Link. Quick research says sulfur is indeed the agent. I suppose this is plausible.
From the archives (1997) | V.S. Naipaul: “India is a country that, in the north, outside Rajasthan, was ravaged, and intellectually destroyed to a large extent, by the invasions that began in about 1000 A.D.”
Link. Great essay from long ago via Noah.
Yes, He Will Burn It All Down.
Link. “Complete and utter imperviousness to shame is one of Trump’s superpowers.”
GOP meets the sword.
“There are no confirmed sequelae of Covid-19,” said Dr. Chong Yutian”
Link. Until this week China had promoted Long COVID fear to discredit western vaccines. Now they are in full reverse.
My cyberpunk city, my cyberpunk world. “And then those adventures became not just possible, but inescapable and terrifying.”
Link. Stupidmancer, but yes.
52 things I learned in 2022 by Tom Whitwell
Link. “Fees from music playing on Peloton are “a top 10 account for pretty much all major record labels right now.”
“All I want is for you to be nice to me. Please be nice to me. Please be my friend. Will you be my friend?”
Link. The Onion gets it.
“former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.”
Link. Musk is a moron.
Udell – hope for the Fediverse (mastodon, etc)
Link. “High autonomy. As little friction as necessary, but not too little. As much fanout and velocity as necessary, but not too much.”
iPhone 14 Repair Changes
Link. Battery replacement is much higher.
Daring Fireball: Google Moves Maps to the Root Google.com Domain
Link. “Grant location access to Google Maps now, and you grant it to all of Google.”
Family Sharing: all charges go to Family Organizer – UNLESS there’s an Apple Account balance
Link. Apple’s purchase history doesn’t capture this – that’s a bug.
“why Amazon chose not to implement a blockchain of its own: It couldn’t get a straight answer to the question, “What useful thing does it do?”
Link. Apple never even looked at it.
The BSA & Military Bicycle Museum: “Another section of the welfare scheme is that devoted to improving the life and training of the boy workers. The physical development of the lads is encouraged by the teaching of Swedish Drill and Gymnastics.”
Link. Late 19th to early 20th. Amazing reading.
Swedish Death Cleaning: “consider taking an afternoon to declutter your hard drive and desktop as well—that’s one mess no one looks forward to dealing with.”
Link. “afternoon” Hilarious. Digital cleanup for pending death is a multi-year project.
“Yiannopoulos said, he arranged the dinner “just to make Trump’s life miserable” because news of the dinner would leak and Trump would mishandle it.”
Link. Ok. I give up. I admit I am living in a simulation.
Lecanemab and Alzheimer’s: “From the perspective of a physician caring for Alzheimer’s patients, the difference between lecanemab and placebo is well below what is considered to be a clinically meaningful treatment effect”
Link. “The British press in particular has been completely useless in covering Alzheimer’s for decades now…”
“The $14,400 in lottery fees that the day’s hopeful hikers pay to Recreation.gov for a shot at a permit all go to a giant military contractor: Booz Allen.”
Link. There is government corruption here.
“current supply shortage of 3.8 million units, driven by a 40-year collapse in the construction of homes smaller than 1,400 square feet”
Link. The growth models assume many cities would depopulate while others grow enormously.
Vinland: 1021 AD in Newfoundland’s L’Anse aux Meadows.
Link. The definitive date is new. I visited in 80s, I think ivory trade is new since then. First known euros in Americas.
Aaronson talk / essay on AI safety.
Link. Supported by OpenAI. I’m sitting back to study this one.
Making friends for men.
Link. 1. Join group (CrossFit, ski, etc)
2. Be the organizer, set things up
3. Check-in on people.
4. Ask for help occasionally.
“The shame one feels at being associated with the modern right might conceivably burn so hot that it can be cooled only by embracing an adversarial party.”
Link. Conservatives watching their political home burn.
“White power is better thought about as a connected movement of groups and activists who are overtly racist and interested in using violence to create an all-white ethnostate…”
Link. Fuentes and Trump.
NHL rookie orientation Aug 2022: ”If you came down from Mars and saw all this,” he said, ”you’d think that women were an evil, evil species.”
