Assam joke
Oracle has won a deal
Oracle has reportedly won a deal to manage TikTok’s US cloud operations. Oracle had been rumored to be part of the bidding process to acquire TikTok, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has been selected as a “trusted tech partner” instead. This is different from an outright sale, and appears to suggest Oracle will be helping run TikTok’s US operations with its own cloud technologies.
If Trump agrees to this, Tik Tok is poised to explode much bigger and it will open the door to more Chinese companies operating in the West. My guess is “not likely”.
- Hawley calls for US to reject Oracle’s TikTok deal. The deal is currently awaiting a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but it has received praise from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who chairs the committee. In an open letter to Mnuchin, Hawley calls on the secretary to take a more skeptical look at the proposal.
- Rubio has sent a letter to the Trump Administration urging it to reject the proposed Oracle-TikTok deal, which would leave TikTok as an independent, US-based company, because ByteDance, TikTok’s parent, will retain a majority stake.
- Ted Cruz has joined Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and others in opposing the deal, penning his own letter claiming that any deal that doesn’t 100% address national security concerns should be rejected.
Chinese bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis) Yuen Long
Chinese bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis) 白头鹎 9-14-20 Yuen Long
Race for the Superconducting Quantum Computing Cloud
China’s independently developed 6-qubit superconducting quantum computing cloud platform online. Based on its self-developed quantum computer “Wuyuan 悟源”, equipped with a 6-qubit superconducting quantum chip Quafu KF C6-130, the fidelity, coherence time and other technical indicators have reached the international advanced level.
09-02-20
Toronto-based Xanadu announced the release of the world’s first publicly available photonic quantum computing platform. Applicants can access 8, 12, and soon 24 qubit machines over the cloud.
Dragonfly and snail 9-13-20 Yuen Long rooftop
Yoho Mall 9-13-20 complacency
Four people allowed for each table in a restaurant. Every one is out and about, in the mall and on the street.
Trump lied about science
When President Donald Trump began talking to the public about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in February and March, scientists were stunned at his seeming lack of understanding of the threat. We assumed that he either refused to listen to the White House briefings that must have been occurring or that he was being deliberately sheltered from information to create plausible deniability for federal inaction. Now, because famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward recorded him, we can hear Trump’s own voice saying that he understood precisely that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was deadly and spread through the air. As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States.
UN Adopts Resolution Calling For Global Cooperation To Fight COVID-19, 169 countries in favour, US against
The United States voted against a COVID-19 resolution in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 11 that sought a “comprehensive and coordinated response” to the pandemic and also called for recognition of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) leadership role. The United States, which withdrew from the UN health body this July, along with Israel, voted against the resolution that was adopted by an overwhelming majority with 169 countries voting in favour of the text. Washington had accused WHO of mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic and also siding with China before officially withdrawing from the global health agency this summer.
Out of 193 nations, 169 voted in favour of the resolution, Ukraine and Hungary abstained from voting, while the United States and Israel voted against the text, that calls for international cooperation to contain and overcome the pandemic and its consequences.
Jilin-1 failed launch
The launch of the “Jilin-1 吉林一号 ” high-division 02C satellite by a Qizhou-1A carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre was abnormal and the mission was lost. The specific causes are being further investigated and analysed.
COVID-19 in US long before China
A new study by American researchers, released on Thursday, suggests the deadly coronavirus may have already reached Los Angeles by late December, actively circulating in the area months before the first definitive cases in the United States were identified.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), evaluated more than 10 million patient and health records for UCLA Health outpatient, emergency department and hospital facilities, spanning Dec. 1, 2019, to Feb. 29, 2020, and compared those records with data from the same period over the previous five years.
They found a troubling trend. The outpatient clinic visits by UCLA patients seeking care for coughs increased by over 50 percent and exceeded the average number of visits for the same complaint over the prior five years by more than 1,000.
They also discovered a “significant” excess in the number of patients seen in emergency departments for reports of coughs and of patients hospitalized with acute respiratory failure during this time period.
These excesses remained even after accounting for changes in patient populations and seasonal variation, according to the study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research.
“For many diseases, data from the outpatient setting can provide an early warning to emergency departments and hospital intensive care units of what is to come,” said Joann Elmore, the study’s lead author and a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Researchers noted the unusually high number of visitors, patients and hospitalizations suggests community spread of SARS-CoV-2 prior to established clinical awareness and testing capabilities.
It may indicate that the coronavirus had silently arrived and begun establishing a foothold undetected on the West Coast around Christmas 2019. If true, that would shake up the current narrative of the virus’ origins in the country.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the first U.S. COVID-19 case on Jan. 21, who was a man traveling from Wuhan, China to Washington state. And it was not until Feb. 26 that the CDC confirmed community spread of the coronavirus in the United States.
UCLA researchers did not conclude for certain that coronavirus was behind the trends laid out in their study, saying other factors could be responsible for some of this unexpected increase, such as the use of e-cigarettes, or flu.