It looks like the weather won’t be so great this week. Which is remarkable considering that it has been beautiful for pretty much the whole duration of this quarantine. Some say it’s the driest spring since 1929, I haven’t verified the claim, but it kinda fits that major economic crises of the century come with good weather.
I have done some house keeping on the site, now it should be more readable on mobile and if you want you can subscribe via email leaving your address in the form on the side. Subscribing via email sounds a bit a thing of the 90s, but looks like it’s all we have outside social media (I do encourage you to figure out RSS aggregators if you have some time, it’s still totally worth it).
Last week I watched the launch and docking of Crew Dragon. Quite a show! There was a lot of waiting for things to happen, but there were moments even better than Apple’s product launch events. That booster landing back on the drone ship is always amazing!
I’ve been pulled down a rocket science rabbit hole on YouTube for the last few months, so I found the whole thing even more interesting. It did remind me the excitement of watching the first launch of the Space Shuttle with my grandfather when I was 10.
Many have shared a picture comparing the Space Shuttle cockpit with thousands of buttons to the Crew Dragon one, with three touch screens and a couple of dozen of buttons. I think that the most remarkable thing is that those buttons could very well have been used by astronauts to switch between Netflix and Amazon Prime, after all the whole mission was self-driving (the same hardware flew a couple of months ago with an empty suit sitting on the chair).
Imagine these two guys, who made their career out of trying to control the most advanced and uncontrollable vehicles that humankind had ever built, just sitting along for a ride. Actually the instructions they got just before docking on the ISS was to stow away some shit and wipe the screen, just like any other cleaning lady.
I got my new Etsi mask this week. Looks great. Stay alert, scare the virus.
Stay safe, be nice, and keep in touch.
What is an Etsi mask when it’s at home? I’m finding contradictory findings on masks. In particular suggestions that masks create “jets” in your wake that can be even more problematic than your normal breath. It’s hard to know what to do for the best.
You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the interwebs ;)
I don’t know much, but I can observe that surgical masks have been in use for decades in situation where they try to limit the spread of infections. Surgeons have been wearing them for hours and hours, day after day, while slicing and dicing people’s organs. I think that I can wear one for 10 minutes at the supermarket as a sign that I care about other people and want to try avoiding spitting germs on their box of cereals.
Countries with wide adoption of surgical masks seem to be doing better than those which don’t (look at Asia, but also Italy).
In the surgical case things are very different though, they are trying to block infections spreading into the area they are working on when they have someone opened up. We know that masks do do that. But in the general case we are talking about “people around you” if you are blasting a jet behind you that’s potentially going to affect people walking behind you. It’s different. I’m not arguing against masks, I’m simply saying the evidence isn’t clear cut yet.