Link Log Roundup for May 4, 2020
In this edition: imagination, distractions, green zones, cowboys, dying wishes, environmental regulation, coronavirus models, restaurants, banned books, driving cross-country, three futures, pandemic maps, lacking tests, nationalism, a global pledge, mental health, naked bicyclists, presumptive cases, and books.
Your daily look at links I’ve saved to my Link Log (RSS) over the course of each day but didn’t necessarily address or highlight here on the blog. These are the links I logged yesterday, and not necessarily links to things published yesterday.
The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations
And yet: “Flatten the curve.” We’re now confronting a miniature version of the tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people. It’s harder to come to grips with the fact that we’re living in a long-term crisis that will not end in our lifetimes. But it’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon.
Autistic people may have trouble tuning out distractions | Spectrum | Autism Research News
In the new study, researchers compared autistic and typical people’s pupil responses when performing a task with and without a distracting sound. Typical people’s pupils grew larger when hearing the sound, suggesting a boost in focus directed by the locus ceruleus. By contrast, the pupils of autistic people did not widen, indicating they do not modulate their attention in the same way.
Green zones: a mathematical proposal for how to exit from the COVID-19 lockdown
We suggest that each nation should be partitioned into geographic areas, or cells, with 5,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. To limit economic damage, this partition should consider “commuting zones”, that is, zones which share many economic ties.
It was no wonder then, that in the 1950s and 1960s, those eager to destroy an active government tapped into the image of the American cowboy as their symbol. Gunsmoke debuted on the new-fangled television in 1955, and by 1959, there were 30 prime time Westerns on TV. These westerns portrayed the mythical cowboy much as he had been after the Civil War: an independent white man fighting the “savages” of the plains to provide for his eventual family. A man who wanted nothing of government but to be left alone.
Coronavirus rules don’t keep woman from dying wish to stand on Oregon beach
In all of her 55 years on Earth, she had never seen an ocean, never stood in the sand, sniffed the salt air and watched the tide roll in.
Federal Environmental Policies During Pandemic Raise Concerns Across Northwest
Oregon and Washington environmental regulators said the decision to relax federal environmental enforcement during the pandemic puts more of the onus on them to make sure industrial facilities are operating properly at a time when their own agency budgets are collapsing because of sharply and suddenly plummeting revenues.
This coronavirus model keeps being wrong. Why are we still listening to it?
The model has been cited often by the White House and has informed its policymaking. But it may have led the administration astray: The IHME has consistently forecast many fewer deaths than most other models, largely because the IHME model projects that deaths will decline rapidly after the peak — an assumption that has not been borne out.
This Restaurant’s “Exhausting” List Of Coronavirus Procedures Shows How Hard It Is To Reopen
Other employees at O’Charley’s — which has 200 locations across 17 states, and reopened 42 of its dining rooms in Georgia and Tennessee as of Thursday — also told BuzzFeed News that they thought the restaurants were reopening “prematurely” and they didn’t have enough time, resources, or staff to follow the state-issued guidelines.
Portland band Portugal The Man offers to send banned books to kids in Alaska
“We’ve got five books here that are labeled as controversial and they’re controversial because of words like rape and incest and sexual references and language and things that are pretty serious problems, especially in our teenage world,” said school board member Jeff Taylor in April, when the board made the decision. “Is there a reason that we include books that we even label as controversial in our curriculum? I would prefer that these were gone.”
How a cross-country drive revealed uncertainty for black Americans during COVID-19
As one who never needs much of a push to drive, I decided that hitting the road was my best option. Driving would also provide an opportunity to see firsthand how my fellow human beings were reacting to a rapidly spreading virus nationwide.
Covid-19’s future: small outbreaks, monster wave, or ongoing crisis - STAT
Society must referee what Leung calls “a three-way tug of war” among a trio of competing needs: to keep cases and deaths low, to preserve jobs and economic activity, and to preserve people’s emotional well-being. “It’s a battle between what we need to do for public health and what we need to do for the economy and for social and emotional well-being,” he said. If the public health part of the tug-of-war weakens, then the waves will keep on coming through the end of 2022.
Collecting the Maps That Will Define the Pandemic
Lately those librarians have had their hands full. John Hessler, a specialist in modern cartography and GIS at the Library of Congress, is collecting the maps of the coronavirus pandemic. In a public health crisis where the interpretation of data, maps and other visualizations has been critical, Hessler’s job (at least part of it) is to ensure that future historians and lawmakers can access that data, and see how mapmaking itself advanced, as they try and grasp this moment in time.
A Mayor Accepts a Nightmare: The COVID Tests Won’t Come
Fulop’s calculus underscores the extent to which local officials across the country have moved from the phase of shock and scramble into one of acceptance as the coronavirus has lingered. After weeks of calling on the federal government for help with testing resources, local officials, especially here in Jersey City, are indignant at the response they have received, still wondering when, if ever, that tap will be opened. But increasingly they are proceeding as if it won’t, leaving them with what they see as the last, unfortunate option: rolling the dice, albeit with care and prayer.
The GOP’s Anti-American Animus
When this president calls himself a nationalist, he’s not talking about the United States. When he talks about borders, he’s not talking about US borders. He’s talking about himself as the leader of a “nation” defining itself less for what it is than for what it isn’t—less by its own values than by the values of its perceived domestic enemies.
World leaders pledge $8 billion to fight COVID-19 but U.S. steers clear
World leaders and organisations pledged $8 billion to research, manufacture and distribute a possible vaccine and treatments for COVID-19 on Monday, but the United States refused to contribute to the global effort.
The coronavirus pandemic is pushing America into a mental health crisis
When diseases strike, experts say, they cast a shadow pandemic of psychological and societal injuries. The shadow often trails the disease by weeks, months, even years. And it receives scant attention compared with the disease, even though it, too, wreaks carnage, devastates families, harms and kills.
Naked Bike Ride cancels Portland gathering for 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has led to another canceled event. The World Naked Bike Ride will not go on as planned June 27, organizers announced on the event’s website, due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak and public health risk inherent in a massive gathering of naked people.
OHA now including “presumptive cases” in daily reporting
A presumptive case is someone who does not have a positive PCR test – a “Polymerase Chain Reaction” that confirms if a person has COVID-19 – but is showing symptoms and has had close contact with a confirmed case. If they later test positive, they will be recategorized as a confirmed case.
Two New Book Startups Compete Where Amazon Won’t
For readers, the benefits to shopping with Bookshop lie also in what is lost when local bookstores close their doors: recommendations and community. Hunter says he plans to launch an online community aspect to Bookshop (a product that I’ve been desperately begging for). But for now, the company works with a network of bookstores, authors, and book influencers to help create digital versions of the tables at physical bookstores with handwritten recommendations by booksellers and stacks curated by subject matter or imagined audience.