The Ministry of Silly Walks set a new standard for absurdity when the comedy sketch first appeared on Monty Python’s Flying Circus television show in 1970. But just exactly how silly were those walks? Extremely silly, new research suggests.
A team of scientists from Dartmouth University conducted a gait analysis on the walks performed by John Cleese (the minister) and Michael Palin (Mr. Pudey, a man applying for a grant to improve his own silly walk). The results appeared in the journal Gait & Posture.
“In the spirit of Monty Python’s humor, based on an actual gait analysis, a Dartmouth research team finds that the minister’s silly walk is 6.7 times more variable than a normal walk,” the university said in a statement on Thursday.
I think the fact that there is a journal called “Gait and Posture” is the funniest part of this article.
On the fourth floor of the Museum of the Bible, a sweeping permanent exhibit tells the story of how the ancient scripture became the world’s most popular book. A warmly lit sanctum at the exhibit’s heart reveals some of the museum’s most prized possessions: fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient texts that include the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.
But now, the Washington, D.C. museum has confirmed a bitter truth about the fragments’ authenticity. On Friday, independent researchers funded by the Museum of the Bible announced that all 16 of the museum’s Dead Sea Scroll fragments are modern forgeries that duped outside collectors, the museum’s founder, and some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. Officials unveiled the findings at an academic conference hosted by the museum.
“The Museum of the Bible is trying to be as transparent as possible,” says CEO Harry Hargrave. “We’re victims—we’re victims of misrepresentation, we’re victims of fraud.”
People typically think of soap as gentle and soothing, but from the perspective of microorganisms, it is often extremely destructive. A drop of ordinary soap diluted in water is sufficient to rupture and kill many types of bacteria and viruses, including the new coronavirus that is currently circling the globe. The secret to soap’s impressive might is its hybrid structure.
When you wash your hands with soap and water, you surround any microorganisms on your skin with soap molecules. The hydrophobic tails of the free-floating soap molecules attempt to evade water; in the process, they wedge themselves into the lipid envelopes of certain microbes and viruses, prying them apart.
“They act like crowbars and destabilize the whole system,” said Prof. Pall Thordarson, acting head of chemistry at the University of New South Wales. Essential proteins spill from the ruptured membranes into the surrounding water, killing the bacteria and rendering the viruses useless.
Fascinating how the seemingly most simple thing is one of the most effective.
the speed at which the outbreak plays out matters hugely for its consequences. What epidemiologists fear most is the health care system becoming overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of illness that requires more people to be hospitalized than it can handle. In that scenario, more people will die because there won’t be enough hospital beds or ventilators to keep them alive.
A disastrous inundation of hospitals can likely be averted with protective measures we’re now seeing more of — closing schools, canceling mass gatherings, working from home, self-quarantine, self-isolation, avoiding crowds — to keep the virus from spreading fast.
Epidemiologists call this strategy of preventing a huge spike in cases “flattening the curve.” Flattening the curve means that all the social distancing measures now being deployed in places like Italy and South Korea, and on a smaller scale in places like Seattle and Santa Clara County, California, aren’t so much about preventing illness but rather slowing down the rate at which people get sick.
Yeah, it sucks that our favourite events, sporting or otherwise, are being canceled but it’s not out of a sense of panic for the most part.
The fate of scripted television production is very much in flux as the world grapples with the coronavirus.
As of late Thursday evening, NBCUniversal has either suspended production or accelerated the season wrap schedules on 35 shows (scripted, unscripted and syndicated) as a precaution. CBS meanwhile, is taking a similar strategy and has done the same with a fair amount of its series. Other networks and studios are taking things on a case-by-case scenario. While every network, streamer and studio scrambled to make decisions about staffers working from home and what to do with series production, everyone had one thing in common: a sense of uncertainty given the unprecedented nature of the global pandemic.
By mid-Friday, Netflix had shut down all scripted TV and film physical production and prep for two weeks in the U.S. and Canada to comply with government restrictions in the regions. Disney TV Studios had shut down 16 pilots.
The news included a tidbit about Apple.
