We have…different interpretations of Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever. and Let's all become Isaac Newton this month.
...and do all that while spending the majority of your time on alchemy and occult christian mysticism. Then when you emerge from isolation transformed, move to a big city and execute a lot of men.
The paragraph you omitted between the cherry picked quotes explain that this month is a good time to try and do things you normally can't because you're normally too busy, like calling family, or cooking a new food.
I quoted like 10% of it, that's hardly cherry picking.
It's fine if we don't react the same to the tone, but that's what I responded to, and I sort of react to your "this month is a good time to..." in the same way. Lot's of people aren't on a nice vacation this month, for lots of different reasons.
Eh, some of us just have to keep working. No time to work on our magnum opus, because we're trying to remain productive in the ersatz offices we've cobbled together at home.
I feel for the parents. Some of my coworkers are struggling. Thankfully we're all lucky enough to still be working now but it's definitely tough. I'm the primary care giver for my father. While that's meant preparing his meds, preparing meals, and taking him to doctor's appointments, etc. With the closing of the senior lunch and his few friends unable to visit I'm now full time social director. Much more stressful than I'd have anticipated. On the other hand, he isn't a child and generally stays out of my way while I work.
Best of luck to you all. The number and variety of stressors right now is off the charts. Hope you and your families come out the other side stronger for it all.
This is obviously a luxury, but I've found having a separate room helps a lot. Putting my laptop to sleep and turning off the light acts as a transition.
If you don't have a separate room, you could also plug your computer in somewhere, and go on a short walk every day.
I was already not very into or committed to my job, so working from home made it even harder to focus (or care), and now I just spend most of my time playing video games
It isn't that I'm being forced to work more, it's that I end up working more because I never get out of 'work mode' psychologically. It's become too easy to jump on and start doing a code review or start the next ticket. I used to work 2 days a week from home, but the routine of the office the other three days was enough that I knew at 5 PM, even at home, that the work day is done. I don't have that routine anymore.
My home office for years was a walk-in closet. Just big enough for a small desk and a chair. Because I'd turned my old office into a server room, and it was too noisy.
But before I did that, I hacked used cube farm partitions into office space in said server room. It didn't actually work, because the scream of those 1U servers was very hard to block. But it would have been fine in the living room, or wherever.
I know I'm lucky to still have a job at a company that seems to be doing just fine despite the pandemic but I kind of wish I could have a month of time completely to myself
Nice but sadly also May (what did Newton do in his second month?)
The IHME models they chose to use are too optimistic, too many people aren't wise enough to understand or care how this works and won't be told what to do, there are going to be rather stubborn congregations for Easter.
NY state has 8 million people. The United states has about 320 million. Thus, assuming an equal distribution, I would expect NY to have about 1/40 the number as the entire country. 62000 / 40 = 1550, so actually New York has a lot more than one would expect.
I would expect there to be more ventilators today than 2010 (but I could be wrong).
Love how the third paragraph starts all positive and reasonable then suddenly segways into "Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup" and then an article about how "Hyperbitcoinization" is coming and how the modern economy is going to collapse from inflation.
Or...if you still have to work, then find a way to help a furloughed person be Newton for a month. Maybe a spouse or your kids. Maybe a stranger (from six feet away). Doesn't matter.
I wish I had time for any of that. I keep reading ideas for how to deal with the boredom of self-isolation, but nobody writes about the stress. My wife and I have to homeschool two kids while also doing our own jobs from home. We're lucky of course that we have jobs, and we can do them from home, and we have two awesome and healthy kids. But homeschooling while we work really is a bit much.
My feelings really go out to you. Hope you all come through healthy and caring for each other. Meanwhile, it's even tougher for people with kids at home who still have to go to work. Not all of us are lucky enough to be able to work with zoom and github.
In my country, only people with "vital" jobs, which means health care, police, emergency services, everything related to food (production, delivery), logistics, garbage collection, etc. still go out to work, and for them, child care is still available. Home workers have to handle their own children.
My wife and I are trying to manage a 6 year old and 3 year old and the original comment made me try to imagine what the theoretical hardest age to try to work from home with would be. 5mo and 2yr is roughly what I came up with in my head.
