April is going to be exceptionally cruel

AM Slog's Georgia comments are unfortunately spot on. Republican governor didn't know people could pass cov-19 asymptomatically until this morning? You can't make up shit like this. No one would believe you.

"April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring, dull roots with spring rain."

My Plague Year, a23

Working with successive applications of the Mass Abstractor effect in Studio Artist's image operation module. The final canvas is built off of a series of curated topical source images. Don't be afraid to work with masking to get where you want to go.

Covid-19 hits remote island communities

The rural community of Hāna in East Maui has its first confirmed case of COVID-19 . So much for the road block on the Hana Highway. Case on Molokai confirmed today as well. Access to medical facilities and supplies are very limited in both remote rural communities. Molokai case lead to the closure of the island's main grocery store.

The Bubble Factory

A virus is “simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” the biologists Jean and Peter Medawar wrote in 1977.

Great article by Carl Zimmerman in the New York Times. The complete kitchen recipe instruction manual on how to assemble SARS-CoV-2. Or rather, a guide to how it dis-assembles you and your kind. The Bubble Factory refers to the NSP6 protein, which works with NSP3 and NSP4 to make virus factory bubbles.

My Plague Year, a22

Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.

According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this.  New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.”

Xenobots

We are witnessing the birth of a new discipline of synthetik organisms.  Xenobots are programable organisms that live for only about a week.  Are they robotics, zoology, or something else?

Article includes a shout out to Karl Sims 1994 work on the co-evolution of virtual creatures. So then imagine that work extended to actual programable biological machines, that were alive and biodegradable. Now imagine no more, for they have arrived.

Let the craziness begin

A train engineer intentionally drove a speeding locomotive off a track at the Port of Los Angeles because he was suspicious about the presence of a Navy hospital ship docked there to help during the pandemic.

“You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. I had to,” Moreno told investigators, according to the complaint. “People don’t know what’s going on here. Now they will.”

Oh really?

Like a bad saturday morning cartoon show, the train smashed into a concrete barrier at the end of the track, then smashed into a steel barrier, then smashed into a chain-link fence, then slide through a parking lot, then continued across another lot filled with gravel, and finally smashed into a second chain-link fence”