I have posted here more than once about Kim Stanley Robinson's major (and best-selling) new novel, The Ministry for the Future.
The Kindle edition is on sale today for $3.99. If you have a Kobo, it's also on sale at Kobobooks for the same price.
I just bought it. Why don't you?
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
I am generally a big fan of government spending for science and space exploration, but there are exceptions, and the NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is one of them. The SLS, based on outdated and un-reusable Shuttle technology that was designed in the 1970s, is a boondoggle that, over more than 10 years, has cost more than 20 billion dollars and has yet to fly.
Now that there is a new administration in power, funding for the SLS program may be jeopardy, especially since much cheaper private alternatives are being developed and actually flown. Mainstream news organizations like Bloomberg are beginning to question the reason for its existence.
Supposing the SLS were to magically get back on track tomorrow, its underlying rationale would still make little sense. One could make the debatable case that returning to the moon will be a useful (albeit expensive) precursor to deeper-space missions in the years to come. But no such mission is realistically on the horizon. And relying on a hugely expensive single-use rocket to establish “a sustainable human lunar presence” — as NASA intends — when cheap and reusable commercial options will soon be available makes no sense.
No doubt, the era of government spacefaring had its glories. But space is now a $424 billion business, with U.S. companies at its forefront. The new administration should embrace this revolution — and bring the power of private enterprise to bear in crossing the next cosmic frontier.
Personally, I would like to see a complete reassessment of NASA's plans for lunar exploration. I want to see human presence on the moon, preferably in the form of a permanent base. The Artemis program, in its current form, makes little sense. Scrap the Lunar Gateway space station and concentrate on getting as much tonnage and people on the moon as possible, using reusable boosters and spacecraft produced by companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
I came across an interesting article by Annalee Newitz, author of a new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. She has an interesting premise about the future of the internet, based on research about the history of cities going back about 9,000 years.
In the Neolithic era, people had already started living in large cities. Then the cities disappeared and wouldn't return for several thousand years. The reason appears to be social factors, not environmental.
Let’s unpack what Kuijt is saying here. First, he notes that “more powerful lineages,” or elites, had emerged in these cities — these would have been community leaders who helped organize everything from feasts to harvests. At the same time, social cohesion was suffering due to the population explosion, which led to increased segmentation (literally, in the case of architecture) and the usual communication mishaps that occur in large groups. With all these difficulties came the loss of public events that could include everyone in the community.
It’s the end of “communal rituals,” writes Kuijt, that sounded the death knell. As society fractured, people grew disenchanted with the “powerful lineages” who led the old rituals. Without faith in leadership and each other, urbanites saw no reason to say. Ultimately this was a failure of public institutions.
So what does this have to do with modern society and the internet?
Consider that this moment might be equivalent to the late Neolithic in terms of communications technologies. Humans spent millennia using paintings and writing to pass their thoughts along to people they would never meet. Now, in the past two centuries, we’re seeing the very beginning of where new tools like the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio will lead us.
We’re building technologies that are supposed foster bigger, more complex communities, but instead they are leading us into mistrust, privacy invasion, fragmentation, and loss of shared public rituals. If the failed Neolithic experiment tells us anything, it’s that humanity has been here before. Sometimes we build amazing places, only to abandon them. That’s why I won’t be surprised if the internet is dead in less than a century. After all, one of the most popular topics of conversation online is how to stop being online.
I have been wondering the same thing. If we don't get a handle on how to behave in a socially responsible way online and clean up the disinformation that is flooding our screens, we may see a social collapse that's directly caused by our misuse of modern communication technologies.
Newitz publishes a more-or-less weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to here. I highly recommend it.
I didn't get taken in by the fake video that is the subject of this article. I know enough about space science and Mars exploration that I'm pretty sure I'd have ignored it had I come across it. But I have gotten taken by stories on other subjects, so I'm quite aware of the problem of misinformation on the internet. Usually the subject is political or related to a hot-button scientific topic like COVID-19 or climate change. But until I read this article, I had no idea that there was so much crap floating around about Mars exploration.
@wonderofscienc, who imitate the account @wonderofscience, posted the video… while the “real” @wonderofscience posted a similar video around two weeks prior, but with full attribution — that the footage was from Curiosity and the sound from Insight. The imitator @wonderofscienc got less engagement than the well-attributed video from @wonderofscience, but it is also engaging in a strange form of identity theft, and one that is paying off a little — the fake Wonder of Science has more than 10,000 followers, which is only 1 percent or so the number of the real Wonder of Science (which, while often simply displaying images with a brief explanation, also source images and videos and occasionally provide link-backs.)
So, many of the accounts are on less than the up-and-up.
Often, Mack says, they’re accounts that have scraped images from Reddit and other sites, often removing attribution, and at times stitching together things that shouldn’t be there — adding lightning to a cloud formation over the Moon, or showing a misrepresented image of an eclipse. The accounts all chase one thing: virality.
It's sad that people will misrepresent what is one of the highest achievements of the human race to gain clicks (and maybe a few bucks) from social media.
Look for more on this subject in an upcoming post.
Access to population mobility data is giving researchers an important tool to use in modelling the spread and transmission of COVID-19. Their research, published in Nature, confirms that a small number of superspreader events cause a majority of illness.
Our mobility networks are derived from mobile phone data and map the hourly movements of 98 million people from neighbourhoods (or census block groups) to points of interest such as restaurants and religious establishments, connecting 56,945 census block groups to 552,758 points of interest with 5.4 billion hourly edges. We show that by integrating these networks, a relatively simple SEIR model can accurately fit the real case trajectory, despite substantial changes in the behaviour of the population over time. Our model predicts that a small minority of ‘superspreader’ points of interest account for a large majority of the infections, and that restricting the maximum occupancy at each point of interest is more effective than uniformly reducing mobility. Our model also correctly predicts higher infection rates among disadvantaged racial and socioeconomic groups2,3,4,5,6,7,8 solely as the result of differences in mobility: we find that disadvantaged groups have not been able to reduce their mobility as sharply, and that the points of interest that they visit are more crowded and are therefore associated with higher risk.
