By order of the Central Commission for Calendrical Gynmastics, today is Wednesday for the next, oh, three to five minutes.

Wuhan Coronavirus

• Or COVID-19, according to the WHO – Because we live in an era where calling something by an easily-recognizable, human-friendly name is insensitive. Not being deeply concerned with sensitivity here, we’re going to stick with ‘the Wuhan coronavirus’.
• A snippet of an interview with the director of the NIH
• A paper and associated model on the start date of the outbreak, from the University of Toronto
• Big spike in cases in Hubei province… – … caused by changing methods of diagnosis. Namely, lung imaging can now be used, which may sweep up some unrelated pneumonia cases, but how many of those are there, really?
• Incubation period may be as long as 24 days instead of the standard two-week quarantine – That’s just how I’d design a virus if I wanted it to spread in spite of control efforts.
• Epsilon Theory remarks on the epidemic – I agree that China’s numbers are probably still under-reported, but disagree that, as the author thinks, we should be seeing exponential growth—that’s only the case if there are no efforts at control, and there’s been quite a lot of ink spilled over the past month or two about just such efforts.

Defense

• Ukrainian armed forces still using the Maxim gun – “Whatever happens, we have got/the Maxim gun, and they have not” – Hilaire Belloc
• OMFV no longer has a 2026 deadline – The resurrected OMFV, not the one they recently canceled. As ever, the Soapbox thinks the odds-on favorite for OMFV 2.0 is ‘canceled before entry into service’.
• US Navy to retire four of the early LCS hulls – Two of each type. The oldest ship is twelve years old. The youngest is six.

Science and Technology

• Jailbreaking used Teslas – Tesla, in the same manner as noted corporate villain John Deere, believes that a durable good and the software that powers that durable good are sold separately. Buyers of used Teslas rightfully do not like this.

History

• Navy ordered to release documents on USS Thresher – We’ll link to them when the Navy gets around to releasing them.

Guns

• Customs and Border Patrol clearly like their iron sights and don’t want to switch to optics – That’s my takeaway from the preposterous list of requirements, anyway.

Lighter News

• Texas DOT has a sense of humor about misspellings – Which is news to me; having lived briefly in Texas, I’m surprised TxDOT has a sense of humor about anything.