Link. Funny.
Author Archives: jgordon
“PBS really should be doing an internal investigation about why they broadly promoted a dangerous quack for years”
Link. Before you donate ask the status of that investigation. Christine Northrup.
macOS Upgrade to Big Sur fails due to bug handling Spotlight files.
Link. private/var/folders/*/*/C/com.apple.metadata.mdworker. Apple will fix eventually.
“lot of potential for more lightweight outliners like Drummer and Zavala that can potentially talk to each other and to the web.”
Link. All that is old is new again.
Device Software Updates
Link. I got one for Mojave. Nice.
If America Had Six Parties, Which Would You Belong To?
Link. Quiz.
The biofuel opposition: “tip the scales against farmers like me who produce corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel.”
Link. CO2 support is bigger than Exxon.
“Black and Hispanic or Latino death rates are six times higher than those for white people.”
Link. In middle-age, men 1.6x women. Get vaccinated.
Genetically altered pig kidney works briefly for a brain-dead human.
Link. “Dr. Montgomery and his team also transplanted the pig’s thymus.” Many thanks to the patient and their family who gave permission for this work.
“that’s not what Amazon — and Jeff Bezos in particular — have said under oath”
Link. Bezos lied about how bastardly his company behaves. Bit like Cook but more flagrant.
“secretary, who is vaccinated, learned of his infection during routine testing ahead of a foreign trip”
Link. We need home antigen test kits.
“the longer a person had high levels of LDL — no matter what their LDL level is in young adulthood or middle age”
Link. Favors treating LDL over 100 earlier in life. Some people have dramatic drops with small statin doses.
“street vendors who used to line the sidewalks, some of whom were kidnapped by the gang for what little they had in their pockets or told to sell what few possessions they had at home”
Link. Haiti is a warning.
“protein-based vaccine as a booster for people who have already received other vaccines”
Link. Good overview. Future is likely regular COVID vaccines of different types. Challenge is parsing out side-effects.
Tuberculosis: “coughing accounts for as little as 7 percent of the total bacteria emitted by an infected patient”
Link. One of the odder learnings of the COVID era.
“the Minnesota Psychiatric Society released a position paper opposing authorization of medical cannabis as a treatment for every and all anxiety disorders.”
Link. No kidding. There’s no medically credible evidence that cannabis is a good longterm treatment for anything. Cannabis is recreation (with risks) and should be treated that way.
“Supply-Side Progressivism is the kind of vision I want to fight for. Cost Disease Socialism is the kind of last-ditch palliative that I will accept, but only glumly.”
Link. Would love to see a critique of his dismissal of Baumol’s cost disease.
“horseback riding likely sends more people to the hospital than other sports like football, auto and motorcycle racing, and skiing”
Link. Motorcycle racing?! They probably don’t mean super cross. But otherwise this is not surprising. Horseback riding is THE extreme sport.
Powell immunosuppressed due to multiple myeloma history and therapy.
Link. I’m sure he received monoclonal antibodies as well.
“the kind of media that suffocates nuance, venerates self-assuredness, and equates self-reflection and principled concessions with weakness.”
Link. The 20% who sustain civilization sigh and go back to pushing the rock up the hill.
“In Idaho, commissioners last month appointed a new physician representative to the health board in the Boise region who advocates unapproved treatments for Covid-19 and refers to coronavirus vaccinations as “needle rape.”
Link.
Summary of housing crisis.
Link. Too few homes and corporate consolidation makes eviction more efficient. Does not dig into problems with assistance programs.
“Inflation-adjusted retail spending across the U.S. has risen 14 percent over the past two years”
Link. The COVID boom.
“… there is a powerful entrenched force arrayed against the climate solutions we need — it just isn’t economists, billionaires, or lefty activists. It’s the fossil fuel industry.”
Link. It’s their nature.
The Rankings Racket Goes to Kindergarten
Link. For colleges: “dilute the influence of any one ranking system, by adding much more complexity and different facets to the system”. US News must die.
