Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Once again, it's almost Christmas and it's time for me to take a break from blogging. It will be a white Christmas here in the Great White North, given the two-day blizzard that is going to hit us tomorrow. Nancy and I will hunker down and hope we don't have an extended power failure like the one after the ice storm a few years ago.

I probably won't be back here until after the New Year.

I hope you enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate and the company of your family and friends. 

Here's an appropriate picture of one of the local Christmas light displays. 

Merry Christmas

Touch the Earth

I just found a treasure. Back in the 1970s, the CBC had a wonderful radio show hosted by Sylvia Tyson called Touch the Earth. I'm sure the master tapes of the show are (I surely hope they are) somewhere in the CBC's vast archives. So far they haven't shown up.

But what is online is a 2 LP set of The Best of Touch the Earth. If you want a sampling of some of the best Canadian folk and blues from the era, here it is. On just the first disk: Cedric Smith, Colin Linden, Willie P. Bennett, Bill Houston, Ian Tambyn, David Rea, and many others. It's a wonderful compilation and brings back many memories. (Out of the 25 artists on the record, I've seen more than half). 

We're Toast 34

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

McGee is not worried

Uncertainty, Social Media, and the Radicalization of the US. "A confluence of factors is leading people in the nation to gravitate toward extremist views."

How a dangerous stew of air pollution is choking the United States. "Fires and droughts in the western states are getting worse — and they’re co

QAnon Followers Are Arguing if the Beatles Were Involved in Witchcraft and Child Sacrifice. "Followers of the fringe movement think Paul is dead, John was assassinated by communists, and that the group normalized child sacrifice combining with industrial sources to threaten air quality and people’s health."

Americans Are Moving Into Danger Zones. "Folks are flocking to areas plagued with wildfires and extreme heat. Climate change will only make things worse."

The Grim Origins of an Ominous Methane Surge. "During the coronavirus lockdowns, emissions of the potent greenhouse gas somehow soared. The culprit wasn't humans—but the Earth itself." 

The Recombination Potential between SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV from Cross-Species Spill-over Infections. A cross between SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV would be a very bad thing, indeed. 

Human activity 'decimating' marine life — IUCN. 'Global conservation body, the IUCN, says there is a "perfect storm" of human activity which is "decimating marine species" in its latest updated list of threatened species.'

A Group of Seven Adventure

No, this isn't about some new Marvel project. The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian artists, prominent in the early 20th century, who came to epitomize Canadian landscape art. Although loosely based in Toronto, many of their best-known paintings were of scenes from Northern Ontario.

A Group of Seven Adventure shows locations from Thunder Bay to Toronto where they painted some of their pictures. It would make a wonderful drive, assuming you have a few days to do it slowly and take in the scenery.  

Here's a picture I took many years ago of one of the sites mentioned in the article, Pancake Bay.

Pancake Bay

Featured Links - December 19, 2022

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

Swans on Frenchman's Bay

• What Is QAnon? No One Told You THIS About Conspiracy 2022. Here's a long article that explains what QAnon is and what its adherents believe. 
• Severe COVID could cause markers of old age in the brain. "Key genes that are active in the brains of older people are also active in the brains of people who developed serious COVID-19."
• On Joining Mastodon. "From my vast experience of three weeks, a guide to diving in" from journalism professor Jeff Jarvis. This is one of the best articles I've seen so far on how to get set up on Mastodon. 
• The best science images of 2022. "An almighty eruption, the cosmos remastered, swirling cells and more."
• Try Canva Docs — a new way to write visually. "Canva Docs is an intriguing new alternative to Google Docs. Along with text it lets you stick almost anything inside a document — slides, graphics, photos, and videos. Launched yesterday, Dec 7, it’s already more versatile than GDocs, Word and other traditional writing tools, though it has some limitations."
• Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2022. "Our reviewers each picked their top contenders for the best books of the year, ranging from glittering alternate history to meditative hopepunk, and elegiac science fiction to apocalyptic horror. We’ve got blood magicians, multiverse prophets, elven detectives, and much more."
• Brains, Braun, or Both: What Drove the Creation of Modern Dog Breeds. "Genetic variants associated with brain development help distinguish breeds designed for different physical tasks, a new study reports."
 

