"Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious..."

"... than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March.... The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells.... Italy was one of the first countries to see the new virus in the last week of February, almost at the same time that the original strain appeared. Washington was among the first states to get hit with the original strain in late February, but by March 15 the mutated strain dominated. New York was hit by the original virus around March 15, but within days the mutant strain took over.... Some of the [vaccine] compounds in development are supposed to latch onto the spike or interrupt its action. If they were designed based on the original version of the spike, they might not be effective against the new coronavirus strain... Although the researchers don’t yet know the details about how the mutated spike behaves inside the body, it’s clearly doing something that gives it an evolutionary advantage over its predecessor and is fueling its rapid spread. One scientist called it a 'classic case of Darwinian evolution.'"

From "A mutant coronavirus has emerged, even more contagious than the original, study says" (L.A. Times reports).

"And just two men, locked in a hut for six months of dark and cold, would probably kill each other, he concluded."

"So it would have to be one person alone. As the leader of the expedition, he felt obliged to assign himself to the job.... Once the sun set, on April 12, he would be stuck. No plane could fly in again until the sun returned in October.... Byrd at first took comfort in his routine of weather observations and in constantly rearranging his supply closets.... His cabin was buried in the snow, to present a low profile to the wind; the only way out was through a hatch in the roof.... On the page, Byrd’s voice cries out like the merciless Antarctic wind. He sits in his sleeping bag playing solitaire. He bangs around in the dark, fetching food and fuel from his storage tunnels.... He registers the ice crawling up the inside walls of his cabin, and the drifts of snow that cover him whenever he manages to lift the hatch to peer out at the weather and tend his instruments. Weakened by the carbon-monoxide fumes from his stove, he throws up most of his food. He stares at sleeping pills and wonders if he should take them. 'The dark side of man’s mind seems to be a sort of antenna tuned to catch gloomy thoughts from all directions,' he wrote of a particularly bitter day early in June. 'I found it so with mine.'"

From "Self-Isolated at the End of the World/Alone in the long Antarctic night, Adm. Richard E. Byrd endured the ultimate in social distancing" (NYT).

"Melville’s ever-philosophical narrator, Ishmael, asks: 'Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.'"

"From a world he experienced as spherical from atop ships’ masts, Melville perceived a sea-level humanity, embracing and celebrating the latitudes and longitudes of human variation, now termed diversity. When Ishmael finds himself compelled to share a blanket at the sold-out Spouter Inn, he declares, 'No man prefers to sleep two in a bed.' But he settles in, waiting for his mysterious South Seas roommate who, he’s informed, is peddling a shrunken head on the streets of New Bedford. Queequeg’s appearance terrifies Ishmael mute. But after things equilibrate, Ishmael reconsiders: 'For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal … a human being just as I am. … Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.'... Reflecting on Queequeg’s tatted visage, he concludes: 'Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face — at least to my taste — his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. … Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.'... Nearly two centuries ago, Melville showed us how easy it is to welcome as our own the touches of others, their equivalent colors, customs and beliefs; their journeys, their transitions. And to remember those who, unwelcomed, suffered. How much could have been avoided, and embraced, had we heeded...."

From "Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed" (NYT).

An old-looking new ad for a new Jerry Seinfeld special — it caught my eye, so I deem it successful, if creepily weird.

Obviously reminiscent of posters for pop-culture nonsense from the 1960s (but I'm not sure quite what):



ADDED: The reviewer at New York Magazine says the first half is good and the second half is bad. This is from a description of the second half:

He has been married for 19 years, and it is exhausting. “Marriage,” Seinfeld says, “is two people trying to stay together without saying the words ‘I hate you.’” He imagines himself waking up every morning and standing in front of a Jeopardy! podium, trying and failing each day to match his wife’s level of petty animus. “‘I’ll take ‘Details of a Ten-Minute Conversation We Had at Three in the Morning Eight Years Ago,’” he envisions her saying, “and I would like to bet everything I have on that, Alex.” Women are the Übermenschen; men who try to take them on do so foolishly and with no hope of winning....

"Tengujo can be made so thin that, at a certain point, it is too insubstantial for even the most gentle, decorative uses."

"At the width of a couple of kozo fibers, the paper becomes as thin as the wings of a mayfly. Only one use remains then: paper conservation. Trying to aggressively mend a document is risky because long-term chemical and physical effects are highly variable and relatively unknown. 'The more and more I am in this field, I feel that I should do less and less,' Ms. Choi said. So, as far as reinforcement material goes, the thinner the better.... The width of this thinnest tengujo is the same as the diameter of a single kozo fiber: 0.02 millimeters.... Slicing a 3-millimeter strip of Hidaka Washi tengujo with an ethanol-activated adhesive brushed onto one side, Ms. Choi gently covered an imperfection in Pinckney’s yellowing page. With a little push, the papers melted into each other. From a normal reading distance it looked as if nothing had been done, but under close examination you could see tiny strands of kozo gripping onto the ink....."

