The following data is from worldometer on October 23, 2020. Non-USA death tolls are scaled to USA population.

USA — 331.6 million population with 8,746,953 cases and 229,284 deaths

China — 1,439 million population with 85,747 cases and 4,634 deaths: 1,068 deaths

Japan — 126.4 million population with 95,138 cases and 1,694 deaths: 4,444 deaths

Vietnam — 97.6 million population with 1,148 cases and 35 deaths: 119 deaths

Germany — 83.9 million population with 417,350 cases and 10,090 deaths: 39,879 deaths

South Korea — 51.3 million population with 25,775 cases and 457 deaths: 2,954 deaths

Australia — 25.6 million population with 27,495 cases and 905 deaths: 11,723…

Please give generously: Smalltalk Programming Competitions.

Here’s the trailer for JRMPC 2021:

Things have escalated, but they needn’t have…

Everybody in the world knows that this whole thing was purely politically motivated. The legal case in the United States was a charade, a sham.

From the outset, the resolution was obvious: Justin Trudeau should’ve

1. publicly conceded that the Meng Wanzhou situation was purely politically motivated, that the “rule of law” was a load of horse puckey
2. negotiate with the Chinese to release the two Michaels in exchange for Meng Wanzhou, the sort of thing that used to be done in the Cold War with respect to the exchange of captured spies
3. exercise his executive power to circumvent the judicial process and the extradition treaty (every national leader has this kind of executive power to be applied at their discretion; otherwise, they couldn’t function to manage national…

JRMPC, or The James Robertson Memorial Programming Competition, is a national contest open to Canadian high school students. It was completed on March 6, 2020 and the awards ceremony was scheduled for April 18.

Here is the awards ceremony video for JRMPC 2020:

I hope you enjoyed it. This video represents the culmination of eighteen months of hard work on the competition. It also nicely caps off a five-year advocacy campaign for the Smalltalk programming language.

Here are close-ups of the trophy awards…

First Prize:

Second Prize:

Third Prize:

Presentation Box:

For more details about the competition, read “JRMPC 2020 Award Winners.” …

To: gps@cnn.com
Date: May 3, 2020
Subject: Your Interview with Peter Navarro

Hello, Fareed.

I love your show. (In particular, I love “Fareed’s Take.”)

I have to make some comments about what Dr. Anthony Fauci said in January and about what Peter Navarro said in your interview.

Dr. Fauci said the risk was very low given the science that was available at the time. However, this isn’t really true and it’s rather misleading.

Factually, we already knew everything we needed to know by the end of January to begin mitigation measures.

On January 12, China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus. …

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, everybody has been trying to blame China for the severity of the pandemic. They blame China for a lack of transparency, for covering up details about the virus, for her tardiness in reporting the disease to the WHO. The claim is that had China been more forthcoming, the global death toll due to COVID-19 would’ve been much lower, by as much as 95%, according to some estimates. …

From this Quora answer…

Your question is based on a false premise. Most programmers and engineers do not detest Python.

However, there’s no question that many do, based on the many answers I’ve seen on Quora, as well as comments made elsewhere on the web.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, Python’s syntax is very polarizing. A great many developers don’t like using indentation as syntax. It removes freedom to format your code as you like. And it invites code alignment errors.

Second, Python’s OOP implementation is very crude. It hides instance variables and methods “in plain sight” by using underscore-prefixed names. …

Many people want to know what are the most popular programming languages. They also want to know why these are the most popular.

Ranked by job postings at Indeed, here are the most popular (and their main uses):

1. Python — data science, machine learning
2. Java — Android, web, embedded
3. JavaScript — front-end web development
4. C/C++ — systems programming, HPC, real-time
5. C# — Windows/.NET, games, cross-platform
6. PHP — back-end web development
7. Ruby — Rails web development

This is more or less consistent with language indices like TIOBE, PYPL, and RedMonk.

The reasons why these languages are so popular are mainly because of the following (in no particular…