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Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors. And it's going to be a while till we travel again. Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while. A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.

From January to the end of June, over 500,000 people died of confirmed cases of Covid-19. In order to demonstrate the magnitude of the pandemic, James Beckwith made a time lapse map of each Covid-19 death. “Each country is represented by a tone and an expanding blip on the map when a death from Covid-19 is recorded. Each day is 4 seconds long, and at the top of the screen is the date and a counter showing the total numbers of deaths. Every country that has had a fatality is included.” As was the case with the pandemic, the video starts slow but soon enough the individual sounds and blips build to a crescendo, a cacophony of death.

Quarantunes is for... - sustaining the creation of (live) music throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. - providing a platform for artists + fans to connect, despite the cancellation of tours and shows in venues. - creating opportunities for artists to recoup lost earnings from cancelled dates through donations from fans via livestream. - encouraging new experiments in sound and music, using digital technologies and social media interfaces.

While the intent here is to give a lesson on exponential and logistic growth as general phenomena, with epidemics as a timely case study, there are a few notes worth adding when it comes to epidemics themselves. Probably the most important, mentioned only as a small on-screen note, is that these models should account for the amount of time someone with the virus remains infectious. Those who recover (or die) are no longer able to spread it, and so don't factor into the growth equation. The faster the growth, the less this matters, since at each point on the curve most people with the virus will have only contracted it recently, but especially in the long run or with slower growth, any realistic model has to consider this. The other factor, which I was hesitant to even get into here, is the extent to which reported cases reflect real cases. Generalizing away from epidemics, though, the key upshot is to be aware of phenomena where the rate of growth is proportional to the size of the thing growing. Compound interest, technological progress, population growth, and many other things fit this pattern, and it's shocking how bad our intuitions can be at recognizing what it means.

It involved the designation of wild animals as “natural resources” by the Chinese government, which caused a large increase in wildlife farming, with many more and different kinds of animals being put into contact with humans and each other on a regular basis. Add illegally trafficked animals into the mix, and you’ve got the right conditions for diseases to jump from the animals to humans. Then potentially infected animals and their meat, accompanied by potentially infected humans who raised those animals and butchered that meat, are then brought to the wet markets for sale to the public. "Unless China bans wildlife farming for good, this will keep happening.”

for anyone with covid19 cabin fever, here's some of my fav walking tour youtube channels 🧵 i love having these ~1hr vids the background when working on my computer or cleaning. gives a great sense of exploration of other people/cities…