6 ms·

April Is Canceled

107 points by dannymx 7y ago

maxerickson 7y ago
Or you know, just try to make it through to the other side in a reasonably calm manner. That's fine too.
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  That’s what the post is talking about.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    We have…different interpretations of Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever. and Let's all become Isaac Newton this month.
    - smsm42 7y ago
      Not everybody will invent calculus. But everybody can try to not let themselves slip into doom and gloom and despair.
    - gumby 7y ago
      ...and do all that while spending the majority of your time on alchemy and occult christian mysticism. Then when you emerge from isolation transformed, move to a big city and execute a lot of men. If you can’t do that you’re no Isaac Newton.
      - tasogare 7y ago
        > execute a lot of men I had to search that on Wikipedia. This is referring to the men Newton prosecuted for counterfeit coins as part of his Master of Mint appointment.
    - dx87 7y ago
      The paragraph you omitted between the cherry picked quotes explain that this month is a good time to try and do things you normally can't because you're normally too busy, like calling family, or cooking a new food.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        I quoted like 10% of it, that's hardly cherry picking. It's fine if we don't react the same to the tone, but that's what I responded to, and I sort of react to your "this month is a good time to..." in the same way. Lot's of people aren't on a nice vacation this month, for lots of different reasons.
01100011 7y ago
Eh, some of us just have to keep working. No time to work on our magnum opus, because we're trying to remain productive in the ersatz offices we've cobbled together at home.
- faitswulff 7y ago
  Some of us are stay at home parents.
  - maguirre 7y ago
    I was just explaining to someone that I have to be: a parent, a teacher, an engineer and a husband. I feel I am doing all of them equally badly sigh
    - na85 7y ago
      That's okay, I was doing all those things badly before the apocalypse.
    - lemonberry 7y ago
      My guess is you're doing better than you think. Be gentle with yourself and watch that self-talk. It can be a killer.
    - beart 7y ago
      Remind yourself that the fact that you are even in your children's life on a daily basis already puts your children ahead of 1/4th of the U.S. > According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic
  - stared 7y ago
    A friend wrote "Train for a Mars mission: how to survive social distancing while working from home with your kids around without losing your sanity" https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-survive-social-distancing-while-working-from-home-with-your-kids-c9874ad0922a https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-su...
mdonahoe 7y ago
Issac Newton didn't have kids home from school, and didn't need to attend Zoom meetings.
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  Indeed. But you still have a job and you are (hopefully) healthy. Think about it for a second. It could be much worse.
  - mdonahoe 7y ago
    I'm just saying I don't like the pressure of having to compare myself to Issac Newton. Also everything could always be worse, so it's a mostly useless argument.
- abjKT26nO8 7y ago
  And had a lot of inherited wealth to support his intellectual endeavours without being exhausted by a day job.
morphogenesis 7y ago
I know I'm lucky to still have a job at a company that seems to be doing just fine despite the pandemic but I kind of wish I could have a month of time completely to myself
- tjr225 7y ago
  About to come out of two months of parental leave and it was fantastic.
ck2 7y ago
Nice but sadly also May (what did Newton do in his second month?) The IHME models they chose to use are too optimistic, too many people aren't wise enough to understand or care how this works and won't be told what to do, there are going to be rather stubborn congregations for Easter. https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections Ventilators run out way before ICU beds.
- TechBro8615 7y ago
  Thanks for this site, I haven't seen it before. This predicts a peak usage of 32k ventilators, but I don't see any data for how many ventilators we already have?
  - tathougies 7y ago
    In 2010, there were about 62k ventilators in American hospitals, more than any other developed nation at the time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 If you take into account non-'full time' ventilators (not sure what these are but apparently they exist), the US has 99k.
    - ck2 7y ago
      It's not the count but the distribution. NY State only managed to come up with 6500, feds finally gave them 4400 more but the federal "stockpile" turned out to be a lie. There is also a good chance given how complex the machines are that many a decade old from 2010 are no longer functional? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-ventilators.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
      - tathougies 7y ago
        NY state has 8 million people. The United states has about 320 million. Thus, assuming an equal distribution, I would expect NY to have about 1/40 the number as the entire country. 62000 / 40 = 1550, so actually New York has a lot more than one would expect. I would expect there to be more ventilators today than 2010 (but I could be wrong).
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Love how the third paragraph starts all positive and reasonable then suddenly segways into "Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup" and then an article about how "Hyperbitcoinization" is coming and how the modern economy is going to collapse from inflation.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Whoa. I didn't look at the links. That's bonkers.
Punkyou2 7y ago
I absolutely loved reading this! Thank you!
rad_gruchalski 7y ago
Very inspiring, with a twist. Thank you!
thatfrenchguy 7y ago
Sounds like a pretty privilege take by people like us that still have jobs.
