Link. Science, medicine, politics. If you don’t tear up you need therapy.
Author Archives: jgordon
Apple Watch: all apps dying.
Link. Exercise related and bike navigation among few opportunities. Apple Watch main value is getting text message when active and phone inaccessible.
“most Americans — including children and vaccinated adults — face little personal risk from Omicron.”
Link. In SF 1/3 of persons admitted with Omicron it is incidental. Likely most immunized admissions are incidental.
“There’s about $1.6 trillion worth of $100 bills in circulation — 80 percent of all U.S. currency”
Link. Neither zealots or critics speak much of Bitcoins true value in illegal transactions.
Web3: “micropayments, but in crypto”
Link. Wait! I like that! I’m a huge fan of micropayments and enemy of subscriptions. Now I have to be a crypto fanboy?!?!
“It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”
Link. That seems high, and hard to achieve outside of work or school.
“The slowest ager gained only 0.4 “biological years” for each chronological year in age; in contrast, the fastest-aging participant gained nearly 2.5”
Link. Lifespans don’t vary 6x however. This aging variability is easy to see in dogs.
Botulism: “why canned foods have a burnt, metallic taste and jarred sauces can sometimes have a harsh acidic note”
Link. So good.
Cowpox transport: “Twenty-two orphans, ages 3 to 9 … accompanied by lead doctor Francisco Xavier de Balmis … and Isabel Zendal Gómez, the head of the boys’ orphanage”
Link. The orphans, and Balmis, saved tens of millions from Smallpox. Adopted by families in Mexico they must have descendants now.
Create a computer-to-computer network on Mac
Link. Ad hoc Wi-Fi is deprecated in Big Sur but can be resurrected. Via TidBITS.
Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine: Meh so far.
Link. Nice flu review.
Inside iCloud+ Private Relay.
Link. I will enable eventually.
Djokovic: “On Dec. 16, the day he said he tested positive, he appeared at a live-streamed public event. The following day, he appeared at an awards ceremony for junior players, where photographs showed that he was not wearing a mask.”
Link. Either he’s lying or he’s an asshole.
Screen Time calculation nonsensical due to persistent web sites.
Link. I think this bug is new in iOS 13.
“H01 is a petabyte-scale dataset, but is only one-millionth the volume of an entire human brain. Serious technical challenges remain in scaling up synapse-level brain mapping to an entire mouse brain (500x bigger than H01), let alone an entire human brain
Link. June 2021. Mouse is exabyte.
Mathematica 13 – 1/3 of a century of development.
Link. I used it in grad school around ’95. It was just a toddler then. (The programming models were kind of everything.)
Time Machine has a bug with backup to APFS
Link. With large numbers of small files
Converting from Aperture to Apple Photos: Personal results
Link. The first of many updates to this blog post. I was unable to find any useful descriptions online so I’m doing my own experiments.
Aperture and unsupported image formats – use Photos and export as TIFF
Link. Video formats are, of course, much harder. For me Adobe’s DNG converter is good enough.
“Sibelly said there were no staff absences, pointing out that most teachers had contracted Covid last month or over the Christmas holidays.”
Link. London. Essentially all teachers will get Omicron, but without surveillance many won’t know.
The Case Against Crypto(currencies) – “every use case is better served by another simpler technology except for crime, ransomware, extralegal gambling, and sanctions evasion”
Link. Handy reference.
How Mars got red.
Link. It’s a bit complicated.
“Many of number theory’s most important problems arise when mathematicians think about how multiplication and addition relate in terms of the prime numbers.”
Link. The starting points are so easy to understand. Then the warp drive kicks in.
“If you see a hedgehog in your backyard,” he said, “you should probably avoid kissing it.”
Link. MRSA evolution from fungus vs. bacteria on hedgehog skin.
Antigen tests less sensitive to Omicron.
Link. More pressure on PCR.
“Feature that allows me to use Google’s search engine through DuckDuckGo: prepend “!Google” to searches. Basically, DuckDuckGo launders my search.”
Link.
Oracle’s Ellison: “You’ve got to be good at intellectual intimidation and rhetorical bullying,”
Link. That’s the Ellison we know, but this shocked: “He later disavowed this as the strategy of an “inexperienced and insecure” C.E.O.”. WTF? Is there nobody we can trust?
“school disruptions were an important issue for swing voters who broke Republican — particularly suburban white women.”
Link. GOP will encourage unions to fight for remote schooling. Article doesn’t mention unvaccinated teachers – a weird omission.
Lawsuit Alleges Google Paid Apple to Stay Out of Search.
Link. A 30 billion dollar fine would be nice.
“Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.”
Link. 1st readable web3 review.
[untitled]
Link.
Flurona: not twice as bad.
Link. Multiple simultaneous infections was little studied until past 20 years.
“two divorces were soon underway, and Mr. Perelman and Ms. Duff were soon engaged.”
Link. “The wrong box got checked and out went $893 million … because the error was Citigroup’s, the loss belonged to them, rather than to Mr. Perelman”
The ‘Strongman’s Dilemma’.
Link. “the problem of strongman succession may be, on some level, irresolvable.” China.
“At Seattle Children’s Hospital, for example, about 21 percent of children are testing positive for the coronavirus, compared with the average of about 1 percent”
Link. Still possible omicron is hard on small airways.
“he refused the preventive treatment of a rabies vaccine along with donated antibodies”
Link. He committed suicide in other words. “treatments are life-saving, they can be prohibitively expensive, costing thousands even with insurance.”
“Last year, for the first time, the number of registered Independents exceeded the number of registered Republicans.”
Link.
Noah Smith: climate change meets science.
Link. Insane transition speed.
“we could have had lower overall inflation if we had squeezed service prices — say, by slashing aid to families or raising interest rates”
Link. We made better choices.
“If you told me in April 2020 that unemployment would be 4.1% by December 2021, I’d have laughed in your face.”
Link. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
“Between 1982 and 2016, the American ski season shrunk by an average of 34 days annually, and levels of snow cover saw an average drop of 41 percent”
Link. I used to Nordic Ski. Now I ride a fat bike. I remember the great cross country ski lodges of the 20th.
COVID Group Home Staffing Crisis.
Link. High risk settings. Similar to teachers and long term care facilities.
“In 1983, he wrote an article for Parade magazine outlining his exercise habits routine. To maintain his physique, Reagan informed his readers of the virtues of weight training to shape one’s outward appearance.”
Link. Reagan lifted puny weights, but this was a big deal for the day. Great essay. Could be expanded by including bicycle/health craze of 1890s that died of cars and tobacco by 1910. (2015 Essay)
Beyond boosters: NYT squints through murk.
Link. They don’t address the interesting question of whether this strain is a good choice for the well immunized.
State of the many lies.
Link. Murdoch’s Fox plays a key role.
“over 87,849 “power-intensive” mining rigs have made their way from China to Kazakhstan.”
Link. I wondered what they would do. Nov 2021. Via Charlie Stross.
“GOP has no platform other than a Christianist White Supremacist Authoritarianism, no goal other than a corrupt oligarchy, and no plan for its supporters other than to keep them hyped up on fear and hatred of anyone who is a convenient target.”
Link. Romney’s party.
1942 Letter to a son going to war.
Link. Damn. That dude could write.
“Numbers uses a proprietary, compressed binary format to store its tables. This format is comprised of a zip file containing images, as well as Snappy-compressed Protobuf.iwa files containing metadata, text, and all other definitions used in the spreads
Link. Brilliant work.
Novak Djokovic: “players seeking an exemption had to pass muster with two panels of medical experts.”
Link. Those “medical experts” should be tarred, feathered, and deported.