Photo of the Week - December 18, 2022

Here's a picture of Nancy trying to get the dog to do her business late at night. This was taken with my Pixel 4a in regular Camara mode, not Night Sight. I rather like the mood.

Late night outing with the dog

Saturday Sounds - Billy Strings - June 29, 2022

Today's post features the hot young bluegrass guitarist, Billy Strings, recorded live on June 29th at the Rooftop at Pier 17 in New York. I posted a video of some of this performance back in July, but this time I'm featuring a recording of the whole performance made by the folks at NYCTaper. This is an audience recording, but other than some audience noise, you'd never know. The performance, including a few songs with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, is absolutely first-rate

With the backdrop of the NYC skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge, the juxtaposition of the city center with bluegrass music seemed to motivate both the band and the song choices. The cover of John Hartford’s 1976 classic “In Tall Buildings” was most poignant, although several numbers drew upon the rural/urban dichotomy for inspiration. When the set closed with Strings’ apparent hard-life autobiographical and compositionally brilliant “Turmoil & Tinfoil” this night had already delivered exactly what we had come to see. But there was clearly more to come.

The band started the second set with Hargreaves shining throughout an instrumental run through the traditional “Sally Goodin”. Ultimately the set evolved into the show’s highlight – a furious nearly 20-minute “Meet Me at the Creek”, that managed to remain vital and driving for its entire improvisational five-member instrumental segment. As had been rumored in crowd whispers all night, the appearance of Trey Anastasio was not entirely surprising, but quite welcome. It certainly motivated Billy. The five-song mini-set with the star guest featured a couple of Phish numbers, but it was the three bluegrass covers where the massive amount of talent on stage truly excelled. At the end, this show instantly catapulted into a “best of year” category and we continue to be amazed at the level of excellence achieved by this band. See you at Nassau in November!

I can't embed the link from the NYC Taper site, but you can stream or download the show from their site.  

Photography Links - December 16, 2022

Here are some articles about photography that I found interesting or useful. 

The photo is of a Christmas light display near our house, taken with my Fujifilm X-S10 and 27 mm. F2.8 lens and slightly tweaked in Photoshop Express. 

A Christmas light display

• How To Edit Your Photos on Snapseed. "Snapseed is a great app. It's my tool of choice for editing on my phone, easy to use with many features. And it's free.
• Photographer Turns Slide Projector Into a Arduino-Powered Digitizer. It requires some technical skill to put this together but might be workable if you have an old projector.
• Award-winning landscape photographs show fragility of the natural world. " Orange lava shooting up from a volcanic vent in the Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland, and mountaintop shadows cast on a glacier in Yukon, Canada are among the winning subjects of the second annual Natural Landscape Photography Award."
• Understanding Exposure Controls. A simple explanation about basic exposure controls and how they affect each other.
• A Complete Multi-Platform Guide to Astrophotography Processing. "Astrophotography is quickly becoming a popular hobby, and image processing shouldnt be hard! I believe the techniques here are the easiest and fastest method to produce amazing results, with minimal effort."
• Focus Stacking Can Unlock a New Range of Subjects and It’s Now Easier Than Ever. " Focus stacking, where you combine multiple exposures at different focus points, can completely change the game when it comes to tricky depth of field situations. When you don’t have to worry about stopping down or picking what’s in focus, you can be even more creative."
• The reason why Bokeh is spelled with an "h" at the end. Now you knowThere are many different ways to make money from photography (and hopefully bring in the big bucks too!), from selling your images online to taking images for clients. In this feature we’ve outlined a few of them so you can get a better idea of what is available to you.." 
• How To Make Money From Photography and Sell Your Photographs. "There are many different ways to make money from photography (and hopefully bring in the big bucks too!), from selling your images online to taking images for clients. In this feature we’ve outlined a few of them so you can get a better idea of what is available to you."

Posts Will Be Sparse For a While

Posts here will likely be sparse until the New Year. Usually, I don't post between Christmas and the New Year anyway, but there are some things I need to spend some time on that will eat up my time. Partly, it's just the usual Christmas stuff (shopping, cooking, cleaning), but I also have to do some work on my old blog. My ISP keeps sending me messages about exceeding resource allocation and I need to figure out what's going on and fix it. 

To console you, here's a cat picture.

