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May!

Sunday,  05/03/20  11:39 PM

May!  That's not just a name, it's an attitude :)

I sense everyone is not having the "sheltering in place" thing anymore and everything is gradually going back to "normal", whatever our politicians may say.  The "flatten the curve" thing was all about avoiding overloading our hospitals; well they are sitting empty.  No amount of sheltering is going to defeat the virus; for that we'll need a vaccine, and we may not get one.  Note: there is no SARS vaccine yet, and it's still out there...

I've noted how my company Teladoc's business is booming; so too all "business" video systems like Zoom.  But as the WSJ notes, Microsoft isn't cutting Zoom any Slack (great punny headline), their Teams product is a worthy competitor.  Teams is integrated into Office 365 and it's a pretty nice combination of Slack and Zoom.  The new Microsoft in action... 

Tim Bray: Bye, Amazon. "I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19."  Wow.  Read the whole thing; not good. 


You know what's going to happen in May?  NASA: Get ready to launch, America!  "A new era of human spaceflight is about to begin. American astronauts will once again launch on an American rocket from American soil to the International Space Station as part of our Commercial Crew Program!"  Yay.  Planned for May 27, mark your calendars! 

This is a fantastic bug story.  "I shipped a word processor that formatted the hard drive every 1024 saves."  The comments are great.  Via Clive Thompson


Visual Capitalist: Visualizing the world's 100 biggest islands.  So great.  Can you even believe how big some of them are? 

Indonesia may be an island nation, but some of those islands are huuge...


From the awesome Discoverer: The best small towns in every state.  The California pick is Ojai, and it's a good one.  Would love to visit them all! 

Bucket list item: Skagway, Alaska.  Was just reading a novel about the Klondike gold rush.  The whole Alaskan Inside Passage is a must see for me.

Everyone's adapting: World Tour teams to race Zwift's new Tour for All stage race.  Starts tomorrow and lasts five days; stages are expected to last between 75 min and 2 hours.  Well, cool.  And broadcast "live" on Eurosport, too. 


So, have you watched Planet of the Humans yet?  It's Michael Moore's latest documentary, it's free to everyone on YouTube, and it's pretty astonishingly anti-climate-change.  Actually it's more accurately anti-green-energy.  "It’s easier to fool the masses than to convince them that they are being fooled. -Mark Twain."  I've watched it and I found it was pretty mild.  But religions do not take apostasy lightly. 


Keep an eye on this: The Wolfram Physics Project: the first two weeks.  In which Steve Wolfram and a band of interns try to rewrite physics from the ground up ... using automatons.  Will it work?  Stay tuned... 

News you can [most definitely] use: NetNewsWire is reborn on IOS.  Yay!  I've been looking for a good RSS reader for my iPad; NetNewsWire is a good RSS reader.  It's like Christmas! 


The 10-engine plane that time forgot.  Yes you read that right, 10 engines, including six backward facing propellers and four jets. 


Soooo beautiful: A very close look inside the Mandalorian's ship.  I love this sort of fantasy reverse engineering. 

And of course ... May the Fourth be with you!