Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• This coronavirus dashboard lets you play with the data in a huge number of ways – Linked is the country comparison page, which is far and away the niftiest one. It lets you answer questions like, “How bad is it in Iran compared to Italy?”
• Zerohedge: China, lying on official numbers? – Say it ain’t so!
• A biochemist’s analysis of Trump’s coronavirus news conference – It’s from last Thursday, so analyzing it now will almost certainly yield a ton of fun ‘well that’s out of date’-ing.
• Welcome to Coronavirus Central – Well, Italy, which is more like Coronavirus Satellite 2, but nevertheless.
• Singapore’s Health Minister makes a statement on the coronavirus – Singapore, as you might expect, is well on top of things.
• Singapore’s dashboard is an information gold mine/privacy nightmare hell-pit – Depending on your point of view. Cases->Network Graph is particularly awesome/scary.
• Perspective: the numbers aren’t as bad as they seem
• Counter-perspective: it’s much worse for the rest of the world than it is for China – I don’t quite agree with the undercurrent of ‘China dealt with it, and we should be willing to take similar extreme measures’. I do think the individualist West is poorly suited to the task of containment, though. China could authoritarian-lockdown its way to safety. On the fate of other Asian peoples, I point to the Japanese and the habit of wearing masks not to prevent getting sick but to prevent transmission. That’s just not the sort of thing that happens in the West.

Defense

• Turkey to allow refugees from Syria in
• It must be nice for Britain, being a carrier power again – Photo of Prince of Wales‘ vast flight deck.
• Then and now: who does it take to get a carrier aircraft into the sky? – Thursday update: fixed a possibly-broken link.

Science and Technology

• When Mars simulations go wrong – What happens when a fake Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano has a real life-threatening problem?
• What’s beneath the lunar regolith? – A lot more regolith, it turns out, thanks to China’s dark side Chang’e 4 over on the dark side.
• Adversarial attacks can easily defeat reinforcement-learning neural networks – By ‘easily’ I mean with 50 times less effort than learning in the first place. Take a look at the two GIFs in the article; they’re a good indication of what this actually means.
• Cloudflare goes AMD – At this point in processor development, it’s irresponsible not to. The price/performance ratio is absurdly slanted in AMD’s favor right now.
• How is software so reliable without being mathematically proven? – Although I object to the implication in the title,

American Sportsball

• Tom Brady to leave the Patriots? – C’mon, Oakland…

Grab Bag

• Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai arrested – Staunchly anti-mainland. I wouldn’t call it entirely unexpected, but I am a little surprised China’s moving right now. Maybe they want to combine the flak they’re taking for anti-democratic moves with the flak they’re taking for coronavirus response?