Move fast and break things

Who doesn’t love a rainy Tuesday?

David Leonhardt reports that Covid cases are dropping in the US and worldwide. It could be the end of a peak in the mysterious two-month cycle. Or it could be something more promising. Fingers crossed.

Facebook went down yesterday. Then it came back up. It wasn’t a big deal for me, although I did get one annoying SERVFAIL before moving on. Cloudflare engineers watched in real time how the outage affected the Internet. In the real world, for a few hours there was less partisan cocooning and fewer cute dog videos. And we all survived.

Jonathan Franzen has a new book. It’s the first of a trilogy.

Andrew Yang has changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Independent. But don’t try this at home, kids, he says.

And John Kraus too some photos of the night sky with his iPhone 13 Pro Max. Pretty impressive.

iPhone photography

It’s astonishing how good the cameras on phones are these days. Although I dread the inevitable dominance of computational photography, you have to admit that it can produce nice images.

Salt Marsh, eastern Connecticut

I took this photo with an iPhone 11 pro near Groton, Connecticut, from the window of a fast moving Amtrak train. The train windows added a bit of light distortion to the sky but overall this is a pleasing result, considering the circumstances.