You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus: Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.: “Certain containment measures will be appropriate, but widely banning travel, closing down cities, and hoarding resources are not realistic solutions for an outbreak that lasts years.”
Links
Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.
How to win Monopoly in the shortest possible time: “Refuse to let bank fail. Rushing one million Monopoly dollars to you by airmail – carry on.”
Saint Expedite
From Julie McGalliard, the story of how she discovered “St. Expedite”, the “patron saint of getting things done in a hurry”.
Saint Expedite and me: Part 1:
Our guide took us through Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is the oldest church building in New Orleans. It’s Catholic, of course, but it also has — according to our tour guide — the only genuine Voodoo saint in the US. He showed us the statue of “St. Expedite” (yes, his placard has the quotes) and told us the following story:
This Italian-made statue of a young Roman Centurion is from the 19th century. It was secular, intended for a Garden District mansion. But it was delivered to the cathedral by mistake. The French-speaking nuns opened it and, seeing that it was similar in size and style to the statues of saints in the Cathedral, they assumed it was a saint they were unfamiliar with and put him on display, using the name stamped on the outside of the crate: Expedite.
Some time later they discovered their mistake and tried to remove the statue, but after much public outcry, they put him back up again. See, the local Voodoos had already taken Saint Expedite to heart as the patron saint of getting things done in a hurry.
[…]
It wasn’t until then that I made the connection between things I wanted being offered to me, on the contingency that I accept them RIGHT NOW, and having earlier asked for a blessing from the mysterious entity known as Saint Expedite.
And be sure to continue on to the next post, Saint Expedite and me: Part 2
“You know that statue that’s been in the crawlspace forever? I think it’s Saint Expedite.”
We thought this unlikely, to say the least. Because there aren’t statues of Saint Expedite — not in this country, anyway. The one in New Orleans was the only one, as far as we knew. As far as anyone knew. That’s why the tour guide could tell that story about the nuns and the mis-delivered statue, because he could be confident that nobody taking the tour had ever seen or heard of Saint Expedite before.
Still, we had to go to Port Townsend and check it out.
Fascinating story, and you know? It never hurts to keep things like this in mind when you’re in need of a little extra assistance.
Someone Built a Distraction-Free Cellphone With a Working Old-School Rotary Dial: “Haupt’s creation seems like it was brought to Earth from a parallel dimension where mobile phones took an entirely different evolutionary route, and where technologies like touchscreens never came to fruition.”
The Erasure of Elizabeth Warren Continues: I’ve been noticing this in a number of the articles I’ve seen — not just post-Iowa, either, though it’s become more obvious and egregious — and it’s been ticking me off.
Magic Debug Values: “…are specific values written to memory…so that it will later be possible to tell whether or not they have become corrupted…. Memory is usually viewed in hexadecimal, so memorable repeating or hexspeak values are common.” Though not a programmer, I’d seen some of these in various other contexts. Particularly fond of 8BADF00D, BADC0FFEE0DDF00D, D15EA5E, DEFEC8ED, and FEE1DEAD.
Daring Fireball: Our Long National Nightmare Is Over: Netflix Makes Preview Autoplay Optional: Oh, thank god. Or, rather, thank you @netflix for finally giving us this option!
Wacom drawing tablets track the name of every application that you open: “I don’t care whether anything materially bad will or won’t happen as a consequence of Wacom taking this data from me. I simply resent the fact that they’re doing it.”
Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE: “The National Archives is letting millions of documents, including many related to immigrants’ rights, be destroyed or deleted.” This is horrifying and infuriating.
What is a Blade Runner? How Ridley Scott’s Movie Has Origins in William S. Burroughs’ Novella, Blade Runner: A Movie: This is fascinating; I had no idea. And now I want to see if I can track down copies of both Nourse’s and Burroughs’ books.