joncp 7y ago
Or...if you still have to work, then find a way to help a furloughed person be Newton for a month. Maybe a spouse or your kids. Maybe a stranger (from six feet away). Doesn't matter.
mcv 7y ago
I wish I had time for any of that. I keep reading ideas for how to deal with the boredom of self-isolation, but nobody writes about the stress. My wife and I have to homeschool two kids while also doing our own jobs from home. We're lucky of course that we have jobs, and we can do them from home, and we have two awesome and healthy kids. But homeschooling while we work really is a bit much.
- hodgesrm 7y ago
  My feelings really go out to you. Hope you all come through healthy and caring for each other. Meanwhile, it's even tougher for people with kids at home who still have to go to work. Not all of us are lucky enough to be able to work with zoom and github.
  - mcv 7y ago
    In my country, only people with "vital" jobs, which means health care, police, emergency services, everything related to food (production, delivery), logistics, garbage collection, etc. still go out to work, and for them, child care is still available. Home workers have to handle their own children.
- fideloper 7y ago
  can’t upvote enough, 5mo old and a 2yr old here and it’s.......a lot.
  - Exmoor 7y ago
    My wife and I are trying to manage a 6 year old and 3 year old and the original comment made me try to imagine what the theoretical hardest age to try to work from home with would be. 5mo and 2yr is roughly what I came up with in my head. Not that it helps much, but you have my sympathy. If it feels like it's really, really hard, stressful, and frustrating it's because it is. And that's okay.
  - scruple 7y ago
    My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right). It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.
etrk 7y ago
In an alternate reality, Newton did five pull-ups instead of inventing calculus.
- greenyoda 7y ago
  It's OK. Leibnitz[1] (who independently invented calculus) would also have had to be doing pull-ups for calculus to not have been invented. Although Newton not having invented calculus might also have hampered his contributions to physics, which would have been a great loss. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz ---- Something I just learned about Leibnitz from that Wikipedia article - he was also a pioneer in computing: "He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of all digital computers."
  - etrk 7y ago
    Yeah, unless Leibnitz was busy making some tacos.
ecopoesis 7y ago
Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn. It's expected that we will all mourn. The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone. You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.
- johnmarinelli 7y ago
  > millions wat
  - danharaj 7y ago
    Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.
  - monksy 7y ago
    Yes.
  - blattimwind 7y ago
    The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.
    - evan_ 7y ago
      also: there are countries other than the United States.
      - blattimwind 7y ago
        Conjecture unproven before man.
    - ecopoesis 7y ago
      And there are 6.7 billion folks not in the US who all matter too.
steve-benjamins 7y ago
You could also rest. You don't need to force feed yourself creativity and productivity. I don't mean to take anything away from the author, just seeing a lot of this sentiment on social media. Thought it would be worth voicing a counter balance.
m0zg 7y ago
Good advice to those of us who have the means to stay afloat, but it's not going to be just April the way things are going now. Unless a working prophylaxis is found/confirmed May and June will be canceled too. That's what's unnerving about this whole situation: nobody knows what the endgame is. Say we're at the end of April. Then what? Open stuff back up? Not going to happen if opening it back up could realistically mean another 100K deaths before we shut everything back down. So let's get those drug studies going in earnest, and lets rewrite the rules for what's "acceptable" in terms of regulation and rigor when faced with a potential death toll of this magnitude. I'm sure we can do more than a couple of studies at the same time, and in a shorter timeframe to preliminary results than "8 weeks" or "18 months".
poletopole 7y ago
I already found a new transcendental number in my research and it has only been three weeks.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Well, almost all reals are... I would be more impressed if you found a new number that isn't!
- WantonQuantum 7y ago
  Nice! How many transcendental numbers are we up to now? (Kidding! I kid!) What properties of Poletopole's constant make it interesting?
  - poletopole 7y ago
    Odds are you might see my paper on HN later this week if I'm right about what I discovered today. But the constant popped up while I was playing with a prime/integer model that allowed me to eliminate the complex space of any real system. However, today I realized the significance of what I had discovered the other day while playing with a 5-cell system and should lead me to finally end my research ongoing since August, which was to derive a prime number space--as silly as it sounds--but now that I have unlimited free time to work on the paper, things have escalated quickly. I started on this project because I needed an ambient space to work with topologies for a theoretical and highly decentralized/distributed, partition-tolerant, declarative, multiplexed L8 (yes, L8) protocol based on some of the entropic principles of digital communication Claude Shannon introduced, but not exclusively; it is semantically plain HTTP at L7 but is IP tunneled over HTTP/2 and the dat/ipfs protocols and runs on the WASM. Why I'm developing that protocol is another story, but I will say that, as a programmer, I done. Anyways, tomorrow I will see what the tide washes ashore.
bradlys 7y ago
