Featured Links - October 15, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The moon over Frenchman's Bay

• Jim’s Toolbox — So many nifty tools in one collection. A simple utility that provides a front-end to many Windows' settings and features in one place Easier and faster to use than digging through the Windows 11 interface. 
• Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah (gift link). "New details emerge of Israel’s elaborate plan to sabotage Hezbollah  communications devices to kill or maim thousands of its operatives."
• Conceptual models of space colonization. From SFF author Charlie Stross: "And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?"
• The Wilderness Hidden in the Heart of Toronto (gift link). "A sprawling network of ravines threaded through Canada’s largest city offers urban explorers an oasis of birdsong, burbling creeks and whispering trees." The ravine system really is a natural wonder and extends out of Toronto; see the Rouge River system to the east which is a national urban park.
• One of the busiest emergency departments in Ontario also has some of the shortest wait times. "On a tour this week, Peter Voros, Humber River’s vice-president of clinical programs, showed off how the command centre and its staff keep patients flowing. One of the big-screen TVs displayed how long patients had been sitting in the ER’s “O-zone,” where patients wait if they are expected to be examined and sent home. Experienced nurses known as clinical expediters monitor the screens and intervene if a patient waits longer than the targeted time for their health complaint."
• Missing immune cells may explain why COVID-19 vaccine protection quickly wanes. "New insights on what stimulates long-lived antibody production could spur better vaccines."
• Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. "It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers."
• COVID-19 raises the stakes for heart attacks, strokes, and even death long after infection, new study finds. "The study, involving nearly a quarter-million adults, found that those with any type of COVID-19 infection in 2020 had twice the risk of suffering a major cardiac event—a heart attack, stroke, or even death—in the three years after a diagnosis than those who weren’t infected. People whose infections were severe enough to warrant hospitalization faced nearly a four times greater risk of a major cardiac event or death than the uninfected group."
• 'It went horribly wrong': DNA analysis sheds light on lost Arctic expedition's grisly end. "By comparing DNA from the bones with a sample from a living relative, the new research revealed the skeletal remains belonged to James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus. The Royal Navy vessel and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, had been under the command of Sir John Franklin, who led the voyage to explore unnavigated areas of the Northwest Passage. The treacherous shortcut across the top of North America meanders through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago."
• The politically incorrect guide to saving NASA’s floundering Artemis Program. "To get somewhere, Artemis must avoid going nowhere."

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Great White North. We're not quite white yet, but nights are getting down to the freezing point so it won't be long. I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. Regular posts will resume on Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy these fall flowers.

Fall flowers

 

A Journey Across a Divided America

There's always been division and polarization in US politics, but I'm not sure if there's been a time since the Civil War when the country has been so evenly divided. Most of the coverage of current politics seems to focus on the politicians and the "chattering classes", but not what's going on in the lives of average Americans.

Recently, author and journalist Ian Brown spent two weeks riding a Greyhound bus across the US from Los Angeles to New York followed by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson. He writes about the trip and the people he encountered in this long article in the Globe and Mail. 

“On a plane, you have first-class and economy,” a rider would say to me on the first day of the trip. “On a bus, you have no idea who’s on there with you.”

The bus is also the last truly democratic way to get from here to there, at a time when a critical slice of Americans can’t decide which road to take. There were 168 million registered American voters in the last presidential election. Polls suggest they are deadlocked between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The election will be decided by an estimated three million undecided voters in swing states – among them Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all places I plan to debus for a glance around before I reach New York City. (Georgia and North Carolina are also swing states, but I have only two weeks, so they’re off the itinerary.)

All of which is to explain why, on a Saturday in late summer, I was standing in the doorway of a four-person tent pitched on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a short walk from my hotel and the nearby Greyhound station.

It's a brilliant, sharp piece of writing coupled with memorable photos and I strongly encourage you to take the time to read it. (It's a gift link from my subscription, so no paywall. Articles like this are why I subscribe to the Globe and a few other newspapers). 

Featured Links - October 7, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The Scarborough bluffs

• Prime's enshittified advertising. "Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money." From Cory Doctorow. 
• ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning. "Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife."
• Escalating contest over South China Sea disrupts international cable system (gift link). "China’s effort to dominate the disputed waterway is taking a toll on the network of underwater cables that provide essential internet connectivity in Asia."
• College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time. "The demo highlights the dark side of AR glasses."
• Mark Shapiro doesn’t even talk a good game. "The Blue Jays are a disaster. And the boss has to go (gift link)." As usual, Rosie DiMano doesn't pull any punches.
• License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars. "From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more."
• The 1912 War On Fake Photos. "Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated."
• Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’. "It’s a policy approach gaining momentum around the world. It aims to avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water, and ensure wellbeing for all humans, while staying within planetary boundaries."

