Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

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  The old pennies appear to be back. (See my entry for November 7, 2019.) Over the last two weeks, at least 75% of the pennies I've gotten at McDonald's were pre-2000, some of them very pre-2000. Yesterday alone I got three pennies, two from the '90s, and one from...1962. This morning I actually got a parking-lot nickel. (Left, above.) It's from 1999 in case you can't make it out, and it's lived a very hard life. The nickel on the right is 80 years old. The penny, a trifling 38. I wonder if, with new coins in short supply, McDonald's is again getting them from the people who run networks of supermarket coin exchangers. I was getting shiny new pennies for a couple of months, and then suddenly I wasn't. We'll just have to see how it goes.
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  "How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted? And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the manager? I would like to see him."
  --Soren Kierkegaard, Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits (1847)
  
  (Hmmm. Maybe "Soren" is German for "Karen".)
  
• There's an excellent COVID-19 stats dashboard maintained by the Arizona Department of Health Services that as best I can tell is updated daily. It covers new cases, hospitalization rates, daily death rates by date of death, demographics, and lots of other useful stuff. The daily death rates for the disease have been in single digits since September 10, and the peak death day was July 17, when 97 people died. Seeing the graphs and digesting the numbers, it's pretty obvious that the pandemic is burning out in Arizona.
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  The older red wine is, the less trans-resveratrol it contains, and thus the fewer beneficial health effects. I'm not a wine snob, and most wine I drink these days is 2017 or 2018. I'll open old wine now and then (we have some) when the occasion demands, but not for daily consumption.
• Put this on your calendar: On December 21 there will be a "grand conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn, which will be the closest conjunction of the two giant planets since 1623 AD. The planets will be separated by only 6 arc minutes, which is one-fifth the width of the full Moon. With a decent scope and good eyepieces, you should be able to see the disks of both planets in one view.
• This is a good year for planet spotting. On October 6, Mars will reach its closest approach to Earth during its 2020 opposition. (The opposition itself refers to Mars with respect to the Sun, and is on October 14.) The Red Planet will reach magtnitude -2.6, and on that date will be brighter than Jupiter. It won't be this big or bright again until 2030. So put it on your calendars.
• Great fun: Sixty Seconds of Stella Leaf Jumps. (I remember leaves, heh.)
• We've been hearing that Vitamin D enhances immune function for respiratory infections for quite awhile. It's also true that many of the people who die from COVID-19 are significantly and often severely deficient in the vitamin. Here's a scientific paper correlating Vitamin D levels with SARS-CoV-2 test results. Short form: The more deficient you are, the more likely you are to be infected after contact with the virus. Take some pills. Get some sun. Don't just cower in your spare room waiting for a vaccine.
• Twitter can be so worth it sometimes.
• Check out the first graph in this article. Countries that treat their COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine have far lower case-fatality rates than countries (including ours) that has banned or discouraged the use of the drug.