Link. Gopgle’s no-backup approach has been disastrous for many.
Monthly Archives: December 2020
UK Hail Mary on vaccines: “… is simultaneously the correct decision for them to make and also very bad news”
Link. Biden-Harris, we need you now.
Lilla is back: Dems … “redirected their energies from party politics to movement politics, focusing attention in particular on minority and gender identity movements.”
Link. He’s right. Related: education is NOT the answer to the problems of the Left Behind.
“he got a job as a custodian in the biology department at Washington and Lee in 1963. Within a year he was working as a lab assistant and, once the school allowed Black students, taking night classes”
Link. Hell of a story.
“give it out randomly, like a Walgreens did in Kentucky.”
Link. Vaccination now needs to focus on those who want to be vaccinated.
“The summit of Mount is Everest is about the size of two Ping-Pong tables.”
Link. NYT picks 74 facts for 2020.
“the European Union is finally freed to develop in the way that its other major members clearly want”
Link. Free of Britain.
Post-COVID psychosis.
Link. Presumably organic brain syndrome related to neural injury by virus or immune. Clues to how schizophrenia develops post viral infection. Rare so far.
U.S. Diet Guidelines Sidestep Scientific Advice to Cut Sugar and Alcohol.
Link. These are always political, not clear this is Trumpism or more business as usual.
“Trump is the villain of the year. Of the decade. Perhaps of the century.”
Link. Killed more than bin Laden.
“Black suicide rate is about one-third that of whites.”
Link. That is an astounding difference if true. Gun ownership a factor. I suspect also misclassification. Compare Canada?
“Mr. Xi’s speech foreshadowed what was to come — rewriting the history of the crisis even as it was happening”
Link. So much like Trump.
Britain takes some calculated vaccine risks.
Link. Spacing out 2nd dose, gambling on AZ.
Best CO2 sensors for workplace and gym.
Link. Should be mandatory use.
20 Macs for 2020: #4 – MacBook Air (2nd generation)
Link. My 2016 13” Air is the best computer ever made. Still.
Facebook’s Unknowable Megascale.
Link. “tobacco company executives would have loved to invent tobacco products that didn’t cause cancer.”
The problem is the attention driven business model.
Mac App Store Updates Failing on Mojave
Link. Don’t blame the devs.
“If you update to Safari 14.0.1 or 14.0.2 you will be unable to attach anything to an email”
Link. I can’t upload to web site either. Drives me crazy. I was blaming the web sites.
GOP guy gets COVID at House GOP event because he is an idiot.
Link. He had a hard ride and likely little sympathy.
The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable.
Link. Homer didn’t have a college degree but earned enough to be middle-class in 1980. Very unlikely now.
Jan 1, 2020: “WHO immediately switched to emergency mode. In North Carolina, it was three o’clock in the morning when the conference started.”
Link. And we heard about it when?
Russia hid 2/3 of its COVID deaths.
Link. Why admit it?
“Pandemic and quarantine and economic collapse and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and anti-maskers and the election and the Stupidest Attempted Coup in Modern World History and 300,000 people dead”
Link. My small personal writing project stuck too.
Future war: “one trend in 21st century defense will be reassuringly human: the continued rise of special forces”
Link. All with college degrees. In the US the military was a major government run employment service for the non-college. That will slowly go away.
State colleges face the crunch.
Link. Overspent on amenities but depending on budget quirks they might not have saved much of that anyway.
“constraints on the amount of spatial curvature we have … tell us that it must go on for at least ~400 times the part visible to us in all directions”
Link. Furthest theoretically visible object is 61 billion ly. “energy conservation only works at a particular location, not for the expanding Universe”
“The intellectual forces behind Goldwater’s sudden rise thought that Eisenhower and J.F.K. were agents, wittingly or otherwise, of the Communist conspiracy”
Link. Democracy, like science, is not something most humans enjoy.
Wonder Woman 1984 Is Bursting With Unfinished Thoughts | Tor.com
Link. I agree. There’s a good movie buried by odd choices. The possession was nuts.
“We seem in India to be regressing into a Hindu version of Pakistan”
Link. A bad case of Trump-disease.
Chinese Demography: first of a series
Link. Noah Simpson is doing a series on China’s Power.
Zika: “the virus ran its course, infected a large portion of the population, and herd immunity developed”
Link. There wasn’t time to test a vaccine. Good retrospective, I went looking for it.
There is a climate doom cult around “Deep Adaptation” book.
Link. Poorly edited piece obfuscates how bad book is.
“in reality, there’s no clear cutoff between a virus that travels in aerosols and one that travels in larger droplets”
Link. Names are powerful. Confusing classification with reality is a perennial problem in medicine. The model is not the truth.
“For hours, the alarm on the teacher’s bedside monitor bleated. Her oxygen level was dangerously low, her pulse racing and her blood pressure soaring. Still, she remained conscious, saying she could not breathe”
Link. South Africa. Spread there is weird.
Toxic Fumes On Planes.
Link. “Senior Boeing engineers worried that data from sensors would prove damaging in lawsuits by sick passengers and crew member.”. Another job for Biden.
Nuclear weapons agency breached.
Link. Cybersecurity agency overwhelmed.
“Russia has not terminated its chemical weapons program, but has instead disguised its development capability behind a network of state-run institutes.”
Link. Very bad people.
“President Trump’s grants of clemency to convicted liars, corrupt congressmen and child-killing war criminals”
Link. His people.
How Amazon Wins.
Link. Ugly.
Immunocompromised hosts accelerate viral evolution.
Link. Obviously must happen all viruses, not just COVID-19.
Middle class existence requires a college degree.
Link. This has been true for a long time.
536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
Link. Icelandic volcano. Took a lot to kill the Roman Empire.
The US needs genomic surveillance now.
Link. When high risk mutants identified intensify local vaccination and reduce spread.
Camera geekery: ProRAW.
Link. Goes deep fast.
Brave CEO is a Trumpista.
Link. Do not give this guy money.
For history: Trump pardons of 12/22/2020.
Link. Hoping we find new crimes to return them to prison.
Pollster comes close to admitting urban riots cost Dems Senate.
Link. I’m amazed Biden pulled it off.
“Park Avenue apartment that Ms. Vrablic, Mr. Scalzi and another Deutsche Bank colleague purchased for about $1.5 million from a company called Bergel 715 Associates in June 2013. Mr. Kushner held an ownership stake in that company at the time.”
Link. There is so much of this ahead.
Germany also has a Nazi problem.
Link. 2020.
“The Ashburn area outside D.C. is the largest data center market in the world,” said Mr. Lin of Equinix. “It’s really the hub of the digital economy in a lot of ways”
Link. Underseas cables come ashore.