Link. Light reading.
Monthly Archives: October 2020
Car-free development in Arizona.
Link. I could see something like that for retirement.
Birx: “said to have walked out of a meeting of the White House coronavirus task force this summer, and decided never to return again.”
Link. Atlas was the last straw.
“municipalities with first-wave excess deaths of at least 0.5% of the population have tallied 216 cases per 100,000 people—one-third as many as in areas with excess deaths around 0.1%.”
Link. As expected. Vaccines should work.
“If you need to be cocooned in nostalgia—and slightly repulsed by adolescence—there’s the middle-school comedy “Pen15,” which is set in the early two-thousands”
Link. The 2000s are nostalgia now.
CDC: “ProPublica’s reporting affords the most comprehensive inside look at the escalating tensions, paranoia and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters”
Link. I expected more would speak out.
Declining COVID fatality driven by decreases in olds.
Link. German data series.
Trump and lost illusions
Link. A litany of bad presidents actually refutes the claim that Trunp is not unique. he unites the worst of every horrible president. Harding’s corruption. Nixon’s abuse of power. Wilson’s racism. Then he adds an unprecedented attack on truth.
The illusions that Trump removed.
Link. Credit him for this: we know what we are now.
Allocating COVID vaccines: Black priority?
Link. Favoring Black Americans would crush White vaccine resistance.
Zuck hates Apple privacy protection.
Link. No stronger validation.
“The union that represents Minneapolis police officers is trying to recruit former cops to work as ‘poll challengers’ to work in ‘problem’ areas at the request of an attorney connected to President Donald Trump’s campaign”
Link. Scum.
The Never Trumpers: “we will always be able to say that when Trump and his thugs took over the Republican Party and then the elected branches of the United States government, we did not cut and run. We stood and fought.”
Link. Respect.
“Apple started attaching RFID tags to some of its equipment to keep track of where it was going”
Link. China is a tough neighborhood.
‘Inside Foxconn’s Empty Buildings, Empty Factories, and Empty Promises in Wisconsin’
Link. If Trump loses WI there might be a small measure of justice.
“there’s no reason anyone should buy Apple’s 20W adapter instead of Anker’s or Aukey’s”
Link. Noted.
Average body temp drop in Amazon tribe too.
Link. Associated with longer life.
Trump circulated Biden smear: “One of the original posters of the document, a blogger and professor named Christopher Balding, took credit for writing parts of it when asked about it and said Aspen does not exist.”
Link. These bozos have effectively insulated Joe and Hunter from *any* allegation. Honorary Resistance members.
“offered us a corruption master class, presenting for our edification a kind of full-spectrum corruption that may be unprecedented in American history”
Link. Harding can rest easy now.
“once dogs had become domesticated, and even while they were sometimes breeding with wolves, no new wolf DNA entered their genomes.”
Link. More questions than answers. Pushes domestication back to 20kya, weird that modern wolves have dog DNA but not vice-versa. Very successful global parasite!
Melania at her most likeable.
Link. “Heart of assassin” but the author is clearly a fan. In a funny way I too respect Melania’s brand of evil. She and Trump do seem to be friends.
Why have COVID death rates fallen?
Link. We are doing less harm and providers fear the virus less, but mortality fall not fully understood. Hospitalization rates have fallen less.
“From 1971 to 1972, there were 2,500 bombings in the U.S”
Link. I did not remember that. I do remember the 1970s were extremely weird.
Remdesivir: “very, very bad look for the FDA, and the dealings between the Gilead and EU make it another layer of badness”
Link. Gilead did well though
“not a single case of fomite-caused Covid-19 has been observed”
Link. All that wiping … probably cut down on colds though.
“ doubt I will ever buy an Apple Watch as a gift again, except maybe for my wife.”
Link. I do not have enough lifespan for this.
“If their CNN mimicked a visual system, they wondered, could it predict neural responses to a novel image?”
Link. Establishing parallel architectural features.
Malaria tricks: timing attacks when mosquitoes are around.
Link. Falciparum adaptations hold clues to many disease treatments. Natural selection is a diabolical inventor.
Cash prizes for drug abstinence: “significant improvements in attendance to therapy sessions, significant reductions in drug and alcohol use.”
Link. Not a vote winner.
“Mr. Biden has a relatively poor 78-11 lead among Black men“
Link. Hispanic men very close. Reparations said to poll poorly among Black voters as well. Any GOP reform is based on pivot to Hispanic voters (GWB strategy)
“an expired certificate isn’t normally revoked”
Link. Great primer on code signing.
Autoimmune diseases in long haul COVID.
Link. More evidence RA starts with viral infection.
“modified Hellfire hurls about 100 pounds of metal through the top of a target’s vehicle. If the high-velocity projectile does not kill the target, the missile’s other feature almost certainly does: six long blades tucked inside, which deploy second
Link. The longest American war.
The recession is coming.
Link. I do not understand why we haven’t yet crashed hard.
XProtect: more macOS antimalware.
Link. Quietly macOS has acquired a lot of malware protection. I wonder how well it works.
The Font of Misinformation and Lies at Trump Campaign Rallies.
Link. 1.5 lies a minute. His base believes.
“he has shown contempt for American ideals; he has made cruelty a sacrament; he has provided comfort to propagators of hate;”
Link. There are a lot of semicolons.
“Apple pushed MRT 1.68 (on 19 October), which has wreaked havoc on many Macs from El Capitan to Catalina. That’s the third update in three months to prove flawed.”
Link. Remote work contributing?
macintouch hacked via wordpress.
Link. Ric comments on the evolving net hellscape.
“Trump is really not the deep structural cause.”
Link. I think IT starting 1970 and globalization (esp rise of China) are root causes; growing inequality is a result.
“the Messenger told his two ministers in Chicago that day that the Muslims and the Klan indeed had similar goals but with different shading”
Link. I’d like to read more about Elijah Mohammed. A peculiar kind of madman.
How Trump could use emergency powers in the upcoming U.S. election
Link. We only get to rest if Trump clearly wins.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday that he saw nothing criminal in Hunter Biden’s past business ties with Ukraine or Russia”
Link. Trump calls go direct to voice mail now.
A not bad critique of the Barrington thing.
Link. The problem is it’s so absurd, and contains so many flaws, that it’s hard to know where to start a critique. Maybe what we need is a serious description of what a “herd immunity” strategy would actually look like.
“popular news outlets, rather than social media platforms, were the main drivers of a disinformation campaign meant to sow doubts about the integrity of the election.”
Link. Right wing propaganda shops that sell newspapers. Funded by advertisers seeking the gullible and credulous with money — now concentrated in GOP.
“Falun Gong Epoch Times created Facebook fueled Trump supporting unreality engine.”
Link. Fox, QAnon, Epoch Times, Talk Radio. GOP is a true train wreck.
Catalog of Trump’s Worst Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes: The Complete Listing.
Link. A top 100 is also good. Frum in The Atlantic had focal summary recently. NYT Magazine detailed list.
“We estimated a 4-fold increased risk for COVID-19–related hospitalization and a 10-fold increased risk for COVID-19–related death in persons with Down syndrome, a group that is currently not strategically protected”
Link. Could be many factors besides immune issues and these studies are very hard to do and interpret.
UnitedHealth Flu Kits for 200K: tamiflu and Coronav test.
Link. Innovative! Seems a good idea. Telemedicine component.
“It’s possible to fill a volume with extended attributes and run it out of free space, and that space may also be ignored by services which manage storage use, for example space allocations for clients in a server system”
Link. Is gain worth complexity?