Not that it helps much, but you have my sympathy. If it feels like it's really, really hard, stressful, and frustrating it's because it is. And that's okay.
My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right).
It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.
Our twins are turning four in a couple weeks. I can't imagine being in that first year during this time. It felt like we were drowning, and that was just "normal" twins (plus a 5 year old).
My only unsolicited advice (because unsolicited advice is obligatory on the internet) is to cut yourselves a whole lot of slack. A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little in the grand scheme of things. Don't add any extra stress you don't need. Take any and all "shortcuts".
> A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little
I can second this. Some stuff we are told means very little as well.
I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old. My wife does not work (quit her retail job to have our second) so my situation is different. That being said, making sure everyone is eating and sleeping as much/well as possible takes everything we have.
I’m right there with you. I get so irritated seeing stuff like this because I wish I could use my time to get ahead but we are just trying to stay afloat. At least we got our health which is what really matters.
It's OK. Leibnitz[1] (who independently invented calculus) would also have had to be doing pull-ups for calculus to not have been invented. Although Newton not having invented calculus might also have hampered his contributions to physics, which would have been a great loss.
Something I just learned about Leibnitz from that Wikipedia article - he was also a pioneer in computing:
"He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of all digital computers."
Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn. It's expected that we will all mourn. The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone.
You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.
It's not at all absurd. Napkin math: 1% fatality rate * 60% infection rate * 7.8 billion people = 46.8 million deaths. You can plug in all sorts of adjustments, but millions is totally plausible.
Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths.
Most of us will live through this. Yes, the world will be a bit different, but different is not always worse. There may be some good things to come out of this around the world.
Keep calm. Wash your hands. Wear masks if you got 'em. Help out your friends and neighbors where you can.
If you're under 50 or healthy, it's effectively 100%.
That's not to minimize the very real human tragedy though. Just a bit of context. Remember that 650,000 people die of heart disease every year, and a lot of those deaths are preventable.
"Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever."
"Let's all become Isaac Newton this month."
Those comments come across pretty tone deaf to me. I imagine the person who wrote it doesn't have any young children and enjoys a relatively high degree of privilege.
Depends on how empty or full you think the glass is I suppose. Nothing wrong with encouraging others to be their best version of themselves in a time of crisis.
Like I said, people die every day. More are going to die during April. It sucks. Make the most of a bad situation. As an individual, nothing you do can move the needle (besides the social distancing and other guidance), so look inward.
I think that telling the millions of people living in poverty -- many of whom still have to go into the world and work in the face of great risks, others who will be out of work and struggling to feed their families -- that this is an opportunity for them to be like Isaac Newton is pretty tone deaf. A statement like this only works if you are only talking to people who have the privilege of a safety net.
There are approximately 40 million US citizens living in poverty. Try going to their houses and telling them that Isaac Newton invented calculus during the plague, so they should look at this as an opportunity for them to learn a foreign language or program an app. You might want to plan an escape route before you do so, though.
Sounds like they're advocating not sitting around playing video games or trying to make viral TikTok videos, and instead using the government mandated alone time to try and work on things that are difficult in our always-connected world. Just because not literally everyone can make use of this time doesn't mean they are tone deaf.
> Those comments come across pretty tone deaf to me. I imagine the person who wrote it doesn't have any young children and enjoys a relatively high degree of privilege.
A whole lot of millennials don't have children and won't anytime soon. Some of us don't have time, money, savings, security, or desire to do so. Assuming kids is what's tone deaf.
Its an s-curve with parameters that are changing by the hour and is sensitive to so many other variables. I’m definitely advocating as extreme a response as possible, but I see those numbers more as a pessimistic upper bound (necessary for people to take appropriate action).
This is correct. There were 1.9k new cases on the first of March. The dashboards I checked were out of date, but the latest is 75k new cases on the 30th. The curve ramped up around the 12th. And that's only people who were able to get a test. We have no idea how big this thing is.
Anyone would recognize that kind of growth as a breakout success if it were users on an app, but somehow they don't recognize the pattern with a disease.
I thought it would hit people how serious it was when sports stopped, movies stopped releasing, kids couldnt go to schools and people started scalping toilet paper.
