Link. Those 3 were already known as the worst of the worst. Remnber this.
Monthly Archives: December 2020
“The Republican speaker of the house, Lee Chatfield, responded by stripping him of committee assignments, then issuing a statement forcefully rejecting pleas to appoint a separate, Trump-backed slate of electors”
Link.
“the defeat of Trump, the populist standard-bearer, is creating a sense in other populist-ruled countries that the juggernaut has stalled.”
Link. It’s not over, but there is hope.
“We are at the start of a high-speed global transition, at least for the mass market, from born-fed-and-slaughtered beef, pork and chicken to ‘cultivated’ versions of the same meat.”
Link. There are billions of chickens now. In 30 years perhaps tens of thousands?
Pornhub: “The vast majority of the content on the website, which is one of the most trafficked each day online, appears to have been taken down.”
Link.
“Nearly all Fortune 500 companies, including The New York Times, use SolarWinds products to monitor their networks. So does Los Alamos National Laboratory, where nuclear weapons are designed”
Link. I’m sure there are no other vulnerabilities.
“many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community”
Link. Many of our viruses are nastier than most imagine.
Educational legal analysis of one of Trump’s failed suits.
Link. Sounds like his lawyers weren’t idiots, they simply had a hopeless case.
“Japan doesn’t have birthright citizenship, so many native-born residents of Japan, who speak no language other than Japanese, hold foreign passports.”
Link. Essay on diversity in Japan.
Pandemic Heroes: Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang and Doctor Li Wenliang of China.
Link. Despite Xi.
A story of migrant separation and reunion — and some incredibly kind Americans.
Link. It’s a story about Ms Peren and Yovany, and thus touches lightly on those who helped them, but it is good to read of those people. The anti-Trumps essentially.
Bicycling Surges in Manila: “It’s really fun, like you’ve unlocked something overwhelming.”
Link. Based on photo of a portion his bike it should serve him well for many years.
“I have not found a single outbreak traced to a movie theater”
Link. Talking/singing when aligned with air flow — your mouth to my mouth carried by air currents. In Las Vegas casinos with indoor smoking air flow is unusual. Masks work in part by decreasing talking.
Apple Silicon M1 problems: Big Sur.
Link. BS sounds like it might be ok next summer. Better than Catalina!
Vaccine strategy trials.
Link. Cutting 2nd Pfizer vaccine dose in half for under 65 is worth doing.
Energy optimism.
Link. College degree not required.
“Petersen used a portion of the money to smuggle dozens of pregnant Marshallese women in to the United States and offered them $10,000 once the baby was born”
Link. This is a special flavor of despicable evil.
An iOS Zero-click Radio Proximity Exploit
Link. “A fairly trivial buffer overflow programming error in C++ code in the kernel parsing untrusted data, exposed to remote attackers.” See aside on why OS protections fail – legacy code.
Family Sharing for Subscriptions and IAPs
Link. Makes subscription model better — but only when cost of switching to competitor is low or data is disposable.
“deliciously stupid but frighteningly anti-democratic traitor tots”
Link. What a great phrase.
“X-Mode would pay to embed its SDK into other developers’ applications in exchange for the location data it collects.” Sold to military and others.
Link. App Store not all bad.
“Nullification wing of the Republican Party is obsessed with the fact that Trump lost key states in part because a lot of Black voters in big cities rejected him”
Link.
Twilight of the autonomous automobile.
Link. Maybe some highway trucks where autonomous should be much safer than human – but would need remote human backup because people are awful.
“In three years, Mrs. Rodríguez captured nearly every living member of the crew that had abducted her daughter for ransom”
Link. Not a movie.
Trump may force Pence to crawl before him.
Link. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving lackey. The line about “shadow over presidency” is really stupid.
Digital vaccine certs.
Link. We used to do this on paper. Is needed, will happen, will be abused.
“WSJ journalists should not be reprimanded for writing about errors published in Opinion”
Link. WSJ Opinion is a sewer.
