An interesting announcement from Nvidia.  Not long ago I was building such GPU clusters for the financial services industry.  Nvidia seems to be moving up the food chain from a graphics coprocessor developer to a full systems house.  Their rumored interest in ARM could make them a new version of the fully integrated systems houses of yore, like IBM and Sun.

AI of the Storm: How We Built the Most Powerful Industrial Computer in the U.S. in Three Weeks During a Pandemic

The making of Selene is a tale of systems expertise that’s bringing high performance computing to the data center.

In case you weren’t paying attention, while the Congress argues over funding for the unemployed in this pandemic, the Federal Reserve has bought $7 Trillion (yes, trillion) in corporate debt in open market actions.  This may not even be legal.  What it does is prop up stock markets, sending vast sums to the already wealthy.  From Marketwatch.

Fed slows corporate debt purchases to trickle

Fed’s overall balance sheet at $6.9 trillion

I have estimated that the death count from COVID-19 is about 50% too low.  This is from looking at numbers early in the pandemic.  Thing is, overall death counts are hard to hide. And since the death rate is fairly predictable you can look at the “excess deaths” in 2020 and get the true COVID-19 death count.  Note that this also has the effect of removing the count of very sick people who would have died from something else had COVID-19 not taken them.  From the New York Times.

Taking a break from golf and Twitter to make America great again.  From the BBC.

US calls for shower rules to be eased after Trump hair complaints

The Supreme Court’s enigmatic “shadow docket,” explained

How the Supreme Court hides major conservative victories in plain sight.

From the Vox article:

According to a November 2019 paper by University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, “during the sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, the Solicitor General filed a total of eight such applications — averaging one every other Term.”

By contrast, “in less than three years, [Trump’s] Solicitor General has filed at least twenty-one applications for stays in the Supreme Court (including ten during the October 2018 Term alone).”

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has rewarded the Trump Justice Department’s behavior. Vladeck finds that the Trump administration achieved a full or partial victory in about two-thirds of cases where it seeks to temporarily block a lower court opinion. What was once extraordinary is now quite ordinary.

I know Wade Davis mostly from his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.  This article is a  good read but I have to add that the plague in the middle ages did not mean the end for Europe.  I am skeptical of a Chinese Century and think America may get a second shot, if only by default.  But hey, that first shot was by default, too.  From Rolling Stone

The Unraveling of America

Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era

I grew up in Louisiana and politics there still exists in the shadow of Huey Long.  Other varieties of populism have also sprouted there, including David Duke who was the prototype for Trump, if not the entire modern Republican Party.  From Current Affairs.

Huey Long and the Power of Populism

What we can learn from the successes and failures of “the Kingfish.”

In my front yard.  Mask up!

From the New York Times.  A snapshot of where the US and the world is today with respect to COVID-19 and how we got here.