Many more will die as indirect consequences from the pandemic. When health services are overloaded, chronic conditions get deprioritized, and emergencies are slower to handle. Not to mention all the jobs that simply stop existing or are endangered. I'm very afraid for my elderly relatives who in many cases live alone and can't afford to get sick or stop working.
I know that this will make it sooner than we thought for some, but for those who are going to die from this, this was always going to be their death date. I'm not trying to be insensitive and I'm not saying we shouldn't try our hardest to mitigate problems. We absolutely should. But when problems happen, lamenting has it's place, but only does so much good before it starts to do harm.
How do you know it will be worse for almost everyone? Parents will die, children will inherit windfalls (family farm? Dads truck?). Boomer politicians die, we see new blood in politics.
The reason is that people should not feel additional pressure to do amazing things right now. If they don't have the energy to learn Cantonese and build an app while their relatives are in ICU, that should be fine.
You really think pressure to do something and motivation to do something are entirely unrelated?
I get the guy's intent. Some people will like and be excited by this. Some people will feel sad and guilty. But even if he only had the first group in mind, he's addressing the whole world. The reaction from ecopoesis is a valid one, because it's not the message he needs. Where we aim doesn't matter as much as what we hit.
I think the pressure is non existent unless you somehow believe this webpage is aimed at people going through serious personal torment and/or turmoil rather than an equally large (or larger) number of people who are cooped up trying to adapt their daily life.
It would take some serious self righteousness to take this as a message to the former.
The issue I had with the response was the direct attack on the author's intent e.g. "fuck this".
There are plenty of other comments that state their disagreement or why it didn't land with them without taking it to the level of shutting down the op.
I don't understand the need to diminish the attempt at a potentially helpful mindset. It's helpful to some, pointless for others.
It is not just pointless for others. For some, it is harmful.
"Fuck this" is not an attack on the author's intent. it's a valid reaction to how it lands for some readers. If the pressure is nonexistent for you, great! But people other than you are also reading it.
Agreed. This is a very stressful time already, and we've got at least another year of this. If some people are insanely productive, great! Lucky them. But if the best people can do is staying home, taking care of themselves and their families, and not freaking out, they get a gold star as far as I'm concerned. No need to raise expectations.
Maybe. So far only a few thousand have died so how about toning down the fearmongering hysteria? Also, 60 million people die every year. Every single year with or without the pandemic. Actually, it's more likely we'll have a lower death total around the world as a result of this pandemic as quarantine has prevented people from dying in car crashes, other diseases, etc.
> It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number.
No. It's very unlikely even in your worst case scenario. Unless you have the loosest definition of "friends".
> The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone.
The world isn't going to be different. People are still going to eat, sleep, go to work, etc. Life will go on. Just like it did after the spanish flu, ww2, vietnam war, iraq wars, 9/11, etc.
> Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
Oh god. Stop watching the news. Unless you are paid to spread lies and fear, you aren't benefiting one bit from the hysteria. It doesn't help you, the toxic hysteria only hurts you.
There's the short-term: thousands of unfortunate deaths due to a respiratory virus
and the mid-term: environmental issues caused by the over-consumerism and excessive activity in our societies. We can feel it with those lockdowns, improvement in air quality, noise stress reduction, etc.. those factors cause millions human deaths every year, as soon as this frenzy will start again, let alone for the rest of animals and vegetables
> it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone
It could be, if we let it go that way. Or we could use this crisis to our advantage, learn from it and restructure things to be better for people in future.
This situation has exposed many problems that were already pervasive but just not as destructive to so many people as they are now showing to be under the stress our social system is being subjected to. The fact that so many people live paycheck to paycheck, that so many have poor access to healthcare, and generally have little to no safety net when times get just a little bad, through no fault of their own.
The pandemic has really shown how undervalued many of the most important workers in our society are and how fragile the systems we have in place are, due to the mismanagement of our institutions and the disproportionate power we have given to very greedy and callous people. We have an opportunity to reject the institutions in their current state and hold those in power to account for the crimes they are committing which are the same crimes they have been committing all along.
You could also rest. You don't need to force feed yourself creativity and productivity.
I don't mean to take anything away from the author, just seeing a lot of this sentiment on social media. Thought it would be worth voicing a counter balance.
Good advice to those of us who have the means to stay afloat, but it's not going to be just April the way things are going now.