Another article provides somewhat less technical context.
With a year’s worth of data, researchers have amassed ample evidence of some chief ingredients of superspreading events: prolonged indoor gatherings with poor ventilation. Activities such as singing and aerobic exercise, which produce many of the tiny infectious droplets that can be inhaled by others, are also common components.
But key questions remain. “We have some ideas of what factors are involved, but we still don’t know what is the main driver of the superspreading,” says Endo. Foremost are uncertainties about how much individual differences in people’s behaviour and biology matter — or can be controlled — and how best to target high-risk settings while keeping the cogs of society turning. Understanding the underlying factors that drive superspreading is crucial, says Lucy Li, an infectious-diseases modeller at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, California.
Experts say that we already know enough about the main factors of superspreading to use this phenomenon to our advantage. They are calling on policymakers to harness this knowledge to target control measures that will slow — or even stamp out — the pandemic. One of the most basic steps is closing crowded, indoor hotspots to prevent superspreading events. Researchers also recommend following Japan’s lead, by using backwards contact tracing to uncover superspreading events.
As a technical writer, I was used to writing about complex, technical subjects. Often my audience was more technically savvy than I was, so I didn't have to dumb down my material; the challenge there was knowing what really mattered to my audience. Other times, I was writing for non-technical end-users, which made my task more difficult.
Writers who are writing about science and technology for a popular audience, such as a newspaper or magazine, face the same challenge. Nicholas Booth is a British author who has been writing about science and space for many years. Last week, he was writing for the People of Space Twitter account, which presents a different person each week writing about a space-related topic.
Here he's compiled a long Twitter thread into a single post about how to write about complex and technical subjects for a non-technical, popular audience. There's some good advice here that should be relevant for technical writers too.
Most people aren't numerate. Indeed most people are SCARED of mathematics because they either do not understand it or simply even see what math is all about. For scientists and engineers, that forms a fundamental problem in explaining what you do,
The point is this: if you say a launch velocity is 17,500 miles an hour, it doesn’t mean anything. If you say 7 miles a second, it does. That's from here to the next town in the blink of an eye.
What you are also doing when you are explaining something - making it understandable - is providing context. You are adding meaning to what you are being told.
If you say there is a resonance frequency is at 15MHz, what does that mean. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Was it a surprise? Or did it confirm what you were thinking when you did the work?
If this doesn't give you goosebumps, nothing will.
I wish I could go back in time and show it to my ten-year-old self.
"Do the research" has been a rallying cry of the QAnon movement. For most people, that means looking up a topic on Google or watching a chain of increasingly crazy videos selected by YouTube's algorithm.
We've seen what that leads to.
So what difference would real research have made, had more people taken advantage of the information resources at their libraries? Or received advice from people who research topics for a living?
I've seen a couple of good articles recently that go into some detail on this topic.
First, with a catchy title, Lizard People in the Library. This is an especially salient point.
As Francesca Tripodi has demonstrated, many conservatives read the news using techniques learned through Bible study, shunning secular interpretations of events as biased and inconsistent with their exegesis of primary texts such as presidential speeches and the Constitution. The faithful can even acquire anthologies of President Trump’s infamous Tweets to aid in their study of coded messages.
While people using these literacy practices are not unaware of mainstream media narratives, they distrust them in favor of their own research, tied to personal experience and a high level of skepticism toward secular institutions of knowledge. This opens up opportunities for conservative and extremist political actors and media to exploit the strong ties between the Republican party and white evangelical Christians.
After all, QAnon itself is something of a syncretic religion. While at its core it’s a 21st century reboot of a medieval anti-Semitic trope (blood libel) it has shed some of its Christian vestments to gain significant traction among non-evangelical audiences.
Next from The Atlantic, The Librarian War Against QAnon, which suggests that just traditional research methodology is not enough. They propose several solutions.
First, taking a leaf from an organization formed to advise journalists on how to cover a divisive election, educators should consider ways to frame discussions of knowledge through the lens of democracy rather than through partisan political positions. This means being willing to take a strong stand on behalf of ethical research practices, the voices of qualified experts, and the value of information systems that judiciously vet and validate information, along with a willingness to clearly reject the notion that truth is simply a matter of political allegiance or personal choice.
Second, educators must be explicit about the ethical frameworks and daily practices of truth-seeking institutions such as science, scholarship, and journalism. Social-media platforms enact values that are firmly grounded in beliefs about individualism, capitalism, and consumerism. Educators must make clear how those values differ from the pursuit of truth through other means. Be humble about failures, but avoid allowing cynics to blur distinctions between the values and training of scientists, scholars, and journalists and the values of social-media corporations, television personalities, and internet influencers.
Third, as Mister Rogers famously said, “look for the helpers.” People in educators’ circles have a deep knowledge of intersecting information systems, or at least of parts of them. Scholars have been studying these systems and documenting their findings for years. Journalists too. There’s no need to research them yourself. Find the experts and develop communities to share ideas about teaching practices.
Fourth, the kids are all right. While they may not have much academic knowledge, and their technical understanding may be limited, among students in any given class there is likely to be a lot of knowledge about how information circulates through social media. Some students may have significant experience in measuring the reach of their own media messages. Connecting what they’re learning in class to their lived experience online may encourage students to share what they know and are learning about information systems with their friends and family beyond academia. Indeed, in focus groups conducted by Project Information Literacy in 2019, college students expressed concern about whether the younger people and elders in their life understood how social-media platforms work and how to recognize disinformation.
They make some good points, although I think the last point is somewhat optimistic (see Young Republicans).
I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (generally known as 'The Sault' or even 'The Soo', and even though I've lived elsewhere all of my adult life, I still miss the north. This blog post will give you an idea of why; it's a beautiful part of the world.
The article describes several key attractions in the Sault, including the Bush Plane Museum, the Agawa Canyon train ride, and driving north from the Sault on Highway 17. Even if you don't read the article, check out the photos - there's a reason the Group of Seven painted so many pictures in the Algoma region around the Sault.
