Saturday Sounds - St. Vincent - Live in London

I haven't followed the musical career of St. Vincent (the stage name of Jules Buckley) closely though I have listened to some of her albums and enjoyed them. Live in London was performed at the Royal Albert Hall with a full orchestra as part of the BBC Pops series. 

Orchestral pop albums can be hit or miss but this one nails it. The arrangements perfectly suit her songs and the recording quality, as you might expect from the BBC, is outstanding. She's performing in Toronto with an orchestra on her current tour but unfortunately ticket prices are out of my league. 

The Bloated Web Page

I'm constantly annoyed and frustrated by the crap that websites are blasting my phone with when I try t o read an article or browse a web page. Popups, autoplaying videos that refuse to close, ads that jump out and shove the text I'm reading out of the way;; I'm sure you've seen it all.

If you want to get a better idea of what's happening and why, read The 49MB Web Page by Shumham Bose, a developer and user interface design expert. The article was triggered when they looked behind the scenes at what was happening when they opened an article from The New York Times website and found that the browser downloaded 49 MB of data. (That's roughly equivalent to an album of MP3s or 50 books in EPUB format). 

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

I don't usually see most of this on my PC because I run an ad blocker (uBlock Origin Lite) that blocks much of the crap that the article discusses.  I use Firefox with uBlock Origin as my default browser on the phone, despite the annoyance of having different browsers on my PC and phone. (I know, I know; it's just laziness that keeps me from using Firefox on my PC). Apps, where publishers seem to consider pushing ads their primary purpose in life, are also problematic. 

I should point out that there are real security problems inherent in the use of programmatic ad auctions and tracking pixels and their associated scripts. (I'll have another post about this tomorrow or Monday). 

This is the best article about web design that I've seen in a very long time. Even if you're not particularly technical, it's worth reading just to understand why your browsing experience is so unpleasant.

Featured Links - March 25, 2026

Things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Bluffer's Park on a cloudy day

• Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck. "Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones. Victims’ families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls ‘apocalypse-proof’" Just in case you need another reason to not buy a Cybertruck. 
• No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing (gift link). "Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators."
• Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers (archive link). "The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world."
  
• Resisting the superbugs (archive link). "Canadian researcher Gerry Wright is searching for the next generation of life-saving antibiotics." Unfortunately, discovering a new antibiotic is easier than getting it to market. 
  
• Record-torching March heat ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change. "Friday’s spring equinox may seem like a quaint notion to those already enduring furnace-like 90-110°F summer heat." In this part of the country, we've had a cold winter with more snow than usual in recent years.
• The Trap Always Closes. "Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win." History shows that Trump can't win this war. His only way out is to stop, and he won't.
• Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories. "We are stardust, we are golden ...".
• The World Factbook. "The community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook. Comprehensive data on 254 countries and territories." The CIA killed the CIA World Factbook in February and that this site is maintaining the information. 
• Canada wants to build up its long-neglected Arctic. The hard question is how. "Ottawa wants to modernize a region in the north that’s about six times the size of Texas, ‘just like in the 1800s’"
• As SpaceX Launches its 10,000th Satellite, A Photographer Captures the Impact on the Night Sky, "This week SpaceX passed an eye-watering milestone: it launched its 10,000th satellite into low-Earth orbit. The sheer scale of the devices whizzing around above humanity is unimaginable, but photographer Joshua Rozells is helping people see. Rozells’ image, Swamped Skies, is a composite of 343 photos that all contain at least one satellite streak. The Australian photographer didn’t set out to make the image; he originally wanted to capture star trails."
• Project Hail Mary is packed with hard science. An astrophysicist breaks it down. '"Project Hail Mary" is more than just an epic adventure film with beautiful visuals. It's a story that reminds us how important our world is—and how vital science is to our continued existence on it.'
• When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos. "Choke points are everywhere you look." The crisis over the strait of Hormuz is only the beginning. 
• Historians Say They’ve Discovered a Long-Lost Page From the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Treasure Trove of Rare Ancient Mathematical Treatises. "Three leaves had been missing for more than a century. Researchers found one of them when they decided on a whim to check the archives of a French museum."

