Tesla on Wednesday became the highest-valued automaker as its shares surged to record highs and the electric carmaker's market capitalization overtook that of former front runner Toyota Motors. From a report: Tesla shares gained 5% in early morning trade to a record of $1,133, boosting the company's market cap to $209.47 billion - roughly $6 billion more than Toyota is currently valued by investors. Tesla is now worth more than triple the combined value of U.S. automakers General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co. The shares' meteoric rise, up more than 163% since the start of 2020, highlight growing confidence among investors about the future of electric vehicles and Tesla's shift from a niche carmaker into a global leader in cleaner cars. After several years of losses, Tesla has delivered three straight profitable quarters since the third quarter of 2019 and surprised investors with solid first-quarter deliveries despite the virus outbreak.

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I spent the day so far combining the Radio3 docs into one Howto page. Consider this a draft, I still have to do a couple more read-throughs. If you have any questions or comments, please post them here.

I know a lot of people don't like Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York. I had a sligntly negative opinion of him before the virus hit. My mom didn't like him. She said NY Democrats were really Republicans. I trusted her opinion on that.

I also remember his father ran a really dirty personal campaign against Ed Koch, so dirty that if he did it today he'd be disqualified from running for anything as a Democrat. I've heard it said that young Andrew did the awful deed. I don't know.

Anyway somehow I've never engaged in state politics here, never understood why a city like NY isn't its own thing at a national level. More people live in the metro area than in the rest of the state. A nice little state could be formed with the five boroughs, Westchester, Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Anyway, I went from meh on Cuomo to admiring him when he led us when we desperately needed leadership. I've never seen a politician rise to the occasion like Cuomo did with the virus. Never.

Now the process is more or less complete in New York, except for the country around us. Our immediate neighbors, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts have also done an outstanding job of controlling the virus.

I resent it when people say the US is backward and helpless. I can see saying that about all other parts of the country, but not where I live. I feel lucky to be here. We didn't dick around like Florida, Texas, Arizona and a bunch of other states with ridiculous governors running them. We got the curve to flatten, bend, and approach the X-axis. Put the northeastern US in the same group as Spain and Italy, that's where we belong.

But then there's the rest of the country. Ultimately our health will be the same as the country's. So if the US doesn't get its act together, soon, we're going to be right back where we were in March. Except it will be much worse for a couple of reasons.

1. Wear and tear. In so many ways we've used up the reserves we had, as people, as economic beings, in our relationships with other people. Rent is due today, it's a crisis for an unthinkable number of people. There's going to be hunger soon, on a scale not seen here in my lifetime, and who knows how bad it will get. It's here now, in March, it was just looming.
2. Math. The virus has spread much more thoroughly and evenly around the country than it had in March. Based on a NYT study, the virus had spread much more than we realized by March, but now it's had another three months to push into every nook and cranny of the country. This wave is going to crest a lot higher than the first one, assuming we can manage to get it to crest before everyone is infected. The higher density means when you go to the supermarket instead of on average there being 1/2 of a Covid carrier with you, now there will be 3. And the load in the air you're breathing will probably be an order of magnitude more dense. Which means you and I will get it, where two months ago, we wouldn't have. Everything about the virus, math-wise, has led the curve straight up, vertical. We're there now. Exploring terrible new territory. It's like being cast out of a space ship in a vacuum with very little oxygen and no possibility of a rescue ship. We're going to have to ride this out.

Cuomo, in his daily briefings, kept saying look at the numbers, look at the numbers. Okay. Assuming he is looking at the numbers, he sees we're at the very last moment when the government might be able to help. Not unlike the position NY, Connecticut and NJ were in in March. So here are the two questions on my mind.

1. If you're Cuomo, what do you do?
2. If you're you and me, what do we do with Cuomo?

When I think about the second question I think of Biden. He's in a position to appoint Cuomo his top adviser on the the virus. Then Cuomo has a sliver of a national platform to speak on. Not unlike the sliver of a platform Fauci has. And what about the Repubs? Now everyone but Trump is actively saying Wear A Mask. Great. That's new. What more could they do right now?

1. Have Fauci testify in the Senate, and treat him with respect. That would send a strong message to the country and the world. Even if the orange blob tweeting in the bunker doesn't get it, we do, and we're taking charge.
2. Even better, have Andrew Cuomo testify, and let him spew his Cuomo arrogance. Let him lecture. Let him show you the numbers. Let him tell you what to do. With Fauci next to him, agreeing, and now we have a much better shot than we had with the leadership of Pence, who still hasn't let go of his allegiance to Trump (he must have some good dirt on him).

Let's get our shit together while we still have shit to get together.

A Swedish study found twice as many people had protective T-cells as tested positive for antibodies.

Astronomers have found a previously unseen type of object circling a distant star.

The best defense against Putin and Trump is to teach every student the basics of journalism. Not just how to detect fake news, but how to write a news story. If we do it now, we'll be glad we did in a few years.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a video game that simulates a worldwide pandemic. You get to be Fauci, and have to deal with a mentally incapacitated president and Republican governors who just want to reopen. Your challenge is to make the US virus free, and win the Nobel Peace Prize.

