Week of March 9, 2020

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Greenhouse

Tom Hegen captures photographs of Dutch greenhouses from above. Incredible.

Hidden

The story of a secret.

Twitter avatar for
@humansofny Brandon Stanton @humansofny

(1/11) “It was just a normal morning. Almost exactly five years ago. I was making tea in the kitchen..."

February 5th 2020

11,380 Retweets26,397 Likes

Wealth

Alex Tabarrok critiques a post by Branko Milanovic that argues against comparing wealth over long time scales.

Bezos and Gates clearly are poor relative to people in the future who can choose to vacation on Mars. It seems absurd to me to think otherwise. Jeff Bezos has four children. Suppose one of them had cancer. If he could, do you think Bezos would hesitate for one minute to spend a billion dollars buying the medicine that will be available to an ordinary American in the year 2050? How much would Bezos pay for an extra 10 years of life? What about an extra 100? How much for a bionic eye, a dozen extra points of IQ, or freedom from Alzheimer’s disease?

Life

Gabe Lozano’s eulogy for his wife.

I suspect it’s only natural to think of what one would do if they knew the end was near. Unfortunately, Rachel and I now have firsthand knowledge. In practice, the end of my wife’s life felt like a highly accelerated version of the exact same unconditional love pursuit we’d been exploring for 14-and-a-half years. With the scariest moment of our lives just hours away, we first reverted to simple joys — like cuddling, eating more ice cream, and watching the latest episodes of This Is Us and A Million Little Things. Once settled in, we forced our minds to reimagine the bounds of unconditional love by circling back to a near-final draft of this eulogy — soaking in every single detail; processing the impact of death; and providing one another reassurance that in spite of an utterly incomprehensible situation, we were in this together.
On the morning of February 27, we glanced into one another’s eyes a final time, smiled, and each said, “I love you. Thank you for everything.” Rachel then closed her eyes and we leaped into the terrifying unknown.

Humanity

COVID-19 🦠

These are the best, most informative, and sobering articles and reports on the spread of COVID-19 and what we can do to stop the pandemic:

#FlattenTheCurve
Covid-19, your community, and you from the data scientists at fast.ai.
Why You Must Act Now does an incredible job at explaining how things are changing exponentially and what can be done to stop the spread.
Patient 31, a super spreader in South Korea.
On finally doing what has to be done is written by one of the creators of the The Prepared, a website about prepping.
So if I’m having such a hard time facing what needs to be done, and getting ready for exactly this type of scenario is my full-time job, then I have a lot of sympathy for the great many people who are in total denial that Covid-19 actually a big deal.

And a few tweet threads that bring a level of humanity that you don’t usually find in articles or on the news:

Twitter avatar for
@silviast9 Silvia Stringhini @silviast9

1/ I may be repeating myself, but I want to fight this sense of security that I see outside of the epicenters, as if nothing was going to happen "here". The media in Europe are reassuring, politicians are reassuring, while there's little to be reassured of. #COVID19 #coronavirus

March 9th 2020

28,912 Retweets49,000 Likes

Twitter avatar for
@jasonvanschoor Jason Van Schoor @jasonvanschoor

From a well respected friend and intensivist/A&E consultant who is currently in northern Italy: 1/ ‘I feel the pressure to give you a quick personal update about what is happening in Italy, and also give some quick direct advice about what you should do.

March 9th 2020

33,252 Retweets47,828 Likes

Twitter avatar for
@ScottGottliebMD Scott Gottlieb, MD @ScottGottliebMD

THREAD: In U.S. we face two alternative but hard outlooks with #COVID19: that we follow a path similar to South Korea or one closer to Italy. We probably lost chance to have an outcome like South Korea. We must do everything to avert the tragic suffering being borne by Italy 1/10

March 12th 2020

8,674 Retweets21,620 Likes

Twitter avatar for
@BryanDFischer Bryan Fischer @BryanDFischer

A chronological sampling of events from the day that was Wednesday, March 11.