CJ

Featured Links - December 12, 2022

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

Let sleeping dogs lie.

• Straczynski News Roundup About Ellison Foundation. Some good news for fans of the late Harlan Ellison. 
• In search of a more "Bible accurate" Christmas. Show this video to your Christian friends and watch their heads explode. 
• Omicron completely changed the pandemic. Are we prepared for what's next? "Omicron completely changed everything we thought we knew about COVID-19 when it unexpectedly emerged a year ago and rapidly spread around the world within weeks — and there's still so much uncertainty around what it could do next."
• ‘Are we alone in the universe?’: work begins in Western Australia on world’s most powerful radio telescopes. "A huge intergovernmental effort, the SKA [Square Kilometre Array] has been hailed as one of the biggest scientific projects of this century. It will enable scientists to look back to early in the history of the universe when the first stars and galaxies were formed. It will also be used to investigate dark energy and why the universe is expanding, and to potentially search for extraterrestrial life."
• How dangerous are Germany's Reichsbürger? "In a large-scale raid, German police targeted dozens of individuals from the Reichsbürger scene who were suspected of planning a coup. What kind of movement is this — and what threat does it pose to democracy?"
• These exclusive satellite images show that Saudi Arabia’s sci-fi megacity is well underway. "Weirdly, any recent work on The Line doesn’t show up on Google Maps. But we got the images anyway."
• We Are Watching Elon Musk and His Fans Create a Conspiracy Theory About Wikipedia in Real Time. "Here’s what actually happened with the ‘Twitter Files’ Wikipedia page."
• The weird, worrisome mystery behind America's plague of purple streetlights. "The sky over the city of Vancouver was the color of a television tuned to a Prince concert."

Photo of the Week - December 11. 2022

It's that time of year again where some of our neighbours put up ridiculously extravagant Christmas light displays. This one is a couple of blocks away from our house and draws a crowd of spectators every year; donations to charity are encouraged.

As a technical note, I am amazed at the X-S10's ability to let me shoot hand-held in low light. Until I looked at the EXIF data, I hadn't realized how high the ISO was. Back when I started out with a film SLR, pushing Tri-X to ISO 800 was considered extreme. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 at F5.6, 1/100 second at ISO 10,000, -.7 stop EV, Velvia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band - Live at the Capitol Theater

Earlier this week I watched a webcast of David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band recorded live at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ in 2018. I was blown away. Crosby is playing with musicians close to a third of his age and still making beautiful music. The harmonies were exquisite.

The performance is now available on DVD and CD. I am now seriously regretting not going to see them when they played in Toronto just before the pandemic hit. If they return, I will go. 

We're Toast 33

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Our wired future

We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. "Elon Musk’s platform may be hell, but it’s also where huge amounts of reputational and social wealth are invested. All of that is in peril."

In Philadelphia, ‘tranq’ is leaving drug users with horrific wounds. Other communities are bracing for the same. As fentanyl wasn't bad enough.

Rapidly Melting Glaciers Are Releasing a Staggering Payload of Unknown Bacteria. "In a study of glacial runoff from 10 sites across the Northern Hemisphere, researchers have estimated that continued global warming over the next 80 years could release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria into environments downstream of receding glaciers."

Sperm count drop is accelerating worldwide and threatens the future of mankind, study warns. "Sperm counts worldwide have halved over the past five decades, and the pace of the decline has more than doubled since the turn of the century, new research shows. The international team behind it says the data is alarming and points to a fertility crisis threatening the survival of humanity.

China’s COVID Wave Is Coming. "The world’s most populous nation is being forced onto a zero-COVID off-ramp."

Extreme Heat Will Change Us. "Half the world could soon face dangerous heat. We measured the daily toll it is already taking."

World’s Nations Face Shrinking Odds of Taming Climate Mayhem. "It has been an alarming time for climate scientists. One by one, the grim scenarios they had outlined for the near future have been overtaken by events: extreme storms, droughts, floods and ice-sheet collapses whose sudden appearances have outstripped researchers’ worst predictions. Catastrophic climate change is happening more rapidly and with greater intensity than their grimmest warnings, it transpires."

About ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot that just launched last week and is already generating quite a lot of buzz. It's similar in concept the the generative art programs like DALL-E and Midjourney, but it produces text as its output, not pictures.