What the benchmark is set at: > Let's not forget the time when Isaac Newton changed the world during a quarantine from the plague, he did not wait idle for the plague to end, he continued working in isolation in this serene place where the mind was set free and lead to many discoveries. Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever. What they give examples of doing: > call your dad Give me a break.
finaliteration 7y ago
We could also just take some time to relax and focus on self-care because the current situation is really stressful for most people. I don't think everyone benefits from the added pressure of being expected to produce some great work with their time in isolation. Some of us just want to get through the work day and then spend some time playing video games or read a book.
millie 7y ago
Bleh. Clearly written by someone who isn’t trying to work a full time job without childcare for tiny children. This whole period will set the low watermark for my inadequacy as a parent and worker. Can’t wait for it to be over.
pesfandiar 7y ago
While the quarantine could provide a great opportunity for some to achieve great life goals, things could be quite different for parents working and caring for young children. With two working parents and a toddler at home, I'd be so happy to accomplish bare minimum work and home duties; pulling an Isaac Newton be darned!
tombert 7y ago
I agree with the theme of this, but the company I work for has been taking the COVID lockdown as an excuse to have more remote meetings, some of which are late at night for me (since this company is based in California and I'm in NY). I definitely agree with making the best of a forced quarantine, I've been trying to get my brother-in-law to study for his GED (or whatever they call it in NY), but it feels like for the happy few that have a remote-friendly job, this crisis has actually decreased my free time.
- brewdad 7y ago
  My wife has been working from 7am-6pm every day for the past two weeks including about 5 hours a day on the weekends. About every third night, she'll have a 9pm meeting too and skipped a 10pm meeting last night. She's taking fewer breaks during the day than she would at the office as well. WFH is beginning to take a toll. She knows that she needs to be better about stepping away and has this week, but another new "crisis" this morning means long days ahead.
theboywho 7y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that might have helped people achieve great things: solitude. Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching countless videos on the internet. What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19, unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't need a pandemic to do deep work.
vlunkr 7y ago
It's amazing how people here are managing to find fault in a 3 paragraph long inspirational post. You don't have to do any of this stuff, it's not a mandate, just a person on the internet arguing for something positive.
- PureDimension 7y ago
  Have you seen these last links? They are far from being positive. Also the author has some pretty extremist stuff on twitter.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  It isn't inspirational; I'm having a hard time settling on what I don't like about it, but it's not saying "look on the bright side", it's a rapid-fire machine gun of orders and demands, look: > code that great app, learn a second language, donate blood, donate to your local food bank, do 5 pull-ups, then do 10, train like Arnold at home, learn about the current economy, learn about the future economy, and they all ring with the same energy of a multi-level-marketing scheme, or a "death is coming, frantically DO THINGS" panic. Go shout that at your grandma, and see if she feels like being Isaac Newton afterwards. > Let's all become Isaac Newton this month Become offended by people criticising my ideas, take a 30 year sinecure job as Warden of the Royal Mint obtained by the patronage of an Earl, lose $3 million in the collapse of the South Sea Company, study the literal interpretations of the Bible, study Alchemy, sure I can do these things. Oh you mean the cherry picked best bits of a 1-in-a-billion mathematical genius. Haha. Good one. Very inspirational and not at all depressing by comparison.
- beart 7y ago
  For me, the fault is that the author seems to have an extremely limited perspective - seemingly assuming that everyone has a bunch of free time and is in the position to throw all their energy into creative endeavors or self improvement. The millions of people who are unemployed and facing unpaid bills are not focused on their start-up idea. There are people right now at hospitals in critical condition. Their loved ones not allowed to visit them as they face the chance of death. There are thousands of businesses on the verge or closing permanently. Their owners aren't sitting around thinking they can use the next month to do more sit ups. There are countless families who must continue working while now taking care of children not allowed to return to school. Those families also now have to figure out how to actually teach their children so they don't fall behind. On and on it goes... I don't find this page to be inspirational in the least. I find it to be self-centered and naive. Funny thing is, I wasn't really that bothered by it to start with, but the more I think about it, the more angry I get at the author.
jackyinger 7y ago
This guy is saying take the silver lining if you can. This is a positive call to action, take it and be inspired to do something. This general sentiment applies to life in general. There’s a lot of comments here focusing on the negative. I think we’re all well aware of the things that aren’t going well. I have empathy for all those impacted by the pandemic, it does suck. But, forgot glass half empty, go for half full! There are all kinds of opportunities out there (not equality distributed of course), and it is up to you to get creative and leverage those opportunities available to you no matter how mundane they may be. Do it!
pixelpoet 7y ago
That's a nice sentiment but recent history doesn't have Newtons or von Neumanns showing up, and I've often asked why. In my opinion it's quite a serious question, will we ever see such genius again, why or why not?