I will second their recommendation of the Voyageur Lodge and Cookhouse on Batchewana Bay; the whitefish tacos are worth the trip to the Sault all by themselves.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
I missed the Grateful Dead's 1987 tour with Bob Dylan, although I did see the band about a week earlier at Kingswood Music Theatre north of Toronto (and it was an excellent show). Good quality tapes of the tour have circulated for some time, but until now, I've never seen a video of Dylan's set with the Dead. This video is from July 4, 1987.
Microsoft has announced Office 2021. Basically, it's a standalone version of the Office suite, intended for customers who don't want or can't use Office 365, the cloud-enabled subscription version of Office.
Like the version that came before it, Office 2019, Office 2021 is Microsoft’s standalone option for folks who don’t want to buy a subscription for the company’s cloud-enabled Microsoft 365. Office 2021 is set to roll out sometime later this year for both Mac and Windows, Microsoft 365's corporate VP Jared Spataro said in a company blog post on Thursday. Meanwhile, Office LTSC will be available as a commercial preview beginning in April on both Mac and Windows, with a full release slated for later this year.
Microsoft will provide support for both products for five years, a slight downgrade from the seven-year warranty it’s offered with previous Office products. Each will come with OneNote and ship with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The one-time purchase pricing will remain the same for both personal and small business users, though there will be a 10% price increase for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and individual Office app purchases.
Office 2021 will be released sometime later this year. At this point, there are few details on new features.
As for me, I'm still using Office 2013. I wouldn't mind using a more current version, but I have no compelling reason to upgrade. If I was using Word more, I would consider it just to get dark mode in documents. Security updates will be released for Office 2013 until 2023, so there is no absolute need to upgrade until then.
As if you needed another reason to not get COVID-19, there are some indications that severe cases may cause eye disease and may lead to vision loss.
Doctors are warning that covid-19 may be capable of causing lingering eye problems. A new study suggests that some people who survive a severe infection can develop growths in the back of their eyes that could lead to vision loss. It is not yet clear how covid-19 might cause these growths, or if people with milder covid-19 are also at risk of this complication.
Researchers at the French Society of Neuroradiology looked at medical records from certain patients with severe covid-19. These patients had all gotten a brain MRI at some point during their illness, which allowed the researchers to look for potential abnormalities in and around the eye.
In total, they looked at data from 129 patients across 16 hospitals who were infected during the first wave of the pandemic in France, between March and May 2020. Nine of these patients (7%) had evidence of nodules around the back of the eyeball, with most having growths on both eyes. Eight patients had also been in the intensive care unit.
This is just one study and not a large one, so results are very preliminary. But, if you'll pardon the pun, it's something to keep an eye on.
Overdrive, the company that distributes ebooks to libraries in the United States and Canada bought the library unit of RBdigital recently. At the end of January, they transferred all the magazines available through RBdigital to the Overdrive service.
Overdrive bought the library unit of RBdigital last year, which meant that all of their audiobooks and magazines would be available on the platform. Many libraries had their patrons download multiple apps in order to read or listen to digital content, but this is not the case anymore. Thousands of libraries are now making blog posts, sending out newsletters and starting public awareness campaigns that they are transitioning away from RBdigital and Zinio and only doing business with Overdrive and their Libby app.
Libby is compatible with all major computers and devices, iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets and Chromebook. Through Libby, readers can also “send to Kindle” (U.S. only). All titles will automatically expire at the end of the lending period and there are no late fees. Readers can also download titles onto Libby for offline use. Named one of PCMag’s Best Free Software of 2019 and one of Popular Mechanics’ 20 Best Apps of the Decade, Libby is one of the best apps on the market.
I liked the RBdigital app a lot and was disappointed to see this.
The Libby app is similar to the RBdigital app in many respects, at least as far as the reading experience goes. You have a choice of reading the magazine in the page layout view or switching to a text-only mode. However, I found a few things that could be improved.
As if wild weather swings weren't enough, climate change has more bad news in store for us. If you have allergies, you are not going to like this news.
A new study out Monday is the latest to suggest that climate change is already making people’s lives worse, this time for those allergic to pollen. The findings indicate show pollen season in North America has gotten measurably longer and that pollen has become more plentiful over the past three decades, due in part to a warmer climate.
There are different types of pollen from plants and trees that become prevalent at different times of the year. But typically, the pollen season starts in early spring and runs through the summer and early fall. These months are associated with an uptick in seasonal allergies, which is also known as hay fever or allergic rhinitis. Sufferers experience cold-like symptoms like a stuffy or runny nose, watery eyes, along with itching around their nose and roof of the mouth.
The study’s researchers looked at data from pollen count stations across the U.S. and Canada, stretching between 1990 to 2018. During those years, they found that the pollen season has significantly changed. Compared to 1990, the average pollen season in an area now starts about 20 days earlier, runs 10 days longer, and pumps out 21% more pollen. While this change was seen everywhere, areas like Texas and the the midwestern U.S. saw the largest increases in total pollen over those years.
It might be time to buy stock in companies that make antihistamines.
Here is a long and well-researched article from CNN about the extent of extremism, in the US, especially extremism in the Republican party. It reaches some rather disquieting conclusions. It does note bode well for the future of the US political system.
Madrid, one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, agrees. The biggest challenge for the country, he argues, is not "the extremists" themselves but "the enablers" inside the GOP who are creating more oxygen for extremism to gain strength. The GOP's situation, he says, resembles the dynamic in Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army during the years of their violent resistance to British rule.
"They would go out and blow things up," Madrid says. "You could ask Irish Catholics who would say, 'I'd never be part of the IRA, but I kind of get what they are doing ... They are on the right side; they've got a point.' And that's where we are already at in the Republican Party, and that's what that polling data suggests."
This tacit acceptance of extremists and violence carries a clear political risk for the GOP: a continued loss of support among racially moderate voters in the white-collar suburbs who already moved steadily away from the party under Trump.
