Before Apollo computers were huge and filled whole rooms like this :
Burroughs B3500
Apollo guidance system was this :
Space industry led the way to a complete new era of digital personal computers.
We are now in 2020 and we all saw the first launch of a manned private mission to Space Station : the SpaceX dragon capsule attacched to ISS and astronauts @AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug used a docking interface on a touchscreen device (try it out here https://iss-sim.spacex.com ) to dock dragon.
So consumer/private technology is currently used in the space industry : the complete opposite of Apollo/GoToTheMoon era.
Think of this from a political point of view : there were times when the biggest achievements in technology were driven by US federal agencies, pouring public money into research, universities, private companies to reach unbelievable goals (go to the moon). Those investment has been around $280 billion of today money. This drove the country into years of technological leadership, leadership US is loosing against another country (china) which is doing exactly what US did during the 60s i.e. pouring money into the economy with state participated companies.
Its time for another “go to the moon” type of effort and the new moon is giving this planet sustainable energy for sustainable growth.
As you probably know Italy is experiencing one of the worst periods of its recent history. The covid-19 epidemic has put the medical system on its knees and the lock down is severely testing the population’s self-control capabilities.
Open data for the covid-19 infection is available here https://github.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19 and updated daily. These are numbers and as usual they need to be read, understodd. One of the questions I was asking my self is how the rate of positives compared to the number of tests done is moving. I made this chart :
The ordinate is the percentage of positive cases against the number of tests done each day. Spikes of 42% are probably due to differences of response times for the laboratories which currently do not guarantee a stable processing time for tests. This behavior could be that due to the test methodology being changed or simply because we are finding less people infected.
Another information that can be interesting is the number of daily people being treated with intensive care :
Again here we might be in a situation of saturation of Intensive care units or just the number of people being treated in intensive care is decreasing.
This is the behavior of the number of people being hospitalized