April Is Canceled

107 points by dannymx 7y ago

maxerickson 7y ago

Or you know, just try to make it through to the other side in a reasonably calm manner. That's fine too.

rad_gruchalski 7y ago
That’s what the post is talking about.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  We have…different interpretations of Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever. and Let's all become Isaac Newton this month.
  - smsm42 7y ago
    Not everybody will invent calculus. But everybody can try to not let themselves slip into doom and gloom and despair.
  - gumby 7y ago
    ...and do all that while spending the majority of your time on alchemy and occult christian mysticism. Then when you emerge from isolation transformed, move to a big city and execute a lot of men. If you can’t do that you’re no Isaac Newton.
    - tasogare 7y ago
      > execute a lot of men I had to search that on Wikipedia. This is referring to the men Newton prosecuted for counterfeit coins as part of his Master of Mint appointment.
  - dx87 7y ago
    The paragraph you omitted between the cherry picked quotes explain that this month is a good time to try and do things you normally can't because you're normally too busy, like calling family, or cooking a new food.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      I quoted like 10% of it, that's hardly cherry picking. It's fine if we don't react the same to the tone, but that's what I responded to, and I sort of react to your "this month is a good time to..." in the same way. Lot's of people aren't on a nice vacation this month, for lots of different reasons.

01100011 7y ago

Eh, some of us just have to keep working. No time to work on our magnum opus, because we're trying to remain productive in the ersatz offices we've cobbled together at home.

faitswulff 7y ago
Some of us are stay at home parents.
- maguirre 7y ago
  I was just explaining to someone that I have to be: a parent, a teacher, an engineer and a husband. I feel I am doing all of them equally badly sigh
  - na85 7y ago
    That's okay, I was doing all those things badly before the apocalypse.
  - lemonberry 7y ago
    My guess is you're doing better than you think. Be gentle with yourself and watch that self-talk. It can be a killer.
  - beart 7y ago
    Remind yourself that the fact that you are even in your children's life on a daily basis already puts your children ahead of 1/4th of the U.S. > According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 19.7 million children, more than 1 in 4, live without a father in the home. https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic https://www.fatherhood.org/father-absence-statistic
- stared 7y ago
  A friend wrote "Train for a Mars mission: how to survive social distancing while working from home with your kids around without losing your sanity" https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-survive-social-distancing-while-working-from-home-with-your-kids-c9874ad0922a https://medium.com/@szopa/train-for-a-mars-mission-how-to-su...

mdonahoe 7y ago

Issac Newton didn't have kids home from school, and didn't need to attend Zoom meetings.

rad_gruchalski 7y ago
Indeed. But you still have a job and you are (hopefully) healthy. Think about it for a second. It could be much worse.
- mdonahoe 7y ago
  I'm just saying I don't like the pressure of having to compare myself to Issac Newton. Also everything could always be worse, so it's a mostly useless argument.
abjKT26nO8 7y ago
And had a lot of inherited wealth to support his intellectual endeavours without being exhausted by a day job.

morphogenesis 7y ago

I know I'm lucky to still have a job at a company that seems to be doing just fine despite the pandemic but I kind of wish I could have a month of time completely to myself

tjr225 7y ago
About to come out of two months of parental leave and it was fantastic.

ck2 7y ago

Nice but sadly also May (what did Newton do in his second month?) The IHME models they chose to use are too optimistic, too many people aren't wise enough to understand or care how this works and won't be told what to do, there are going to be rather stubborn congregations for Easter. https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections Ventilators run out way before ICU beds.