But if conspiracy theorists and other extremists solidify, or even expand, their beachhead in the GOP, the risk for the country could be much greater. The growing racial and religious diversity that triggers the retreat from democratic values among a growing number of GOP voters will only accelerate in the next decade. If the Republican Party does not find more will to explicitly renounce the dark forces circling around Trump, persistent outbursts of White nationalist political violence could be the deadly drumbeat for the years ahead.
"Clearly they think that's where the base is and they can't change it," Neumann told me. "But I would argue we are at a moment where ... if nobody steps up and tries to tell the truth and tries to lead people out of this echo chamber of stolen elections and [the belief that] violence is justified, that is catastrophic for the country. We will not survive as a democracy."
Just to make you feel even better, here's a quote from an article from Slate written after Trump was acquitted.
If any doubt had been left, the Senate established what we are, or what this government is. Donald Trump is still in command of one major political party and free to run for president again, in hopes that the next election might be closer, or that his next mob might bring more guns. Immediately after the trial ended, the Louisiana Republican Party voted to censure Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had been one of the seven Republicans to find Trump guilty. To oppose the coup was to oppose the party.
There is concerning news about the last Virgin Galactic test flight of Spaceship Two. It came very close to ending in disaster, something which wasn't discovered until the vehicle was inspected after landing.
But when the ground crew wheeled the suborbital spacecraft back into the hangar, company officials discovered that a seal running along a stabilizer on the wing designed to keep the space plane flying straight had come undone — a potentially serious safety hazard.
“The structural integrity of the entire stabilizer was compromised,” Todd Ericson, a test pilot who also served as a vice president for safety and test, said, according to a soon-to-be-published book. “I don’t know how we didn’t lose the vehicle and kill three people.”
If you have a Washington Post subscription, you can read the original story that the article that I linked to was based on.
I am surprised that I haven't heard more about this.
As someone who enjoys a cold beer now and then, I found this story quite interesting. Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the world's oldest brewery, about 5,000 years old. And it was a large brewery, not just a few pots in the back of a market stall.
According to Waziry, the brewery consisted of eight large areas which were used as “units for beer production”.
Each sector contained about 40 earthenware pots arranged in two rows.
A mixture of grains and water used for beer production was heated in the vats, with each basin “held in place by levers made of clay placed vertically in the form of rings”.
I remember reading somewhere that beer production may have been the major driver of early agriculture. This seems to bear out that theory.
One of the things I've been meaning to do since retiring is to put Linux on my main desktop PC, which is currently running Windows 10. I worked quite a bit with Linux systems at work and got used to using the shell commands. For many reasons, I haven't had the time to set this up, other than by downloading a live DVD or Ubuntu or another distro and booting into that. (Keeping a Linux boot disk around is a good idea; using one saved me from a Windows reinstallation when one of my registry files got corrupted).
The Ask Woody Newsletter has an article that explains several ways of installing and running Linux on Windows. The article describes several ways of running Linux under Windows 10 including:
The latest Insider Builds of Microsoft Office 365 have added something that might finally get me to update my copy of Office 2013 – a dark mode for documents. Current versions of dark mode only apply to the ribbon.
According to Office Watch, there are a few quirks in the beta build.
Changing the on-screen page background isn’t a simple as you might think. The much darker background canvas alters the look of text colors.
According to Microsoft “… reds, blues, yellows, and other colors will be shifted slightly to mute the overall effect of the color palette and look more visually pleasing with the new dark background. “
Keep that in mind if you’re publishing to an onscreen format like a read-only Word document or PDF.
The current builds have some strange behaviors with shades of grey canvas backgrounds. But that kind of thing is to be expected in a beta build.
I don't use Word as much as I used to so it's not an essential feature, but given that Office 2013 is now about eight years old, it may be time to upgrade.
It would be nice to have the ability to fiddle with page background and text colours in a document. Way back in the day, when I was using Word for DOS, I generally used a royal blue background with yellow text. I would still use that colour combination now if I could.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
I've come across a couple of interesting astronomical discoveries this week.
First, the farthest object in the solar system has been detected, a planetetoid that the finders have nicknamed Farfaraway.
Farfarout's average distance from the Sun is 132 astronomical units (au); 1 au is the distance between the Earth and Sun. For comparison, Pluto is only 39 au from the Sun. The newly discovered object has a very elongated orbit that takes it out to 175 au at its most distant, and inside the orbit of Neptune, to around 27 au, when it is close to the Sun.
Farfarout's journey around the Sun takes about a thousand years, crossing the massive planet Neptune's orbit every time. This means Farfarout has likely experienced strong gravitational interactions with Neptune over the age of the solar system, and is the reason why it has such a large and elongated orbit.
Second, astronomers may have detected a planet in the habitable zone around Alpha Centauri C, the closest star to the Sun.
Wagner and his colleagues reckon they have improved upon today's methods, and can capture direct images of planets that are up to three times the size Earth located within habitable zones of stars near our Sun. They tested their new direct imaging technique by observing Alpha Centauri, a system made up of three stars codenamed A, B, and C, located 4.37 light-years away, using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and made a fascinating discovery.
The team were surprised to find what looks like a never-before-seen object around Alpha Centauri A, which they have since nicknamed “C1”. Olivier Absil, co-author of the paper and a research professor at the University of Liege, told us the object was missed in previous observations because the detection methods used weren’t sensitive enough.
“Direct imaging observations have never reached such a sensitivity [before], all other direct imaging experiments are limited to Jupiter-type planets," he said. "In the specific case of Alpha Centauri, even indirect methods such as radial velocities, which are generally more sensitive, but do not provide a picture of the planetary system, have not been able to reach a Neptune-size sensitivity for the orbital distance considered here.”
What I found most interesting about that discovery was not finding the planet itself (assuming the discovery is verified), but the improvement made to adaptive optics technology. That is exciting and will likely be used in the new 30-metre telescopes now under construction.
Messenger RNA (mRNA) is the technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. It enabled the historically rapid development of these vaccines, but it wasn't something that happened overnight; the mRNA research has been going on for 20 years.
This article from Technology Review offers a look at the history of mRNA technology and what it might mean in the future.
