Stuck at home? On demand and Virtual Events and Entertainment
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Yes, we’re all stuck at home, or at least limited in our entertainment and activities. Don’t sit in front of the tv binge watching your normal tv shows – save that for your normal tv viewing time. Use some of your free time to check out new types of entertainment and virtual events and broaden your horizons while you stay at home!
We’ve gathered a list of free online and virtual events and activities so you can feel social while social distancing.
Virtual Events and Activities for Anyone!
Virtual Museum Tours and Exhibits
Google Arts & Culture has joined together with over 500 museums and galleries around the world to offer virtual tours and online exhibits of some of the most famous museums around the world.
Home Safari Facebook Live each weekday at 3pm will highlight one of the amazing animals and include an activity you can do from home. Join them starting Monday, March 16 at 3pm for the first Home Safari- featuring Fiona!
Watch 2 sessions of Columbus Zoo Q’s Series on their Facebook page. On Zoo Qs, they’ll offer answers with weird, wacky, and fun facts about the awesome animal kingdom. There are 10 episodes available, and each is just a few minutes long, such as “Why do giraffes have spots?” or “Wombat Poop Is What?”.
You can also watch a new video of Aurora’s 15 week old cub explore his behind-the-scenes yard and pool!
Each day next week at 3pm EST you can log in for free and your kids can go on a LIVE and one of a kind adventure with some awesome people. Open to all ages but focused on kids ages 5-10.
Monday – an exotic animal veterinarian will be hanging out with real giraffes (yes, this photo is one of them!) and teaching us all about their lives
Tuesday – a local policeman will give a tour of his police car and share all about how our policemen spend their days
Wednesday – some fun and relaxing and CALMING kid’s yoga with the amazing Allison Sullivan
Thursday – an adventure all the way to Ghana, Africa with yours truly
Friday – an online art class where kids will learn new skills and refine old ones and create something awesome (and not messy)
America’s Preppers are Finally Getting a Little Respect
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By John Seewer, AP
Curt La Haise has put up with plenty of razzing from friends over the years who have called him paranoid for stockpiling an eight-month supply of food in his basement and having enough fuel to power his generator for almost an entire winter.
They’re not laughing anymore amid panic buying that has cleared store shelves across the U.S. and growing fears that the new coronavirus will force many Americans to self-quarantine for weeks in their homes.
“Now my friends are like, ‘What should I do, what should I get?’” said La Haise, who operates a firearms and safety training business near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. “Prepping doesn’t look so bad now.”
For those in the often-mocked “prepper” community, this is quickly becoming their “I told you so” moment. But many are resisting saying that, even if it’s in the back of their minds. What they hope is that they’ll finally be taken seriously and that more people will follow their lead.
“We’re not laughing. We’re not saying, ‘I told you so,’ when people are out there fighting over toilet paper and hand sanitizers,” said Paul Buescher, of Northfield Center Township, Ohio.
Buescher is one of 32 members of a group in northeastern Ohio that shares a farm packed with enough canned and dehydrated food and water to last for years. He said he is now getting calls all day long asking for advice.
Jim Wiseman displays his guns in a gun safe at his home in La Jolla, Calif. The 54-year-old businessman and father of five has a back-up generator, a water filter, a grain mill and a 4-foot-tall pile of emergency food tucked in his home in this upscale San Diego suburb. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)
Survival supply stores can’t keep up with the demand for food kits and medical supplies.
“Every single business that has to do with emergency preparedness is overloaded,” said John Ramey, founder of a Colorado-based prepper website called The Prepared.
Most preppers say they are about self-reliance and common sense and are quick to distance themselves from the “doomsday preppers” who are depicted on television shows awaiting the day most of the world’s population is wiped off the map.
“The vast majority of this is ‘beans and Band-Aids,’ not ‘bullets and bunkers,’” Ramey said.
Jim Cobb, a disaster readiness consultant and editor-in-chief of Prepper Survival Guide magazine, said he has seen a few fellow preppers gloating on social media about people who are crowding stores in search of disinfectants.
