Recommended reads #170
Flatten the curve of armchair epidemiology
Math teachers should be more like football coaches
Why live teaching isn’t always the best
Plasma of COVID-19 survivors could save lives
Everyone thinks they’re right about masks [highlighted read]
Food safety and coronavirus: a comprehensive guide. I thought this was well-balanced, evidence-based, and practical. There are some extreme ones out there, and this isn’t that.
My children are now watching me. All day. Every day.
It turns out that our shortage of ventilators was successfully prognosticated thirteen years ago. And a great plan was formulated to address the issue. The government wanted to purchase a large fleet of inexpensive ventilators to be used in the event of a pandemic such as this one. They had companies bid to design and build these ventilators, and it turns out small outfit designed highly effective ventilators that could be produced at a fraction of the cost of the ones one the market today. The government contracted this work from them, and then, they got bought out by a much larger company that makes the expensive ventilators. And the work was never done. I found this story to be deeply revealing about what’s wrong with our healthcare system and crony capitalism. [highlighted read]
Reading Camus’s The Plague in the time of Coronavirus: “By writing about an infectious disease, Camus was emphasizing the relative unimportance, to him, of the motivations of the evil thing… Camus was as uninterested in self-mythologizing as he was in anatomizing the fascist mentality. The Nazis were not evil because they occupied an extreme position on the political spectrum but because they were enemies of life itself. Such an enemy lies, like the microbe, beyond reason [emphasis mine]. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is: What are my reasons? Why do I fight, and on whose behalf?”
Jared Kushner is going to get us all killed
Last year one Oxford college admitted 96% of its students from state schools. How did they do it?
Can my son get more worksheets before the world ends?
“Here is one of the most popular recipes The Times has ever published, courtesy of Jim Lahey, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery. It requires no kneading. It uses no special ingredients, equipment or techniques. And it takes very little effort — only time.”
Hey, let’s stay secure and connected to one another, everybody. Have a nice weekend. Whatever a weekend might be nowadays.