Back in March 2020, when the vaccine programs were getting under way, skeptics said messenger RNA was still an unproven technology. Even this magazine said a vaccine would take 18 months, at a minimum—a projection that proved off by a full nine months. “Sometimes things take a long time just because people think it does,” says Afeyan. “That weighs on you as a scientific team. People are saying, ‘Don’t go any faster!’”
The shots from Moderna and BioNTech proved effective by December and were authorized that month in the US. But the record speed was not due only to the novel technology. Another reason was the prevalence of infection. Because so many people were catching covid-19, the studies were able to amass evidence quickly.
Is messenger RNA really a better vaccine? The answer seems to be a resounding yes. There are some side effects, but both shots are about 95% effective (that is, they stop 95 out of 100 cases), a record so far unmatched by other covid-19 vaccines and far better than the performance of flu vaccines. Another injection, made by AstraZeneca using an engineered cold virus, is around 75% effective. A shot developed in China using deactivated covid-19 germs protected only half the people who got it, although it did stop severe disease.
“This could change how we make vaccines from here on out,” says Ron Renaud, the CEO of Translate Bio, a company working with the technology.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of mRNA technology in the future.
In late 2019, before covid-19, the US National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced they would spend $200 million developing affordable gene therapies for use in sub-Saharan Africa. The top targets: HIV and sickle-cell disease, which are widespread there.
Gates and the NIH didn’t say how they would make such cutting-edge treatments cheap and easy to use, but Weissman told me that the plan may depend on using messenger RNA to add instructions for gene-editing tools like CRISPR to a person’s body, making permanent changes to the genome. Think of mass vaccination campaigns, says Weissman, except with gene editing to correct inherited disease.
I'm an avid photographer who started out with SLRs back in the 1970s. I do have a DSLR, but most of the pictures I take now are with my phone, currently a Pixel 4a. One of the main reasons for getting a Pixel was the quality and features of Google's camera. But I have to admit that I'm jealous of my wife's new Samsung phone, which has three cameras, including a 3x optical zoom. But all that hardware makes for a large, bulky camera bump on the back of the phone.
That may be about to change if this article is any indication.
A company named Metalenz is promoting a technology called optical metasurfaces. To me, it seems similar to the micro-mirror arrays used in digital projectors, or possibly ulta-small and high-resultion Fresnel lenses. A flat sensor array would replace all of the lenses currently used in phones.
Phone makers like Apple have increased the number of lens elements over time, and while some, like Samsung, are now folding optics to create “periscope” lenses for greater zoom capabilities, companies have generally stuck with the tried-and-true stacked lens element system.
“The optics became more sophisticated, you added more lens elements, you created strong aspheric elements to achieve the necessary reduction in space, but there was no revolution in the past 10 years in this field,” Schindelbeck says.
This is where Metalenz comes in. Instead of using plastic and glass lens elements stacked over an image sensor, Metalenz's design uses a single lens built on a glass wafer that is between 1x1 to 3x3 millimeter in size. Look very closely under a microscope and you'll see nanostructures measuring one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Those nanostructures bend light rays in a way that corrects for many of the shortcomings of single-lens camera systems.
I can't wait to see this happen. So which phone company will be the first to use it? I'm betting on Apple. What do you think?
Marketing communication (marcomm) and technical communication (techcomm) are two different worlds, generally with different tools and a different focus. Technical writers are sometimes asked to synchronize their content with that produced by the marketing department or to provide technical content lite for the marketing folks. Usually, it ends badly.
In Connecting the XML and web CMS mindsets, Sarah O'keefe from Scriptorium examines how to bring these two worlds closer together.
Good news: The technical problem of integrating marketing and technical content has been solved.
Bad news: The hard work is just starting.
The design-focused marcom perspective and the structure-focused techcomm perspective need to co-exist and co-create.
For online content, technical content and marketing content have typically used two different publishing stacks. Marketing content uses a web CMS of some sort. The emphasis is on creating the best possible experience for the site visitors, so that the visitor will buy the product or at least think kindly of the organization.
Technical content has a different publishing stack, which is normally built for efficiency. It emphasizes consistency, structure, scalability, and automated channel delivery.
But today, we have the ability to push technical content into the marketing delivery channels, such as the web CMS. Both Adobe and SDL let you integrate their web CMSs and their XML CMSs, and there are other possibilities. So now, the web CMS/marketing professionals are designing for technical content delivery. And there is friction at this interface.
Here’s some of what I’m seeing as a result.
I've known Sarah since very early in my technical writing career. She knows what she's talking about.
SpaceX has received a major launch contract from NASA to launch two modules of the Lunar Gateway on a modified Falcon Heavy booster. The launch is planned for May 2024.
As well as the core module launch, SpaceX will be launching cargo modules to the Gateway station, also using a Falcon Heavy.
The tandem launch of the PPE and HALO sections requires a rocket with an extended payload shroud. The payload fairing currently flying on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is not long enough for the job, but SpaceX plans to introduce an extended fairing for future U.S. national security satellites, along with a new vertical integration hangar at pad 39A to enable the attachment of military payloads in a vertical orientation at the launch site.
The new fairing design and launch pad integration tower are part of a Pentagon launch services agreement SpaceX won last year. ULA won a similar Defense Department launch contract, and the two companies will share national security launch duties through 2027.
The fairing and integration building are required for SpaceX to be able to launch all of the military’s space missions, and the enlarged shroud is also an enabler for the Falcon Heavy to launch the Gateway.
SpaceX is on contract for other parts of NASA’s Artemis architecture.
The company’s Dragon XL cargo vehicle will deliver supplies to the Gateway space station. The Dragon XL missions will also launch on Falcon Heavy rockets.
I would love to get down to the Cape for a Falcon Heavy launch.
Adobe has added collaboration features to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fresco. You'll be able to send an "Invite to Edit" message to another user to share editing on a file.
t’s a small quality of life tweak, but if you use Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fresco and work with other people, the “Invite to Edit” button will likely become a part of your daily life. Adobe announced the feature on Tuesday, and it should’ve already rolled out to users’ updated apps. Just look up in the right corner of the interface.
