Happy Solstice

The exact time is 4:44 CDT today.  Be sure to get outside and enhance your vitamin D levels.

It's a Deadly Puzzle

As noted at Slate, COVID Cases Are Rising, COVID Deaths Are Declining, Why?

I'd been wondering about this.  Increased testing, a drastic lower shift in the median affected age, improving treatments; any and all of these could be behind this phenomenon.  I was guessing that it was increased testing driving this, but that was only a guess.

Digging around on the web however found that the number of tests administered per day in the U.S. is down by about 25% since the start of June. [edit 6/20: chart has changed, tests are UP about 20% since the start of June.  OK, things now make a lot more sense.] Not at all what one would expect, but there it is.  And this is right on top of when the number of confirmed cases began to rise.  Doubly perplexing.

So now for hypothetical causes, we have increased testing, lower median age, improving treatments, and the possibly that this troublesome yet fragile little 30k of RNA is starting to fray with repeated replication errors.  That last one would be really, really good news, but there's no hard data showing that this is happening.  The other three causes, yes, there's hard data there.  In what proportions?  Not enough information surrounding the data to tell.

Maybe we'll bumble into herd immunity sooner than we thought, and with somewhat less pain than we'd feared.  In the meantime, there's a world of people out there saying "hold my beer, watch this" and rushing out to do something stupid.  Don't be stupid.

Can't say it was fun at the time...

... but oh brother, did I ever appreciate her teaching a couple of years later when I was staring differential equations 201 in the teeth.  May my high school math teacher, Myra Ponder, rest in peace.

Up until her classes, everything had been easy.  Then all of a sudden, it wasn't, and I had to learn to study.  Just what high school should be all about.  What a great teacher.

Thank you, Mrs. Ponder.

Sometimes...

... you've just got to laugh in the face of catastrophe.  The latest from OCMS:

Do you see it too?

I was out mowing the lawn last Saturday, looked up, and saw this:

Like something out of Annihilation was all I could think.  At least it wasn't moving and there weren't any unearthly sounds coming from it.  Just a branch that broke off in last week's storm.

Still, pretty freaky looking.  Nice greenery though.

+134.0 dB rel 1 inch

In case you're wondering, that's approximately the distance to Jupiter.

What the way you write large numbers says about you, at xkcd.

See?  Includes dimensions and everything in this representation.  Easy.  You should try it sometime.

ps: It's also 22.3 S-units.  Very convenient units for balancing a checkbook.

Musical Interlude: JJ Cale

Beyond mowing the grass, not a lot got done today.  Some weekends are like that.  Nice weather though.  Anyway, one of my favorites from back in the early 80s: JJ Cale's Cloudy Day.

Who doesn't love a bluesy number like that?  Beautiful day here though, not a cloud in the sky.