Universities
Almost half of them may be gone within a decade.
Good riddance. This was a bubble waiting to be popped, and the pandemic was the pin.
D-Day
It was the invasion that saved the world.
Last year was a much bigger deal, because it was the 75th anniversary, and there’s a lot more going on this weekend.
[Update a while later]
This year, the beaches and fields are empty.
[Sunday-morning update]
First link fixed, sorry.
[A few minutes later]
What if the invasion had failed?
Counterfactuals are always dicey.
Artificial Red Blood Cells
…that may perform better than natural ones. That would be a life saver in many cases.
The Lockdown
May have saved no lives, and cost many.
It’s appearing more and more to me that that was the case. It was perhaps the biggest blunder in human history.
The FBI Investigation Into Trump/RUssia
Now looks even worse. One wouldn’t have thought that possible, but here we are.
Meanwhile, the slapfight between Rosenstein and McCabe has begun.
George Floyd
Herd Immunity
This is good news, if true. It could explain why it hasn’t been worse, and probably won’t get worse.
Amazon Warehouse Fire
When I saw the headline, I wondered where in LA it was. But the hed is wrong; Redlands is nowhere near LA. It’s east of San Bernardino.
It does look suspicious, though.
Shackleton
We watched a documentary about the expedition last night. I was struck for the first time by the parallels with Apollo 13: A near disaster from which they recovered only through ingenuity and endurance (the ship was aptly named).
I only mentioned him in the book in terms of the probably apocryphal ad in the Times of London. If I ever do a new edition, I’ll probably talk more about that, as I did with Magellan.