Clicking the button opens a field to invite a collaborator via their email address. A successful connection will share the document within the program between multiple parties, but unfortunately, only one person can work on it at a time.
Now, when will they add this for FrameMaker and RoboHelp users?
The use of social media in politics since the election of Barrack Obama is one of the defining features of the modern political era. During and since the election of Donald Trump, it's become the primary method that politicians and their parties use to carve out their space and attract voters.
If we were just having reasonable discussions about policies online, but that's obviously how things have gone. This article from Gizmodo looks at what's happened over the last few years and where things might be going. It's not a pretty picture.
How you shatter the funhouse mirror that connects posters and power is one of the defining issues of our time. Social media has both warped the incentives of politics and pumped a steady stream of poison and lies into our discourse. Democrats and both houses of Congress have signalled democratic reforms are high on the priority list for this session. Among possible fixes are ranked choice voting; Washington, DC; statehood; automatic and same-day voter registration; and other fixes that would bring more people into the political process and reduce the abilities of extremists to hold power.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies could also face regulation. How to do that without limiting legitimate speech or putting too much power into the hands of Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey is a delicate balancing act. Among suggestions from a report released late last year are slowing the spread of viral content and reducing the ability to microtarget ads to individuals as means to the prevalence of misinformation. Other proposals include making social media publicly owned utilities, though that raises risks about giving too much power to the government to regulate speech and the public square. What is clear, though, is that the current situation is untenable. Continuing down this path will ensure the public square is taken over by mobs again and again, screaming about Jewish space lasers and lusting for blood, marshalled and egged on by a congresswoman from Georgia, a senator from Texas, and an online economy fueled by the worst posts we can dredge up.
My own take on it is that there has to be a return to something like the Fairness Doctine that was in effect for mass media until the 1980s and that would apply both to conventional mass media (newspapers, radio, and television) and social media like Facebook and Twitter.
This is not just an abstract argument. The political turmoil of the last few years has had real and devastating consequences on peoples' lives, and will continue to do so, unless a way can be found to dial down the heat so to speak.
When a person close to you has fallen down that rabbit hole, when you’re left shouting into the void with nothing but anger and pain, sometimes the only solution is to unfriend and move on. That’s easier said than done, especially when it’s family. If they do ever manage to see the error of their ways, do you welcome them back into your life? I believe in redemption, but I also believe in personal boundaries.
The issue here is trust. What happens when a former partner or friend or family member decides to crawl back into your life? There is a reason why white supremacist groups target QAnon followers for recruitment. How can you be sure that the friend that once so easily fell for tales of pedophile cannibal Democrats running a massive child-sex-trafficking cabal isn’t into adjacent far-right garbage? In my friend-losing experience, QAnon and further deprecation of already marginalized groups went hand-in-hand.
I was surprised at how smoothly November's US election proceeded. To be honest, I expected quite a bit of civil unrest, especially in the two months following the election. That didn't happen, with the notable exception of the January 6th insurrection.
The smoothness of the electoral process wasn't an accident. As this article from Time Magazine shows, it was due to a concerted and largely hidden effort by a large number of people from diverse social and political groups acting in concert over the last year.
This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.
I don't like the slant that the article put on the events. Calling it a conspiracy is extremely provocative and negative. However, the rest of the article is much more balanced.
It is worrisome that something like this had to happen to ensure that a fair election took place. I hope that over the next four years that there will be reforms in the process to remove some of the barriers to ensuring that all votes are counted and that everyone who has the right to vote can do so without obstruction.
The Expanse is a science fiction television series on Amazon Prime that just finished its fifth season. A sixth and final season is planned. It's based on a series of books by James S. A. Corey, the pseudonym of Ty Franks and David Abraham, who are also involved with the show.
In almost every respect, it's the best science fiction series ever produced for television. (IMHO just so you know where I'm coming from, the runners up would be Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica (the reboot), and Star Trek: Next Generation.) I don't have the time to write a long post explaining why I like The Expanse so much. Briefly, it's the depth of the setting and character development, the respect for the original material, the respect for physics (very unusual in a TV show), and the incredible attention to detail. It's a show that you can watch and then watch again and again.
Here are a few articles about The Expanse that have come across my screen in the last week or so. All are good and worth reading. Fair warning: some may contain spoilers.
I've seen comments online about the makeup of the January 6th insurectionists indicating that people think they were just a bunch of rabble made up of the worst of Trump's base - uneducated, unemployed, and unhappy. They were certainly unhappy, but many were anything but uneducated or unemployed.
Third, the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.
This is something that the Democratic Party needs to recognize.
Democrats should try campaigning on the truth: The Republican Party is controlled by intelligent, college-educated, and affluent elites who concoct dangerous nonsense to paper over a bigoted, plutocratic agenda and to justify attacks on the democratic process. That agenda and those attacks are supported by millions of reasonably intelligent voters who will believe or claim to believe anything that furthers the objective of keeping conservatives in control of this country forever. Simply pointing to figures like Greene and hoping the indignation of college graduates will do the rest is a mistake. Instead, Democrats should present voters with a material choice between a party that has nothing to offer the majority of Americans but abuse and conspiratorial flimflam and a party committed to building a democracy and an economy that work for all. If they don’t, the lizard people who run the GOP will be running the government again in no time.
The pandemic has created several major social changes. One of the biggest has been the shift to working from home, for those fortunate to have the kind of work where this is possible. It's likely that even after the pandemic subsides, many workers will continue to work from home, commuting into the office only occasionally.
This article from The Atlantic looks at this phenomena and others that are affecting cities and tries to imagine what the future of our biggest and most important cities will be.
Some evenings, when pandemic cabin fever reaches critical levels, I relieve my claustrophobia by escaping into the dreamworld of Zillow, the real-estate website. From the familiar confines of my Washington, D.C., apartment, I teleport to a ranch on the outskirts of Boise, Idaho; to a patio nestled in the hillsides of Phoenix, Arizona; or to a regal living room in one of the baroque palaces of Plano, Texas.
