The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins is pulling together data from the WHO and CDC and two Chinese health site, the NHC and Dingxiangyuan into a Google Sheet the drives the visualization above.
You can read more about the map and how they put it together on their blog.
After driving around waiting for a calling from God, Nadejda Reilly decided to take it up a notch and drive into the path of an oncoming car. Local police charged her with aggravated assault for causing a wreck an injuring two people.
In India, a man suffered lacerations to his neck while taking his rooster to a cockfight when his prized bird turned on him instead.
Temps dropped to below 40 in Florida so it rained iguanas again.
Canadian Neil Young was finally granted US citizenship after his application was held up because of his long history of smoking weed.
In Italy medical marijuana is now apparently free of charge and apparently grown by the Italian Army.
If one Arizona lawmaker gets his way, it will become a felony to lick ice cream and put it back in the store cooler.
Nearly 100,000 gallons of cabernet sauvignon spilled into a river in Northern California at the Rodney Strong winery.
A man with ‘murder’ tattooed across his face sentenced for murder.
Several furries attending a nearby convention stopped a domestic assault, pulling the offender from his car and sitting on him until police arrived.
A Detroit man, trying to deposit a settlement check from a racial discrimination lawsuit against his employer, was refused by a bank that later called the four police officers on him and initiated a fraud investigation. So he sued the bank for racial discrimination.
Oh, and just in case you didn’t think the world is about to end – ‘Unprecedented’ Swarms of Locusts have descended on East Africa
Have a great weekend everyone!
Spanish ultra marathoner Kilian Jornet is crazy. He apparently climbed Mt. Everest twice in one week (although there is some controversy about that claim) and holds the Fastest Known Time for ascents of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc.
His latest stunt was to race a someone up and down a 1500 foot mountain in Norway with the catch that his competition had a wingsuit so he could literally fly down. Stating the obvious, Kilian says, “he would be quick to climb and of course very fast on the way down.” (via Runner’s W0rld)
Nike has done it again, this time capturing the sometimes comic ritual of gift-giving (in this case, the tradition of hongbao red envelopes given out during the Chinese New Year) in Asian culture.
These envelopes are often filled with money and given to children by elder relatives for good luck. The 90-second spot from Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai depicts a cat-and-mouse game between an aunt attempting to give an envelope and her niece who repeatedly declines out of politeness.
The Drum
Hat tip to my son Tyler who has always had his finger on the pulse of pop culture.
New analysis determined that the past 10 years are the top 10 years on record for the world’s oceans or, to put it into terms we could understand, “the amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.”
A medical marijuana farm in Arizona literally turned the sky above into a purple haze. (queue Jimi Hendrix)
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert put the kabash on an HIV-prevention campaign that involved handing out 100,000 free condoms after negative reaction to the packaging that “did not go through necessary approval”
The San Francisco Giants hired the first full time female coach in Major League Baseball history.
Louis Vuitton announced a partnership with the NBA.
Ben & Jerry’s have a partnership with Netflix – I’ll let you guess the name of the new flavor they launched.
A company called Mojo has been thinking about shrinking a video display and embedding on to your eye as a contact lens. They’ve reportedly have released their first prototype.
First it was pigeons in cowboy hats in Vegas. The mystery deepens this week as pigeons in sombreros have been spotted in Reno. Viral casino ad campaign or new ICE initiative?
Apparently there’s a killer squirrel on the loose trapping Houston residents indoors.
Danni Morritt asked her Amazon Echo to teach her about the cardiac cycle of the heart. To her horror, someone had edited the wikipedia page that the Echo uses for source material so the Echo told Danni not only that heartbeats are “bad for the planet” but that she should, “stab herself for the common good.
Police in Colorado Springs arrested a bank robber who robbed a downtown bank, then stepped out and tossed the cash in the air while saying “Merry Christmas”
The US Patent Office awarded Nike a patent for blockchain-verified sneaker line they are calling CryptoKicks.
Scientists have figured out how to edit tomato genes to make them grow into bouquets, like flowers.
