mini-splits in animanga

Another thing about mini-split A/C: once aware of them, I see them in anime and manga all the time. Or it feels that way. Look in the background of a drawn modern bedroom, and you have a good chance of seeing a vaguely curvy white bar under the ceiling. Tra-la!

The funny bit is that I've never seen attention drawn to it. Characters will interact with space heaters or kotatsu, or give thanks for A/C (or bemoan its lack) in general, but I've never seen someone pull out a remote control to turn it on, or stand under a vent to cool off. It's just there, part of the room, like desks and wardrobes.

covid new case rates by country

I've started following https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

which gives daily new cases per country, and total cases per population, but not new cases per population. I wanted to find that out, and more explicitly than doing math in my head. So I wrote a web scraper. I have concluded that writing a scraper should be a last resort, it was a shitty experience. But I got what I wanted: https://mindstalk.net/covid_scrape/new.html

This is a one-day snapshot, not regularly updated. A few countries:

US: 143 new cases per million people.
Sweden: 30
Iran: 30
UK: 20
Austria: 5
Australia: 1.45
Japan: 0.7
Hong Kong: 0.4
New Zealand: 0.2

Granted those last two have single digit new cases, so could jump around from an extra person getting sick. Japan had 87 new cases, that's a significant number. The US, well, had almost 3x as many new cases in one day as Japan has had total cases...

I'd like to leave the country but I don't think there's anywhere that would let me in. Trapped in the Plague Zone.

Edit: a friend found https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
lower half has a graph of this stuff, though it seems to leave out the really low countries. I haven't played with it much yet.

See, this is why I don't have a portfolio of big programming projects; almost anything I think of has already been done.

Edit 2: yeah, the presentation isn't exactly what I want -- I don't see an option for table data. OTOH it shows a 1-week average, which is more robust than daily results, though can also be slow to show exponential takeoff.

Last 7 days average 102 for the US, with 136 as last point; Japan average 0.6. NZ 0.4. I can't even get it to show me data points for Hong Kong. Sweden 98! -- I must have snapped a really low data, or a partial report.