Featured Links - April 7, 2025

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

A floor-cleaning robot

•  Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought. "Hey, this is a very precarious situation we're in." This is probably the closest the space program has come to a disaster since Columbia was lost.
• Rewilding Death in the Appalachian Mountains. "A growing conservation burial movement is challenging the funeral industry’s environmental footprint while healing the land."
• A Note on Trade Deficits and Manufacturing, How trade deficits really work, from a real economist.
• Loomered. "Laura Loomer, an online right wing troll once driven from Trump’s side, has reemerged with a vengeance." The inmates have taken over the asylum.
• How to disable ACR on your TV (and why doing it makes such a big difference for privacy). "Smarter TV operating systems bring new privacy risks, with one major concern being automatic content recognition (ACR) - a feature that monitors your viewing habits."
• Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science. "Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go."
• Human bodies begin breaking down at two very precise ages. "A comprehensive study reveals some eye-opening insights about aging, focusing on exactly “when” things start to shift and how our bodies begin to break down, both inside and out."
• I visited the sprawling 'metroburb' where 'Severance' is filmed. "It's a 2 million-square-foot town under one roof."
• Digital hygiene. A good overview from AI researcher Andrei Karpathy. If you implement even some of what he suggests, you will be more secure online.
• Your data is unwell. "Sharing electronic medical records in Canada is a hassle – and, for some, a health risk. Tech companies and governments are looking for a fix to our patchwork of digital systems."
• COVID didn’t end. Its story just stopped being told. "That Canadians aren’t being supported through known complications of infection is a crisis of the moment, of 2025 – not 2020." The situation is much the same, or worse, in the US. 
• How I wrote the notes app of my dreams (no coding required). "The new phenomenon known as vibecoding lets you describe an app and have AI build it to your specifications. The results astounded me." 

Photo of the Week - April 6, 2025

This week's photo is of a now almost forgotten piece of technology, the pay phone. This bank of phones is located in the Toronto Dominion Centre in downtown Toronto. I noticed it while walking through the PATH network on Friday and just had to grab a picture with my phone. I was surprised to see the¢m; who knows how much longer they'll be there? I didn't check for a dial tone but they do seem to be working; the display panel says "Please lift receiver, calls 50￠".

Pay phones in the TD Centre

Saturday Sounds - Miles Davis - Bag's Groove

This week's musical treat is a Miles Davis album that I had never heard until recently. Bag's Groove is the recording of a stellar session featuring not just Miles but Thelonious Monk, Sony Rollins, Milt Jackson, Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and Kenny Clarke. I found out about it from the Everything Jazz newsletter.

But the second recording session for “Bags Groove” has gained a reputation as one of jazz’s most notorious. Weinstock claims he only brought Miles and piano pioneer Thelonious Monk together on Christmas Eve 1954 because they had separately complained to him of being in urgent need of some holiday money. The result was two takes of the title track, named for its composer Milt Jackson, both of which feature what many commentators cite as some of the best solos Miles ever committed to vinyl.

Still, everyone from Ira Gitler to Charles Mingus has claimed that Monk and Miles nearly came to fisticuffs when Miles asked Monk to “lay out” (not play) underneath his solo. But Miles confirms in his autobiography that he was just looking for more space in his music, and that Monk would have played that way anyway.

The result is simply one of jazz’s key compositions, as singular and memorable as “Stolen Moments”, “Blue Train” or “Song For My Father”. On take one, Miles’s sublime solo stops time, though he’s not afraid of “out” notes and includes a famous, much-imitated lick at 10:00 (repeated during the second take). Meanwhile Monk’s solo is audacious in its minimalism and obtuseness. Take two has noticeably better sound quality, Clarke’s cymbals brighter and Heath’s bass with more low-end, while Monk plays twice as many notes as he did on take one.

I've probably heard some of Bag's Groove before this but it never registered. It has now. It's definitely a classic of 1950's jazz and some of the best music that Miles recorded. Enjoy.

The USA versus Canada 5

It's time for more posts about the hottest topic in Canadian news right now. It seems that Canada got off lighter than many people expected in Trumps tariff announcement, but now he's taking on the whole world. What a fucking mess!

