Parvusimperator is on vacation this week, both from our day job and from the Soapbox, so with the exception of one or two items from the end of last week, this one’s all me.

Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague

• Your correspondent is under the weather, but it’s not the coronavirus¹ – That said, if you have to pick a time to catch it, ‘first case in your region’ is second only to ‘the last person to catch it’.
• Universities moving to online courses – The undergraduate alma mater of the Soapbox contributors and the alma maters² of several Soapbox associates
• Coronavirus dashboard of the week – This one shows US infections by county. Note that the counts on the map do not appear to be entirely accurate, but at the very least, they give you an idea of density on a sub-state level.
• Honorable mention: avatorl.org’s Compare Countries 2 – Compare how long it takes countries to go sub-exponential.
• There are at least two active Wuhan coronavirus strains
• Also, it can linger in the air for up to 30 minutes, or on certain surfaces for several days
• This isn’t the next Spanish flu
• How did the CDC screw up coronavirus testing so badly? – Okay, to be fair, this only touches on how they screwed up coronavirus tests in the technical/scientific sense.
• Gates Foundation working on home-testing kits for COVID-19 – Isn’t technology awesome?
• How did the CDC screw up coronavirus testing so badly? – This one strikes more to the heart of the issue. (Thanks, NYT.)
• A coronavirus survivor tells his story

Defense

• Turkey’s UAV fleet strikes Russian-made air-defense assets in Syria
• Marines bringing back the land-based Tomahawk
• Historical photo of the day: Hellcats and Corsairs lined up in Vought’s factory, waiting to be shipped
• Japan retires its last Phantoms – Farewell, old girls!
• Britain can’t afford new weapons
• China can – Another new amphibious assault ship is launching soon. On that note, the Johns Hopkins coronavirus dashboard now calls Taiwan ‘Taipei and environs’.
• A new weapon system: armed UAVs launched from shipping containers – By Kratos Defense. A relative of mine works there!
• ERCA fires test shots 40 miles
• Statistics, models, and mine-hunting – It looks interesting, but since I’m under the weather, as I said, everything gets a little blurry.

Science and Technology

• A SpaceX launch photo you’ve never seen before – Long-exposure plume interactions between the first and second stage of the final CRS mission, showing the second stage’s engine igniting and the first stage starting its boostback burn.
• Russian submarine design bureau un-biased-ly proposes enormous LPG tanker submarine – Why would you think they have a vested interest in selling submarines? Don’t be absurd.

Grab Bag

• Little Mikey’s Wild Ride – Inside the Scrooge McDuck-style money pool which was Bloomberg’s run at president.
• Inside the world of Silicon Valley VCs – In which 20-somethings fresh out of college determine which startups will succeed and which will not.
• What does it cost to run a successful Boston restaurant? – A deep dive into one particular restaurant’s books.