Apparently, many of you are doing the same thing. Zillow searches have soared during the health crisis, according to Jeff Tucker, the company’s chief economist. “We’ve seen online searches for Boise, Phoenix, and Atlanta rising fastest among people who live in coastal cities, like Los Angeles and New York,” Tucker told me. Higher search volumes on Zillow have coincided with a booming housing market in the South and the West, as rents fall in expensive coastal cities.
Zillow tourism and a few affluent workers decamping for Atlanta might strike you as a fad—kind of like this whole remote-work moment. Indeed, if you’re lugging your computer to the living room every day to sit on the couch for eight hours, you might not be thinking to yourself, I’m practically starting the next industrial revolution.
But maybe you are. As a general rule of human civilization, we’ve lived where we work. More than 90 percent of Americans drive to work, and their average commute is about 27 minutes. This tether between home and office is the basis of urban economics. But remote work weakens it; in many cases, it severs the link entirely, replacing spatial proximity with cloud-based connectivity. What knock-on changes will this new industrial revolution bring?
I've posted several times about the re-creations of 1960s computer toys and educational games that my talented cousin, Michael Gardi, has been producing over the last few years. He has a new project, an updated version of Hasbro's Think-a-Tron, a "computerized" trivia game I put "computerized" in quotes because, as you'll see from Michael's article, it was not computerized at all, but just made to look like one.
Ok, my elevator pitch for this project is just a "bit" overstated, but so was the marketing for Think-a-Tron, "the machine that thinks like a man". While some toys of the same era, like the Digi-Comp I for instance, endeavored to teach people about computers, Think-a-Tron took advantage of the growing interest in computers to sell a cleverly packaged trivia game. In fact, if there is any "claim to fame" attached to Think-a-Tron, it's that it introduced the trivia game concept 21 years before Trivial Pursuit.
My goal for this project is to honor Think-a-Tron, not to reproduce it. I want to build something that is clearly a Think-a-Tron derivative, but utilizes modern fabrication techniques and components. At the same time I would like to maintain the 60s mainframe vibe of the original. As always I want to have some fun along the way.
Hackaday has this to say about it.
In an effort to right past wrongs, [Michael Gardi] rebuilt the 1960s “thinking machine” toy with modern components. The original may not have lived up to the hype, but at least did a decent job of evoking the room-filling computers of the day is a plastic cabinet with a dot-matrix-like display. The toy uses “punch-cards” with printed trivia questions that are inserted into the machine to be answered. A disk with punched holes spins between a light bulb and the display lenses, while a clever linkage mechanism reads the position of a notch in the edge of the card and stops the wheel to display the letter of the correct answer.
[Michael]’s update to the Think-aTron incorporates what would have qualified as extraterrestrial technology had it appeared in the 1960s. A 35-LED matrix with a 3D-printed diffuser and case form the display, with trivia questions and their answer as a QR code standing in for the punch-cards.He also added a pair of user consoles, so players can lock-in and answer before an ESP32-Cam reads the QR code and displays the answer on the LED matrix, after playing some suitable “thinking music” through a speaker.
Update: Mike has created a follow-up project, the Think-a-Tron Mini.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
One of the more notable things about Trumps's speech before the January 6th insurrection was the movie shown at the rally. Slickly produced, it drips fascist imagery.
This article analyses the movie, shot by shot, to show its antecedents in fascist imagery from the past and what that imagery actually means.
The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly “globalist,” but really Jewish, threat.
The analysis makes it perfectly clear what would have been in store for the US had Trump ended up as president for a second term – a fascist dictatorship.
I've used UNIX- and Linux-based systems almost from the beginning of my technical writing career and have developed a bit of skill with the command shell. It was especially useful navigating the dozens of command scripts that I had to document at the TSX and especially when working with logs of error messages that could be thousands of lines long.
Although many technical writers shun the command line as an archaic relic, there are some things that you just can't do easily with a GUI-based tool, even one that has a macro programming capability. This article from Nature is aimed at scientific researchers, who often have to work with huge data sets, but can apply equally well to writers who have to work with similar kinds of files on a smaller scale.
Prebuilt into macOS and Unix systems, and available on Windows through such tools as the free ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’ and MobaXterm, the command line (also called the shell) is a powerful text-based interface in which users issue terse instructions to create, find, sort and manipulate files, all without using the mouse. There are actually several distinct (although largely compatible) shell systems, among the most popular of which is Bash, an acronym for the ‘Bourne again shell’ (a reference to the Bourne shell, which it replaced in 1989).
Bash is both a collection of small utilities and a full-blown programming language, ranging from ‘grep’, a powerful text-search tool, to ‘for loops’, which allows users to repeat actions across multiple files. Johnson directed her terminal to scan her hard disk for sequencing data files, extract the needed information and compile them into a tidy spreadsheet. “That took me less than 10 minutes,” she says; recomputing the data would have taken a full day.
Many computational disciplines, such as bioinformatics, rely heavily on the command line. But all researchers who use computers can benefit from it, says Jeroen Janssens, principal instructor of Data Science Workshops in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and author of the 2014 book Data Science at the Command Line. “The mouse doesn’t scale,” Janssens explains. For instance, although it is certainly possible to rename a file by pointing and clicking, that task becomes tedious when it is scaled to hundreds or thousands of files.
As the article points out, even Windows users can access the command shell. At the TSX, I used Cygwin, but newer Windows systems now have Linux integration using the Windows Subsystem for Linux. The native Windows Powershell tool is also quite powerful, although it uses a different syntax than the venerable BASH Linux shell.
One of my family members posted a link on Facebook to an app called FilmBox by Photomyne that lets you scan film negatives with your phone. It's a nice idea, and OK for quick and dirty scanning, but you'll find issues with getting a balanced backlight and accurate focus on the negative (a lot of old film negatives curl).
If you have a printer with a built-in scanner, it will give much better results, and most all-in-one home printers come with software designed for the task, as well as guides to hold negatives or slides.
If you're scanning prints, there are several free apps to scan photos. I've used Google PhotoScan occasionally, and it does a good job, although not as good as what you'll get out of a dedicated scanner.