I've signed up for an account but haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I am very intrigued, as are many others. 

Here are a couple of long articles about ChatGPT that are worth reading if you intend to use it or are just curious about what it can do.

• How to Talk to ChatGPT, the Uncanny New AI-Fueled Chatbot That Makes a Lot of Stuff Up. "OpenAI's new platform promises entertainment, industry disruption—and plenty to worry about." 
• AI Homework. "It happened to be Wednesday night when my daughter, in the midst of preparing for “The Trial of Napoleon” for her European history class, asked for help in her role as Thomas Hobbes, witness for the defense. I put the question to ChatGPT, which had just been announced by OpenAI a few hours earlier:"

Of the two articles, "AI Homework" gets deepest into the implications of this technology, and they are considerable.

Cory Doctorow Interviewed In the New Yorker

Cory Doctorow is one of those people who's career crosses several fields. He's a Hugo Award-winning science fiction author, co-founder of Boing Boing, former Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and advocate of liberalizing copyright laws. His latest book is Checkpoint Capitalism. Nancy and I remember him behind the counter at Bakka, Toronto's science fiction bookstore. 

He's now well enough known that the New Yorker has favoured him with an interview. As you'd expect from the New Yorker, it's long, wide ranging, and deep. 

If there were one thing that you wish more people would think about when it comes to where tech is going, what would that be?

When we design a computer that treats its user or owner as its adversary, we lay the groundwork for unimaginable acts of oppression and terror. Here’s an example: in 2005, it was revealed that Sony BMG had shipped millions of audio CDs that had a rootkit on them that, when you put it in the CD drive on your computer, silently patched your computer’s kernel so that it could no longer see programs that began with “$sys$”—that little string of characters. And then they installed a program that started with that string which broke CD-ripping, so you could never rip a CD again. They didn’t want you to uninstall that program, which is why they modified your kernel for that. This was radioactively illegal. They infected between two and three hundred thousand computers. They settled with the F.T.C. for a giant amount of money. Every virus writer in the world immediately pre-penned their virus to “$sys$” and made it invisible to your computer and its antivirus software.

Wow.

This is 2005. So we are now fifteen years into this and we still have car companies, phone companies, med-tech companies all building devices that are designed so that the owner cannot override the manufacturer’s choices. You have HP shipping updates to printers that update them so they can detect the latest third-party ink cartridges. And everyone has followed them because, of course, we have market concentration, so there’s only four printer companies. They all do this now. They all have zero-touch, no-user-intervention firmware updates that could be used by malicious parties to do incredibly terrible things to your network, to you, to your data.

There’s a guy named Ang Cui. He runs a thing called Red Balloon Security. But, in 2011, he was a grad student at N.Y.U., and he gave a security presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress called “Print Me if You Dare,” where he showed that he could update the firmware of an HP printer by sending it a poison document. You just give, like, the H.R. department a document called resume.doc. And when they print it the printer’s firmware is updated silently and undetectably: it scans all future documents for Social Security numbers, and credit-card numbers, and sends them to him. It opens a reverse shell to his computer, through the corporate firewall, and then it scans all the computers on your lan for known vulnerabilities and takes them over. It was just a little proof of concept; he never released it.

Tracking Shrinkflation and Skipflation

There's been a lot of news recently about inflation and how it's affecting food prices. (Have you tried to buy romaine lettuce recently?) Prices have been going up but there is also subtler forms of price increases happening – what's called shrinkflation, where the price remains the same but the product shrinks in size. I most recently noticed this when I bought some Campbell's soup, and the can had shrunk by about 10 percent, but I've seen it with many other products (bags of potato chips, dishwasher detergent, packages of bacon). 

The New York Times just published a long article (gifted outside the paywall) about Edgar Dworksky, who has made a career of tracking shrinkflation and skimpflation (where the packaging remains the same but there is less product or it's watered down). 

Consumer product companies have been using this strategy for decades. And their nemesis, Mr. Dworsky, has been following it for decades. He writes up his discoveries on his website, mouseprint.org, a reference to the fine print often found on product packaging. Print so tiny “only a mouse could read,” he says.