“I hate the thought of alienating any of them because they think were a bunch of elitist goofballs.” he said. “We’re trying to take advantage of the opportunity that for once they’re not laughing and pointing fingers at us.”
While most people who have tested positive for the virus experience only mild or moderate symptoms, there’s a greater danger and longer recovery period for older adults and people with existing health problems.
Experts say it’s most important to practice safe hygiene: Wash hands frequently, cover sneezes and coughs, and stay home if fever or other symptoms arise.
As for the preppers, they have their own recommendations for anyone who is unsure of what to do next:
— Be ready to stay at home for at least two weeks. Have plenty of food and water. Don’t forget about your pets and medicines. That includes over-the-counter products for fevers and coughs.
— Yes, toilet paper is important, but so are hand sanitizers, disinfectants, sanitation wipes, eye protection and gloves.
— Get your finances in order. Make sure you can pay your bills and have cash on hand.
— Maybe most important, relax and don’t panic. And pay attention to the news and what’s happening around you.
This morning I see this Tweet from CNN sentient potato Brian Stelter:
Surgeon General Jerome Adams used the word "need" while talking to the WH press corps. So I will too. He needs to spend his time educating the public about how to protect each other, not lecturing the press about what’s newsworthy. https://t.co/1beTbBHZPWpic.twitter.com/VXFYkD19H9
“We really need you all to lean into and prioritize the health and safety of the American people,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said at Saturday’s White House briefing. There’s nothing controversial about that — news outlets are empowering the public with health and safety information. But then Adams said this: “No more bickering, no more partisanship, no more criticism or finger pointing. There’ll be plenty of time for that. But we all need to hit the reset button and lean into moving forward the health and safety of the American people…”
What Adams called “bickering” and “criticism” is what most of us call accountability. Is there value in focusing on the future? Yes, but when Adams said he wants “less stories looking at what happened in the past,” I hear him saying “stop exposing the Trump administration’s failures.” There is value in all of the coverage. And government officials don’t get to decide that — readers and reporters and whistleblowers and editors do.
So Stelter admits that he is biased and projects his own anti-Trump hatred onto what the Surgeon General says.
The media would rather run with “make Trump look bad” than anything helpful to people.
Yesterday I went to the grocery store. There was no milk, bread, and toilet paper, and hardly any eggs.
Why is this happening?
Because the media is fucking dog-shit awful to a degree that is hard to fathom.
If the media were responsible, this is what they would be covering:
The United States, however, is more than self-sufficient on toilet paper and paper products in general. About 90% of US toilet paper is produced domestically. Most of the rest comes from Canada.
There is a reason for this. The United States has millions of hectares of harvestable forests in the Pacific North West. When you wipe your ass with a fluffy brand name two-ply paper, you are wiping your ass with some of the finest maple, oak, pine, and douglas fir ever cut down by American lumberjacks.
Chinese export shutdowns are not going to interrupt the toilet paper supply chain.
The is the same for food. In 2016, 87.3% of US food consumed was produced domestically. What we import is mostly specialty items like wines, cheeses, tropical fruits, and exotic items. Our staples are almost entirely US grown.
More than that, many of your staple items are produced within a couple of hundred miles from where you live. The milk I buy in Huntsville, Alabama, comes from a dairy in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, all of 112 miles away. I know, because I checked the milk code.
If you live in New York City, your milk probably comes from upstate New York.
There is no reason to horde milk or toilet paper or bread because of the Coronavirus.
BUT…
The media covered the Australian toilet paper hoarding and failed to explain any of this and people panicked and the shortages began.
Once there was a shortage of one staple (toilet paper) it caused people to horde other items and eventually, it cased a societal cascade failure.
Why?
So because of the media’s malfeasance and desire to make Trump look bad no matter what, we end up with this:
People should stop this toilet paper crap. There’s enough toilet paper for every person on this god forgotten rock floating in space. pic.twitter.com/s2m9k8ttrb
Rather than telling Americans that it’s not worth fighting each other over the last package of toilet paper in Target like its guzzoline in the wasteland, they are reporting shit like this:
So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection. Twenty-two of those deaths occurred in one poorly run nursing home outside of Seattle, the Life Care Center. Another nine deaths occurred in the rest of Washington state, leaving ten deaths (four in California, two in Florida, and one in each of Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, and South Dakota) spread throughout the rest of the approximately 329 million residents of the United States.
