Test 2

Now that we've been in this living secluded/self-isolation/working remotely for a few weeks, the daily chatter around my house has started to change. While the conversation still includes concerns for health and safety, we have also started to realize some of the benefits (hopefully?) of this whole social distancing thing.

Case in point, Mother Earth seems to be doing some healing as a result of us all staying the f**k at home:

“Nitrogen dioxide is produced by fossil fuel burning and therefore often used as an urban pollution tracer,” Barbara Dix, an atmospheric researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Earther in an email. “Burning fossil fuels directly emits a lot of nitric oxide and a little nitrogen dioxide (often referred to as NOx together), but the nitric oxide is rapidly converted into nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere. Nitrogen dioxide can easily be measured by satellite.”

Given that fossil fuels power everything from cars to electricity, nitrogen dioxide satellite imagery really does show the impact covid-19 is having on society like no other dataset. There are clear signs of the virus’ impact all around the world, and we’ll dive into some U.S. examples below. But it’s also important to note a few small caveats as you scroll around the map and look at the before and after images.

The data presented here is a series of single-day snapshots. Weather patterns can blow pollution around and disperse it while rain and even the level of sunshine can further change readings taken by Sentinel-5P. There are also natural sources of nitrogen dioxide that can affect readings. The data in Google Earth Engine isn’t necessarily quality filtered. Dix noted that means clouds can mess with readings, which may be why on the interactive map there are some rougher-looking areas like northern New England in March or signs of pollution in the Seattle area where there may not be much. It will take researchers time to really dive into the data and filter it to get a fine-scale understanding of covid-19's impact on air pollution. Despite these caveats, the trends in many major cities around the U.S. are staggering and clearly at least in part tied to the changes forced by the covid-19 pandemic.

“The rapid decrease we see in nitrogen dioxide due to covid-19 is unprecedented,” Dix said. “We are now witnessing a global experiment where one emission source is rapidly turned down (NOx), while other sources are still up or will decrease more slowly. A lot of atmospheric science will come out of this.”

...and for those of us in the northeastern United States:

The populous area stretching from Boston to Washington, DC, is the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak and also a hub of economic and political activity. It’s also an area where states and cities have moved quickly to shut down non-essential services to slow the virus’ spread.

Though New Yorkers aren’t as car-dependent as their Los Angeles counterparts, there are still plenty of vehicles normally on NYC roads and dense clusters of buildings emitting pollution. Ditto for Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, which normally form a daisy chain of pollution along Interstate 95. With covid-19 lockdowns, the chain has been broken.

Just check out the satellite comparison:

grabbed from Earther, click to embiggen

Positively shocking, awesome, and inspirational - all at the same time! And that satellite imagery only represents a span of about 60 days.

Check out the rest at Earther, where you can do the same comparison for anywhere on the planet. China is especially interesting...

Note:

Please don't misunderstand; I am not trying to make light of the situation here. I completely recognize that there are people - lots of people - that are sick. Some of whom are dying due to illness. Many people are out-of-work due to coronavirus. My heart certainly aches for anyone whose health and/or well-being has been impacted by this pandemic.

Rather, like many people, I am making an effort to find positive things that will come to be as a result of this highly negative situation. The healing of the earth is one H U G E positive in this.

What a great isolated-version of "Don't Stand So Close To Me" by the Police. This is the content that we need right now!

The tuba tho!

Bad. Ass.

Honestly, I would probably watch anything that Chris Hemsworth does. Aside: if you haven't seen it, Hemsworth had a hilarious cameo in Kevin Smith's latest, Jay & Silent Bob Reboot (you can stream it on Amazon's Prime Video, if you're a subscriber).

Additionally, I have been increasingly pleased with the original content that Netflix is producing (Altered Carbon, Stranger Things, The Witcher, 6 Underground, etc.) and I am typically happy to give the streaming service's self-produced programming a shot.

Plus, this gives me something else to watch while we're all stuck at home.

This is my wife and beloved Melissa:


She's pretty great. And she straight-up rocks that Minnie Mouse jacket.

Today, she turns [redacted] years old. This is something of an 'ode to a happy birthday' for her.