Unless a working prophylaxis is found/confirmed May and June will be canceled too. That's what's unnerving about this whole situation: nobody knows what the endgame is. Say we're at the end of April. Then what? Open stuff back up? Not going to happen if opening it back up could realistically mean another 100K deaths before we shut everything back down.
So let's get those drug studies going in earnest, and lets rewrite the rules for what's "acceptable" in terms of regulation and rigor when faced with a potential death toll of this magnitude. I'm sure we can do more than a couple of studies at the same time, and in a shorter timeframe to preliminary results than "8 weeks" or "18 months".
Odds are you might see my paper on HN later this week if I'm right about what I discovered today. But the constant popped up while I was playing with a prime/integer model that allowed me to eliminate the complex space of any real system. However, today I realized the significance of what I had discovered the other day while playing with a 5-cell system and should lead me to finally end my research ongoing since August, which was to derive a prime number space--as silly as it sounds--but now that I have unlimited free time to work on the paper, things have escalated quickly. I started on this project because I needed an ambient space to work with topologies for a theoretical and highly decentralized/distributed, partition-tolerant, declarative, multiplexed L8 (yes, L8) protocol based on some of the entropic principles of digital communication Claude Shannon introduced, but not exclusively; it is semantically plain HTTP at L7 but is IP tunneled over HTTP/2 and the dat/ipfs protocols and runs on the WASM. Why I'm developing that protocol is another story, but I will say that, as a programmer, I done. Anyways, tomorrow I will see what the tide washes ashore.
> Let's not forget the time when Isaac Newton changed the world during a quarantine from the plague, he did not wait idle for the plague to end, he continued working in isolation in this serene place where the mind was set free and lead to many discoveries. Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever.
We could also just take some time to relax and focus on self-care because the current situation is really stressful for most people. I don't think everyone benefits from the added pressure of being expected to produce some great work with their time in isolation. Some of us just want to get through the work day and then spend some time playing video games or read a book.
Bleh. Clearly written by someone who isn’t trying to work a full time job without childcare for tiny children. This whole period will set the low watermark for my inadequacy as a parent and worker. Can’t wait for it to be over.
While the quarantine could provide a great opportunity for some to achieve great life goals, things could be quite different for parents working and caring for young children. With two working parents and a toddler at home, I'd be so happy to accomplish bare minimum work and home duties; pulling an Isaac Newton be darned!
I agree with the theme of this, but the company I work for has been taking the COVID lockdown as an excuse to have more remote meetings, some of which are late at night for me (since this company is based in California and I'm in NY).
I definitely agree with making the best of a forced quarantine, I've been trying to get my brother-in-law to study for his GED (or whatever they call it in NY), but it feels like for the happy few that have a remote-friendly job, this crisis has actually decreased my free time.
My wife has been working from 7am-6pm every day for the past two weeks including about 5 hours a day on the weekends. About every third night, she'll have a 9pm meeting too and skipped a 10pm meeting last night. She's taking fewer breaks during the day than she would at the office as well. WFH is beginning to take a toll.
She knows that she needs to be better about stepping away and has this week, but another new "crisis" this morning means long days ahead.
The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that might have helped people achieve great things: solitude.
Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching countless videos on the internet.
What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19, unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't need a pandemic to do deep work.
It's amazing how people here are managing to find fault in a 3 paragraph long inspirational post. You don't have to do any of this stuff, it's not a mandate, just a person on the internet arguing for something positive.
It isn't inspirational; I'm having a hard time settling on what I don't like about it, but it's not saying "look on the bright side", it's a rapid-fire machine gun of orders and demands, look:
> code that great app, learn a second language, donate blood, donate to your local food bank, do 5 pull-ups, then do 10, train like Arnold at home, learn about the current economy, learn about the future economy,
and they all ring with the same energy of a multi-level-marketing scheme, or a "death is coming, frantically DO THINGS" panic. Go shout that at your grandma, and see if she feels like being Isaac Newton afterwards.
> Let's all become Isaac Newton this month
Become offended by people criticising my ideas, take a 30 year sinecure job as Warden of the Royal Mint obtained by the patronage of an Earl, lose $3 million in the collapse of the South Sea Company, study the literal interpretations of the Bible, study Alchemy, sure I can do these things.
