Category: Miscellany

At CEDR Digital Corps we continually explore how new technologies and tools can help the public better understand natural disasters. This Google Earth Studio animation of the “Apple Fire” currently burning in Riverside County, CA visualizes the results of the fire service’s infrared mapping flight last night, providing a unique perspective on the challenging terrain that firefighters face in battling this fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYWwsAz4F-I&feature=emb_logo #EmergencyManagement #TechnologyInnovation #RemoteSensing

Apple Fire August 3 2020 via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYWwsAz4F-I&feature=emb_logo

Well, I think even the Orange County Board of Education saw this one coming when they voted to recommend re-open all the schools without precautions and let God sort ’em out (I paraphrase) but here we are… ““We are now putting out guidelines that schools can open for in-person learning when the county is off our monitoring list for 14 days,” Newsom said at a Friday news conference. OC has been on the watchlist for roughly three weeks, along with most other large counties in the state, because of the rising number of cases and hospitalizations. Because of that, no OC schools can physically reopen, unless the county gets off the monitoring list and stays off for two weeks.”

Orange County Schools Likely to Have Online Learning Only at Start of Fall Semester via https://ift.tt/2DKzlVp

So Justin Hart , it would seem that you and “your team” have a bit of work to do. I look forward to your rebuttal tomorrow morning explaining how the fact that children do, in fact, make up a significant percentage of recent COVID-19 infections should have absolutely no bearing on if or how we re-open schools and how we should “just open the schools” because “there’s ZERO reason to do anything otherwise.” —————————————————————- Covid-19 Infections on the Rise in Kids and Teens With School Approaching —————————————————————- “As the school year draws near, children and teens represent a ballooning percentage of Covid-19 cases in the U.S. as the youngest Americans increasingly venture outside their homes and are able to get tested. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long maintained on its website that those younger than 18 make up only 2% of cases, state data paints a much less rosy picture. California and Mississippi, for instance, are recording rates nearing 10% of overall cases. Florida has found that about a third of all children tested there are infected.”

l.facebook.com via https://ift.tt/2ZCKvUA

Voice of OC has several excellent pieces on how hospitals are being impacted of COVID19 Orange County, one of which says “state officials said for the first time Wednesday they would soon be publicly disclosing hospital-specific data on a daily basis” …so that will be very revealing information to see if and when it is actually released. In the meantime, the same story also notes this one metric which is fairly disturbing: “OC emergency rooms have seen a large uptick in recent weeks in how often they temporarily close to new patients being delivered by ambulance due to not having capacity, known as “diversion.” Emergency rooms in the county temporarily closed to new ambulance transports for 235 total hours in the week ending Monday due to not having capacity, up significantly from 23 total hours in the full month of April, according to county data.”

Which Orange County Hospitals Are Most Impacted by Coronavirus? via https://ift.tt/2Zf2vnO

There are two bits of knowledge you need to appreciate this video (and the audio dub added to it). I’ll give you the first one: the video footage is real and was taken from local news station KTLA over Los Angeles on July 4th. (Sidebar: fireworks are, er, illegal in Los Angeles. So that worked out well). The second one? You either know it and will love it, or you don’t… I’ll tag Marc Danziger just ’cause I’m pretty sure he will know it…