Apple, meanwhile, has suspended all active filming on projects from outside studios. That includes previously announced The Morning Show and Foundation, as well as See, Lisey’s Story, Servant and For All Mankind.
Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, is stepping down from the board of the company. Gates previously served as CEO of Microsoft until 2008 when he stepped down from the position in order to spend more time on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates stepping down from the board is apparently due to similar motivations, with a press release announcing the news citing a desire to “dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities.” Gates will still serve as a “technology advisor” to current CEO Satya Nadella.
This may be seen as minor news – Gates hasn’t been CEO since 2008 – but it’s still interesting.
Rene Ritchie joined me on this week’s show to talk about the effects of coronavirus on Apple and around the world. We also talked about the gear Rene is using right now, as well as his favorite Apple TV+ shows.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines for “community mitigation strategies” to limit the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, which include recommendations for “social distancing”—a term that epidemiologists are using to refer to a conscious effort to reduce close contact between people and hopefully stymie community transmission of the virus.
If you’re confused about what to do right now, you’re not alone—even these experts occasionally disagreed on the answers to my questions. Where there were discrepancies, I’ve included all the different answers as fully as possible. This guide is aimed toward those who are symptom-free and not part of an at-risk group, with an addendum at the end for those in quarantine. If you are symptom-free but are over 60 years old; have asthma, heart disease, or diabetes; or are otherwise at risk, experts recommend defaulting to the most conservative response to each of these questions.
There is a general consensus that while young and healthy people who are at lower risk for personally suffering severe illness from the coronavirus don’t have to be locking themselves in their homes for the next month, they do need to dramatically alter their daily lives, starting now.
As Canadians, we’re already good at social distancing. We hate when anyone gets within three feet to us.
What’s at stake in this coronavirus pandemic? How many Americans can become infected? How many might die?
The answers depend on the actions we take — and, crucially, on when we take them. Working with infectious disease epidemiologists, we developed this interactive tool that lets you see what may lie ahead in the United States and how much of a difference it could make if officials act quickly. (The figures are for America, but the lessons are broadly applicable to any country.)
Ignoring the inflammatory headline (by their own story, the situation doesn’t have to get worse/dire), the charts are a fascinating look at how important various forms of intervention are as well as how fast we implement them.
Apple has announced that this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will be held online due to the ongoing spread of the novel coronavirus.
The decision to move WWDC online was made due to the “current health situation,” Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller said in a statement. In recent years, the event has been held in San Jose. Developers sessions are usually posted online after the in-person event.
Typically, WWDC begins with a keynote to showcase the next versions of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS, and Apple dedicates the rest of the week to on-site sessions about developing for its platforms. But the company is taking a different approach this year holding those sessions and the keynote online. That could help prevent the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new virus, and create social distancing, which could prevent people from coming into contact with others who might be sick.
As predicted by myself and many others. This was to be expected given the situation the world finds itself in right now and is certainly the right decision. Apple tries to put a brave face on it saying, “This June, WWDC20 brings a completely new online experience to millions of talented and creative developers around the world.”
Apple also says it will “commit $1 million to local San Jose organizations to offset associated revenue loss as a result of WWDC 2020’s new online format.”
Two years ago historians marked the 100th anniversary of the Spanish Flu, a worldwide pandemic that seemed to be disappearing down the memory hole. Not so fast, said historians, we need to remember the horror. Happy belated anniversary, said 2020, hold my beer. And so here we are.
So let’s put our current moment into perspective with this 10+ minute history on the Spanish Flu from Cambridge University. Here are the numbers: it killed 20 million people according to contemporary accounts. Later scientists and historians revised that number to somewhere between 50 to 100 million.
“This virus killed more people in the first 25 weeks than HIV/AIDS has killed in 25 years,” says historian of medicine Dr. Mary Dobson.
As global efforts to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 virus continue, Apple has temporarily suspended Today at Apple sessions at all stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. The pause in creative programming follows a steady stream of daily new health precautions at Apple Stores and regional session cancelations earlier in the week.
