I went into the local fabric store to pick up some reupholstered chair seats, and the decorators all dropped what they were doing to admire my two-year old Amazon Orolay coat. I had to take it off, so they could try it on. I guess it’s still popular.
How crowded are your local hospitals with ICU patients?
“Certain parts of the world might one day use the effects of climate change as rungs on a ladder toward greater influence and prosperity. And the United States, despite its not-unfavorable position geographically, is more likely to lose than win — not least because so many of its leaders have failed to imagine the magnitude of the transformations to come.” You know who is going to win? Russia.
Picture: Me, aged six or seven, at my aunt’s wedding. Like every redhead, I was counting the days until I would be allowed to wear mascara.
Watching: Babylon Berlin Reading: Gossip blogs Preparing: Two foot snow storm heading this way
Apt. 11d 
The likelihood that Russia will flexibly and intelligently adopt to anything strikes me as negligible. And if it’s change that requires imaginative leaders, the likelihood falls to zero.
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y81,
“The likelihood that Russia will flexibly and intelligently adopt to anything strikes me as negligible.”
Unless it involves fatally poisoning dissidents with nerve agents!
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It would be hard to innovate and adapt with a declining, aging population. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/09/03/chinas-population-to-drop-by-half-immigration-helps-us-labor-force/?sh=434a8eae3d65
I don’t expect countries to allow their young farmers to traipse off to feed other countries.
That’s if Russia and China don’t go to war: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/expect-war-russia-china/#
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I wish we could still put boys into short pants until they were officially old enough.
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Houston, we have a numbering issue. There are two SL 816s right now.
Laura wrote, “How crowded are your local hospitals with ICU patients?”
Here’s how it’s going. Things are still kind of weird after the holiday (with some strange oscillations in case counts), but new cases in our county peaked in the week before Thanksgiving. There were a couple of days when the county ICUs were completely full, but it’s down to 94% occupancy right now. Not great, but better than it was. Meanwhile total hospital COVID occupancy in our county is at a record high. I don’t get it. On the other hand, I recently read an article from the local news that said that about 20% of our county COVID patients at the time were from outside the county, so maybe that explains the high patient count. We’re approaching 4 weeks past peak for new cases.
A couple weeks ago, our county tripped a Texas state trigger that says that if 15% or more of patients at a hospital have COVID, various restrictions come into play in that county. At the time, it felt like 15% was too high and too late (the restrictions were triggered 2 weeks AFTER the county’s new case peak), but at the same time, it is true that there does seem to be at least a little bit of space in the ICUs, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to be crushed–at least not by county residents.
I was messing around with the NYT’s Texas COVID page and I was noting that (at least right now), bigger Texas population centers (including El Paso) are almost all doing relatively well, and their new case counts are generally either down or flat. If you click the hot spot counties, a lot of them are pretty small, and the alarming stats are produced by a small number of cases (2.6 new cases a day in Terrell County).
It looks like Texas’s new cases peaked Dec. 5. A decrease in hospitalizations should be coming soon.
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Oh, I almost forgot to drop this off!
https://thenewstack.io/advent-of-code-builds-a-programming-community-around-puzzles/
“December brings another once-a-year phenomenon for computer enthusiasts: the arrival of a new set of programming puzzles at a site called Advent of Code. Every year, Eric Wastl creates 25 two-part programming puzzles, all connected together by a cute story about needing to save Christmas,” explained Tanya Reilly, principal engineer at Squarespace, in a recent blog post describing the phenomenon. “But the real fun is when you’re doing them in December as they appear, one every day, with a community of thousands of other people solving them at the same time.”
My 10th grader’s physics teacher tipped him off to this.
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Binghamton just got destroyed with snow according to the news. We only got a foot.
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40 inches! My Ithaca correspondents say that there was only 12-15 there (about 40 miles NW of Bingo).
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The news says we only got nine inches, but it looks like more than that to me. Either way, the most snow since Snowmaggedon.
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40 inches in Bingo?! Wow.
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We don’t have any snow 😦
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It’s about a foot here in NYC. I sent some of my suburban friends a picture of the sidewalks in front of our apartment building, immaculately shoveled, and not by me! They didn’t think it was as funny as I did.
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