LOS ANGELES, JULY, 2020 via https://ift.tt/3f3Qmb5

And now for a brief break from my seemingly non-stop Facebook Posts of Doom. (There’s still quite a bit of Doom, to be clear, it’s just even I have to think and write about not-entirely-Doom things occasionally). So here goes: My thesis is that music matters, and I’m here to talk about one particular musician: Gary Numan. I am a child o’ the ’80s with all that implies: I still have my Atari 800 that I learned to program on and the 1200 baud modem I surfed the BBS scene with on it. To me, “Gary Numan” was, well… “that Cars guy”. Cool song for what it was worth back in the day, but, ya know, eh, whatever. And then at some point ~ a month ago, I came across this version of Numan performing ‘Cars’ live with … Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. https://youtu.be/6qlUFKFHNIU After I got off the floor that I had been knocked on my ass upon, I said to myself “Self, this Numan character seems interesting. I wonder if he ever did anything other than that one song.” Spoiler / TL;DR : he did a whole hell of a lot. He’s been making music basically nonstop from his first hit in 1979 and is still working (and making new music) today. I haven’t yet listened to the entire album, but his latest, “Songs from a Broken World” in 2017, has at least two exceptionally good songs (“Ghost Nation” and “My Name is Ruin”). Anyhoo, besides my delight at finding that I truly love a lot of his music beyond ‘Cars’, something about the dude just charms me, so I signed up for his Patreon, which got me access to his (even more charming) awkward and honest video diaries (he’s a father now and by all I can tell, seems like a good one, and much of those are “so, child x has this going on so i had to drive her to…” kind of thing). So musicians make their living these days as I understand it mostly from touring and concerts, not album sales — and while Numan doesn’t sound like he’ll be out on the street anytime soon, I don’t get the impression that he’s rolling in huge $$$ either (despite the quality of his work, there’s a reason why I wasn’t aware of it; he had some bad luck and made some bad decisions in terms of how to try to drive his career and so kinda got screwed over by the music industry). So I was pleased on multiple levels to hear that he was going to do a concert tour in the UK soon. Wait, what, you say — CONCERTS? With like PEOPLE GATHERING? And Rob APPROVES? Well, yes. Because these aren’t normal concerts: they’re DRIVE-IN concerts: https://ift.tt/2VGWcar Limited to ~ 300 vehicles per show, with each having a dedicated zone around it ensuring social distance and space for people to get out and enjoy the show… sure, it is still *a* risk, but I commend the effort to find a way to keep life going while taking the crisis seriously. And of course… if you could pick one guy… who had one song… to be the one to do one of the first of these shows… you couldn’t do better than Numan. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I know what he’ll open with, and it’ll be epic…

NIN: “Cars” with Gary Numan, London 7.15.09 [HD] via https://youtu.be/6qlUFKFHNIU

Today’s OC Health metrics are out and the TL;DR is: Positive Cases: 456 Hospitalized: 485 ICU: 175 Deaths: 4 https://ift.tt/388sL6v More of note is that congrats y’all, we’re now officially on the state watch list for flunking key metrics; see this OC Register piece: https://ift.tt/38eBjbH …and you can see the state Naughty List for counties and which metrics they are failing here: https://ift.tt/3g7yEn9 What that means is if we don’t turn those numbers around in a few days, we’ll likely end up back to lockdowns mandated from the state. So let’s do our best – wear your masks, social distance, we know what we need to do let’s just *do* it…

occovid19.ochealthcare.com via https://ift.tt/388sL6v

My skeptical (but open-minded!) friend Tad Kaput was interested in data on people who survived COVID19 and how many of them seem likely to suffer medium- and long-term health impacts. This is just a brief commentary, not a data set, but anytime a NYC pulmonologist wants to tell me their experience with this disease, I’ll listen. (Somewhat annoyingly can’t link to the specific article; scroll down a bit or search on “recovery rates and the long-term health effects of Covid-19”) “What we’re seeing is that many of them, at least at one month of follow up, are still having significant pulmonary complaints, they’re short of breath. They’re still having chest pain. A lot of them still have abnormal X-rays. Many of them, up to 40 to 50 percent of them, still have abnormalities in their breathing that we can measure. A lot of them are having symptoms of post traumatic stress. Some of them have anxiety. Some of them are showing signs of depression. And the lung is not the only organ that was involved in this pandemic. Many of the patients have had neurologic abnormalities. A lot of them have kidney abnormalities. We’re going to see that there is a significant health care burden that’s going to be associated with the Covid pandemic for a very long time.” — Rany Condos, pulmonologist and director of the advanced lung disease program at NYU Langone Health “One of my colleagues is exactly my age, healthy. He got Covid. He came within a couple hours of being intubated. He was hospitalized for seven days, lost 15 pounds, had to go home on oxygen, and hasn’t been able to work for two months. He is so weak. This is a healthy 64-year-old man. We have seen issues with pulmonary compromise. We’ve seen issues with Myocarditis, with acute kidney injury. There’s beginning to be and this will likely be a longer term understanding of what effect has Covid infection on the brain. We know it can cause loss of taste. We know it can cause loss of smell. Does it do other things to the brain? And there’s been some initial suggestions that yes, there is. What about long term effects on the fetus? No one knows yet. Remember that everything we know about this virus is what, 22, 23 weeks old.” — Gregory Poland, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at The Mayo Clinic, director of the Mayo vaccine research group

Covid comes to Florida Man via https://ift.tt/2Z9pf7t