British firms fail to win leading roles in the expansion of the Copernicus Earth observation project.

The government says it wants to make immigration "easy and quick" for researchers and innovators.

Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that U.S. health officials are keeping an eye on a new strain of flu carried by pigs in China that has characteristics of the 2009 H1N1 virus and 1918 pandemic flu. The virus, which scientists are calling "G4 EA H1N1," has not yet been shown to infect humans but it is exhibiting "reassortment capabilities," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee during a hearing. "In other words, when you get a brand new virus that turns out to be a pandemic virus it's either due to mutations and/or the reassortment or exchanges of genes," he told lawmakers. "And they're seeing virus in swine, in pigs now, that have characteristics of the 2009 H1N1, of the original 1918, which many of our flu viruses have remnants of that in it, as well as segments from other hosts, like swine." Fauci said Tuesday there's always "the possibility that you might have another swine flu-type outbreak as we had in 2009." "It's something that still is in the stage of examination," he said. It's not "an immediate threat where you're seeing infections, but it's something we need to keep our eye on, just the way we did in 2009 with the emergence of the swine flu."

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Can hydrogen - a relatively clean source of fuel - help power the economy of the future?

swell shares the findings from a small pilot study that suggests a few minutes of looking into a deep red light could have a dramatic effect on preventing eyesight decline as we age. CNN reports: Researchers recruited 12 men and 12 women, whose ages ranged from 28 to 72. Each participant was given a small handheld flashlight that emitted a red light with a wavelength of 670 nanometers. That wavelength is toward the long end of the visible spectrum, and just short of an infrared wavelength, which tends to be invisible to the human eye. They spent three minutes each day looking into the light over a period of two weeks. The lights work on both cones and rods in the eye. Cones are photo receptor cells that detect color and work best in well-lit situations. Rods, which are much more plentiful, are retina cells that specialize in helping us see in dim light, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Researchers measured the cone function in subjects' eyes by having them identify colored letters with low contrast. And they measured their eyes' rod sensitivity by asking them to detect light signals in the dark. There was a 14% improvement in the ability to see colors, or cone color contrast sensitivity, for the entire two dozen participants. Improvement, however, was most significant in study participants over age 40. For those ages, cone color contrast sensitivity rose by 20% over the course of the study. That age bracket also saw significant increases in rod threshold, which corresponds to the ability to see in low light. Study participants under 40 also experienced some improvement, but didn't see the same jump as older subjects. Younger eyes haven't declined as much as older eyes.

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Someone transferred bitcoins worth close to $1 billion on Tuesday morning, a move that was public for everyone to see while the identities of the sender and receiver remain unknown. Motherboard reports: Big money moves hiding in plain sight tend to be events of some interest among Bitcoiners. Decrypt noted that the sending wallet was recognized as the largest Bitcoin wallet not known to be associated with a business such as an exchange. This means that it could belong to a wealthy private individual, or it could really belong to an exchange, investor, or other business that is simply currently unknown. There's no obligation to publicize which Bitcoin addresses one controls, and if nobody else puts two and two together, one's activities may remain shrouded in pseudonymity. If the Bitcoin wallet belongs to someone legit, then it's likely the transfer was internal to the business, or it represents a large purchase of goods or services, or the sale of bitcoins. Regardless of what it was, the business would be expected to pay taxes in any relevant circumstances. If the transfer wasn't legit, well, pseudonymity and the ability to freely move money without the pre-approval of an authority is the point of Bitcoin. That being said, law enforcement is certainly aware of Bitcoin at this stage in the game and if I'm talking about this transfer then I'm sure more important people could be, too.

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One of the two leading manufacturers of tape cartridge storage, FujiFilm, claims that they have a technology roadmap through to 2030 which builds on the current magnetic tape paradigm to enable 400 TB per tape. AnandTech reports: As reported by Chris Mellor of Blocks and Files, Fujifilm points to using Strontium Ferrite grains in order to enable an areal data density on tape of 224 Gbit-per-square-inch, which would enable 400 TB drives. IBM and Sony have already demonstrated 201 Gbit-per-square-inch technology in 2017, with a potential release of the technology for high volume production in 2026. Current drives are over an order of magnitude smaller, at 8 Gbit-per-square-inch, however the delay between research and mass production is quite significant. Strontium Ferrite would replace Barium Ferrite in current LTO cartridges. Strontium sits on a row above Barium in the periodic table, indicating a much smaller atom. This enables for much smaller particles to be placed into tracks, and thankfully according to Fujifilm, Strontium Ferrite exhibits properties along the same lines as Barium Ferrite, but moreso, enabling higher performance while simultaneously increasing particle density. [...] Fujifilm states that 400 TB is the limit of Strontium Ferrite, indicating that new materials would be needed to go beyond. That said, we are talking about only 224 Gbit-per-square-inch for storage, which compared to mechanical hard disks going beyhind 1000 Gbit-per-square-inch today, there would appear to be plenty of room at the top if the technologies could converge.

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