Devin Berg @drb@scholar.social

I think this might be the first Wikipedia article that I've contributed from scratch. Written about someone I found in my family history. Something like 11 generations back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Felton

Current status: On an MS Teams call with 90+ faculty and admin. So many unmuted mics and unnecessary video streams.

I manage the internship program for my students and we've now started seeing the COVID19 related cancellations of internship offers. This is going to be difficult to cope with for students trying to progress in their careers.

Made it back to the US after a long day of travel from London, through JFK, and on to Minneapolis. The extra screening at JFK was very minimal and quite quick. Now we isolate for a couple of weeks in an AirBnB. The kids might lose it being so close but not being able to see the grandparents.

We are slightly closer to getting home. My flight has now been changed twice due to cancellations. If the latest one holds, we should finally get to fly home on Wednesday. We'll be leaving out of London rather than Paris and now have a stop on the East Coast rather than direct.

There is probably a twist or two yet to come, but hopefully we are close. Of course, when we get "home" we won't actually be home. Instead we will self-isolate in an AirBnB for two weeks.

The market almost immediately triggered the 7% circuit breaker after opening. Seems like the president's speech is being quite well received.

I think I just have one remaining conference that is still up in the air. I'm rather hoping that they offer a remote participation option or, even better, go full virtual. However, I'm guessing that is unlikely.

Then, within 15 minutes of each other, I get emails from our chancellor and Engineers Without Borders USA discontinuing travel. So that will clear the schedules of my students as well.

Today we decided to cut our trip short and head home next week rather than continue on to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and back to Paris as originally planned.

Watching how the US is handling the Coronavirus, I'm thinking my family might be safer if we just stayed in Europe/Scandinavia.

Watching it spread across the map isn't much better.

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1yCPR-ukAgE55sROnmBUFmtLN6riVLTu3

Just watching the numbers climb and wondering about our upcoming flights...

https://outbreak.cc/

I also discovered that there is a whole book relating to the history of this side of my family history.

https://archive.org/details/genealogicalhist00felt/

One of his fellow signatories, John Proctor, was then accused of being a witch (first male so accused). Nathaniel Felton was the first signature on the petition prepared in support of John Proctor.

https://historyofmassachusetts.org/john-proctor-first-male-accused-witch/

So it turns out that one of my relatives, Nathaniel Felton, signed a letter disavowing the witch trial of a woman named Rebecca Nurse.

https://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-petition-to-free-rebecca-nurse/

So if I discovered that one of my distant ancestors was a 40 year old constable in Salem, MA during the time of the witch trials, how questionable would that be?

I don't seem to understand web caching. An update to my site isn't reflected in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge. Yet it is in Lynx. I've cleared both browser caches and Cloudflare cache.

I like how NSF emailed my provost about my grant's final report being due. As if he's going to write the thing.