Author: Alex Nonnemacher

The Hammer and the Dance

Tomas Pueyo does a technical but clear explanation of the current, most aggressive planning regarding how the US–and the world–should deal with COVID–19. The conversation has turned to the relative merits and limitations of mitigation strategies vs suppression, which has found clear explication in the UK’s Imperial College Report. Regarding China’s response, he notes:

This graph shows the new cases in the entire Hubei region (60 million people) every day since 1/23. Within 2 weeks, the country was starting to get back to work. Within ~5 weeks it was completely under control. And within 7 weeks the new diagnostics was just a trickle. Let’s remember this was the worst region in China.

The fallacy I’m seeing propagated online is that we’re doing the same thing that China did and now their problem is over… so in three weeks, we’ll be clear here in the US. That’s not the case at all.

The suppression strategies that have worked in Asian countries include more than asking people to stay home and testing sick people. Suppression involves quarantine of the sick (at the very least, home quarantine, but other countries have instituted far stricter measures of this). It involves contact tracing.

And in truth, it’s expected that suppression strategies–which are designed to reduce the spread of the virus–won’t result in any kind of herd immunity. As such, until an effective vaccine can be crafted, suppression strategies will have to be reinstituted when the virus re-emerges. Which it likely will, if the Spanish Flu of 1918 is any guide:

The first pandemic influenza wave appeared in the spring of 1918, followed in rapid succession by much more fatal second and third waves in the fall and winter of 1918–1919, respectively.

Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance – Tomas Pueyo – Medium

Dear Leader

Jennifer Senior, writing for the New York Times, on the sham of Trump’s press conferences:

But telling the media that they’re peddling fake news is straight from the playbook of the political gangsters of the last century. So many of Trump’s moves are.

Having each of his cabinet members fulsomely thank him for his leadership and congratulate him for his “farsightedness” before each of their remarks: Check. Making sure each one stays on a message, even if that message has nothing to do with his or her purview: Check.

Leans totalitarian to me.

Call Trump’s News Conferences What They Are: Propaganda

iPad Pro 2020

MacWorld does a nice roundup of all of the features coming to the refreshed iPad Pro. In class Apple fashion, they continue to iterate on the product and its features.

Not to disparage the hardware, but I would argue that the development of iPadOS shows most clearly how they’re focusing on the iPad as the central computing experience for most users: in 13.4, true mouse support is upon us, with an implementation that rethinks the visual cursor more than anything users have seen since the dawn of the visual pointer. From Daring Fireball:

This mouse pointer support is rich and deep — it is far more than a simplistic virtual finger tip, and far more thoughtful and graceful and direct than a port to iOS of Mac-style mouse cursors.

The upgrade to Safari in iPadOS 13 promoted the device for me to something I could use for just about everything I do at work. The mouse support in Universal Access was a nice first step, but this will elevate the experience of using iPadOS once more.

5 ways the new iPad Pro changes everything about Apple’s vision for the tablet computer

Google Meet Will Deliver Us

My employer and local school district has had to move to an almost entirely online business model overnight. For myself, I’ve had to learn a bit about Google Meet for the purposes of having meetings and making phone calls, and the teachers and service providers have had to study up on Google Classroom.

Right now, there is a Google Meet and a Zoom conference going on in two rooms in my house, both for school purposes. I completed two teacher conferences yesterday on Google Meet as well. (In true Google fashion, there’s Google Hangouts, Google Meet, and then in a calendar event, you can add videoconferencing and it’s called “Hangouts Meet”.)

Google’s gSuite is free for school districts, so it’s going to be the popular choice there. But other companies, such as Zoom, are enjoying/suffering a boom right now.

Also: try getting a webcam on Amazon. Brutal.

Soviet Trump

Masha Gessen, writing for the New Yorker, compares the Trump Administration’s response to the Coronavirus to the Soviet Response to Chernobyl. Perhaps more foundational, though, is this:

But the Trump Administration shares two key features with the Soviet government: utter disregard for human life, and a monomaniacal focus on pleasing its leader, who wishes only to look good and powerful. These are the features of totalitarian leadership. We have long known that Trump has totalitarian instincts, that he would want to establish total control over a mobilized society if only such an option were available to him. Fortunately for us, however weak American institutions have turned out to be, we have been a long way from the possibility of totalitarianism. But the coronavirus has brought us a step closer.

Pence’s super-weird praise of Trump after the super-weird press conference on Friday, March 13 is a precise illustration of this.

How the Coronavirus Pandemic Fuels Trump’s Autocratic Instincts

Mind the Gap

What Trump did not say is the problem, argues David Frum in *The Atlantic*:

He offered no guidance or policy on how to prevent the spread of the disease inside the United States. Should your town cancel its St. Patrick’s Day parade? What about theatrical productions and sporting events? Classes at schools and colleges? Nothing.

He offered no explanation of what went wrong with the U.S. testing system, nor any assurance of when testing would become more widely available. His own previous promises of testing for anyone who needs it have been exploded as false. So what is true? Nothing.