• Prominent Yale professors flee Trump’s America for new roles at University of Toronto (archive link). "Philosophy Prof. Jason Stanley will be transferring in a few months, joining Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore." As the article points out, there are others coming north, and there will be many more. 
• Is Canada Treating Trump’s Annexation Threat Seriously Enough? "We can’t cling to the belief things will return to normal." If he goes after Greenland, then we'll know he's serious about Greenland.
• Environmental comeback of Great Lakes at risk with Canada and U.S. in tariff turmoil (gift link). "But the Trump administration’s combative stand on binational relations – coupled with deep job cuts to U.S. civil servants dedicated to Great Lakes initiatives – have strained the partnership and put the region’s hard-won environmental progress at risk." For example, the idiots in DOGE have laid off people from the lamprey control initiative. This is nightmare fuel, especially if you've ever seen a lamprey.
• Worthwhile Canadian Observations. "About a “boring” country that definitely isn’t." Some things about Canada that Americans should learn. 
• Canada’s New US Travel Warning: Leave Your Phone, Grab a Burner, and Maybe Skip the U.S. Altogether. "Canada’s government just updated its travel advisory for the U.S., and it’s not your usual “pack a sweater” memo. Immigration lawyers are advising Canadians to leave our smartphones at home, pick up a burner phone, and seriously consider staying north of the border. Why? Things south of the 49th are getting messy, and Canadians—along with a few other countries—are taking notice." Yes we are. I just read that traffic across the international bridge in Sault Ste. Marie was down 30 percent in March.
• Trump’s Big "Fentanyl" Lie About Canada Just Got Exposed— US Senators Are Lining Up For Canada on Tariff Day And Trump Is Furious. "Some US Senators Are Fighting to Stop His Fentanyl Tariffs—Here’s Why."

TV Garden

A few years ago, I posted about Radio Garden, a wonderful website that lets you listen to almost any radio station in the world in real time.

Now there's TV Garden, a website that lets you watch television from around the world. It works something like Radio Garden; you select a country from the globe and you get a list of TV stations for that country. It's not as polished as Radio Garden in the sense that you can't select individual stations from the map. I'm guessing that's because so many TV stations and networks these days aren't tied to specific locations. The list isn't complete either; for example, for Canada it only shows the CBC News Network but doesn't show local CBC stations, though it does for City-TV. 

TV Garden with Canada selected

You can search for a specific network or station and if you click on the 3-bar button on the left it opens a menu that lets you select stations by category; for example, Science or News. No sports though, which makes sense because they'd probably get taken down in about 30 seconds if they offered that.

There's no Android app yet (there is for Radio Garden). But it will be handy, especially if you want to watch news from another country. (That's limited in usefulness by language, of course. Perhaps our AI tools will evolve enough that something like Gemini will do the live translation for use). 

I like it and will be using it in the future. 

2024 Analog AnLab and Asimov’s Readers’ Awards Finalists

Each year the readers of two of the three remaining science fiction digest magazines get to vote on their favourite stories. The editors of Analog and Asimov's have announced the finalists for the Analog Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) and the Asimov's Readers' Awards.

As usual, they've kindly put most of the finalists up on their websites so you can read them without charge.

These are the Analog AnLab finalists for Best Novella.

Ganny Goes to War, David Gerrold, March/April 2024

Minnie and Earl Have a Kitten, Adam-Troy Castro, September/October 2024

The Last Days of Good People, A.T. Sayre, July/August 2024

Uncle Roy’s Computer Repairs and Robot Parts, Martin L. Shoemaker May/June 2024

The are the Asimov's Readers' Poll finalists for Best Novella.

Death Benefits, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, November/December 2024

Death and the Gorgon, Greg Egan, January/February 2024

Proof of Concept,  Kristine Kathryn Rusch, January/February 2024

Une Time Machine S’il Vous Plait, Peter Wood, March/April 2024

Wildest Skies, Sean Monaghan, November/December 2024

Movie and TV Reviews - March 2025

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in February. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. Now that baseball season has started, there will probably be fewer items here.

Movies

• Miss Willoughby and the Haunted Bookshop: A cozy mystery. Meh. (Amazon Prime)
• Anora: This year's Best Picture Oscar winner about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch. It's a good movie and we enjoyed it, but I'm not sure it deserved all the awards that it won (except for Best Actress). (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• The Oscars: I'm not sure why we watched this as we've only seen one of the nominated films. It wasn't the best of the Oscar shows but it wasn't the worst either. It was about an hour too long. 
• Sherwood (season 2): This takes place ten years after the first season. It's even grimmer and I didn't find the characters as likeable. Still very good. (BritBox)
• Prime Target: A entertaining if somewhat implausible thriller about a mathematician who discovers a way of discovering patterns in prime numbers, making it possible to crack any encryption. (Apple TV+)
• Law and Order Toronto (season 2): The plots are sometimes interesting when they're built on Toronto events but the show is too formulaic. It would be much better if the episodes were longer like most of the British shows. (City TV)
• A Remarkable Place to Die: A police procedural set in New Zealand. The lead detective gets away with some stuff that would get most people fired but it's still quite watchable and the South Island scenery is spectacular. (Acorn TV)
• Reacher (season 3): Light entertainment. Not too gory. Not too serious. Some of it filmed in a Pickering backlot. (Amazon Prime)
• Death and Other Details: Stylist, light, and just complicated enough to be interesting. A bit meta too, which I like. (Disney+)