Good morning, RVA! It's 30 °F, and today looks chilly! You can expect highs in the 40s today, so make sure you grab something cozy before you head out the door—a coat, a hot beverage, maybe both!
Water cooler
Take a look at this week's coronacounts via these all-time graphs of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19 in Virginia, and you'll see mostly positive trends. While cases have started to rise again, hospitalizations and deaths, at least for now, continue to drop. This is good and expected, I think! We know transmission of coronaviruses seems to increase in the colder months, so the rise in cases tracks, but we've also vaccinated a ton of Virginians over the last 11 months which should help keep folks alive and out of the hospital. I hadn't checked in a while, but 6.2 million people, or 73.5% of the state's population, have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Given the year we just had, I think that's impressive.
Also coronarelated, I totally forgot to mention that the CDC expanded eligibility of booster shots to basically every adult. Before this past weekend, eligibility requirements were loose and confusing, now they're still loose but way more straightforward. Here's the gist: Everyone 18 and up who is fully vaccinated is eligible for a booster—two months after a J&J or six months after the second Pfizer or Moderna. So if you got your J&J shot on September 23rd or your mRNA shot on May 23rd, you can walk right on up to any of these events, or get an appointment at a local pharmacy, and get boosted. So easy!
The Richmond Times-Dispatch's Chris Suarez has an update on yesterday's story about police arresting a woman who filmed them arresting another woman. From the piece: "Commonwealth’s Attorney Colette McEachin said her office dropped the case Monday after a judge declined the prosecution’s request for a continuance because a witness was unavailable for the trial. Sabbakhan’s lawyer said one of the officers was absent due to an illness." That's great, I guess, but this whole situation makes me want to learn more about the funding and planning for both the Civilian Review Board and the Marcus Alert. I've lost track of where both of those initiatives sit in the legislative process, but I imagine we'll learn more during the fast-approaching budget season.
Also in the RTD, good public housing news from Mark Robinson: "HUD announced it was awarding the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority $450,000 to conduct a planning process that’s a precursor to redeveloping Gilpin Court...RRHA was one of eight housing authorities across the country to receive one of the coveted grants this year." You know I love a good planning process, but the best part of this award is that it puts Richmond in a better place to win one of the enormous implementation grants from HUD.
Jonathan Spiers at Richmond BizSense reports on another parking-lot-to-homes conversion happening downtown—this one at the downtown YMCA. The Y will add apartments to their existing facilities but also to the parking lot behind the building. The same developers bought up a bunch of other Y-owned parking lots on that block and along Foushee and could really turn that corridor into a spot. Walking distance from both Triple Crossing and the library!
Every year, for a million years, the Science Museum has hosted the Model Railroad Show, and this year is no exception. I'm really really into riding bikes, some people are really really into model railroads, and I think that's neat to experience. So if you're interested in checking out what it looks like when people get super into their hobbies, you can buy tickets right now on the Science Museum's website. Looks like they've still got spots available on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Here's Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears refusing to disclose her vaccination status on CNN while also making some pretty asinine comments about vaccine safety and public health. Given the first two paragraphs above, these incoming, anti-science Republicans are lucky that (for now) it seems like we're headed towards moving past this pandemic. I'm absolutely sure that once they all take office they'll strike down COVID restrictions (which don't currently exist) and Open Virginia Back Up For Business (like it has already been for a year now). I will roll my eyes and hope we don't face another public-health emergency over the next four years.
This morning's longread
Playing with Pixels
Janelle Shane's AI Weirdness blog is one of my favorites, and, every once in a while, she makes the AIs do something so neat that I have to share it with y'all.
Lots of image-generating algorithms I've used lately work like this. What's fun about Pixray (which is itself based on some of those) is that Tom White gives it a very limited number of pixels and colors to work with. A fun recent twist on Pixray is Pixray Swirl by altsoph. It makes an animation by taking an image, zooming/moving/rotating it, blurring the image, and then telling Pixray to optimize the image again to match the prompt. With the default settings I made the fun ice cream animation above, and also this animation of "Smoke Swirling from Victorian Chimneys".
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