Melissa is the yin to my yang, and nowhere is there more evidence of that than in our living under one roof. I am the laid-back type that operates under the 'take it as it comes' philosophy. But, even before the current state of things related to COVID-19, Melissa has always been the extremely cautious type. The way things are now, she's the one that wants to wipe-down anything that will be entering our house.

No joke. She has been using alcohol wipes to cleanse groceries before we put them away.

But that's okay, because she just wants to protect the ones that she loves. And she's got a lot of love to give.

It's for that reason (and so many, many more!) there is nobody on the planet that I'd rather be cooped-up with in our current coronavirus-inspired isolation. Every day brings a sunshine-filled start, a lunchtime walk with Molly Weasley, and a happy-hour that is like no other.

Happy birthday to my loving, quirky, caring, parent extraordinaire, student-centered, Disnified, and loving partner! (...and yes. "Loving" appeared twice in that list because she's got so much love to give.) When this 'keep-your-ass-away-from-everyone-who-doesn't-live-in-your-house' time ends, I vow to take you out to a lovely dinner and celebrate the annual reminder of just how awesome you are.

But for tonight, you'll have to settle for home-made lasagna and a cake that your daughter baked and decorated.

#GoTeamDolphin

Seriously guys. It's things like this that help me to believe that people are good. What a great way to start your day.

Oh, and as a music nerd, I can't begin to understand how the cast stayed together via a video conference call. So good.

Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Bill Withers passed away yesterday at the age of 81. A great write-up at the New York Times captures the essence pretty well:

William Harrison Withers Jr. was born on July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., to William and Mattie (Galloway) Withers. His mother was a maid, and his father worked in the coal mines.

At 17, eager to avoid a coal-mine career himself, Mr. Withers joined the Navy.

“My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I went to aircraft-mechanic school.”

He spent nine years in the service, some of it stationed in Guam. He quit the Navy in 1965, while stationed in California, and eventually got a job at an airplane parts factory. A visit to a nightclub to see Lou Rawls perform was a catalyst for changing his life.

“I was making $3 an hour, looking for friendly women, but nobody found me interesting,” he said. “Then Rawls walked in, and all these women are talking to him.”

He bought a cheap guitar at a pawnshop, started learning to play it and writing songs, and eventually recorded a demo. Clarence Avant, a music executive who had just founded an independent label, Sussex, took note and set him up with the keyboardist Booker T. Jones, of Booker T. & the MG’s, to produce an album.

“Bill came right from the factory and showed up in his old brogans and his old clunk of a car with a notebook full of songs,” Mr. Jones told Rolling Stone. “When he saw everyone in the studio, he asked to speak to me privately and said, ‘Booker, who is going to sing these songs?’ I said, ‘You are, Bill.’ He was expecting some other vocalist to show up.”

Mr. Withers was laid off from his factory job a few months before “Just as I Am” came out. After the album’s release, he recalled, he received two letters on the same day. One was from his workplace asking him to return to work. The other was from “The Tonight Show,” where he appeared in November 1971.

The quintessential discovery story - love it.

While Withers has several recognizable songs ("Ain't No Sunshine", "Lean On Me", "Just The Two Of Us", "Lovely Day" and others), for me it doesn't get any better than "Use Me":



Studio version is here. Whether a live performance or in the studio, dude simply oozed soul. This is one of my personal top five favorite songs of all-time. And that's saying something.

It's too bad that Withers became frustrated with the music industry because I'm sure that he had more music to share with us.

Gross groove. Some good music for your earhole on a Friday morning.

Late yesterday big news broke about the University of California system, and how they will respond to the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 crisis:

The University of California announced Wednesday that it will greatly ease some admission requirements for fall 2020 and beyond by eliminating SAT test scores and minimum grades, saying that “grave disruption” to schools during the coronavirus crisis calls for maximum flexibility in evaluating students.

The move, authorized by UC Board of Regents leaders, will relax the admissions process for more than 200,000 prospective freshmen and transfer students who annually apply to the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses but are now studying under dramatically different — and, for many, highly stressful — circumstances.

Those students may not meet UC admission requirements this year because their high schools or community colleges have shifted to online instruction with varying degrees of success, pass/fail grading systems or reduced course offerings.

