Link. Breaking point with China’s abusive and dysfunctional COVID controls.
Monthly Archives: October 2022
“There’s no longer any reason someone should browse the App Store. It’s a dirt mall with a mob casino in it.”
Link. I avoid it like the plague.
“The App Store has corrupted such a great company so deeply. They make so much from gambling and manipulative IAPs that they don’t even see the problem anymore.”
Link.
“other elephantine asteroids, veiled by the sun’s glare, remain disconcertingly undiscovered”
Link. “NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission … will … find most of the hazardous asteroids that other surveys have missed.”
“0.93-mile-wide (1.5-kilometer) asteroid dubbed 2022 AP7—has an orbit that may eventually put it on a collision course with Earth.”
Link. Hiding in sun glare. One day our asteroid deflection tech will earn its keep.
Pandemic Amnesty: “In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Link.
Predicted EV-D68 paralysis flare in small children didn’t happen.
Link. Last few years have taught us how little we know about infectious disease. Science grows from humility.
“Smarties approached baseball like an equation … and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one.”
Link. Fun essay on the perils of optimization. “Debate is a finite game. Marriage is an infinite game.”
“Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders.”
Link. Debt service from LBO $1b/y. Bankruptcy when?
How to blog – including a review of 2022 options.
Link. I’d start with WordPress.com but I’m personally still on blogger.
A Farewell to Twitter
Link. Well said, from an old App.net colleague. “He’s dead Jim”.
“Republicans already mad at business regulation now worked to pick up the white supremacists who had backed the Dixiecrats and who, by 1964, were attacking Black Americans and their white allies”
Link. A short, dense and authoritative history of American politics, slavery and party identification. Keep as a reference.
Dorsey’s Bluesky and the weird alliance between Musk and Putin.
Link. Musk seems broken.
“statins did not affect MRI incidence/progression of cartilage damage, BML, osteophytes or effusion”
Link. Some have wondered if statins slowed OA progression. Seems unlikely.
Sabine on “Longtermism”.
Link. Reminds me of the Sin of Onan. Also, Kant did this topic.
A liberal Jewish perspective on the rise of antisemitism in the GOP.
Link. Are right wing Jews starting to be uncomfortable?
“From a rooftop position, two former computer programmers turned tank hunters directed drone strikes that took out two Russian armored vehicles in the space of about three hours,”
Link. Wearing NATO night vision goggles. Daring.
“multigenerational households … likely to grow in popularity in the future as rising productivity in the rest of the economy makes childcare and home healthcare … much more expensive”
Link. Legit futurism. Also, why do economists dislike Baumol’s cost disease?
“This is the world in which American students — most of them learning remotely for many months, many of them for close to a year, and some for longer — fell off by a handful of points,”
Link. Test score decline was modest given the circumstances.
“you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money”
Link. Pass the popcorn.
Five reasons not to move from Twitter to Mastodon
Link. He recommends moving.
Virtual Screening: “… led to scoring of about 7.5 trillion complexes. Not a typo. That took close to 9 hours of grinding away on a 1000-core computing cluster.”
Link. Lots more room to consume cycles.
“During the off-season that year, Waddell also accidentally shot a man in the hand, saved a drowning woman…”
Link. Early ball players were colorful.
“.. sudden disappearance of work is an unexpected turn for … dray operators — the drivers who transport shipping containers between the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach”
Link. Several reasons.
Emperor Xi: “In social media chat groups, where mentioning his name has become a dangerous thing to do, Xi is just “he.”
Link. The state of Chinese society.
Ride With GPS vs Komoot: Which is Better for Biking?
Link. Rides with free version is pretty good.
ApoE and the Coronavirus: “the [mouse models] with ApoE2 and ApoE4 proteins had notably worse courses of disease and lower survival rates. “
Link. Derek also mentions Alzheimer’s shift focusing on glial cell lipid metabolism.
NYT profile of a Black woman’s life after the great migration.
Link. It manages to pack in a lot of Black American experience into a small article. Progress but slow and hard and intermittent.
Meta: “The number of people who use its apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger daily increased to 2.93 billion users in the quarter, up 4 percent from a year earlier.
Link. That’s curious. Would like to know more.
“If the 774 AD Miyake event really was a super-Carrington solar flare, it was probably around 80x bigger”
Link. Every thousand years or so. Would mess us up bad.
Antisense therapy for rare seizure mutations causes hydrocephalus in the 2 patients treated.
Link. Parents support further research, their children faced certain death.
“President Joe Biden asked all agencies to find ways to cut “junk fees,” the hidden fees, charges, and add-ons that hit consumers on everything from airline and concert tickets, to hotels, to banking services and cable bills.”
Link. Treat fake prices as fraud.
Japan … “behind South Korea in terms of living standards”
Link. I did not know this. SK seems very stressed Society however.
Rubio’s latest delusion explained.
Link. Marco Rubio and the Proud Boys.
“Due to the reduced stability of macOS 13, we very highly recommend that you stay away from macOS 13 “Ventura” as long as possible.”
Link.
“introduced Yamanaka’s factors into living animals. In 2013, a Spanish team did exactly that, with gruesome results. The mice sprouted tumors called teratomas”
Link. Aging zillionaires piling money into life extension.
“If you don’t have automatic updates enabled, you’ll need to use SilentKnight to restore MRT and XPR to their former glory.”
Link. Apple expects automatic updates is active.
“One senior U.S. official said there were new, troubling developments involving Russia’s nuclear arsenal.”
Link. Increasingly desperate Putin.
“The guidelines for state-sponsored Russian propaganda television predict very well what Tucker Carlson says about Russia and Ukraine.”
Link. Carlson is now driving the GOP’s MAGA/Putin agenda. Do we miss Limbaugh now?
“the trajectory Apple has chosen for the future of the iPadOS platform, and it’s one designed for modularity, power users, and multiple input methods. Plus a whole lot of weirdness. And bugs.”
Link.
“Rifle clubs” held contests outside Republican political rallies, “Red Shirts” marched with their guns in parades.”
Link. 1876, when Republicans were the good guys. 2022 GOP are replaying the classics.
“If China invades, it has a very strong incentive to attack U.S. bases first. And if China attacks U.S. bases, the U.S. is highly likely to respond by fighting China.”
Link. Classic game theory analysis of the invasion of Taiwan.
“There are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants all over the planet, except in Antarctica”
Link. Prize winning micro photography of carpenter ant face.
Reflections on DeLong’s “Slouching Towards Utopia”
Link. Responding to resurgent fascism and the despair of modern China.
“The grooming tactic of trying to convince a child everyone around them is a groomer for a very arbitrary reason and they are safe is becoming incredibly common now a days.”
Link. Humans are so weird. Worth reviewing if you have a vulnerable child.
“the steady decline in performance of the macOS Help system has made traditional Help books embarrassing”
Link. OTOH few read help files in any form. FWIW Windows XP had a great help app.
“while many of the children did come from orphanages and group homes, the authorities also took children whose relatives or guardians want them back”
Link. “her Russian foster family treated her well but that she ached to return to Ukraine”
Russia has a thing for war crimes.
“Lara Logan Is Too Crazy for Newsmax … Going from a contributor on 60 Minutes to getting banned by Newsmax”
Link. We don’t recognize all the schizophrenia-adjacent mental health disorders.
Explainer: Passwords and passkeys
Link. Oakley is a marvel. Once we had many sources for such knowledge. BYTE is impossible to imagine now.
“Before this attack, I had thought that I could take on a bear easily.”
Link. But he did attack the grizzly to save his friend, so young man testosterone not all bad. Expected to heal well.