Link. Free link. Fascinating.
“Orion broke the record for the farthest distance traveled from earth of a human-related spacecraft”
Link. I forgot Apollo 13 crew hold “furthest from earth” title.
Essay on a “body in decline” … in 50s!
Link. Aging rates vary; perhaps he got the short stick. I am certain his past activities are not the cause. More likely problem is he stopped being active.
US pedestrian and cyclist death rates rise as other nations reduce deaths.
Link. (free access link) Red states do nothing for “vulnerable road users” and across US police don’t enforce traffic laws. Choose where you live very carefully.
Quantum Computing Winter: “Moore’s law isn’t a law of nature. It worked for conventional computers because those could be miniaturized. However, you can’t miniaturize ions or the Compton wavelength of electrons.”
Link. Come back in a century or so. (Aaronson does the more rigorous version of this winter warning.)
“… both believe that a capacity for multicellularity evolved early in life’s history and is shared with bacteria’s ancient cousins, the archaea, which also seem unicellular.”
Link. The eukaryotic cell seems a tiny bit less impossible.
Peak Subscription — The Atlantic March 2022.
Link. Doesn’t even mention software subs!
I won’t add any sub without removing another. If it auto-renews or is hard to cancel I don’t consider it. I’m done.
Omicron update: more immune escape, no change virulence.
Link. Paxlovid still works and studies of convergent mutations across strains may help predict future evolution.
“Across America, 15 million acres of state and federal land lies surrounded by private land, with no legal entry by road or trail.”
Link. Exposed by OnX app.
“Cambodia became a popular surrogacy destination after crackdowns in other Asian countries nearly a decade ago.”
Link. Very carefully written. “Cambodian households have become some of the most indebted on earth, victims of a microfinance crisis.”
“To exit Zero Covid now would be to admit that China was a merely mortal country after all.”
Link. Long ago we called that “losing face”.
“Don’t trash preference files; instead use commands like defaults delete com.vendor.appname or defaults delete -app AppName”
Link. I wish preference files were still the source of truth.
“If Tumblr were to add ActivityPub support, it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance”
Link. We could do this with RSS of course, but ActivityPub is more fashionable.
The Data General Eagle Super-minicomputer : A project management paper
Link. Something made me remember this paper from a project management class I took in the 90s. The HTML and PDF still render now! Eons ago.
“30% of planned November production could be lost.”
Link. Even a 10% hit, if typical across Chinese manufacturing, is huge.
“Tim Pool and his horrible friends do not think of themselves as supervillains. They imagine themselves heroes.”
Link. Once someone disconnect from reality they can make a heinous crime seem a duty. Murdoch is helping the disconnect.
“Arrow’s Theorem proves that there is no ranked-choice voting method that satisfies all of these criteria.”
Link. Social science proof that all voting systems are imperfect.
Honey Bees Are Only Living Half as Long as They Did in the 1970s
Link. Suspicion is honey bees are massively inbred. Need outbreeding programs.
“Amazon posted a valuation loss of one trillion dollars, becoming the first company to ever lose that much in stock value.”
Link. I totally missed this. It’s a big deal.
Mastodon: “the “Toot” button has been replaced with one that now simply says “Publish.”
Link. Toot was only a problem in English.
“90% of web traffic that looks like it’s coming from Private Relay is actually fraudulent”
Link. Bot clicks.
Enlarged perivascular spaces in chronic migraine?
Link. Did not expect that. Good chance false finding, but we know migraine with OCP has stroke risk.
Mediocre hemophilia gene therapy 3.5 million dollars.
Link. Better stuff coming.
Mercedes-Benz requires subscription fee for top acceleration.
Link. I’m going to drive my 2010 Kia van until I die.
“Mr. Adi has seen the aftermath of many of those disasters firsthand — floods, tsunamis, a volcanic eruption — at times offering his help at three or four in the same month”
Link. Indonesia has a lot of disasters.
“Hearing the movement of blood through the body is supposedly something like an absolute taboo, akin to witnessing the fabrication of Chicken McNuggets”
Link. Anechoic chamber experience.