Sessions were canceled at stores in New York City and surrounding suburbs earlier on March 12.
Today at Apple sessions are still suspended at stores in mainland China and Hong Kong which have reopened to customers, all stores in Japan, and across Italy, where all Apple Stores have been temporarily closed.
I wonder how long it will be or how worse it will get before Apple closes North American stores?
Apple Music has secured new deals for songs from major record labels that include Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music, reports Financial Times.
The licensing deals, which have been signed “in recent months,” will allow for music from popular artists like Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Adele, and others to continue to be streamed on the Apple Music service.
Speculation is that this will kill any bundling options Apple has for Music.
Apple Inc. has reopened all 42 of its stores in China after it was forced to close them last month due to the coronavirus outbreak in the country.
The closures were one of two primary reasons Apple cited for pulling its revenue forecast for the March quarter. China is Apple’s third biggest market.
Since shutting the stores, Apple gradually reopened them and 38 of the 42 stores were operating as of last week. The final four will open their doors on Friday local time, according to Apple’s website. An Apple spokesman confirmed the move.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association said Thursday that it had canceled its Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments because of the coronavirus pandemic, erasing one the most anticipated annual events on the American sports calendar.
“This decision is based on the evolving Covid-19 public health threat, our ability to ensure the events do not contribute to spread of the pandemic, and the impracticality of hosting such events at any time during this academic year given ongoing decisions by other entities,” the N.C.A.A. said in a statement that referred to the illness.
Although the N.C.A.A.’s president, Mark Emmert, said in an interview on Wednesday evening that he thought the limits on fan attendance had left the association in “the right place,” he declined to rule out the possibility of an outright cancellation. Within 24 hours, mounting fears — and a wave of conference tournament cancellations — led the association to scratch the national competitions.
Following a call with the 30 clubs, and after consultation with the Major League Baseball Players Association, Commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. today announced that MLB has decided to suspend Spring Training games and to delay the start of the 2020 regular season by at least two weeks due to the national emergency created by the coronavirus pandemic. This action is being taken in the interests of the safety and well-being of our players, clubs and our millions of loyal fans.
MLB will continue to evaluate ongoing events leading up to the start of the season. Guidance related to daily operations and workouts will be relayed to Clubs in the coming days. As of 4 p.m. ET today, forthcoming Spring Training games have been cancelled, and 2020 World Baseball Classic Qualifier games in Tucson, Ariz., have been postponed indefinitely.
Events are falling like Dominos. I still believe this is the most prudent action for everyone.
“In light of ongoing developments resulting from the coronavirus, and after consulting with medical experts and convening a conference call of the Board of Governors, the National Hockey League is announcing today that it will pause the 2019-20 season beginning with tonight’s games.
“The NHL has been attempting to follow the mandates of health experts and local authorities, while preparing for any possible developments without taking premature or unnecessary measures. However, following last night’s news that an NBA player has tested positive for coronavirus — and given that our leagues share so many facilities and locker rooms and it now seems likely that some member of the NHL community would test positive at some point — it is no longer appropriate to try to continue to play games at this time.
“We will continue to monitor all the appropriate medical advice, and we will encourage our players and other members of the NHL community to take all reasonable precautions — including by self-quarantine, where appropriate. Our goal is to resume play as soon as it is appropriate and prudent, so that we will be able to complete the season and award the Stanley Cup. Until then, we thank NHL fans for your patience and hope you stay healthy.”
Five years after its first smartwatch, the 2020 edition of the TAG Heuer Connected isn’t dramatically different. The team of 30, up from four and now based in Paris, is doubling down on the idea of watch craftsmanship, both on the hardware and in the digital watch faces, and adding its own custom Sports app for golf, running and cycling.
In our hands-on, the 45mm Wear OS watch is as premium-looking as ever; nothing apart from the Apple Watch and a few other luxury options from the likes of Louis Vuitton can match it on fit and finish. With stainless steel and a lighter, matte black titanium case, aimed at sportier users, available and a very slick chronograph design, it’s a familiar look.