By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019, the National Safety Council estimates. That represents an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day; if the press catalogued these in as much painstaking detail as they have deaths from coronavirus, highways nationwide would be as empty as New York subways are now.
As of Monday, approximately 89 percent of Italy’s coronavirus deaths had been over the age of seventy, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sad to say, those victims were already nearing the end of their lifespans. They might have soon died from another illness. No child under the age of nine has died from the illness worldwide. In China, only one individual in the ten-to-nineteen age group has succumbed.
An example: there were 34,200 deaths in the United States during the 2018–19 influenza season, estimates the cdc.
This is outstanding reporting putting common fatalities into perspective.
If you are under the age of 70, you are statistically more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the doctor to get tested than you are of Coronavirus.
Remember that data from 2002 shows that 1.7 million people got a Health Care-Associated Infection (when you get an infection going to the hospital because you are surrounded by other sick people) and almost 99,000 people died from those infections.
That is what killed my dad. His cancer was in remission from the chemo, but that made him immunocompromised, not to mention that he was a 62-year-old diabetic. He went to the hospital, got pneumonia, turned septic and died.
It seems much more likely that an elderly patient going to the hospital with Conronavirus will die from a staph or strep or MRSA infection they picked up in the waiting room than of the virus itself.
It seems that the leading underlying cause of untimely death in Europe is being elderly.
But that reporting does not generate panic clicks, cause people to sit in front of the TV for hours waiting for updates, or make Trump look bad, so the major networks won’t run it.
When the dust settles and we figure out just how much damage was done to our economy and the fabric of our society because of media malfeasance during the Coronavirus outbreak, I think there will be hell to pay.
One work-from-home suggestion: snacks, supplies, a pet, and dolls. You should consider upgrading to a more ergonomic work station (better chair, better keyboard). Replacing the dolls, on the other hand, is not an option, as far as we’re concerned. (Unless you swap in
Babylon 5
toys, we guess.)
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No matter where you live or work, the novel coronavirus means you’ve probably begun exploring the option of working from home instead of a centralized office. (In many cases, “option” is a gentleway of putting it.) Here at Ars Technica, our staffers have seen their phones and messaging apps blow up with countless versions of the following: “How the heck do you pull off this whole work-from-home thing?”
We’re in a position to know. Ars Technica has operated as a remote workforce since it was founded in 1998, decentralized and connected entirely by Internet-fueled collaboration. If this is news to you, fear not: Senior Technology Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote a massive February explainer about how our site functions this way. That feature is one part of a recent remote-work series, and its other entries have focused largely on the business feasibility of the practice.
But that conversation’s tenor is shifting rapidly in the face of coronavirus, and you might be more interested in a broader set of impressions and tips. Thus, we’re here to offer ways big and small to improve your remote workplace experience, based on our staff’s years of doing it successfully. These range from brief to lengthy, and they include suggestions that may seem obvious or silly to some, but sometimes in the course of working from home, the little stuff adds up in a big way.
Above all else, we’re here for you. Expect more coverage about the work-from-home transition from Ars Technica in the weeks to come, and hit us up if you start feeling a bit insane. Even when you work from home, take it from us: you’re not alone.
Doctor’s orders: Jay Timmer, Ph.D., Senior Science Editor
Your office needs to have a view. Trees, birds, open sky—just something you find appealing so that when you raise your head from your screen to clear your mind, there’s something there that you want to see.
Have an exercise and activity routine. Many studies have shown that simply getting up and moving a bit is incredibly positive for your health. When you can set up your office with everything you need and don’t have to get up and find co-workers or go out for food, it’s easy to just go completely sedentary. Establish a routine to avoid that.
Have a default activity for when you need a break from work—something you shift to easily, without having to spend the time thinking about what you want to do. One of the big problems for me is that I usually need a break when i’m already feeling drained and not thinking clearly, so the last thing I want is to have to start an internal debate about what I want to do.
