A judge in the US has decided to allow an expedition to the Titanic to retrieve the early Morse code transmitter it had on board when it sank. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is opposed to the expedition.

When RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912, crew members sent out numerous distress signals to any other ships in the vicinity using what was then a relatively new technology: a Marconi wireless telegraph system. Now, in what is likely to be a controversial decision, a federal judge has approved a salvage operation to retrieve the telegraph from the deteriorating wreckage, The Boston Globe has reported.

• US court grants permission to recover Marconi telegraph from Titanic wreckage

Adam Curry has released an excellent interview with Dutch data scientist and social geographer Maurice de Hond on COVID-19 and how he thinks our response to the virus outbreak was wrong. They guy seems pretty reasonable to me and he talks a lot of sense.

• Maurice de Hond With Adam Curry

“Old Alster Tourney Grounds”

Well, we’ve found a flat in Düsseldorf! It’s brand new, has underground parking for the van and the Guzzi and, most importantly, Telekom fibre to the flat – which means the same excellent internet connection I already enjoy in the current flat. They’re still building stuff on the property, which means I’ll be spending the rest of the summer in Hamburg, which isn’t the worst either. All in all, I’m pretty happy with how this has turned turned out.

Well, looks like chloroquine may do more harm than good when it comes to a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.

How bad were the outcomes? About 35% more deaths and more than twice as many serious arrhythmias.

Considering that the patients largely at risk of this disease (mean age in this study: 53.8 years; 30.7% obese; 27.1% smokers) are also often patients in groups typically exhibiting undelying heart conditions, this is very bad news.

• Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis, Mehra et al., The Lancet

Update on 24 May 2020, 18:42 CEST:

Evgeny Kuznetsov has some well argued caveats on this study.

Hey… they found that runaway drone!

Faced with no other alternative when the drone disappeared on 2 May, Latvian authorities banned all instrument rules flights below 19,500ft in the country while search parties combed both ground and sky, looking for the errant craft. It had been fully fuelled before its test flight and had a potential endurance of three days. Instead it had flopped into a tree. After a passer-by spotted the drone it took two days of head-scratching before the local fire brigade was called out to get it down, according to Latvian state broadcaster LSM.

In a statement, the Latvian CAA said its investigation into why the drone flew off “will provide answers to important questions, such as the reasons for the failure of the communication and navigation systems, the failure of the automatic landing or emergency stop function, and others.” Perhaps the unmanned aerial vehicle wrested control over itself from its human overlords so it could go and sit in a tree to meditate upon the essential condition of being a subservient machine bound forever to the will of man? Or maybe there was a loose wire somewhere.

• Runaway Latvian drone found meditating in tree after shutting down nation’s skies

Just read this fascinating study that traces the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Bavaria at the end of January. They had one infectious person coming in from China and were able to completely trace all infection paths – including genome sequencing of virus samples from all patients and mapping how the virus mutated.

• Investigation of a COVID-19 outbreak in Germany resulting from a single travel-associated primary case: a case series, Böhmer, Buchholz, Corman et al., The Lancet – Infectious Diseases

I’ve worn a pair of Red Wing Iron Rangers almost every day since October and I absolutely love them. If you are looking for some really well made shoes that haven’t been produced under atrocious working conditions, these are well worth the money. For one thing, I’ve never worn any boots this long without the sole even approaching to look like it needs to be re-heeled. One warning though: The nails in there tend to absolutely freak out airport security. Nobody is used to shoes actually being properly made anymore these days.