“there’s a valuable new command to export passwords from Safari and a new pane in System Preferences, which nobody knows about. And if you look in the tool for managing keychains, password export isn’t supported at all”
Link. Remember MacUser?
History of Evernote: “Pachikov worked on the prototype of Evernote (which was initially known as EverNote) for two years, and released a beta version of the tool for Windows in 2004.”
Link. I love his memory ambitions. I love Simplenote because we seem unable to sustain anything more ambitious.
macOS File types: “MIME types when downloading from the Internet, can still use old Classic Mac OS four-character type codes, but ultimately relies on UTIs”
Link. The taxonomy is pretty crude.
“If the Democrats do not succeed in passing a voting rights law, we can expect America to become a one-party state that, at best, will look much like the American South did between 1876 and 1964.”
Link. “The Senate will vote on the Freedom to Vote Act on Wednesday.”
“Espino is searching for employment elsewhere and is considering seeking a license in Florida, where vaccination requirements are lax.”
Link. She will not like the places that are desperate enough to hire her.
Norway, Oil and Climate.
Link. Doing the right thing even when it really hurts.
The Quad and Containing China.
Link. “Quad members collectively outnumber, outgun and surround their adversary.” Australia, India, Japan, US.
“can do nothing about flank collapses on volcanic islands except have a good early warning system”
Link. There are lots of low probability disasters lurking. The mega-tsunami wasn’t on my radar. (MN safe from that, but not from Yellowstone)
“71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do”
Link. We need to resurrect anthropology. We will have to rename and relaunch because the original flamed out.
A guide to using charts – pie, line, bar and more.
Link. Uses Numbers as example. Marvelous reference.
“the forerunners just weren’t there any more. No mass extinction of American megafauna (large prey animals) until the Clovis hunters arrive sixty centuries later makes it almost certain.”
Link. The first First People did not survive.
“Chinese economy is utterly dependent on foreign trade, and China’s geography makes it extremely vulnerable to blockade.”
Link. Details on how China invades and the role of a massive missile attack on Taiwan’s defenses.
“Biden has brokered a deal among the different stakeholders to end what was becoming a crisis.”
Link. Things are getting fixed.
“for most people, low-dose aspirin … should not be used for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease … or colorectal cancer.”
Link. Not a surprise. People with NO known disease.
There are no real consequences for refusing a congressional subpoena.
Link. As long as you have a ready supply of lawyers.
Alden Global Capital’s war on newspapers.
Link. “For Smith, the Palm Beach conservative and Trump ally, sticking it to the mainstream media might actually be a perk of Alden’s strategy.”
“production at one of the key iPhone camera module manufacturing facilities in southern Vietnam has gradually resumed in recent days after several months of on-and-off disruption”
Link. COVID related.
Siri’s Grim 10-Year Anniversary.
Link. I use Siri fairly often and it works for me. It is a long way from the crazy early hype however.
Apple Health efforts flounder.
Link. They aren’t scientists or clinicians and they don’t want to hear bad news.
“puts to bed any notion that this virus had to have been concocted, or somehow manipulated in a lab, to be so good at infecting humans”
Link. True, though limited impact on lab escape theory. More importantly: we need to invest a lot more into potential natural threats.
The Trump coup: “…. many pieces needed to fall into place for the plot to work”
Link. It was a long shot, but the coup attempt exposed *many* flaws in America’s institutions and laws.
Safari and Monterey enable CSV export for iCloud passwords.
Link. Rare example of Apple doing the right thing with data.
“Thiel, one of the most sought-after GOP donors, has emerged as a financial force behind the effort to unseat Trump critics.”
Link. Thiel is hard core Trumpista. What aspects of Trumpism most appeals to him?
“an overview of the last 28 years of scripting the Mac”
Link. “one for the user in the GUI, AppleEvents, Automator actions, and now Shortcuts actions.”
Bad look.
“Some of the U.S. cyberdefense systems are at a “kindergarten level,” he said”
Link. Government software procurement is historically broken — but much is now outsourced to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.