Good luck. I’ve always been a fan of TAG Heuer’s design but I can’t afford an Apple Watch let alone a TAG Heuer with prices starting at £1,495 ($1,883 US) for the stainless steel model and £1,950 ($2,456 US) for titanium. But they do look good.
The NBA announced its current season is suspended indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The announcement comes after a Utah Jazz player tested positive for the virus. The results came shortly before some NBA games began on Wednesday night, forcing the NBA to halt its season with no clear end in sight.
The player, Rudy Gobert, was not present at the team’s scheduled game. The league, for the time being, is in lockdown mode. No games will be played until the NBA is confident that it can resume the season without further risk to the teams and fans.
The NBA made the formal announcement in a brief press release. As expected, the league didn’t offer an estimate on when play would resume.
This is the idiot in question:
Rudy Gobert thought it was funny to touch every single mic and recorder in the media room.
UPDATE: The NHL has also suspended its season. With the 2020 Major League Baseball season scheduled to begin on March 26, what do you think the odds are of Opening Day actually happening on that date?
why did it take a global pandemic for Amazon to consider that a policy that penalizes workers for taking unpaid time off when they are sick is fundamentally inhumane? Why is it still acceptable to put in place protective measures for some part of the workforce, but not for all? And when this outbreak – and the accompanying public pressure – subsides, will Amazon, Uber, Lyft and others go right back to the previous system of forcing the lowest-paid members of their workforces to either work while sick or go without pay?
The situation recalled to me the work of Jacob Remes, a history professor at New York University who studies disasters. Several years ago, when I interviewed Remes about homelessness, he told me: “What the category of disaster does is sort people into worthy poor and unworthy poor.” In America, if you are made homeless by a hurricane, you are considered “worthy” and are (usually) eligible for public relief or support. But if you are homeless due to job loss or eviction, you are generally viewed as unworthy – and scorned by politicians as a sponge on the system.
Coronavirus is now creating a new division – between the worthy sick and the unworthy sick.
And it’s not just tech workers. Give a thought to the folks working in the service industries such as hotel staff, fast food workers, waiters – people who rely not only on hourly wages but are required to show up in physical locations to receive those wages. And many of them have little to no benefits, medical or otherwise.
All Twitter employees must work from home until further notice in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19, the company announced today. Twitter had already “strongly encouraged” employees to do so in an announcement early last week, but is now making the directive mandatory across the world.
Twitter will continue to pay contractors, hourly workers, and vendors for standard working hours if they’re unable to perform their duties at home. The company will also be providing reimbursement for home office setup expenses, as well as for parents who may have to pay additional daycare costs.
We’ve gone from “Hey would you mind….” to “please do this…” to “Holy crap just stay home!”
It’s the mystery posed by every window and mirror, every piece of plastic and hard candy, and even the cytoplasm that fills every cell. All of these materials are technically glass, for glass is anything that’s solid and rigid but made of disordered molecules like those in a liquid. Glass is a liquid in suspended animation, a liquid whose molecules curiously cannot flow. Ideal glass, if it exists, would tell us why.
When you cool a liquid, it will either crystallize or harden into glass. Which of the two happens depends on the substance and on the subtleties of the process that glassblowers have learned through trial and error over thousands of years.
Exactly why the cooling liquid hardens remains unknown. If the molecules in glass were simply too cold to flow, it should still be possible to squish them into new arrangements. But glass doesn’t squish; its jumbled molecules are truly rigid, despite looking the same as molecules in a liquid. “Liquid and glass have the same structure, but behave differently,” said Camille Scalliet, a glass theorist at the University of Cambridge. “Understanding that is the main question.”
I had no idea there was any such thing as “ideal glass” and the line, “Glass is a liquid in suspended animation” kind of blew my mind. It’s one of those things you know but didn’t know.
In a study set to be published in the journal PLOS One, researchers from Penn State and Cornell University surveyed 2,020 people recruited through Qualtrics and questioned them based on interviews with officials at a dozen genomic governance organizations. The resulting reports, for those who wanted to participate, would provide detailed information on ancestry and risk forecasts for 20 genetically based health conditions.