TechBro8615 7y ago
Thanks for this site, I haven't seen it before. This predicts a peak usage of 32k ventilators, but I don't see any data for how many ventilators we already have?
- tathougies 7y ago
  In 2010, there were about 62k ventilators in American hospitals, more than any other developed nation at the time: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 If you take into account non-'full time' ventilators (not sure what these are but apparently they exist), the US has 99k.
  - ck2 7y ago
    It's not the count but the distribution. NY State only managed to come up with 6500, feds finally gave them 4400 more but the federal "stockpile" turned out to be a lie. There is also a good chance given how complex the machines are that many a decade old from 2010 are no longer functional? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-ventilators.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/politics/coronavirus-v...
    - tathougies 7y ago
      NY state has 8 million people. The United states has about 320 million. Thus, assuming an equal distribution, I would expect NY to have about 1/40 the number as the entire country. 62000 / 40 = 1550, so actually New York has a lot more than one would expect. I would expect there to be more ventilators today than 2010 (but I could be wrong).

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

Love how the third paragraph starts all positive and reasonable then suddenly segways into "Stop the Coronavirus Corporate Coup" and then an article about how "Hyperbitcoinization" is coming and how the modern economy is going to collapse from inflation.

wpietri 7y ago
Whoa. I didn't look at the links. That's bonkers.

Punkyou2 7y ago

I absolutely loved reading this! Thank you!

rad_gruchalski 7y ago

Very inspiring, with a twist. Thank you!

thatfrenchguy 7y ago

Sounds like a pretty privilege take by people like us that still have jobs.

joncp 7y ago

Or...if you still have to work, then find a way to help a furloughed person be Newton for a month. Maybe a spouse or your kids. Maybe a stranger (from six feet away). Doesn't matter.

mcv 7y ago

I wish I had time for any of that. I keep reading ideas for how to deal with the boredom of self-isolation, but nobody writes about the stress. My wife and I have to homeschool two kids while also doing our own jobs from home. We're lucky of course that we have jobs, and we can do them from home, and we have two awesome and healthy kids. But homeschooling while we work really is a bit much.

hodgesrm 7y ago
My feelings really go out to you. Hope you all come through healthy and caring for each other. Meanwhile, it's even tougher for people with kids at home who still have to go to work. Not all of us are lucky enough to be able to work with zoom and github.
- mcv 7y ago
  In my country, only people with "vital" jobs, which means health care, police, emergency services, everything related to food (production, delivery), logistics, garbage collection, etc. still go out to work, and for them, child care is still available. Home workers have to handle their own children.
fideloper 7y ago
can’t upvote enough, 5mo old and a 2yr old here and it’s.......a lot.
- Exmoor 7y ago
  My wife and I are trying to manage a 6 year old and 3 year old and the original comment made me try to imagine what the theoretical hardest age to try to work from home with would be. 5mo and 2yr is roughly what I came up with in my head. Not that it helps much, but you have my sympathy. If it feels like it's really, really hard, stressful, and frustrating it's because it is. And that's okay.
- scruple 7y ago
  My wife and I have ~10 month old twins here. No help in the house these past weeks and my wife and I are both still working (full-time, if anything the volume of work has increased instead of decreased) remotely. Adding another layer of complexity to the situation, she's pumping for both of them and we're both stressed out about keeping her supply up through this ordeal (which means we need to continue eating healthy and staying stress free... yeah, right). It's really an unreasonable and unhealthy amount of work for 2 people. We split the day into AM/PM shifts, we both have to help during each others shifts, and I need to help out when she's pumping. I normally cook all of our food, anyway, but with all of this additional overhead it's really wearing me the hell out. We pick work back up after we finish getting the twins to bed and eat dinner. I feel like I'm a walking corpse half of every day.

etrk 7y ago

In an alternate reality, Newton did five pull-ups instead of inventing calculus.