From "The Thinnest Paper in the World" (NYT).

Kozo is material — stems — from mulberry trees.

Choi is Soyeon Choi, "the head paper conservator at the Yale Center for British Art."

Pinckney is Eliza Pinckney, who was "a prominent American agriculturalist" and who wrote that letter in 1753.



From her Wikipedia article:

Eliza was 16 years old when she became responsible for managing Wappoo Plantation and its twenty slaves, plus supervising overseers at two other Lucas plantations, one inland producing tar and timber, and a 3,000 acres (12 km2) rice plantation on the Waccamaw River. In addition she supervised care for her extremely young sister, as their two brothers were still in school in London. As was customary, she recorded her decisions and experiments by copying letters in a letter book. This letter book is one of the most impressive collections of personal writings of an 18th-century American woman. It gives insight into her mind and into the society of the time.

From Antigua, [her father] Col. Lucas sent Eliza various types of seeds for trial on the plantations. They and other planters were eager to find crops for the uplands that could supplement their cultivation of rice. First, she experimented with ginger, cotton, alfalfa and hemp. Starting in 1739, she began experimenting with cultivating and improving strains of the indigo plant, for which the expanding textile market created demand for its dye. When Col. Lucas sent Eliza indigofera seeds in 1740, she expressed her "greater hopes" for them, as she intended to plant them earlier in the season. In experimenting with growing indigo in new climate and soil, Lucas also made use of knowledge and skills of enslaved Africans who had grown indigo in the West Indies and West Africa.

After three years of persistence and many failed attempts, Eliza proved that indigo could be successfully grown and processed in South Carolina. While she had first worked with an indigo processing expert from Montserrat, she was most successful in processing dye with the expertise of an indigo-maker of African descent whom her father hired from the French West Indies.

Eliza used her 1744 crop to make seed and shared it with other planters, leading to an expansion in indigo production. She proved that colonial planters could make a profit in an extremely competitive market. Due to her successes, the volume of indigo dye exported increased dramatically from 5,000 pounds in 1745–46, to 130,000 pounds by 1748.[4] Indigo became second only to rice as the South Carolina colony's commodity cash crop, and contributed greatly to the wealth of its planters. Before the Revolutionary War, indigo accounted for more than one-third of the total value of exports from the colony....

This letter book is one of the most complete collections of writing from 18th century America and provides a valuable glimpse into the life of an elite colonial woman living during this time period. Her writings detail goings on at the plantations, her pastimes, social visits, and even her experiments with indigo over several years. Many scholars consider this letter-book extremely precious because it describes everyday life over an extended period of time rather than a singular event in history....

There's a Pinckney Street in Madison, Wisconsin because of her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who was one of the founders of the United States Constitution.

You can read some excerpts from Eliza Pinckney's letter book here. Example (from May 1742):

Wont you laugh at me if I tell you I am so busey in providing for Posterity I hardly allow my self time to Eat or sleep and can but just snatch a minnet to write you and a friend or two now. I am making a large plantation of Oaks which I look upon as my own property, whether my father gives me the land or not; and therefore I design many years hence when oaks are more valueable than they are now — which you know they will be when we come to build fleets.  I intend, I say 2 thirds of the produce of my oaks for a charity (I'll let you know my scheme another time) and the other 3rd for those that shall have the trouble of putting my design in Execution. I sopose according to custom you will show this to your Uncle and Aunt. “She is [a] good girl,” says Mrs. Pinckney. “She is never Idle and always means well.” “Tell the little Visionary,” says your Uncle, “come to town and partake of some of the amusements suitable to her time of life.” Pray tell him I think these so, and what he may now think whims and projects may turn out well by and by. Out of many surely one may hitt. . .

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night... and do any shopping you might have through the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

The photo was taken at 5:48 this morning. The actual sunrise time was 5:46. Should I give you the 5:44 photograph too, so you can see what I was getting when Meade took this photo of me? Okay. Here:



Isn't it interesting how much the clouds reconfigured themselves in 4 minutes? They're really not as different as it may look, because the top photo is zoomed in.

Bookshelves.

The best thing about these Skype TV interviews is we can be on the lookout for problematic material on politicians’ bookshelves.

I’m compiling a database of MPs who might be reading beyond the scope of permitted opinions.

Report any suspicious books to me. I’ll do the rest. pic.twitter.com/dPTKvj6Aes

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) May 4, 2020

Ha. Not looking to call down the PC police, but this is just something else about the lockdown and the bookshelves, from Roz Chast:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @rozchast on May 1, 2020 at 2:10pm PDT

That's the one Philip K. Dick book that I read, loved, and found to be sufficient: "The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch."

Also:

Nailed it. Depth. Color. Composition. And cool glasses. 10/10 @AlRoker pic.twitter.com/hUM7FoH2x4

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 3, 2020