Thursday’s reading

🌮 I’m up to 16 hours of intermittent fasting as of today. I’m not going to lie, the last hour this morning before I broke fast was really tough. Also tough: making the kiddo breakfast and not munching any of it myself. Argh.

🦠 Since the coronavirus crisis started, the Microsoft AI for Health team has been doing a lot of work to help understand its impact. The data has been really useful for internal planning, and I’m really glad to see it published as a set of interactive visualizations to understand our progress against COVID-19.

🌡 Just because there are other things occupying our minds doesn’t mean the climate crisis is going away. June was the second warmest on record here in Europe. We’ll see what July brings as it’s been cool here in Berlin so far this month.

🛫 It’s kind of a crazy idea to use direct air capture of carbon dioxide to make jet fuel, but it’s kind of a beautiful one as well. Net-zero air travel with current aviation hardware would be amazing.

🎲 Randomness has always been something that computers have a hard time with, but Venkat Mansinghka’s group at MIT is going to present a new algorithm called Fast Loaded Dice Roller (FLDR) that may be able to free us from too much determinism and make for better simulations.

👋 Ok, back to work for me. Catch ya later.