Have a physically separate workspace—ideally a separate office or at least a desk that’s dedicated to work. Put it as far as possible from the kitchen, laundry room, TV, and other sources of domestic distraction. You want to take regular breaks throughout the day, but it should take a bit of time and effort to get there so you’re not constantly tempted to distract yourself with snacks, chores, or whatever.
It’s Slack, not slacking: Lee Hutchinson, Senior Technology Editor
In my experience, what helps more than anything to have coworkers who are also virtual. At a past job I held a role for a year or so where I was the only remote teammate in a large Bellevue, Washington-based administration team. On the upside, this meant I could work from home at need; I had access to a physical office in my city, but I was just as remote from my team there as at home. On the downside, it meant that I missed out on a huge amount of communication. Everyone was in the office, catching each other in the hall for informal communication, sticking their heads over cube walls to ask quick questions or hash out ideas verbally, BSing around the coffee pot, and all the other normal office things one does. Unless someone specifically called my desk phone or hit me up in an instant message or email, I was more or less isolated.
Working at Ars with a fully remote team means the majority of our interaction occurs within Slack, including the informal goof-off stuff that’s so important for building shared experiences and reinforcing team cohesion. The “time-wasting” aspects of Slack that might make it a questionable fit for teams using it to supplement a physical office are important when that’s (more or less) the only socialization you get with coworkers.
So I guess that’s a long way of saying that at least some kind of human contact is a must. Everybody’s got days whene they need to be head-down on a project and don’t want to be bothered, of course, but having someone in a similar situation as you, with whom you can share a dumb link or have a quick laugh over a shared joke, is absolutely vital to mental health.
I have spent much of my career working from home long before I joined Ars, and I absolutely agree it makes a huge difference having everyone working remotely. It’s the same kind of bonding via shared experience that takes place in a physical office, only virtually. When it was just me, I still found ways to build online communities, e.g., through a group of science-writer friends (including Dr. Timmer). We started out with an email list, then graduated to a Slack channel (which I visit far less frequently these days because I’m spending all my time on the Ars Slack—it meets the same need).
I honestly have never really struggled with working from home. It suits my temperament more than your standard office setting, and I’ve always been good at establishing my own daily routine and structure. But I noticed early on that without some regular social interaction in meatspace, it was way too easy to get lost in my own head and get a bit “tweaky.” Case in point: my spouse, Sean, was on a speaking tour in Australia for two weeks last month, and I made sure to schedule some time with friends a couple of times a week until he returned: meeting a fellow writer for tea and carbs, for instance, having a girls’ brunch and movie outing, or stopping by our local animal shelter to pet some rescues and help out for an hour or so. (We adopted our two cats from there, so I feel invested. 😊)
Jennifer Ouellette
Speaking of which: pets are a great outlet for short breaks during the day. I like looking up from the keyboard to see a napping kitty curled up on my Time Capsule or wanting to play fetch or get a few scratches.
I have always, like John, staked out time for regular workouts during the day, just to get me out of the house and away from my desk for a couple of hours. It’s also great for mind/body balance: working out gives my brain a rest so I can come back to work refreshed, ready to pound through any tough story or fit of writer’s block/brain fog that might have been plaguing me earlier. I can also often multitask during workouts by watching films or TV series that I might review, further countering those couch-potato tendencies. If you can review work documents or watch necessary video content while moving, that’s an option with or without a home treadmill; just watch your phone-glancing step if you take it outside. Which I suggest. While it’s better to physically leave the house for workouts, we do have the NordicTrack equivalent of a Peloton for those days when it’s just not feasible (say, a voluntary self-quarantine during a pandemic).