A New York state assemblyman wrote an editorial to the local paper on Christmas Eve about the dangers of drunk driving. On New Year’s Eve he drove his GMC Acadia into a ditch and police determined he was drunk driving.
Headlines with the words Iran and attack triggered high frequency trading algorithms to rapidly sell off dollar/yen before traders grabbed the wheel and brought it back.
A Florida beachcomber brought home what she though was an old rusty plate but later discovered it was a landmine.
A Spanish television reporter won the lottery and quit her job, live on air. “Natalia doesn’t work tomorrow. Woo!” she declared while wagging her finger. Natalia later found out her payout was only $5,500 after discovering she was sharing her earnings with hundreds of others, “It’s unclear if [she] is still an employee at RTVE”
Happy New Year!
Since flipping over into 2020 I’ve been on a bit of simplify kick. My goal is to either upgrade, give away or throw away one thing, each day this year.
So far Izumi and I donated several bags of old clothes, upgraded the alarm and thermostat systems (allowing me to rip out aging control boxes and yards of wires) and also upgrade this ol’ blog to run SSL (finally) on some new hardware.
everwas.com is still hosted with Laughing Squid (going on 13 years!) but on their new Managed WordPress partner, Pressable which allows them to offer a sweet deal for $12/month.
The site is much faster now and I’m happy to finally join the https world.
To celebrate, here’s a video of the Bay Area’s very own Space Lady performing Imagine on a tram in Helsinki.
Photo: The most popular image was this bit of graffiti at Hong Kong Polytechnic which I learned from commenters is a Winston Churchill quote. Seems appropriate to leave this here as Hong Kongers are still protesting since mid-March 2019.
So here it is, the top links from this year’s The Week That Was – these are the stories that most interested you this past year in order of popularity. Thank you for your time and attention this year and see you in the next!
Special Operations Command Is Experimenting With Bullets That Shoot Through Water – Defense One
A night of drinking, a closed strip joint and a White Castle shooting bring suspensions for 3 judges – CNN
Meet the $50 Strawberries That NYC’s High-End Chefs Are Fawning Over – Eater
Fake guns banned in downtown Las Vegas district, but real guns OK – Las Vegas Review-Journal
Tiny Hand Will Be Your New Comic Sans – BuzzFeed
Miami-Dade Commissioner Joe Martinez Involved in Active Criminal Probe – Miami New Times
Memphis youth builds home nuclear fusion reactor – Memphis Commercial Appeal
I Just Took the World’s First 20-Hour Flight. Here’s What It Did to Me – Bloomberg
There’s a Dramatic Beef in the Quilting Community, Over a Pair of Scissors – Jezebel
Garfield phones beach mystery finally solved after 35 years – BBC
Photo credit: Electronic machine used to vote on articles of impeachment.
Jeep, the company behind four-wheeler brands such as Wrangler and Gladiator announced that its entire lineup will go hybrid or full-on electric by 2022
A sharp-eyed researcher discovered that Department of Agriculture listed Marvel’s mythical East African country, Wakanda, as a trading partner on a website built to track tariffs on nations signed on to the free trade agreement. The developer had forgotten to remove the test files from the prototype.
A woman in San Francisco, desperate to locate her dog, stolen while it was waiting for her outside a local grocery store, hired a plane for $7,000 to fly a banner with the website she set up to find her her dog. BTW, the website is www.bringjacksonhome.com/
Merck received FDA approval for the world’s first vaccine for the Ebola virus.
Now that it’s legal in increasingly more counties, marijuana has become a major export for the African country of Lesotho and a “critical piece of the government’s agricultural strategy.”
With the recent proliferation of metal credit cards, those looking for something more distinctive can opt for the $200,000, gemstone-encrusted Visa card from the Insignia Group.
San Francisco had to quietly revise the government’s well-intentioned blanket ban on facial recognition technology when they realized that the City Supervisors’ use of their government-issued iPhone Face ID was made illegal.
A shoplifter at a Walmart in Ohio was quickly apprehended when she made the poor choice to commit her crime during the annual Cops and Kids shopping event.