Link. I admire his ability to torment the RNC.
Author Archives: jgordon
Civilization, complexity and the limits of human cognition – another attempt at explaining the 21st century
Link. Maybe this is as good as it gets?
Apple Mac App Store: “Unable to download item. Please try again later”: The problem may be that you are not the purchaser.
Link. Use Accounts feature in App Store to switch to Family Sharing owner’s account.
“His octogenarian grandparents recovered from their bout with COVID-19 in January without a problem. He’ll get around to getting the vaccine. Eventually. Maybe after this trip.”
Link. He is alive and warning people not to be stupid.
“Moderna is already studying two multi-valent booster candidates in the clinic that were designed to anticipate mutations such as those that have emerged in the Omicron variant.”
Link. Science.
Wisconsin killer – why out on bail?
Link. The key comment (and failure): “If prosecutors believed Brooks was dangerous, she argued, they should have requested a pretrial detention hearing to present that case and see whether the court agrees.” The low bail is a red herring.
A power lifter’s review of CrossFit.
Link. Pretty fair really! I think injury risk varies by coach and facility though. (I’m a fan)
“I have been on ivermectin for 16 months, my wife and I,” Dr. Bruce Boros declared at the end of the meeting at the World Equestrian Center in Ocala… Two days later, the 71-year-old cardiologist fell ill with COVID-19″
Link. Dementia.
“For all practical purposes, stealing a bike is risk-free crime.”
Link. Even though revenue is mediocre still a worthwhile business for a petty criminal. Beyond that bikes are stolen by miserable people who resent anyone’s joy.
“Sjoquist and his wife often travel with their cross-country skis and fat bikes, alternating between the two depending on the snow conditions.”
Link. I mourn the end of Nordic skiing, but my fat bike is a consolation. More expensive though.
“organized bike-theft ring that raided dozens of shops on the Front Range and then sold the stolen bikes, perhaps in Mexico.”
Link. $8k here, I wonder how much they sell for.
“As of Nov. 22, the rate of new Covid cases in Erie County was 16 times higher than in Ontario’s Niagara Region”
Link. Canadians reluctant to visit Buffalo.
Huge investments in medicine, science, and infrastructure.
Link. Because Biden won.
NYT project finds you a place to live.
Link. I applied my filters and it said my best option was St Paul MN. Where I have lived since 1994.
Covid-19 Delta Linked to Four Times Higher Risk of Stillbirth.
Link. I wonder what other coronaviruses do in pregnancy.
GoDaddy Hack: “customers’ WordPress administrator passwords”
Link. The initial generated provisioning passwords. I guess it’s possible to not change them or to change but reuse?
“Prosecutors agreed to release Mr. Brooks on Nov. 11 for a fraction of the $10,000 bail they initially requested.”
Link. We make mistakes in medicine too — but I wonder if the burden on prosecutors is even greater.
xkcd: Bayes’ Theorem
Link. Mandatory introduction to every Bayes lecture forever.
GOP authoritarianism is permanent.
Link. I suspect less than 40% of Americans are strongly committed to democracy.
“the population can be divided into networks of quasi-homogeneous mixing populations that are internally well-connected but only loosely connected to each other, the effective reproduction number can undergo large fluctuations even in the absence of beh
Link. Simulations have disappointed.
“In 2017, after more than a decade of work, Laporta published his magnum opus — the electron’s magnetic moment to 1,100 digits of precision.“
Link. Love this description of hard core mathematical physics.
“participants who were smokers but had taken naltrexone were less likely to consume high-fat, high-calorie foods than smokers who had been given the placebo.”
Link. Naltrexone is used now in some people with severe obesity.
DeLong’s latest blog home is on substack
Link. At least it has an RSS feed. Because of the way sub stack works I can’t tell how old it is, maybe 2021?
Vials labeled ‘Smallpox’ contained vaccinia.
Link. This really should have gotten more coverage.
“Fox employees often speak of this in terms of “respecting the audience.”
Link. I have wondered how they get up in the morning. Also, Tucker Carlson ambitions are limitless.
Identified serial killings are dramatically down in US.
Link. Lots of plausible explanations.
Right-to-Repair: don’t trust Apple.
Link. I hadn’t read previously how Apple screwed participants in their small vendor program.
Africa disintegrates.
Link. Too many languages and cultures.
“COP26, while not yielding much in the way of enforceable commitments to cut emissions, has actually turned out to be one of the more productive climate summits.”
Link. Coal appears.
EVs in winter: “warming the bus during its runs on those cold days drained a little over half of the battery’s charge, whereas driving the bus used a bit more than 40%.”
Link.
“The maximum root pressure measured in some plants can raise water only to 6.87 meters, and the tallest trees are over 100 meters tall.”
Link. Transpirational supposedly but not fully understood.
“life will go on as usual for Wadena County residents, even as many of them get sick or die.”
Link. Most people don’t understand how dumb most people are.
“biggest six-month increase since the department began recording fatal crash data since 1975”
Link. Doesn’t give car vs ped vs bike numbers. Some is shift from transit to car but is surprising.
APFS based Time Machine has a problem with hard drives.
Link. More fragile backup and slower performance.
Belarus: [Putin] … “has yanked on the Belarusian strongman’s chain very hard. The crisis is effectively over, although Lukashenko may be allowed a face-saving ‘decent interval’ before he calls it off.”
Link. Where will refugees end up?
“Which hand do you think controls the front brake on a moto? The right hand! This is why you hear people refer to reversed brakes as “moto-style.””
Link. I’m persuaded. Current arrangement is legacy of old geometries where front brakes promoted headers.
Roundabouts: climate and cars.
Link. The article suggests they are bad for bikes and pedestrians unless special accommodations are made.
The end of file system defragmentation.
Link. SSDs and APFS are marvels.
Managing beavers: “easily, easily trapped and easily caught by wolves, so, no, they’re not exactly the brightest animal on the street.”
Link. The beaver-deceiver is cool. Beaver population is growing very quickly.
“five biggest Chinese mining companies in Congo had lines of credit from state-backed banks that totaled $124 billion”
Link. While Trump focused on …. Coal. The safety story is surprising.
Gordon’s Tech: How to mitigate SMS spam in iOS 15: filter unknown AND disable notifications for unknown senders
Link. If this made the news I missed it.
“mild peripheral neuropathy, a condition defined by nerve damage, pain and stiffening in the feet. Despite extensive testing, the team found no cause for that condition.”
Link. This is common but doesn’t get enough medical attention. Biden is one fit almost-80 dude.
Acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse: “for legal scholars, it was not a surprise”
Link. WTF wasn’t it universal knowledge that anyone who actually knew WI law expected an acquittal? Because journalists won’t spike a hot story.
“unicode (outside of string literals) in programming languages was a mistake”
Link. Undo this.
Proteins Aging: “perhaps the adoption of asparagine as a canonical amino acid might have been a mistake”
Link. My cataracts are developing nicely.
Alzheimer’s Vaccines: “these clinical trials, long shots though they are, are appropriate”
Link. A relatively positive take by a trusted source.
“the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.”
Link. If BBB passes this could be an impressive Biden finish. As they say, “Go Brandon!”
Disk Utility still can’t check and repair APFS volumes and containers.
Link. There are workarounds. Sigh.
Returning faulty Apple product via a doorstep replacement service.
Link. “if the new keyboard was delivered by UPS, I could ask them to wait on the doorstep” while swap old and new.
“At the end of each year, I’ll export the current year’s messages to EagleFiler and have a mostly-empty Mail app to work with.”
Link. I’m slowly moving in this direction. Don’t trust the way Mail manages archives. Would like less Google dependency.