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A lot of numbers get thrown around, in regards to Covid-19. This country has the most cases, that country has the most deaths, etc ad nauseum.

What is the PER CAPITA disease rate, and death rate? I found several hits on that, most of them old. RealClearPolitics has a page that appears to be updated. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/

The columns are sortable. For my immediate purposes, I'm only interested in the "Deaths/1 m pop" column.

Belgium 861.9
UK 694.9
Peru 613.1
Spain 608.8
Italy 581.7
Sweden 564.1
Chile 513.0
US 484.1

At the far end of the spectrum

Burundi 0.1
Caymans 15.2
Curacao 6.3
Benin 3.1
Congo 0.6
Taiwan 0.3

Alright - table doesn't seem to sort itself quite properly. As I work upward from the bottom, I find the Channel Islands hav 12,692.4/million? But they only have 47 deaths total, looks like bad math somewhere.

Are there better charts and graphs somewhere?

Click the column "Confirmed Cases / 1 m pop" and everthing changes.

Qatar 40,197
French Gulana 27,028
Bahrain 26,465
Chile 19,207
Kuwait 16,508
Oman 16,390
Panama 16,149
United States 14,719

Drop down to the bottom and read up,

Burundi 36.1
Cayman Islands 3,084
Liechtenstein 2,347
Curacao 182
Brit. Virgin Isle 266
Turks and Calcos 3,272

The graph is definitely not behaving properly. Maybe I should try a different browser . .. no, other browsers all seem to display the same errors.

Click the column labeled "Tests", and China tops the list with 90,410,000 tests administered. US in second, 60,000,000 and Russia in third with 29,000.000. That blows a lot of headlines away, claiming the US is far behind in testing.

Does anyone know of more useful charts and graphs? It would be really nice to get some kind of handle on all the numbers being thrown around.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Seems to have very similar numbers to the above, but only displays 50 entries max at a time.

Actually I should have titled this “How do I school the ignorant about the laws of thermodynamics?”
        I was visiting an old friend who was talking about a mutual old friend who had moved into a camping trailer on fifteen acres of Nowhere, Missouri; or semi-moved. Anyway, he lit the place with his perpetual motion machine, and you will find it either humorous or infuriating. Maybe just sad.
        The way it supposedly worked was that “Perpetual”, as I’ll call him, had two twenty four volt truck batteries, two solar panels, a generator from a truck, and a motor to power the generator, which fed its power to the batteries that ran the motor that ran the generator.
        Yep, you read that right.
        I’m pretty sure he didn’t do the math, and probably couldn’t even understand the math, since the US public school system has been dysfunctional since at least 1958, when I started first grade. You’re not too stupid to learn, your teacher was too incompetent to teach.
        We didn’t have kindergarten, let alone preschool, since most moms stayed home. They could afford to back then. I’m told I could read before school, and remember knowing how to tell time earlier than that.
        But they really suck at math.
        What I found humorous was that it would appear to work, the batteries the panels charged running the motor that lost energy trying to get free energy. But he was wasting the free energy he got from the panels on his ignorant device!
        I tried to explain it to my friend, but his math teachers sucked, too.

SpaceX Starship rocket’s flight debut set for Monday

For the first time ever, a full-scale SpaceX Starship prototype could be less than a day away from an inaugural flight test in Boca Chica, Texas.

Expected to target the same 150m (~500 ft) maximum altitude as Starhopper’s final flight, the hop will see the full-scale tank section of Starship SN5 attempt to follow in the footsteps of its odd predecessor. Starhopper was essentially a back-of-the-envelope proof of concept, demonstrating that a large rocket could technically be built out of common steel with facilities so spartan and basic that it defied belief.

[...] SpaceX initially wanted to turn Starship SN5 around for its hop debut on Sunday, August 2nd – barely two days [after the static fire test]. Yesterday’s window came and went, though, and SpaceX ultimately pushed its hop test plans back by 24 hours and added a new backup window on August 4th.

Launch window is from 8am to 8pm CDT (13:00-01:00 UTC).

I finally manage time for a fun weekend for myself for the first time in nearly a year and you pull this shit while I'm gone? You ever, and I mean fucking ever, automate your spam bullshit again and your welcome will officially and permanently be worn out here. If you want to be a shithead, go for it, but be a manual shithead.

I don't want to browse at positive but I don't want to see the Spam-y wall of garbage in the top level comments.

Shouldn't be that hard to set the checked value for the input.commentHider for the case of Spam modded top level comments, is it?

