April Is Canceled
aprilcanceled.com
aprilcanceled.com
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."
> According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home.
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.
If 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.
Also everything could always be worse, so it's a mostly useless argument.
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.
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.
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).
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".
> 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
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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."
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.
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!
You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
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:
In 5 days: 77,596
In 10 days: 155,192
In 15 days: 310,384
In 20 days: 620,768
In 25 days: 1,241,536
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.
(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.