Study Finds High Demand for Go and AR/VR Programmers, While Python Remains Favorite Language
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The tech jobs marketplace at Hired.com crunched their data on more than 400,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year to produce their annual "State of Software Engineers" report. Among its surprising insights: software engineers with more than 10 years of experience get 20% fewere interview requests than engineers with 4 to 10 years of experience. Other insights:
Demand for AR/VR talent is up by 1400%, mirroring blockchain’s 517% demand growth last year… In large U.S. tech hubs AR/VR engineer salaries range from $135k – $150k… 46% of software engineers rank AR/VR as one of the top 3 technologies they’d like to learn in 2020… If you work in AR/VR, you may want to move to San Francisco, where they pay $150k/year on average. The next-highest growth in demand came for "gaming engineers" and "computer vision engineers" — with both positions seeing a 146% increase in demand over 2018. The next-highest demand growth was for "search engineers" (increasing 137%) and for "machine learning engineers" (increasing 89%). Demand for "blockchain engineers" increased by just 9%. But they also report that demand for frontend and backend engineers "grew steadily by 17%, which shows that all companies — not just Silicon Valley tech giants — are evolving into being tech companies…"
The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company. Whether the company is Bank of America, Alaska Airlines, Sainsbury’s, or Tesla, investment in top software engineering talent isn’t a future ambition, it’s a matter of survival. And the #1 most-desired coding skill was Go (for the second year in a row), "garnering an average of 9.2 interview requests for every Go-skilled candidate…" But there may be a larger trend.
All told, the number of interview requests across all languages remained nearly constant year-over-year, with only minor fluctuations in average requests, and zero change in how each language ranked against others. This could suggest that supply for these skills has not yet caught up with demand… According to Robert Half, 67% of IT managers plan to expand their teams in areas such as security, cloud computing and business intelligence, but 89% reported challenges in recruiting that talent. Those challenges in hiring are even greater for roles related to machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. Their analysis concludes the most in-demand programming languages are Go, Scala, Ruby, TypeScript, Kotlin, Objective C, JavaScript, Swift, PHP, Java, HTML, and then Python — though Python, JavaScript, and Java are engineers’ favorite coding languages, "largely because of their useful and well-maintained libraries and packages…" "Ruby, PHP and Objective C are ranked the least favorite (and least fun) languages for software engineers."
U.S.A. –-(Ammoland.com)– Oregon-based Kershaw Knives (and sister company Zero Tolerance) have a prodigious release rate, to say the least. I try to spread the reviews out, but it turns out in doing so sometimes I’m so busy using a knife, I forget to write it up! Such is the case with Kershaw’s Static, a pocket cleaver. This is a knife I like a lot, but has one flaw keeping it from being a knife I love. Let’s find out what makes the Static tick.
Given the Static’s composition of a stainless steel 8Cr13MoV blade and a stainless handle, I’m hearing “durable, durable” in my head. By that I mean resistant to the elements, and requires little care or maintenance The only real downside to the choice of 8Cr13MoV for the blade, is that it loses its edge a bit quicker than higher grade steels. 8Cr13MoV compensates for this by taking an edge with ease. Sharpening the static is no chore at all. A quick special mention to the texturing along the base of the knife’s spine! Great traction for when you use your thumb to really bear down while cutting.
Kershaw has often used KVT ball bearings for their blades to spin open on, and to good effect. Just a little resistance to start with, then the Static slides open with ease. Similarly, the usual Kershaw frame lock makes a return appearance here, and is simply reliable. It locks open every time, and unlocks easily enough. While I would appreciate a little texturing on the grip face of the frame lock, it’s not a real necessity here.
Solid lockup
Between the stainless steel construction (outdoors!) and the cleaver blade shape (kitchen!), the Kershaw Static seems most at home being used in a campsite cookset. While I’ve used it as an EDC blade, (and it performs very well in usual daily tasks), it really feels in its natural element cutting through a thick slab of meat that’s getting ready to be dropped into the hot cast iron pan.
Meat, cast iron, Static. nice trio!
So what’s my problem with the Kershaw Static? It’s inexpensive, easy to sharpen and made from some pretty corrosion-resistant stuff. It even checks the usual boxes with good design, a solid framelock and oil-slick ball bearings. My only issue is that the Static is a little to short for my hands. Now, my mitts aren’t giant, nor are they little carney hands. I’m left wanting just a little more handle here, maybe .5″-1″. I know that even if I found my Goldilocks solution, that would leave others out in the cold. I just feel that the Static would be better suited a touch longer, still shorter than many other pocket folders out there!
