new gestures

Red alert, day 39. Lockdown, day 29. Suffolk has 656 (+38) confirmed cases in today’s figures, neighboring Essex has 1892 (+46, about 2X Suffolk population) cases and Tower Hamlets has 550 (+2, about 0.5X Suffolk population) confirmed cases as of this morning.

The UK has recorded 124,743 cases on 501,379 tests (+19,316, some on the same people). A total of 16,509 (+449) deaths in hospital have been recorded. The second derivative on deaths is negative at the moment, but so is the second derivative on testing.

Deaths include Margaret Tapley, an 84 year-old auxiliary nurse for the NHS who at the beginning of the outbreak was still doing three night shifts a week as she had for 40 years. Auxiliary nurses are nursing assistants, and seem to be paid, although the name suggests the sort of volunteers this country seems to run on (volunteer judges, volunteer police, unpaid interns).

Advice for the single:

Dr Fauci says we may never shake hands again. Fine with me.

A high school classmate who has been living in Hong Kong for 20 years says the flat curve there is partly down to changes already made for SARS: people with respiratory symptoms wearing masks (he says normally about 50% do this), establishment of public hand sanitizer stations, regular refilling of soap dispensers in public bathrooms.

US oil prices turned negative, as in oil companies will pay you to take the stuff because they’ve run out of storage space. Stalled production and traffic is the immediate reason, along with secular supply-demand trends such as green energy use no doubt.

Billionaires are still embarrassing themselves. Richard Branson has asked the government for a loan for Virgin Atlantic and has pledged the island he owns as collateral. Denmark and Poland are refusing to bail out companies that are based in tax havens.

Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey is donating $1 billion, or about a quarter of his net worth, to the fight against the virus, but he’s doing it through a fund he controls. Control is very important to these guys; hating to pay taxes is about hating to give up power over the money. It messes with their fantasies of omnipotence.

Expect a boom in voice recognition, gesture, and near-field apps. With low-interaction point-of-use machines, if your smartphone is the client and the machine is the server, there is no need to touch the buttons or screen, or even wave your contactless card. This goes for self-service tills, ATMs, turnstiles and so forth. Already half the work has already been done by installing the smart machines that already work with, for example, Apple and Google Pay. There are even grocery scanning apps where you scan the barcode on your phone at the shelf and never need to go through checkout. All respect people who don’t give in to the tech-industrial complex but their lives are going to get even harder.

COVID crime watch: Suffolk Constabulary warned a while ago that people would be arrested for coughing and spitting on frontline staff and police officers, and some such arrests have been reported. Thefts of anything you can use to get around, and anything with alcohol (including perfume) are continuing. People are also taking cash, even though an increasing number of shops won’t accept it.

Thing I learned today: Green screens are green because they don’t share tones with human skin so the camera can tell where the people are.

Today I started on a small backlog of academic citizenship work that has been deferred during the term, and also began a practice project to activate my Finnish translation brain. I did a social Zoom at the morning coffe break and watched a library science talk from the US at 11 pm.

Posted on by Diana ben-Aaron
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