Photo of the Week - October 6, 2024

It's fall, which means time to harvest. We have a garden in the backyard and this year planted tomatoes, zucchini, squash, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and garlic. Most of the flowering/climbing plants were a disaster. The tomato plants didn't produce and the cucumbers and beets got eaten (despite having chicken wire fencing around the garden). We did get a couple of small peppers and squash and a few zucchini.. 

The garlic, which we planted last fall, and the potatoes turned out well. (The potatoes were in planters). 

The last crop wasn't strictly a garden crop. We've had Jerusalem artichokes growing along the fences for several years and have harvested them before. You can mash them just like potatoes. This year we got a bumper crop.

I roasted some for supper, following this recipe, and they were delicious.

This week's photo is in honour of our final harvest. It wasn't such a bad year after all.

Jerusalem artichokes

Saturday Sounds - Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band - 2024/09/22 - Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls, ON

This week's musical treat is a concert that I wish I could have been at: Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls Ontario on Septermber 22nd.  Ringo has played in the area several times over the years, often kicking off his tours at Fallsview or Casino Rama, but I've never managed to get to one. 

Per Wikipedia, the current lineup of the band is:

• Ringo Starr – vocals, drums, piano (1989–present)[5]
• Colin Hay – guitar, harmonica, vocals (2003, 2008, 2018–present)[6]
• Hamish Stuart – bass, guitar, vocals (2006–2008, 2019–present)
• Buck Johnson (musician) – Keyboards, guitar, vocals (2024–present)
• Gregg Bissonette – drums, percussion, trumpet, backing vocals (2008–present)
• Steve Lukather – guitars, bass, vocals (2012–present)
• Warren Ham – saxophone, percussion, keyboards, harmonica, vocals (2014–present) 

As is typical for his shows, the songs include some classic rock numbers, songs from Ringo's post-Beatles career, and a few Beatles hits. The concert video is a fan production with stable video and decent sound. I hope I'm in as good shape at 84 as Ringo is now. Enjoy.

The Last Dangerous Visions Is Finally Published

The Last Dangerous Visions is probably the most famous book that (almost) never was. The third in a series of legendary anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison was supposed to be published in 1974, but the publication date kept slipping, Ellison died in 2018 and the anthology has finally been published thanks to the efforts of Ellison's friend and literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5, among many other things). 

I can still remember the impact that reading Dangerous Visions had on me as a teenager and I'm certainly not alone in that. It's unlikely that The Last Dangerous Visions will have the same impact, but it's still an important book and deserves ntoice. In Rolling Stone, Jason Sheehan writes about the book's history and why it still matters. (archive.ph link)

That original Dangerous Visions was legendary. It featured new writers alongside famous ones (a collaborative model more or less unheard of at the time), took on topics like race and god and war and freaky space sex. It celebrated the New Wave movement in science fiction that would go on to invent the future we’re living in today, and stuck sparklers and road flares in it so no one could possibly claim they didn’t see it coming. The book was kinked to the frequency of chaos and revolution at a time when mainstream writers were afraid to speak truth to power lest it upset their ability to eat, and publishers were afraid to take chances on new voices. And since we find ourselves again in a similar moment, it’s only fitting that this final installment of Harlan’s anthology comes to the table with the same kind of blood on its teeth.

So here, now, in this cursed year, at history’s dumbest inflection point, we have the capstone to Harlan’s 50-year project. The Last Dangerous Visions gives us Stephen Robinett doing a school kid’s “What I Did Over The Summer” essay on the nightmare warehousing of the elderly and Max Brooks’s epistolary document on the asymetric warfare of hunger and panic. There’s stochastic, structural weirdness from John Morressy; a short, sharp wake-up call from all the things we refuse to see by David Brin; Cory Doctorow on forgiveness and robots; and Cecil Castellucci’s tale of a galactic food critic arriving at a terrible conclusion about how one might come to truly appreciate a culture through their food. With TLDV, Joe followed the model originally established by Harlan — new voices right next to the established ones, young outlaws and old masters together. From the universe of stories that Harlan selected for inclusion in TLDV (in all of its various iterations), Joe kept 24, plus a four-page introduction to Ed Bryant’s trippy “War Stories” written by Harlan himself and never before published. He then added seven more stories, newly commissioned for this publication — including “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum which is about isolation, the loss of definition in the absence of societal constructs, and the conditional immortality of being useful to capitalism. It’s the first story that Kayo ever sold, and that, too, is in keeping with Harlan’s model because, 50 years ago, Harlan bought a story about torture and resistance called “Leveled Best” from a then-19-year-old unpublished writer named Steve Herbst that was supposed to be included in the original, non-existent 1974 edition. Joe included that one in TLDV, too.