With all that said, the Kershaw Static is to me a really good value for what you’re getting. Good design and rugged construction combine with the very reasonable price point to bring a good knife to your collection, whether it’s for EDC or the campsite. MSRP on the Kershaw Static is $59.99, while the street price is around $36. If you like the cleaver shape and are interested in checking the Static out, I think it will be worth your time.
About Rex Nanorum
Rex Nanorum is an Alaskan Expatriate living in Oregon with his wife and kids. Growing up on commercial fishing vessels, he found his next adventure with the 2nd Bn, 75th Ranger Regt. After 5 tours to Afghanistan and Iraq, he adventured about the west coast becoming a commercial fisheries and salvage SCUBA diver, rated helicopter pilot instructor (CFII) and personal trainer, before becoming a gear reviewer and writer.”
YouTuber Builds the World’s Most Powerful Handheld Laser Pointer and It Can Instantly Melt Glass
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The handheld laser pointers you can buy at office supplies stores are legally required to be no powerful than 0.005-watts, and most fall well below that threshold so they’re relatively safe to use. With that as a reference, you have a better understanding of just how terrifying this 100-watt handheld laser pointer really is.
The last time we checked in on Drake Anthony, who’s best known ‘round YouTube parts as Styropyro, he was demonstrating his latest toy: a professional (and extremely sketchy) laser tattoo remover he found on eBay that maxed out at around 30 million watts. However, unlike a laser pointer, the tattoo remover’s beam could only be triggered in pulses just 10 billionths of a second long.
For his latest creation, Drake got his hands on an engineering sample of a blue laser diode array. The diodes are designed to be used individually in devices like laser-based projectors for large movie theaters, so, pushing safety aside for a few hours, Drake turned an old microwave radar gun into a handheld housing that allows all 20 of the blue laser diodes to be fired simultaneously with over 100-watts of power.
Battery life is limited to roughly seven minutes, but that’s not much of an issue as it takes less than a second for the laser pointer to instantly set paper bags and wooden two-by-fours aflame, and that’s with the 20 beams all firing in parallel. Drake further upgrades his laser pointer with a lens on the front that focuses all 20 beams into a single concentrated point. Glass melts at over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and with the beam focused Drake’s laser pointer starts to melt a glass bottle just seconds after it’s been turned on.
If you’re inspired to build one of your own at home: Don’t! Drake is well versed in not only the technology and physics of lasers, but he’s also familiar with the extreme safety risks involved with custom creations like this. At 100-watts, it’s 200 times more powerful than the rating of an already dangerous Class-4 laser. Safety glasses with an extremely high optical density are a must—as is having a fire extinguisher close at hand every time this thing is powered up.
In this video, we’ll apply the “server fetched partials” concept to entire page loads using Turbolinks. By adding one line of code, we’ll make a server-side Laravel app feel like an SPA.
The NASA 3D Resources website has posted hundreds of 3D models, images, textures and visualizations that you can download for free. As far as models, they’ve got everything from astronaut gloves and spacesuits to satellites and spacecraft:
There’s also a Printable section where you can download .stl files for 3D printing (though some of them are fresh conversions that may require tweaking). In that section we found the Cassini probe, the Curiosity Rover, the Hubble Space Telescope, and even the first object designed on Earth, and e-mailed to space for manufacture: A wrench that was 3D printed on the ISS.
"The Multi-Purpose Precision Maintenance Tool has a number of important tools which allow an astronaut to complete tasks with comfort and ease. The different sized drives at the top allows the user to attach sockets. In the center are wrenches of varying sizes, allowing fewer wrenches to be carried to the job site. On the left is a precision measuring tool along with wire gauges and a single edged wire stripper. In the center is an outline for Velcro to be applied allowing an easy storage around the station. A circular hole in the bottom center allows for a clip to be used as well. On the right, and ergonomic grip is built into the tool with ridges for better grasp, lastly a pry bar is built into the ergonomic grip for ease of access."
(@howroute) 
