Don't Stop ICFP

The ICFP music video is out! Thank you to Youyou Cong and Jose Calderon for putting this together. They've done the community a great service.

Segregated by Design

Systematic racism stunts the opportunities available to blacks, but I've seen few clear explanations of it mechanisms. Segregated by Design lays bare these mechanisms as regards housing, explaining how federal, state, and local policies deliberately fostered segregation in contravention of the constitution. Lucid, to the point, and graphically inventive. Animated by Mark Lopez, based on The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

Haskell, Then and Now. Got Questions? Ask them here!

IOHK Cardano Virtual Summit continues. Today's sessions include:

16.00 Fri 3 Jul Haskell, then and now: What is the future for functional programming languages? Prof Simon Peyton-Jones, Prof John Hughes, Prof Philip Wadler, Dr Kevin Hammond, Dr Duncan Coutts.

You can submit questions via Reddit. Register for the summit here. You can log in with your registered username and password here.

Cardano Virtual Summit 2020

I'm participating in four sessions at Cardano Virtual Summit 2020, and there are many other sessions too. All times UK/BST.

16.00 Thu 2 Jul An overview of IOHK research Prof Aggelos Kiayias, Prof Elias Koutsoupias, Prof Alexander Russell, Prof Phil Wadler.

18.30 Thu 2 Jul Architecting the internet: what I would have done differently... Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer and Google internet evangelist, Prof Aggelos Kiayias, panel moderated by Prof Philip Wadler.

20.00 Thu 2 Jul Functional smart contracts on Cardano Prof Philip Wadler, Dr Manuel Chakravarty, Prof Simon Thompson.

16.00 Fri 3 Jul Haskell, then and now: What is the future for functional programming languages? Prof Simon Peyton-Jones, Prof John Hughes, Prof Philip Wadler, Dr Kevin Hammond, Dr Duncan Coutts.

An Incredible Scientific Breakthrough Discovery to Beat Covid

I almost never see masks in Edinburgh, not even in stores or on busses. Brazil has serious problems, but no one in Rio de Janeiro goes outside without a mask. Courtesy of Tom the Dancing Bug.

Haskell Love

I am speaking at Haskell Love, 31 July--1 August 2020,  a virtual event.

Jared Diamond: Lessons from a Pandemic

Another hopeful analysis, from Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of my favourite books.

Covid-19 doesn’t represent an existential threat to the survival of our species. Yes, the pandemic will be a serious blow to the world’s economy, but that will recover; it’s only a matter of time. Unlike many of the epidemics of the past, the virus isn’t threatening to cause military defeats, population replacements or crashes, or abandonments of land under cultivation. 

There are other dangers, present right now, that do constitute existential threats capable of wiping out our species, or permanently damaging our economy and standard of living. But they are less convincing at motivating us than is Covid-19, because (with one exception) they don’t kill us visibly and quickly. 

Strange as it may seem, the successful resolution of the pandemic crisis may motivate us to deal with those bigger issues that we have until now balked at confronting. If the pandemic does at last prepare us to deal with those existential threats, there may be a silver lining to the virus’s black cloud. Among the virus’s consequences, it could prove to be the biggest, the most lasting — and our great cause for hope.

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

One of the more thoughtful and hopeful analyses I've seen, from sf writer Kim Stanley Robinson in The New Yorker.

The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that every historical period has its own “structure of feeling.” How everything seemed in the nineteen-sixties, the way the Victorians understood one another, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the world view of Tang-dynasty China: each period, Williams thought, had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.
In mid-March, in a prior age, I spent a week rafting down the Grand Canyon. When I left for the trip, the United States was still beginning to grapple with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. Italy was suffering; the N.B.A. had just suspended its season; Tom Hanks had been reported ill. When I hiked back up, on March 19th, it was into a different world. I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.
Schools and borders had closed; the governor of California, like governors elsewhere, had asked residents to begin staying at home. But the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

Flying in the age of Covid 19

Erin Bromage is an immunologist teaching at UMass Dartmouth. He writes a blog aiming to explain what is known about how Covid 19 spreads to the general public. He is most famous for a post detailing what is known about spread of Covid 19 in closed environments.  If you may need to travel, his post on flying may prove helpful. (Photo from the Twitter feed of Ethan Weiss, flying United.)

Who is beating Covid 19?

Interesting data from EndCoronavirus.org.