greenyoda 7y ago
It's OK. Leibnitz[1] (who independently invented calculus) would also have had to be doing pull-ups for calculus to not have been invented. Although Newton not having invented calculus might also have hampered his contributions to physics, which would have been a great loss. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz ---- Something I just learned about Leibnitz from that Wikipedia article - he was also a pioneer in computing: "He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685 and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of all digital computers."
- etrk 7y ago
  Yeah, unless Leibnitz was busy making some tacos.

ecopoesis 7y ago

Honestly? Fuck this. Millions of people are going to die. It's very likely some of your friends and family will be in that number. It's okay to mourn. It's expected that we will all mourn. The world we get out of this is going to be different and it's going to be a worse one for almost everyone. You don't need to write King Lear or invent gravity. Just surviving will be a miracle enough.

johnmarinelli 7y ago
> millions wat
- danharaj 7y ago
  Mitigations in the US are taking too long. A lot of people are going to die.
- monksy 7y ago
  Yes.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  The current "best case" scenario of your government is 100k-240k dead; less than one order of magnitude is basically nothing in an exponential crisis. 240k to a million is just two doublings.
  - evan_ 7y ago
    also: there are countries other than the United States.
    - blattimwind 7y ago
      Conjecture unproven before man.
  - ecopoesis 7y ago
    And there are 6.7 billion folks not in the US who all matter too.

steve-benjamins 7y ago

You could also rest. You don't need to force feed yourself creativity and productivity. I don't mean to take anything away from the author, just seeing a lot of this sentiment on social media. Thought it would be worth voicing a counter balance.

m0zg 7y ago

Good advice to those of us who have the means to stay afloat, but it's not going to be just April the way things are going now. Unless a working prophylaxis is found/confirmed May and June will be canceled too. That's what's unnerving about this whole situation: nobody knows what the endgame is. Say we're at the end of April. Then what? Open stuff back up? Not going to happen if opening it back up could realistically mean another 100K deaths before we shut everything back down. So let's get those drug studies going in earnest, and lets rewrite the rules for what's "acceptable" in terms of regulation and rigor when faced with a potential death toll of this magnitude. I'm sure we can do more than a couple of studies at the same time, and in a shorter timeframe to preliminary results than "8 weeks" or "18 months".

poletopole 7y ago

I already found a new transcendental number in my research and it has only been three weeks.

blattimwind 7y ago
Well, almost all reals are... I would be more impressed if you found a new number that isn't!
WantonQuantum 7y ago
Nice! How many transcendental numbers are we up to now? (Kidding! I kid!) What properties of Poletopole's constant make it interesting?
- poletopole 7y ago
  Odds are you might see my paper on HN later this week if I'm right about what I discovered today. But the constant popped up while I was playing with a prime/integer model that allowed me to eliminate the complex space of any real system. However, today I realized the significance of what I had discovered the other day while playing with a 5-cell system and should lead me to finally end my research ongoing since August, which was to derive a prime number space--as silly as it sounds--but now that I have unlimited free time to work on the paper, things have escalated quickly. I started on this project because I needed an ambient space to work with topologies for a theoretical and highly decentralized/distributed, partition-tolerant, declarative, multiplexed L8 (yes, L8) protocol based on some of the entropic principles of digital communication Claude Shannon introduced, but not exclusively; it is semantically plain HTTP at L7 but is IP tunneled over HTTP/2 and the dat/ipfs protocols and runs on the WASM. Why I'm developing that protocol is another story, but I will say that, as a programmer, I done. Anyways, tomorrow I will see what the tide washes ashore.

bradlys 7y ago

What the benchmark is set at: > Let's not forget the time when Isaac Newton changed the world during a quarantine from the plague, he did not wait idle for the plague to end, he continued working in isolation in this serene place where the mind was set free and lead to many discoveries. Annus mirabilis, the year of wonders, that is the name of this period in which calculus, law of gravitation, the color spectrum, these discoveries changed the world forever. What they give examples of doing: > call your dad Give me a break.

finaliteration 7y ago

We could also just take some time to relax and focus on self-care because the current situation is really stressful for most people. I don't think everyone benefits from the added pressure of being expected to produce some great work with their time in isolation. Some of us just want to get through the work day and then spend some time playing video games or read a book.

millie 7y ago

Bleh. Clearly written by someone who isn’t trying to work a full time job without childcare for tiny children. This whole period will set the low watermark for my inadequacy as a parent and worker. Can’t wait for it to be over.

