Friday Link Pack #4
Future Crunch seriously nailed it in this week’s edition. So much good stuff in there, but here are some of their quick links from near the end of the newsletter:
At the beginning of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored
“I never hear scientists, true scientists, good quality scientists, speak in terms of nationality.” Never before have so many of the world’s researchers focused so urgently on a single topic. Nearly all other research has ground to a halt. — NYTAn open dataset of 47,000 articles on coronavirus has been created by Google and made machine readable, meaning researchers can use AI to generate insights. — Kaggle
Researchers from around the world have set up an online platform for volunteers who want to help them fight the coronavirus. There already over 35,000 volunteers.
There are now 95 treatments and 52 vaccines in development for COVID19 in over 200 clinical trials in the US, China and EU. — Milken Institute
The largest of these is being run by Oxford University. Almost 1,000 patients from 132 different hospitals across the UK with thousands more expected to join. — Harrogate
The Gates Foundation is building seven factories for each of the top seven vaccine candidates. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, so we don’t waste time.” — BI
Over a million people have joined up to create the world’s largest networked supercomputer, and it’s just successfully simulated the opening motion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus spike protein. — Folding@Home
The Stockdale Paradox (H/T Daring Fireball)
Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest-ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton. He was there for, I think, seven years, from 1968 to 1974. He was tortured over twenty times. And by his own account, Stockdale came out of the prison camp even stronger than he went in.
In preparation for a day I got to spend with Jim Stockdale, I read his book In Love and War. As I read this book, I found myself getting depressed because it seemed like his systemic constraints were so severe, and there was never going to be any end to it. His captors could come in any day and torture him. He had no sense of whether, or if, he would ever get out of the prison camp. Absolutely depressing situation. It’s like we can all survive anything as long as we know it will come to an end, we know when, and we have a sense of control. He had none of that.
A deeper look at Apple’s latest changes and how the affect PWAs, via Ionic.
TL;DR: if it's a home screen app the 7 day counter will never be hit, and if you’re using Capacitor/Cordova there is no counter as they use WKWebview.
Criterion announce “War Of The Worlds” Blu-ray
Really hoping this gets a UK release, that film is incredible.