now Google and Apple — are discussing more anonymous variants of the Singapore app, that’s not the problem. Anyone who’s worked on abuse will instantly realise that a voluntary app operated by anonymous actors is wide open to trolling. The performance art people will tie a phone to a dog and let it run around the park; the Russians will use the app to run service-denial attacks and spread panic; and little Johnny will self-report symptoms to get the whole school sent home.
The tie-a-phone-to-a-dog thing reminds me a lot of the wagon full of smartphones creating traffic jams. (via @circa1977)
Gary Hustwit’s free film for this week is his documentary on design legend Dieter Rams. I’m gonna set some time aside to watch it this weekend.
This week, Covid-19 passed heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death per day in the United States. In this graph made by Dr. Maria Danilychev using data from Worldometer and the CDC, you can see that Covid-19 overtook heart disease sometime on Monday or Tuesday.
If the data in NYC is any indication, the number of nationwide Covid-19 deaths may be undercounted, so this transition probably happened sooner.1 Hopefully through the social distancing and other measures put in place to flatten the curve, the number of daily Covid-19 deaths won’t start beating out all other causes combined before it starts declining.
Several months from now, it will be easier to get a more accurate count of how many people died by looking at the “baseline” rate of death and comparing it with the actual numbers. Unless this sort of recount is politicized, which it will be, and *siiiigh*↩
Austin Kleon made 30 “quaranzines” over the past month. You can read them all here and watch instructions on how to make your own tiny zines.
This public service announcement from the Ohio Department of Health contains an outstanding simple visualization of how social distancing can help prevent the spread of Covid-19 using ping pong balls and mouse traps.
This ad shows that Ohio’s relatively early response to the pandemic was not a fluke and that the state is still taking it seriously.
The official NASA Acronym Dictionary is 256 pages long. “LASSO: Laser Synchronization from Stationary Orbit” (p. 124).
Starting today and continuing weekly, a little musical band you have never heard of called Radiohead is putting classic live shows up on YouTube. First up and embedded above is a concert they performed in Ireland in October 2000. Here’s the setlist in case you want to skip around a little. The band says they’ll be putting shows up every week until “either the restrictions resulting from [the] current situation are eased, or we run out of shows”.
I went to a show of theirs in Oxford in 2001 and I would love to see it again. They played Creep for the first time in ages after an equipment failure 86’d whatever song they were supposed to play — and the crowd went fricking bananas.
Update: You can find all of the live shows they’ve uploaded in the At Home with Radiohead playlist. They include Bonnaroo 2006, Buenos Aires 2009, Berlin 2016, and Coachella 2012. Tomorrow’s show will be Summer Sonic 2016 (streaming begins at 9am ET).
I do not know if hearing about other people’s quarantine experiences makes going through one yourself any easier, but the story of how NASA sequestered the returning Apollo 11 astronauts away from the rest of the world for 21 days is interesting for other reasons as well. The worry was that some sort of “moon bug” or “lunar plague” was going to make its way from the Moon to the Earth in the spacecraft or the astronauts’ bodies.
From the moment the Apollo 11 astronauts arrive back on earth from their epochal visit to the moon, they will be treated not as heroes but as bearers of the most virulent, devastating plague the world has ever known.
So NASA quarantined Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in a series of specially designed suits and environments until August 10, 1969. At one point, the three of them lived in a modified Airstream trailer in which the air pressure was lower on the inside than outside so if there was a leak, air would rush into the trailer, not out. Armstrong even celebrated a birthday in quarantine.
After Apollo 11, NASA did similar quarantines for 12 and 14 but abandoned them after that because they figured it was safe.
Oh, and if you were curious about the Soyuz launch yesterday that sent three astronauts to the ISS and how they were going to mitigate the chances of sending any SARS-CoV-2 up there, crews on all missions are subject to a mandatory 2 week quarantine before they leave (according to this press release).
Colornames is a collaborative effort to name all 16.7 million colors in the RGB color space. Recent names include Spray Painted Grass, Surfing On A Sunny Day, and Red Enough To Not Be Pink.
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