The Berlin Files #75: Masks! Poolside!
Vaccine progress, virtual worlds within worlds, shopping cart soccer, and much more on hopeful signals, quarantine life, and radical transformations.
Hi all! Eric here.
Hope everyone is staying safe while trying to enjoy the summer as much as is possible during this deeply strange and unusual year. I'm keeping on with the keeping on of covering positive signals and good news with relation to vaccine and recovery progress, while also looking at the radical transformation that's happening across work, home life, and play. And as always look for additional fun stuff, from wacky things happening during quarantine living to music and comedy bits that I stumble upon during the week.
If you're enjoying The Berlin Files, I highly encourage you to send it to some friends or share it with your social networks. Thanks in advance!
Hopeful Signals, Quarantine Life, & Radical Transformations
Vaccine & Prevention Progress
I imagine most if not everyone reading these words won't be shocked by this, but even without a vaccine, the ability to greatly contain the spread of COVID-19 lies in "three simple behaviors":
If people washed their hands regularly, wore masks, and kept their social distance from each other, these three simple behaviors could stop most all of the Covid-19 pandemic, even without a vaccine or additional treatments, according to a new study.
I'll let Derek Thompson quote this Oxford vaccine study, which indeed sounds like great and promising news.
And you have to love this quote from Axios: "Experts are increasingly confident that it's no longer a question of if but when vaccines will be available." Of course, there's still plenty of caveats to underscore that statement with, including:
The challenges of producing, distributing and delivering a vaccine (particularly in two doses, as the Oxford vaccine requires) around the entire world are hard to even fathom.
I also found this, from a Politico "Coronavirus Special Edition," very interesting:
Compared to viruses like HIV the coronavirus has “much less diversity on the genetic level,” said Dave O’Connor, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin. “It’s the same shape in nearly everyone.” O’Connor doesn’t think that we will need a new vaccine every year like the flu because of virus shape changes, but we might need occasional boosters.
And meanwhile, "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first COVID-19 test confirmed to detect asymptomatic cases and cases in those who don't believe they're infected."
Finally, from the UK, the Daily Star is claiming, "Robots that kill viruses in 10 minutes unleashed in hospitals for Covid-19 fight."
The Future of Work & Communications
One other story line of sorts that I've been tracking is how virtual environments are being leveraged in new ways, especially during this time of social distancing and quarantine.
Live virtual concerts within the world of Fortnite, for example, are fascinating not just because it's a little bizarre that within a game where the object is to kill off the 99 other players dropped off on a virtual island, people can take a break and catch a Travis Scott show, but because it points the way toward leveraging popular virtual environments in new and unintended ways.
I was thinking about this when I saw the headline, "You can now boot a Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft and play Doom on it." Playing games within other games have been around for many years, of course, but this seems to be a significant development in which outsiders and third party developers can in theory start to park other kinds of experiences within existing gaming or virtual environments. And when you start to think about the potential implications for work, for socializing, and for other kinds of activities (shopping and conferences, just to name a few), it's pretty fascinating.
Quarantining
I can't help but be captivated by what people get up to in entertaining themselves at home when one's options circa 2019 have been greatly reduced. A turtle pushing a basketball around a backyard is a very solid choice to pass the time of a summer afternoon in my view.
Then there's the person who decided to craft this Modern Wonder.
The Future of Sports(?)
Leave it to the Germans to demo a new sport for a socially distanced world: shopping cart soccer.
If you're thinking, "You mean soccer where you kick the ball but also ram it around with a supermarket-style shopping cart?" the answer seems to be, "Yep, essentially."
This looks kind of close to a Monty Python skit to me, but... who knows, maybe it'll turn into a thing.
Also, bonus points for the Axios piece referencing Eleanor Shellstrop (of The Good Place fame).
Major league baseball returned to the United States this past week, with NBA basketball scheduled to return this coming week. Both will be sans live fans in the audience, and so let the experimentation begin in how to handle that from a broadcasting perspective. Some will undoubtedly work better than others.
I found this one to be particularly weird.
But here's some seriously great news about the return of sports, both for the athletes and personnel participating, and for the outlook on containing the spread of viruses by way of rigorous testing and a comprehensive contact tracing and quarantine strategy. You know, like they have in other countries and stuff.
Election 2020
Here's a fun two-minute video digging into the far fetched but not impossible odds that the Democrats can yield 13 Senate seats in November and obtain a filibuster-proof majority.
Trump is behind in a state no Republican has won the presidency without in 96 years.
Spoiler alert: it's Florida.
The Music Club
Back in some long lost far gone era, I lived in England for about six months. A bit of it was on my own, after which I was joined by my friend Nirav, who has duel citizenship. Finally, our friend Adam joined us for several months, after which we embarked on a European adventure that produced all kinds of fantastic and lifelong memories.
It's wild how music can take you back to very specific times and places, and that's especially helpful during an era like this one when all of us aren't able to go to many of the places we would normally go to during the Before Times.
Part of my experience in the UK was getting hip to a BBC broadcaster named John Peel. At that time, Peel's long running weekly radio show featured live performances by lots of great alternative rock bands of the era -- which, if you know my musical tastes a little, you know hits my sweet spot. I recall hearing Elastica’s performance, for instance, and gaining a great respect for that band.
I recently discovered a fantastic Spotify playlist called “Best of John Peel Sessions,” which includes a large and eclectic mix of songs pulled from the show over what seems to be something like a 20-year period.
Not every song is great or even necessarily good, but it's packed with really fun and highly catchy selections. For example, this Soundgarden cover of The Beatles’ "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except Me And My Monkey) is crazy fun. I'm not even a huge Soundgarden fan, but this song makes me want to dig deeper into their catalog.
I'm a sucker for a good cover, especially one where the band takes the source material, cracks it open, and reinterprets it in a way that you both could never have expected and arguably challenges the musical supremacy of the original. And bonus points for being fun as hell. Case study: this wildly bouncy and raucous cover of Hot Chocolate's disco classic, "You Sexy Thing," by a band called Cud from the summer of 1987.
I don't recall ever hearing of The Delgados, but in any event this song of theirs called "Pull The Wires From The Wall" is spectacular.
If you're wondering, it was "Popscene" by Blur that transported me back to my England days, and a gloomy beyond gloom winter spent on Catherine Street — just off the High Street — in Rochester, Kent.
The Comedy Club
I read a great piece in The Ringer recently called, "'Hot Route! Red Seven!!': How the 'Wedding Crashers' Football Scene Came Together." My wife and I have long been big fans of Wedding Crashers, and it's fun to read about how complicated the filming of its football scene is, and how many of its best moments came together. Here's the (slightly R rated, be forewarned) scene.
Climate Watch
Tweets of the Week
It's a Wrap!
You made it. Now get back to being safe out there, people, while recalling those classic encounters by your local pool.
Also:
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And one last time…