In addition, standardized test scores may be difficult to obtain because testing dates are being canceled or postponed for many required tests, including the SAT and ACT, high school exit exams and, for international students, evaluations of English-language proficiency.

More:

The Academic Senate agreed to temporarily suspend several admission regulations at the request of Han Mi Yoon-Wu, director of undergraduate admissions at the UC Office of the President. “With such grave disruption in the education system, administrators are seeking flexibility where possible under these untenable conditions,” Yoon-Wu wrote in a March 20 letter to Comeaux.

The modifications to admission requirements include:

• Suspending the letter grade requirement for the 15 prescribed college-preparatory courses completed in winter/spring/summer 2020 for all students, including UC’s most recently admitted freshmen
• Suspending the standardized test requirement for students applying for fall 2021 freshman admission.
• No rescission of student admissions offers that result from students or schools missing official final transcript deadlines. Also, admission will be honored through the first day of class until official documents are received by campuses.
• For transfer students, temporarily suspending the cap on the number of transferable units with Pass/No Pass grading applied toward the minimum 60 semester/90 quarter units required for junior standing.

Yoon-Wu noted that efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic had caused an “unprecedented and growing number of school closures” that have forced institutions to confront myriad challenges as they have switched abruptly to remote instruction.

The uncertainty is global, she said, noting that students studying overseas might be unable to earn the credentials typically required for UC admission, as prescribed testing has been or is likely to be disrupted in such countries as the United Kingdom, Pakistan, France, Germany and Italy.

“This period of uncertainty predicated by the COVID-19 situation greatly impacts our previously assured pipeline of students to UC, which includes California resident freshmen, California Community college transfers, domestic and international nonresidents,” she wrote. “The academic verification process ... and enrollments will be notably compromised.”

All very good reasons.

Many folks were watching to see how large publics like the UC system would respond to the coronavirus situation for their future enrollment pipelines. Now that a very large domino has fallen, it will be interesting to see how many other institutions will follow that lead.

More:

Depending on how things go -- what the arc of COVID-19 is nationally or in certain regions of the country, whether physical distancing rules are still in place, etc. -- college campuses may remain off-limits to students come September. Whether that's a 5 percent likelihood, or 25 percent or 50 percent, I have no idea (I'm no Tony Fauci, and even he can't say for sure). But it's almost certainly not zero.

In such a scenario, the impact on college campuses would be enormous -- operationally, financially and otherwise.

[...]

Any decisions about the fall are multiple weeks, if not months, away, and many people aren't ready to discuss the topic, at least publicly. But some foresighted campus officials are (often quietly) exploring that possibility, and I'd like to share some early assertions (or at least hypotheses) based on those discussions.

So, I just discovered Run The Jewels.

I know, I know. If you're like my kids you're likely thinking, "well, you're a mid-40s guy who just doesn't know what is 'hip' anymore." To that I respond:

1. Shut up, and;
2. You're kind of right

The reason that I know that you're kind of right is because I used to have a proverbial finger on the pulse of music. But Run The Jewels (RTJ, as it were) has been around for quite some time now and I was just made aware on Friday of last week.

Damn. I must be slipping.

For work we use the Microsoft Office suite of products, of which Teams is a part. Ever since we have ventured into this 'remote work' space, we use the Teams app even more to stay in touch with each other. Most of it is work-related communication, but sometimes things venture into the personal or "hey have you seen this show/movie/heard this music?"

Last week I created a Teams channel that I dubbed "Entertainment Swap"; a place where folks could go during their lunch hour (or anytime that they were just taking a break) to post up ideas or suggestions. During the course of the first real dialogue in this newly created channel, a colleague mentioned a hip-hop group by the name of Run The Jewels. He explained that it included Killer Mike - with whom I was already familiar due to his appearances on early Outkast songs.

This led me down a proverbial rabbit hole of YouTube videos and Apple Music downloads, and before I knew it, I was bobbing my head and experiencing some serious regret of having just found out about the duo. I mean, check out the video for "Legend Has It" above. Or this NPR Tiny Desk Concert. Or this DJ Shadow tune that features RTJ (and that is a super creative video).

Needless to say, I'm glad that my co-worker brought RTJ to my attention. They're pretty great. Chalk up another win for working remotely!