Reminds me of a massive book, 1,474 pages on ornithology, I once came across while researching something esoteric about duck borne influenza. The book was evidently indexed by someone who did not think much of the author's writing. Buried in the B's was this entry:

birds, for the. pgs 1-1474

The "struck by duck" ICD-10 code is similar, perhaps even written by the same over-worked index and code flunky.

Clearly the transcriptionist responsible for that particular ICD-10 code had a sense of humor. That alone, and of itself, does not detract from the overall utility of the work.

An alternative occurs to me: map makers will sometimes deliberately publish an inconsequential error somewhere in the map so that they can identify when another publisher has stolen their work. Perhaps it is the same with those who publish ICD codes to protect their income stream from digital piracy.

That is fine for future pandemics. It cripples our ability to plan a rational response to the current pandemic. Trading consistent data for a greater amount of inconsistent data is currently a very bad deal.

Remember when you used to buy popcorn at the movie theater? Treasure that memory.

Did you ever experience a Disney World or other amusement park? How will you ever describe that to some kid that was born last year, when they are old enough to understand your words?

We are in a slow motion train wreck. Don't waste your time trying to tell others about how we should design safer rail cars; worry more about how to protect each other from the coming impact.

Ah! The problem of more reporting leading to less information!

Let's do a thought experiment:

Our National Home Economics Standards Board [NHESB] (less formally known as the Home Eck Board) sets a requirement that all home bakers in the USA must report the amount of gluten they use each week in their Betty Crocker recipes, and how many dozens of cookies they produce each reporting period. After a few months this settles into a pattern where some bakers consistently report the amounts in grams while others consistently use apothecary grains. This is workable because the bright boys at the NHESB recognize a high gluten:dozen ratio infers that the gluten is being reported in grams and they do indeed know how to use a gram to grains conversion table. It is possible to determine over time whether American home cooked cookies are becoming more or less gluten free. No problem.

But then the NHESB changes the reporting requirements. Now the gluten needs to be reported by volume rather than weight. But again the mode of measurement is not specified. So some home bakers report in ounces, but some are using dry ounces while others are reporting in liquid ounces. And still others are using the troy ounce numbers from their kitchen scales to determine the ounce volume of the standard dissolved flour solution they pour into the cookie dough. And then there are households where Mom bakes a lot of cookies, who report in pints--- but are these wet pints like so many per liter, or dry pints like so many per bushel?

Everyone is reporting their usage accurately, but without any standard measure, there is no way to assess whether American kids are getting more or less gluten in their cookies. It is a mess. And when you start talking about cookies that are warm (or even hot!) from the oven, it is, in deed, a hot mess.

And don't get me going about the NHESB's treatment of daily sodium ingestion levels....

Coming back to the original problem:

A sure way to fuck up the ability to do reasonable statistical studies over time is to force arbitrary changes in the measuring process without fully documenting either the old way or the new way. To say it differently, we are often better served by reporting that is self-consistent over time than by increasingly detailed reporting that sacrifices consistency.

...an actually serious post. 2 questions for experts in biochem:

Is it true that a prion is basically a rogue ligand?

What are the risk factors in ligand manipulation experimentation? What safety protocols are being / should be used?

Forth.

I enjoyed forth back in the day, when 'putering was a hobby and not a significant part of my vocation.

It was, and still is, the best write-only language ever!

And The Inspiration for Yoda talk it was.

Less traffic.

Cheap gas.

Not much else to do when the movies and malls are closed and the hookers can no longer congregate on the street corner.

In North Portland OR I'm seeing speed bumps with channels cut out of them on two lane streets: one wide channel in the center of the road, and one in either lane so emergency vehicles can whip through the channels without slowing down. They drive more to the center of the road than is possible when there is on-coming traffic. Everyone else (sans sirens and flashy lights) hits a speed bump on either the left or right side.

Is this being done anywhere else? It looks like it is pretty effective. But...

The description is consistent with an eclipse by a large asteroid near miss. Perhaps an astronomer would like to comment?

Yep, I'm on board with XFCE/Xubuntu.

I don't like wasting my time configuring and relearning the GUI every time there is an upgrade. Xubuntu avoids a lot of that overhead.

I do rendering and video editing with Blender and use Audacity for audio editing. These activities are memory and CPU intensive. Xubuntu gets out of the way of this work better than Gnome, KDE, or Mate.

