(no subject)

Few years ago, I believe in Florence, we went to an art museum and discovered a back room filled with rather strange 13th century Italian paintings by an unknown author. The paintings featured female Italian saints and angels with distinctly white Mongolian faces.

This winter, a young Chinese woman walked into my class and I immediately recognized her as a saintess from one of those paintings. Crazy.

Here goes Japan

The government’s overnight change in policy on holding sporting and cultural events amid the spread of the new coronavirus has further eroded faith in the Abe administration’s ability to battle the outbreak.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13168564

The prime minister on Feb. 27 urged elementary, junior high and high schools, as well as special-needs schools, to shut down until the start of spring break in the latter half of March.

http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13172009

March is going to be a critical month for figuring out how the virus is behaving.

(no subject)

In olden times, a camera had one sensor, and lenses moved to magnify the picture. Now, you have several sensors and lenses, each one set to a different magnification. Where the iPhone 11 Pro’s telephoto has a “2X optical zoom” when it jumps from its wide-angle lens to its telephoto lens, the Galaxy S20 has a “10X hybrid optical zoom,” jumping from the ultrawide to the telephoto lens—the lenses themselves don’t move in either case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsungs-galaxy-s20-ultra-has-a-100x-zoom-camera-so-we-tested-it-with-a-private-eye-11582907082

Полезные советы

Чтобы легче перенести инфекцию COVID-19 постарайтесь помолодеть до 20-25 лет.

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Ail sufferers have an awful resourcefulness and ingenuity in finding excuses for painful emotions; they even enjoy their jealousy, their broodings over base actions and apparent injuries, they burrow through the intestines of their past and present in their search for obscure mysteries, wherein they will be at liberty to wallow in a torturing suspicion and get drunk on the venom of their own malice—they tear open the oldest wounds, they make themselves bleed from the scars which have long been healed, they make evil-doers out of friends, wife, child, and everything which is nearest to them. "I suffer: it must be somebody's fault"—so thinks every sick sheep.

--- F. Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morals. Third Essay, 15.