pesfandiar 7y ago

While the quarantine could provide a great opportunity for some to achieve great life goals, things could be quite different for parents working and caring for young children. With two working parents and a toddler at home, I'd be so happy to accomplish bare minimum work and home duties; pulling an Isaac Newton be darned!

tombert 7y ago

I agree with the theme of this, but the company I work for has been taking the COVID lockdown as an excuse to have more remote meetings, some of which are late at night for me (since this company is based in California and I'm in NY). I definitely agree with making the best of a forced quarantine, I've been trying to get my brother-in-law to study for his GED (or whatever they call it in NY), but it feels like for the happy few that have a remote-friendly job, this crisis has actually decreased my free time.

brewdad 7y ago
My wife has been working from 7am-6pm every day for the past two weeks including about 5 hours a day on the weekends. About every third night, she'll have a 9pm meeting too and skipped a 10pm meeting last night. She's taking fewer breaks during the day than she would at the office as well. WFH is beginning to take a toll. She knows that she needs to be better about stepping away and has this week, but another new "crisis" this morning means long days ahead.

theboywho 7y ago

The problem with this reasoning is that it misses the key ingredient that might have helped people achieve great things: solitude. Solitude is almost impossible to reach with today's attention economy (mostly social media), people will most likely spend their quarantine watching countless videos on the internet. What the plague removed are distractions, we can't say the same for covid-19, unless you're trained to resist the attention economy, but then you wouldn't need a pandemic to do deep work.

vlunkr 7y ago

It's amazing how people here are managing to find fault in a 3 paragraph long inspirational post. You don't have to do any of this stuff, it's not a mandate, just a person on the internet arguing for something positive.

PureDimension 7y ago
Have you seen these last links? They are far from being positive. Also the author has some pretty extremist stuff on twitter.
jodrellblank 7y ago
It isn't inspirational; I'm having a hard time settling on what I don't like about it, but it's not saying "look on the bright side", it's a rapid-fire machine gun of orders and demands, look: > code that great app, learn a second language, donate blood, donate to your local food bank, do 5 pull-ups, then do 10, train like Arnold at home, learn about the current economy, learn about the future economy, and they all ring with the same energy of a multi-level-marketing scheme, or a "death is coming, frantically DO THINGS" panic. Go shout that at your grandma, and see if she feels like being Isaac Newton afterwards. > Let's all become Isaac Newton this month Become offended by people criticising my ideas, take a 30 year sinecure job as Warden of the Royal Mint obtained by the patronage of an Earl, lose $3 million in the collapse of the South Sea Company, study the literal interpretations of the Bible, study Alchemy, sure I can do these things. Oh you mean the cherry picked best bits of a 1-in-a-billion mathematical genius. Haha. Good one. Very inspirational and not at all depressing by comparison.
beart 7y ago
For me, the fault is that the author seems to have an extremely limited perspective - seemingly assuming that everyone has a bunch of free time and is in the position to throw all their energy into creative endeavors or self improvement. The millions of people who are unemployed and facing unpaid bills are not focused on their start-up idea. There are people right now at hospitals in critical condition. Their loved ones not allowed to visit them as they face the chance of death. There are thousands of businesses on the verge or closing permanently. Their owners aren't sitting around thinking they can use the next month to do more sit ups. There are countless families who must continue working while now taking care of children not allowed to return to school. Those families also now have to figure out how to actually teach their children so they don't fall behind. On and on it goes... I don't find this page to be inspirational in the least. I find it to be self-centered and naive. Funny thing is, I wasn't really that bothered by it to start with, but the more I think about it, the more angry I get at the author.

jackyinger 7y ago

This guy is saying take the silver lining if you can. This is a positive call to action, take it and be inspired to do something. This general sentiment applies to life in general. There’s a lot of comments here focusing on the negative. I think we’re all well aware of the things that aren’t going well. I have empathy for all those impacted by the pandemic, it does suck. But, forgot glass half empty, go for half full! There are all kinds of opportunities out there (not equality distributed of course), and it is up to you to get creative and leverage those opportunities available to you no matter how mundane they may be. Do it!

pixelpoet 7y ago

That's a nice sentiment but recent history doesn't have Newtons or von Neumanns showing up, and I've often asked why. In my opinion it's quite a serious question, will we ever see such genius again, why or why not?