I have just started dabbling in the Raspberry Pi world. XFCE as a GUI installed on Ubuntu 18.04 server is the best option I have found for desktop-like applications (a dedicated Zoom/social media machine being my first goal).

I'm new to the Raspberry universe.

I'm trying to think of a use case for this 12.3 megapixel camera. I'll want a built-in camera for video chatting, conference calls, etc. But I don't see why I would need one that would show my every facial blimmer and pimple to the world. That's just TMI; more information about me than I really care to share.

More important to me is making it as easy as possible to transfer images from my stand-alone cameras to my RPi4. My EDC camera is now a Fuji XP (mostly because it is waterproof and I like to kayak). It will transfer images to an Android phone by Bluetooth, so I think I will be able to do the same with to my RPi4.

Am I missing something? Would I need a more powerful camera on the RPi4 if I were doing object recognition or something like that? Would it somehow be useful to an astronomer, or maybe as a piece of spectrometry equipment?

But the last legs of the chains are not intact. Back in the day, like in January, Amazon could and did use cargo space on passenger airline flights to quickly move goods around the country. Now those flights are mostly gone and slow trucks move goods from the large, centralized warehouses to regional distribution centers. That is not only a bottleneck, but a problem that was unforeseen when Amazon was developing its algorithms.

Hence the lack of apparent reason why sometimes items scheduled to arrive in 21 days arrive in 2 days, and items that used to arrive in a couple of days now take weeks.

Keeping warehouses staffed and handling bulk purchases from manufacturers is relatively minor compared to trying to replace vans sent to the airport with long distance truckers.

There is too much we do not know about this virus. There is a strong suspicion that there are many cases of mild infections that are going unreported. That children are not showing up in the statistics in a flu-like pattern is just weird. While pre-existing heart disease and immune suppression increase morbidity is understandable; that pre-existing conditions of the lungs such as COPD are not much of a factor is also weird.

There is a possibility that large numbers of mild, undiagnosed, cases are conferring some degree of immunity to the Chinese population, and this may be limiting further expansion of their epidemic. Cow pox was a mild disease that conferred immunity to small pox; it could be that some mild and common childhood disease is protective against covid-19. That China appears to be past the peak of the disease is not unreasonable.

On a different aspect: The numbers game.

We have been seeing numerous reports of numbers of dead as a small percentage of numbers of active cases, and numerous suggestions that covid-19 has a mortality rate of maybe 1% or maybe 3%, which doesn't sound very bad. However this is probably the wrong statistic to use, at least at this time while the pandemic is spreading so rapidly. John Hopkins and others report that the interval between diagnosis and death is usually somewhere between 7 and 14 days. That means a mortality percentage based on currently reported active cases is including a large number of persons who are in the early stages of the disease process, before death is much of a possibility. A more useful percentage is the percentage of mortalities of "finished cases", where a final case is one that has ended either in recovery or in death. We now have enough data to calculate the final mortalities.

John Hopkins has been tracking the needed statistics and they are being reported on a number of web sites, including https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ where I found the following:

For March 13, 2020 at 15:12 GMT:

. . 1. Total number of cases: 139,578

. . 2. Number of deaths: 5,120

. . 3. Number of recoveries: 70,733

. . 4. Therefore, number of final cases: 75,853 (recoveries plus deaths)

. . 5. Mortality rate: 6.7% (deaths as percentage of final cases)

I've run this algorithm on reports for the world and for several European nations each day for the last five days. With the exception of Italy, the mortality rates have been between 5.5% and 6.5% every time. My impression is that this has been gradually increasing and as a WAG it will stabilize around 7%. Italy is a major outlier at more than 40%, possibly because Italy is using more stringent criteria for recovery status and under-reporting relative to other nations, or because their much older population is very much more susceptible, or probably some combination of those and other factors.

I am not bothering to track the USA since its response to covid-19 is so badly broken there can be no confidence in the numbers the USA is reporting.

First language was an intro to Fortran IV but I never did anything with it. Good mostly for the IBM template for drawing flowcharts. Then AppleBASIC on an early Apple ][ computer, and 6502 assembler, so as to POKE assembler code into the keyboard input buffer and run it in there. Fun times.

California, the land of fruits and nuts.

The real problem is that the USA is slightly tipped and everything loose has rolled to California.

It's not that I'm bigoted about California. I've driven though it a couple of times. And I can honestly say, it is a good place to be from. A long way from, that is good.