Oh you mean the cherry picked best bits of a 1-in-a-billion mathematical genius. Haha. Good one. Very inspirational and not at all depressing by comparison.
For me, the fault is that the author seems to have an extremely limited perspective - seemingly assuming that everyone has a bunch of free time and is in the position to throw all their energy into creative endeavors or self improvement.
The millions of people who are unemployed and facing unpaid bills are not focused on their start-up idea.
There are people right now at hospitals in critical condition. Their loved ones not allowed to visit them as they face the chance of death.
There are thousands of businesses on the verge or closing permanently. Their owners aren't sitting around thinking they can use the next month to do more sit ups.
There are countless families who must continue working while now taking care of children not allowed to return to school. Those families also now have to figure out how to actually teach their children so they don't fall behind.
On and on it goes... I don't find this page to be inspirational in the least. I find it to be self-centered and naive. Funny thing is, I wasn't really that bothered by it to start with, but the more I think about it, the more angry I get at the author.
This guy is saying take the silver lining if you can. This is a positive call to action, take it and be inspired to do something. This general sentiment applies to life in general.
There’s a lot of comments here focusing on the negative. I think we’re all well aware of the things that aren’t going well. I have empathy for all those impacted by the pandemic, it does suck.
But, forgot glass half empty, go for half full! There are all kinds of opportunities out there (not equality distributed of course), and it is up to you to get creative and leverage those opportunities available to you no matter how mundane they may be. Do it!
That's a nice sentiment but recent history doesn't have Newtons or von Neumanns showing up, and I've often asked why. In my opinion it's quite a serious question, will we ever see such genius again, why or why not?
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadIf you can’t do that you’re no Isaac Newton.
I had to search that on Wikipedia. This is referring to the men Newton prosecuted for counterfeit coins as part of his Master of Mint appointment.
It's fine if we don't react the same to the tone, but that's what I responded to, and I sort of react to your "this month is a good time to..." in the same way. Lot's of people aren't on a nice vacation this month, for lots of different reasons.
> According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home.
https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic
Best of luck to you all. The number and variety of stressors right now is off the charts. Hope you and your families come out the other side stronger for it all.
If you don't have a separate room, you could also plug your computer in somewhere, and go on a short walk every day.
But before I did that, I hacked used cube farm partitions into office space in said server room. It didn't actually work, because the scream of those 1U servers was very hard to block. But it would have been fine in the living room, or wherever.
Also everything could always be worse, so it's a mostly useless argument.
The IHME models they chose to use are too optimistic, too many people aren't wise enough to understand or care how this works and won't be told what to do, there are going to be rather stubborn congregations for Easter.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Ventilators run out way before ICU beds.
This predicts a peak usage of 32k ventilators, but I don't see any data for how many ventilators we already have?
If you take into account non-'full time' ventilators (not sure what these are but apparently they exist), the US has 99k.
NY State only managed to come up with 6500, feds finally gave them 4400 more but the federal "stockpile" turned out to be a lie.
There is also a good chance given how complex the machines are that many a decade old from 2010 are no longer functional?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
I would expect there to be more ventilators today than 2010 (but I could be wrong).
Not that it helps much, but you have my sympathy. If it feels like it's really, really hard, stressful, and frustrating it's because it is. And that's okay.
It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.
My only unsolicited advice (because unsolicited advice is obligatory on the internet) is to cut yourselves a whole lot of slack. A lot of stuff we worry about as parents means very little in the grand scheme of things. Don't add any extra stress you don't need. Take any and all "shortcuts".
I have a 3 year old and a 3 month old. My wife does not work (quit her retail job to have our second) so my situation is different. That being said, making sure everyone is eating and sleeping as much/well as possible takes everything we have.
"You are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
----
Something I just learned about Leibnitz from that Wikipedia article - he was also a pioneer in computing:
"He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of all digital computers."
You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
wat
god bless the us :')
because you're right and i respect your judgemental ability ;)
Or another way to look at it is that the US could easily see 100k deaths. [1] The us is about 1/20th of the world population, so scaling up we get 2 million deaths.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/world/coronavirus-live-ne...
(before you downvote, please appreciate the subtle dark pun)
In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798.
In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled.