Photo of the Week - March 22, 2026

This week's photo is of a hasta yucca in our front yard that has spent most of the winter buried under a waist-high mound of the snow. I hope this winter hasn't killed it off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and edited in Google Photos to improve the contrast. 

Leaves of a yucca mostly buried in the snow

Saturday Sounds - Santana - 1970/08/18 - Live at Tanglewood

This week's musical treat jumps back to 1970 with a concert from Santana at the famous Tanglewood Music Festival. Santana had released their second album, Abraxas, and the set contains several songs from that album. Carlos Santana and his band are in fine form. This is a pro shot video with good sound and decent video for the era. Enjoy,

COVID-19 Six Years Later

It's hard to believe that it's been six years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concern about COVID-19 has faded into the background for most people, but it's still out there, lurking in the air when you go our shopping or go to a concert. 

So what's the real situation with COVID-19 right now? Your Local Epidemiologist has published an article that looks at the current disease landscape; how much COVID is out there right now, how it's affecting people, and what are the current trends. 

Six years! Six years with a complicated data story of real progress alongside real stubbornness. This anniversary is striking to me for two reasons. The first is the virus itself: it continues to surprise us, and we remain humbled by how much we still don’t understand. The second is what has happened to us in its wake.

For myself, I'm still being careful, masking in crowded situations and in medical facilities like doctors' offices and hospitals. (A good rule of thumb is that if the staff are masking then you should be too.) I'll keep getting vaccinated twice a year and keep hoping for a vaccine that protects against infection. And I'll keep reading YLE and other reputable sites for reliable information about COVID and any other nasties that might be out there. 

Canada Launches a New Space Program

The Canadian government has announced that it will fund the construction of a space launch site near Canso, Nova Scotia. Canada has been building satellites and other space hardware, like the Canadarms on the Shuttle and ISS, but has not had it's own dedicated launch site.  

The government will also be funding the development of a made-in-Canada launch vehicle. 

A spaceport in Nova Scotia. A spaceport in Newfoundland. Three funded Canadian rocket companies. A $105 million competitive grant program with more rounds coming. The global space economy is projected to reach approximately $2 trillion by 2040. Canada is planting its flag in that economy right now, while the ground is still moving — instead of letting a billionaire cult leader control the on-ramp.

Here’s the piece that most coverage is either missing or treating as a footnote, and it absolutely shouldn’t be.

Alongside the Spaceport deal, Defence Minister McGuinty announced that Canada plans to become a full member of the NATO Starlift initiative — a program designed to create a space-launch network across alliance members, allowing allies to get payloads into orbit on short notice, especially during a crisis or active conflict.

All I can say is that it's about time.  

Featured Links - March 18, 2026

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

Birds wintering on the Bay

• Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time. "Cern researchers are testing traps capable of moving antimatter, which explodes into energy as soon as it comes into contact with regular matter."
• War on Iran may provoke a terrorist attack in US – and that may be the point. "‘Of course there’s going to be retaliation,’ says one expert. ‘It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in’"
• When you’ve been told to find new ways to use AI in technical documentation. "Some Documentation Managers and Technical Authors are now being asked to demonstrate how they are using AI and to quantify the benefits. Here are some suggestions on how to approach that challenge." In this article, I saw several uses for AI that would have potentially improved my productivity in my last job. 
• The man who proved rockets could reach space was mocked in his time. "One hundred years ago, Robert Goddard’s invention of the liquid-fueled rocket changed space exploration." This week was the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first launch of a liquid fueled rocket. We've come a long way in a 100 years. 
• Forget Google Docs, Canadian-made cDox could be your new place to write. "cDox stores your data in Montreal, and promises not to train AI on it." A Canadian alternative to Google Docs.
• Dish drive (gift link). "Hundreds of antennas take root in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley for an ambitious project to monitor signals from space."
• Wireless eye implant helps blind patients read again. "Now researchers have shown that a tiny wireless eye implant may help restore some of that lost central vision. In a clinical study, many blind older adults who received the implant regained enough clarity to recognize letters and short words. While the device does not restore natural sight, it helped several participants read again after years of irreversible vision decline."
• The “dumb” TV pivot: why your next screen shouldn’t be smart. "Reclaim your living room: screens without smart TV bloatware." We have a smart TV but hardly ever use any of the built-in features, preferring to stream through our Chromecast.