Chrome is Bad and Keystone is malware.
Link. Some sites don’t work on Safari. Sometimes I need Chrome. We need a way to disable Keystone, only enable as needed.
U.S. corporations say they’ll hire one million Black workers in the next decade. – The New York Times
Link. Because racism and historice inequity have limited Black access to college there is a large Black non-college talent pool to draw from.
“Aliria had exceptionally large quantities of one protein seen in Alzheimer’s — amyloid beta — without much tau, the toxic protein that spreads later in the disease cascade”
Link. Despite early-Alzheimer’s gene protected from dementia by a “double Christchurch mutation” altering APOE. A gift from patient and family.
Australia Scraps Covid-19 Vaccine That Produced H.I.V. False Positives
Link. HIV protein reengineering. Radical technology.
Cloudflare Web Analytics for Everyone
Link. Reference.
“Trump repeats his lies over and over with the belief that the more he tells them the more people will believe them.”
Link. Cohen knows Trump better than anyone. Trump reminds me of OJ Simpson. Strongly reminds me.
“Texas is instead claiming that its voters have been harmed by the supposedly illegitimate pro-Biden outcome in the four other states.”
Link. Specifically the GOP voters of Texas? This is true madness.
“Justice Department announced the indictments of six Chinese individuals accused of concealing their PLA ties. One tried to escape arrest by seeking refuge in the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco.”
Link. Did this get ANY press in July?
Tsai iPhone 12 mini review.
Link. He is my favorite reviewer – by far. The backup problem is weird and yet another marker for the badness of Catalina.
“no one should ever choose to develop a redaction tool for PDFs, as it’s a course to almost inevitable failure”
Link. In gov the doc is scanned and distributed as image PDF.
“MagSafe Duo requires a protocol known as USB Power Delivery 3.0”
Link. Yikes.
“MagSafe Duo requires a protocol known as USB Power Delivery 3.0”
Link. Yikes.
Infectious psychiatric disorders and Bartonella.
Link. Huge opprtunities for research.
Cultist: “Flynn posted videos on social media of himself and his family taking the “Where we go one, we go all” QAnon “oath.”
Link. Cults are thriving again.
“Black people vote for Democrats only because they are offered “free stuff,” Black votes are considered illegitimate even if they are legally cast.”
Link. Besides the rancid racism, by the same logic farmers and wealthy GOP votes shouldn’t count beause of tax breaks and subsidies.
“many volunteers who received the vaccine felt ill in the hours after the second dose, suggesting that many people might have to request a day off work or be prepared to rest until the symptoms subside.”
Link. Friday is ideal day for 2nd dose. I plan to take day after resting and watching movies.
Russians hack a premier cybersecurity firm
Link. Russia’s red team are good at being bad.
“The absolute risk of death for pregnant women who contracted the coronavirus was still lower than for women who contracted the H1N1 virus during pregnancy”
Link. Our extremely low influenza rates, if they hold, mean this may be a safer-than-usual time to be pregnant – on average. (Perhaps not for 35+ – there the morbidity curves may cross.)
CDC ventilation standard.
Link. Six months late. Damn Trump. Timing needs to be part of the hearings.
Reviewing Trump: “Works in this genre may eventually rival Civil War histories in their volume and their depictions of barely avoided national ruin.”
Link. Must read. Great advice on the investigation that must be done.
“ that there is no innate vulnerability to the virus among Black and Hispanic Americans,”
Link. I was wrong, happily.
“In Manaus, the IFRs were 0.17% and 0.28%”
Link. This is for an entire population going to herd immunity. “in São Paulo, the global IFRs were 0.46% and 0.72%, respectively. The difference may be explained by an older population structure in São Paulo.”
Maciej vs Zeynep: Clash of the Politics Titans
Link. Zeynep makes me worry, Maciej makes me drink. I think they are both right, so now I’m going to be sick.