So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this:
Unless things change really really quickly.I get the tone you're trying to convey, but a 98% event isn't a miracle.
Most of us will live through this. Yes, the world will be a bit different, but different is not always worse. There may be some good things to come out of this around the world.
Keep calm. Wash your hands. Wear masks if you got 'em. Help out your friends and neighbors where you can.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/health/coronavirus-lower-deat...
If you're under 50 or healthy, it's effectively 100%.
That's not to minimize the very real human tragedy though. Just a bit of context. Remember that 650,000 people die of heart disease every year, and a lot of those deaths are preventable.
"Let's all become Isaac Newton this month."
Those comments come across pretty tone deaf to me. I imagine the person who wrote it doesn't have any young children and enjoys a relatively high degree of privilege.
Like I said, people die every day. More are going to die during April. It sucks. Make the most of a bad situation. As an individual, nothing you do can move the needle (besides the social distancing and other guidance), so look inward.
There are approximately 40 million US citizens living in poverty. Try going to their houses and telling them that Isaac Newton invented calculus during the plague, so they should look at this as an opportunity for them to learn a foreign language or program an app. You might want to plan an escape route before you do so, though.
A whole lot of millennials don't have children and won't anytime soon. Some of us don't have time, money, savings, security, or desire to do so. Assuming kids is what's tone deaf.
Is it okay for me to just shed the equal amount of tears, or are people then going to accuse me of being emotionally stunted?
In the last 5 days (data from CSSEGISandData) the total number of deaths (excluding china) has doubled from 20679 to 38798.
In the 5 days before that, the total number of deaths (excluding china) also doubled.
So worldwide (excluding china) the total number of deaths looks like this:
Unless things change really really quickly.And I as well hope things are changing quickly...
Glass is half empty for you then, right?
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-could-kill-more-...
Several million worldwide seems very possible. People downplaying this for too long is a large part of why it's gotten so bad already.
Why worry? There's only 15 cases in the US. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my state. Why worry? There's only 15 cases in my county.
Who knows what it will look like in 2 weeks.
Anyone would recognize that kind of growth as a breakout success if it were users on an app, but somehow they don't recognize the pattern with a disease.
I know that this will make it sooner than we thought for some, but for those who are going to die from this, this was always going to be their death date. I'm not trying to be insensitive and I'm not saying we shouldn't try our hardest to mitigate problems. We absolutely should. But when problems happen, lamenting has it's place, but only does so much good before it starts to do harm.
Does it work for everyone? No. Of course not.
But a "fuck this"? Why? If it works for people, good, if not, move on. No reason to bring down someone for trying.
You'd have to be willfully misinterpreting the intent to think this was aimed at people dealing with personal loss.
I get the guy's intent. Some people will like and be excited by this. Some people will feel sad and guilty. But even if he only had the first group in mind, he's addressing the whole world. The reaction from ecopoesis is a valid one, because it's not the message he needs. Where we aim doesn't matter as much as what we hit.
It would take some serious self righteousness to take this as a message to the former.
The issue I had with the response was the direct attack on the author's intent e.g. "fuck this".
There are plenty of other comments that state their disagreement or why it didn't land with them without taking it to the level of shutting down the op.
I don't understand the need to diminish the attempt at a potentially helpful mindset. It's helpful to some, pointless for others.
"Fuck this" is not an attack on the author's intent. it's a valid reaction to how it lands for some readers. If the pressure is nonexistent for you, great! But people other than you are also reading it.
Maybe. So far only a few thousand have died so how about toning down the fearmongering hysteria? Also, 60 million people die every year. Every single year with or without the pandemic. Actually, it's more likely we'll have a lower death total around the world as a result of this pandemic as quarantine has prevented people from dying in car crashes, other diseases, etc.
> It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number.
No. It's very unlikely even in your worst case scenario. Unless you have the loosest definition of "friends".
> The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone.
The world isn't going to be different. People are still going to eat, sleep, go to work, etc. Life will go on. Just like it did after the spanish flu, ww2, vietnam war, iraq wars, 9/11, etc.
> Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
Oh god. Stop watching the news. Unless you are paid to spread lies and fear, you aren't benefiting one bit from the hysteria. It doesn't help you, the toxic hysteria only hurts you.
and the mid-term: environmental issues caused by the over-consumerism and excessive activity in our societies. We can feel it with those lockdowns, improvement in air quality, noise stress reduction, etc.. those factors cause millions human deaths every year, as soon as this frenzy will start again, let alone for the rest of animals and vegetables
It could be, if we let it go that way. Or we could use this crisis to our advantage, learn from it and restructure things to be better for people in future.
This situation has exposed many problems that were already pervasive but just not as destructive to so many people as they are now showing to be under the stress our social system is being subjected to. The fact that so many people live paycheck to paycheck, that so many have poor access to healthcare, and generally have little to no safety net when times get just a little bad, through no fault of their own.
The pandemic has really shown how undervalued many of the most important workers in our society are and how fragile the systems we have in place are, due to the mismanagement of our institutions and the disproportionate power we have given to very greedy and callous people. We have an opportunity to reject the institutions in their current state and hold those in power to account for the crimes they are committing which are the same crimes they have been committing all along.
I don't mean to take anything away from the author, just seeing a lot of this sentiment on social media. Thought it would be worth voicing a counter balance.
Unless a working prophylaxis is found/confirmed May and June will be canceled too. That's what's unnerving about this whole situation: nobody knows what the endgame is. Say we're at the end of April. Then what? Open stuff back up? Not going to happen if opening it back up could realistically mean another 100K deaths before we shut everything back down.
So let's get those drug studies going in earnest, and lets rewrite the rules for what's "acceptable" in terms of regulation and rigor when faced with a potential death toll of this magnitude. I'm sure we can do more than a couple of studies at the same time, and in a shorter timeframe to preliminary results than "8 weeks" or "18 months".
(Kidding! I kid!)
What properties of Poletopole's constant make it interesting?
> Let's not forget the time when Isaac Newton changed the world during a quarantine from the plague, he did not wait idle for the plague to end, he continued working in isolation in this serene place where the mind was set free and lead to many discoveries. Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever.
What they give examples of doing:
> call your dad
Give me a break.
I definitely agree with making the best of a forced quarantine, I've been trying to get my brother-in-law to study for his GED (or whatever they call it in NY), but it feels like for the happy few that have a remote-friendly job, this crisis has actually decreased my free time.
She knows that she needs to be better about stepping away and has this week, but another new "crisis" this morning means long days ahead.
Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching countless videos on the internet.
What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19, unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't need a pandemic to do deep work.
> code that great app, learn a second language, donate blood, donate to your local food bank, do 5 pull-ups, then do 10, train like Arnold at home, learn about the current economy, learn about the future economy,
and they all ring with the same energy of a multi-level-marketing scheme, or a "death is coming, frantically DO THINGS" panic. Go shout that at your grandma, and see if she feels like being Isaac Newton afterwards.
> Let's all become Isaac Newton this month
Become offended by people criticising my ideas, take a 30 year sinecure job as Warden of the Royal Mint obtained by the patronage of an Earl, lose $3 million in the collapse of the South Sea Company, study the literal interpretations of the Bible, study Alchemy, sure I can do these things.
Oh you mean the cherry picked best bits of a 1-in-a-billion mathematical genius. Haha. Good one. Very inspirational and not at all depressing by comparison.
The millions of people who are unemployed and facing unpaid bills are not focused on their start-up idea.
There are people right now at hospitals in critical condition. Their loved ones not allowed to visit them as they face the chance of death.
There are thousands of businesses on the verge or closing permanently. Their owners aren't sitting around thinking they can use the next month to do more sit ups.
There are countless families who must continue working while now taking care of children not allowed to return to school. Those families also now have to figure out how to actually teach their children so they don't fall behind.
On and on it goes... I don't find this page to be inspirational in the least. I find it to be self-centered and naive. Funny thing is, I wasn't really that bothered by it to start with, but the more I think about it, the more angry I get at the author.
There’s a lot of comments here focusing on the negative. I think we’re all well aware of the things that aren’t going well. I have empathy for all those impacted by the pandemic, it does suck.
But, forgot glass half empty, go for half full! There are all kinds of opportunities out there (not equality distributed of course), and it is up to you to get creative and leverage those opportunities available to you no matter how mundane they may be. Do it!