Respondents could choose from one of four answers: “Willing as a charitable donation,” “Willing if I’m paid at least a certain amount of money,” “Unwilling, at least for now,” and “Unwilling, now or ever.”
Unsurprisingly, people were mostly down to share their data if there was money in it for them. Half of the participants said they would do so if compensated, compared to just 11.7 percent willing to do so as a simple act of charity. But, tellingly, 37.8 percent of participants were unwilling to provide their data whether they’d be compensated or not.
I never give up accurate data without getting something in return. You want me to fill out your survey? Pay me. No, not enter me into a draw. Straight up PAY ME.
“I never thought in a million years that I would be controlling nuclear weapons,” says 26-year-old 1st Lieutenant Janet Neufeld, a combat crew commander at F.E. Warren U.S. Air Force Base (AFB) in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Lt Neufeld admits that at the beginning of her own training, she was one of the many people who don’t realize the Air Force even deals with nuclear weapons.
In fact, this branch of the military is responsible for two-thirds of the country’s nuclear capabilities. In addition to Wyoming, there are two other Air Force bases, one in Montana and another in North Dakota, that house B-52 bomber aircrafts and 400 to 450 nuclear capable intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Each day, 90 people across all three bases are grouped in pairs and lowered about 60 feet underground into a missile command area called the capsule. They stay in the capsule for at least a full 24-hour shift manning a console that controls up to 15 ICBMs at a time. In short, there are 90 “missileers” constantly ready to jump into action if the President were to call for a missile launch. And on International Women’s Day, all 90 of those missileers are women.
This is an awesome and terrifying responsibility. Granted, it’s a puff piece but there are interesting tibits in it.
Law enforcement around the country have had varying degrees of success in trying to access evidence from locked iPhones seized from criminal suspects, Motherboard has learned as part of the most comprehensive analysis yet of iPhone search warrants.
Though some law enforcement agencies have accessed evidence on iPhones in the last year, many officials were unable to do so, adding nuance to the debate over whether the Department of Justice should continue its attempts to force Apple to create some form of backdoor in its products that law enforcement agencies could use to more reliably unlock devices.
The analysis found that federal authorities including the FBI, DEA, and DHS have extracted evidence from iPhones in crimes ranging from drug trafficking, to fraud, to child exploitation.
The cat and mouse game between Apple and law enforcement continues.
Apple is among 40 companies voicing opposition to recent bills introduced across the United States that target LGBTQ citizens. The businesses who signed the open letter, which was published today by the Human Rights Campaign, argue that these bills are bad for business.
Across the United States, more than one dozen bills have been introduced that would “affect the lives of LGBTQ employees.” The bills would attempt “to single out and target LGBTQ people for unfair and unequal treatment,” critics say.
The companies call on lawmakers to “abandon or oppose efforts to enact this type of discriminatory legislation and ensure fairness for all Americans.”
Apple has been very clear on its stance with regard to this issue.
Apple Inc. said it is closing all 17 of its retail stores in Italy “until further notice” as the coronavirus pandemic limits activity in the country. The Cupertino, California-based company previously shuttered all 42 stores in mainland China, but it has since reopened most of them.
Apple didn’t say when Italian stores will reopen, but it will “closely monitor the situation” and keep its online and phone support open.
“As we support the work to contain and manage the spread of Covid-19, our priority remains the health and safety of everyone in the communities we serve,” Apple said in a statement on Wednesday.
Italy has been severely impacted by the spread of the virus, which has killed more than 800 people there.
Italy has been devastated by the spread of the virus.
Newspeak House is a small tech-for-good organisation in the UK that has dropped everything to work on this handbook. It is a crowdsourced resource for technologists building things related to the coronavirus outbreak.
The information is aimed at the general public for public health advice, educational summaries, diagnostic questionnaires, surveys, and hygiene tips. It includes tools and best practices for working from home and guidance for organising and facilitating distributed events, meetings or conferences.
Lots of information here including models and forecasting, fighting misinformation, and tools for scientists. Thanks to my friend Jared Earle for the link.