If you suffer of

• science-itis
• acute wussness
• selfish syndrome
• chronic dickishness
• pathological ignorance
• severe moron-ness

and can't wear a mask, just stay at home (1'30" in duration)

Something that picked my eye in a The Atlantic story:

Similar to other right-leaning extremist movements, they are the product of an unhappy generation of men who compare their lot in life with that of men in previous decades and see their prospects diminishing. ...
...
As alt-right protests waned, boogaloo boys began to appear on the streets. Armed men in aloha shirts and boogaloo patches made their first widely noticed appearance at a heavily attended pro–Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Virginia, in January. And they came out again for the anti-lockdown protests in March. Later, many attended protests over the killing of George Floyd, some in solidarity, others to oppose the left.

The catalyst was similar to what mobilized so many young people on the left: the notion that the government enriched a privileged few at the expense of the people. In this, the boogaloo boys shared the anti-corporatist left’s belief that the government had betrayed public trust by maintaining a growing police force to perpetuate an unjust status quo.

Some may invoke higher level concepts (mah liberty), but it started to look to me like the Americans (no matter if left or right) are prone to react to the disproportionate distribution of "bread" by making "gladiator style circuses", especially after a longer period of time. And perhaps their "patricians class" likes it that way, at the very least it maintains the status quo and avoids the sun's reflection on the knife of the guillotines. Or even only on yellow vests

A case of a post-truth culture building their own version of reality to agree with what they need to perceive? Maybe not yet, hopefully never.

How Fox Sports will use virtual fans created in Unreal Engine to fill empty stadiums in MLB broadcasts

“We’re not looking to fool anybody, it’s still about the game. But shot-to-shot, when you’re watching a broadcast, it’s not more noticeable that you’re watching what is normally a broadcast with fans in just an empty stadium and having it feel weird — we want to give people a sense of normalcy,” Zager says. “And we felt like going down this path and trying to use a virtual crowd will hopefully make it so that blends in, and you can focus on the game more because you’re not thinking about the emptiness of a Major League Baseball stadium during the game.”

The effect is a combination of technologies you may have seen before. The augmented reality software used to insert the crowds is called Pixotope, which has worked on AR graphics for things like the Super Bowl and The Weather Channel’s terrifying storm warning demonstrations.

I was not going to write about Stella Immanuel. I almost did. But thought better of it.

But then she doubled down on the crazy.

For those just tuning in . . .
* Stella Immanuel is Trump's latest favorite doctor
* believes malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is a "cure for COVID," (retweeted by Trump and one of the moron twins.)
* claimed that alien DNA was used in medicine (well that explains some things)
* some gynecological problems were the result of sex with demons. (other sources said it was from sex with demons . . . in your dreams)
* demon sperm (that could simply indicate being a feminist)
Rather than provide links, which hordes of ACs will call "fake news", I'll just leave it as an exercise for the reader to google search for her name.

A few bits . . .

"America, you don't need to be afraid. COVID has a cure. You don't need to be afraid. COVID has prevention," she said. "If they put everybody on hydroxychloroquine now, for those with early disease, early disease, and those that want to get prevention, I'm telling you it will stop COVID in its tracks in 30 days."

and

Immanuel told Facebook that their servers would "be down in Jesus' name" if they did not restore her allegedly deleted profile page. At the time of writing, her account still appears to be online and active.

I would suggest that Trump finds her message appealing because she is crazier than he is. I know ACs will dispute this. Which I suppose must mean that he is crazier than she is -- although it could mean they are equally crazy.

If NOT A > B, then either A < B or A = B, but that could be fake news.

Quibi’s recipe for winning an Emmy without really trying

Television’s most important award might be going to its least important streaming service: Quibi. The service was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, of which it’s almost certain to win at least one.

Quibi — which one estimate claims retained only 8 percent of people who signed up for its three-month free trial — hasn’t suddenly started putting out content on the same level as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Instead, the short-form streaming service is competing in a game that no one else is playing.

At face value, Quibi’s nominations and near-certain win seem impossible: Quibi only has 16 original drama or comedy shows, has been around for just over three months, and has made about the same impact on the media landscape as a water balloon has on an Abrams tank.

[...] Quibi’s nominations are exclusively in the short-form-specific Emmy categories. Its competition is a few web-series spinoffs of larger shows and a YouTube series. Unless things go very badly for the mobile-focused streaming service, it’ll be walking away with at least one award come September.

[...] A report from Sensor Tower earlier in July claimed that the company was only able to convert about 72,000 of its initial 910,000 users into paid customers when the three-month free trial offer expired.

Assuming random selection of winners, Quibi has just a 2.4% chance of winning zero Emmy Awards.

Previously: Fox Could Buy Tubi While NBCUniversal Eyes Vudu
Meg Whitman-Run Streaming Service "Quibi" Launches, Reception Mixed
The Fall of Quibi: How Did a Starry $1.75bn Netflix Rival Crash So Fast?