This article from the New York Times is a good overview of different ways of scanning your photos and their various benefits and drawbacks.
I'm sure no one reading this blog is using "monkey123" or "password" as a password on anything that has an internet connection. If you are, you are likely owned by some script kiddie in Estonia. Maybe you are using a password that looks more secure, like "c@b1eC4BL3". That one might not be so good, as this article shows.
The article points out seven common mistakes that people make when choosing passwords. A couple of them are not obvious, so it's worth taking the time to read and think about what you're using for passwords – unless, of course, you're using a password manager.
People who work to break passwords know that people like doing this, so if someone tries to break into your accounts, they're going to try all these substitutions anyway. This reinforces the idea that you should strive to make your password topology---meaning the pattern that your password uses---as random as possible.
For instance, a common password topology for an eight-character password would be an uppercase letter, followed by five lowercase letters, and finally two digits. The password Daniel87 falls under this common topology. While it's still not particularly strong since it uses a name, switching this to dan8iEl7 would be better, as it's not a predictable topolog
Last year, the famed Arecibo radio telescope met an undignified and premature end when a cable supporting the receiver array snapped. That ended, at least for now, more than 50 years of observations at the observatory, although it remains open for some research functions.
ScienceMag has published a long article that describes the history of the telescope, explains in detail why it failed, and discusses plans to replace the telescope.
The researchers first considered a new fixed dish, along with an array of independently steerable smaller ones. But in the white paper delivered to NSF last month, they went with something more ambitious: a flat, 300-meter-wide, rigid platform, bridging the sinkhole, and studded with more than 1000 closely packed 9-meter dishes. The dishes would not steer but the disk would, with hydraulics tilting it more than 45° from the horizontal. At such an extreme tilt, one edge of the disk would be higher than Arecibo’s existing support towers. Steering “will be a great mechanical challenge,” says Anish Roshi, head of astrophysics at the observatory.
In this design, modern receivers built into each dish could cover a broader frequency range than its predecessor and, fired synchronously, the collective radar of 1000 dishes could send out a more powerful beam than a single transmitter. Dubbed the Next Generation Arecibo Telescope, it would be nearly twice as sensitive and have four times the radar power of the original. The steerable platform would enable it to see more than twice as much of the sky as its predecessor, while the field of view of its 1000 dishes would cover a swath 500 times larger.
Perhaps, with an new administration in Washington that respects science, money will be found and Arecibo will once again become a major radio observatory.
Here are some short reviews of some of the more notable music I listened to recently.
Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has published its recommended reading list for 2020. The list includes novels, short fiction, collections, anthologies, non-fiction, and illustrated and art books.
The list is generally regarded as a guide to award nominations. File 770 reports a few interesting things about this year's list.
The number of Novellas listed dropped to 19, after the 2019 list had 32. (The 2018 list had 13, 2017’s had 26.)
For first time since 2016, one of the recommended books is identified as self-published, (One self-published work made the 2016 list, an art book, and the 2015 list had three.)
Baen broke its drought, placing a book on the Locus list for the first time since 2017 — The Eleventh Gate by Nancy Kress – but only one.
On the list for novels, I've only read one (William Gibson's Agency), but have purchased four more, and there are another half dozen or so that I am likely to read if I ever find the time.
Locus has also opened its annual poll and survey, which will be used to decide the winners of the annual Locus Awards. You don't need to be a Locus subscriber to vote.
Here are a couple of articles about COVID-19 that I thought were worth sharing.
First, from the New York Times, an article about the often-confusing advice that we get about wearing masks. What type of mask should you wear and when should you change it?
If I were wearing an N95 just for the weekly grocery store run, I’d probably be fine with alternating two carefully handled masks for many months as long as the elastic works and there’s no soiling. That’s not a lot of use! But if I were wearing one all day, every workday, I’d consider having one for each day and replacing them maybe every month. So that’s about five per month. Could one be really careful and make that two months? Probably.
Also it’s important to emphasize that all this doesn’t mean cloth masks are worthless. Cloth masks do really help with stopping transmission onward, from the wearer to the other people. It would be good to be able to purchase certified cloth masks with the three layers the WHO recommends, with features like nose wires and ties that make them fit better. One can also wear surgical masks — those light, papery ones commonlyused in hospitals — with a brace to help hold them in place. Preliminary studies show those do a great job, too. It’s just that medical respirators like the N95s, KN95 (the Chinese standard), disposable K94 (the South Korean standard) and FFP2 (the European standard) do a much better job of protecting the wearer in addition to helping prevent onward transmission — because that’s what they are designed to do! Protecting the wearer is more important if, for example, someone works with other people who don’t mask up well, or if one is high-risk and can’t isolate. This is especially important with the new, more transmissible variants. But you don’t need an N95 for that outdoor walk.
Second, what about surface transmission? Do we really need to wipe down everything that comes into the house? According to Nature, probably not.
Armed with a year’s worth of data about coronavirus cases, researchers say one fact is clear. It’s people, not surfaces, that should be the main cause for concern. Evidence from superspreading events, where numerous people are infected at once, usually in a crowded indoor space, clearly point to airborne transmission, says Marr. “You have to make up some really convoluted scenarios in order to explain superspreading events with contaminated surfaces,” she says.
Hand washing is crucial, says Marr, because surface transmission can’t be ruled out. But it’s more important to improve ventilation systems or to install air purifiers than to sterilize surfaces, she says. “If we’ve already paid attention to the air and we have some extra time and resources, then yes, wiping down those high-touch surfaces could be helpful,” she says.
Households can also ease up, says Pickering. Quarantining groceries or disinfecting every surface is going too far. “That’s a lot of work and it also is probably not reducing your exposure that much,” she says. Instead, reasonable hand hygiene, as well as wearing a mask and social distancing to reduce exposure from close contacts is a better place to focus efforts.
Here are some short reviews of things I watched in January. My viewing pattern has been disrupted because my wife is spending a lot of time taking care of her mother, so I haven't been watching a lot of shows that I know she wants to see.