And on the one thing he did say?

There was one something in the speech: a ban on travel from Europe, but not the United Kingdom. It’s a classic Trump formulation. It seeks to protect America by erecting a wall against the world, without thinking very hard how or whether the wall can work. The disease is already here. The numbers only look low because of our prior failure to provide adequate testing.

The Worst Outcome

Farewell, MacSurfer

This is sad:

Dear MHN Readers:

Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease operations effective immediately. Please allow a few weeks to process forthcoming refunds. If need be, subscription inquiries can be addressed to the Publisher at the bottom of the Homepage.

Thanks kindly for your support, and thanks for the memories…

MacSurfer’s Headline News Team

MacSurfer was my homepage for many years, and if I had to guess, it was Google Reader that unseated it. It was curated by humans and always timely with the latest news.

MacSurfer

Keep It Adds Sketches, More

Keep It has been my digital junk drawer and reference filing system for the last six months or so. Today’s update adds the ability to add a sketch inside of an otherwise typewritten note, which is a welcome addition that brings feature parity with Apple’s own Notes app. There are other notable features, including automation enhancements.

I’ve been working on a review of the application, as it is in a class that I’ve always found useful since adopting Yojimbo many years ago. Stay tuned.

Keep It 1.8

Collapse and Expand All in OmniFocus on iPadOS

Speaking of iPadOS, I recently read about a useful gesture that involves one of the OS’s most simple gestures: the long press. To wit, in OmniFocus, you can collapse and expand all projects in a folder:

There is a corresponding keyboard shortcut as well. Like the shift-click, command-click, option-click, and other combinations, you can in fact discover quite a bit by experimenting.

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The Knives Come Out for iPadOS

iPad OS has been taking a beating recently (see here, and listen here, and here). There’s a joy to learning some of the gestures and developing some fluency with them (draw your inspiration from Matt Cassinelli), although, as critics have pointed out, the gestures are not discoverable.

Whatever concern this causes to power users and Apple watchers must, in my estimation, be tempered by the possibility that gestures are not inherently discoverable, but must be taught explicitly. A fact lost on such users is the degree to which keyboard shortcuts–visually discoverable by any user navigating an OS with a mouse–are often overlooked. I have had coworkers marvel at my speed in both Windows and Mac environments because of my fluency with basic key commands when such affordances where not new (think cut, copy, and paste).

Like users who prefer to drive with a mouse, you can use the iPad without understanding more esoteric gestures. I don’t want to do that, but there are “regular” users who find this approach perfectly serviceable.

On “Sunday Blues”

Joe Pinsker, writing for The Atlantic, on the dreaded Sunday Blues:

“This feeling, whether we call it anxiety, worry, stress, fear, whatever, it’s all really the same thing,” says Jonathan Abramowitz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Psychologically, it’s a response to the perception of some sort of threat.” The perceived threat varies—it might be getting up early, or being busy and “on” for several days in a row—but the commonality, Abramowitz says, is that “we jump to conclusions” and “underestimate our ability to cope.” For most people, he reckons, the stress of Sunday is uncomfortable but ultimately manageable—and they end up coping just fine. (And just as with other forms of anxiety, some people don’t feel the Sunday scaries at all.)

This is a fascinating article in that it looks at something most people can identify with, but attribute to a multitude of different sources. From psychobiological to sociological, hypotheses run the conceptual gamut. I remember listening to Henry Rollins, no stranger to hard work, once blaming the feeling that set upon him on Sunday nights on “school damage.”

I was mulling it over today and concluded for myself that it’s the notion of a “weekend” at all that causes the feeling: if you’re hunting and gathering or farming or otherwise living life a little closer to the metal, you don’t think about things in terms of five-day work cycles. You do what you have to do when you have to do it. It’s an affordance of our modern era–where we work for someone else–that we standardize some amount of time off.

And as is noted in the article, a four-day work week would be very welcome indeed. Those feel positively luxurious.

Why People Get the ‘Sunday Scaries’

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“I could not possibly eat as much as I would like to throw up.”

This nicely sums up how I felt after watching Trump’s State of the Union address this week. The outright lies, emotional manipulations, and dashing the last vestiges of governmental decorum upon the rocks of his pomposity.

David Frum, Writing for The Atlantic:

The president crammed his speech with blatant and aggressive lies. The Trump administration is not committed to protecting patients with pre-existing conditions; it has repeatedly sought to end this protection and is in court right now trying again. The U.S.’s position as the world leader in oil and gas production is not thanks to any action of Trump’s; the country moved into first place in 2012. Trump has not presided over any kind of “comeback” of the economy, which grew faster in the three years before he took office than in the three years since. Manufacturing employment has not recovered under Trump; because of his trade wars, manufacturing employment has crashed on his watch. Trump’s untruthfulness is notorious, but it’s still a departure to lie and mislead so often and so brazenly before all the assembled Congress.

Trump Is Defiling His Office