I’m working on a tightly-estimated customer project at work these days, so I haven’t been doing as much reading during the day, nor as much blog-post-assembling. Sorry for the wait!

Coronavirus

• NYC social distancing narc line flooded with obscenities
• Digital media taking a coronavirus-related drubbing – Which is kind of a surprising outcome to me. You’d think that online publications advertising things you can ordinarily order online would be doing pretty well.
• New York City: mask-wearing mandatory; New York State: mask-wearing is a crime
• Did Vietnam react to the coronavirus quickly because its state-sponsored hackers knew the extent of the issue in China? – If so, yet another item in my ‘we’re living the cyberpunk future’ file.
• A gaijin living in Japan reports on the state of Japanese hospitals
• The wuflu causes blood clotting problems – At least, that was the story on April 22.
• Analyzing wuflu super-spreader events to reason about its mode of transmission – The author comes down on ‘large droplets’ as the most common mode, which means that wearing just about any mask will make you safer. Relatedly, any bets on when it’ll go back to being strange to see someone wearing a mask in a grocery store?
• COVID sparks hunger around the world

Defense

• A Viking pilot reminisces on late-Cold War carrier aviation – Good read.
• Bombers on Guam are over, Lancer sorties from South Dakota to Japan and back are in
• Airbus tanker carries out world-first automatic refueling contacts – That is to say, a boom tanker without a boom operator.
• Hornet entering the pattern at 600 knots – That’s a little on the spicy side.
• Parvusimperator’s AFV Photo Pick of the Week
• Pentagon confirms three UFO videos are authentic – Not that they show aliens, but that they show unidentified objects. So, who’s the audience, and what’s the message? Not ‘UFO cranks/aliens are out there’, I would guess, but rather, ‘Hey, Commies, bet you don’t have flying saucers like we do’.
• Multiple shipyards for FFG(X)? – ‘A handful of viable shipyards’ seems like a worthy policy goal.

Science and Technology

• This guy has a fleet of homemade trucks powered by Harbor Freight 6.5hp engines – If I had some land…

History

• A series of videos on the Bronze Age Collapse – And perhaps a warning to hyper-interconnected modern societies? I saw a guy on Twitter ask whether Singapore or North Korea has greater food security. Granted, I agree with him that the answer is Singapore in almost every case, but there are moderately-plausible scenarios where the answer flips. If the merchant republics of Italy and their dealings with the Ottoman Empire are any indication, tiny rich city-states have some serious downsides in times of strife.