He writes about shrinkflation in everything — tuna, mayonnaise, ice cream, deodorant, dish soap — alongside other consumer advocacy work on topics like misleading advertising, class-action lawsuits and exaggerated sale claims.

One recent Mouse Print report explored toilet paper shrinkflation. “Virtually every brand of toilet paper has been downsized over the years,” Mr. Dworsky wrote, documenting more than a decade of toilet paper shrinkage.

It's a good article and has made me more aware of how companies are manipulating consumers. I highly recommend looking at his mouseprint.org website. If anyone knows of an equivalent Canadian-focused site, please post it in a comment. 

Featured Links - December 5, 2022

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

November's last rose

• Why doesn’t the U.S. have at-home flu tests? I've wondered about this. It's a more complex problem than you might think. 
• How chaos on Twitter is affecting SF/F authors. "The pitfalls of platform migration." I remember problems when CompuServe and GEnie went away (yes, I am that old), but this is much worse. 
• This Singer Deepfaked Her Own Voice—and Thinks You Should Too. "Self-described “computer musician” Holly Herndon explains why AI vocal clones can help give fellow artists sovereignty over their work."
•  Going meta. "John Scalzi's Redshirts, a decade on." He discusses several other books as well as Redshirts and the Rick and Morty TV show. He should have mentioned Doom Patrol, though.
• Satellite Constellations Could Harm the Environment, New Watchdog Report Says. "Elon Musk’s Starlink and other satellite sources of light pollution and orbital debris should face an environmental review, the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds." It's long past time. 
• Journey to the Doomsday Glacier. "Thwaites could reshape the world’s coastlines. But how do you study one of the world’s most inaccessible places
• Traces of ancient hurricanes on the seafloor are a warning for coastal areas. "Evidence from millennia of Atlantic storms is not good news for the coast."

Photo of the Week - December 4, 2022

I have always been fascinated by the appearance of gas stations at night.  There is something about the garish lighting and minimalist architecture that appeals to my visual sense. This is our local Petro-Canada gas station during the recent bout of fog.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 38 mm., 1/45 second at F5.6, ISO 3200, -1.3 stop EV, Velvia film simulation

 

Goose - November 18, 2022 - Syracuse, NY

Goose are a relatively new jam band that has seen its career take off in the last couple of years. They just wrapped up a tour with the Trey Anastasio Band and were profiled in Rolling Stone. 

Formed in Connecticut in 2014, Goose went through the normal routine that many New England jam-rock acts, Phish included, go through: the nonstop touring through college towns and dive bars, constant rehearsing, and emphasizing “you had to be there” moments of live improvisation. Before the pandemic, they were moving a couple hundred tickets per show but emerged from the shutdown as a live powerhouse, selling out storied venues like Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

In an aging landscape that sometimes feels melodically stuck in molasses, Goose is a breath of fresh air. They’re an arena-level jam band that millennials can finally call their own after years of older fans telling them, “You should have been here back in the day.” Goose, however, is happening right now. 

There are several good-quality videos of Goose's live shows available on YouTube, including this show from Syracuse, NY. 

Google Reading Mode Is a Wonderful New Feature for Android

Google just made my day yesterday. They have added a dedicated Reading mode to Android. It installs through the Play store (look for Google Reading mode) and hooks into your phone's accessibility features, displaying a small widget to open the mode. When you trigger it, it overlays your screen with a new window that displays just the text of what you are reading and lets you control the text's typeface and size, line spacing, colour, and background. It can also read the text back to you. 

It's not a Pixel-only feature. I was able to install it on my wife's Samsung phone. For Samsung, once it is installed, go to Accessibility > Installed Apps > Reading mode and turn on the app. It will add a star to the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. 

I haven't been able to figure out how to take a screenshot while it's working, but this article will show you what it looks like.

It's not perfect: It sometimes refuses to work for an article (usually scrolling down a bit will fix that problem) and the widget can get in the way of a button onscreen (you can move it around). Font choices are somewhat limited. 

Minor issues aside, for someone like me, who has trouble reading dark text on a white screen or text that's too small or lacks contrast, this is a wonderful feature. 

Pluto TV Leaves Me Cold

I saw on the news that Pluto TV is now available in Canada. They have an interesting list of classic TV shows (Gunsmoke, anyone!) but the Android app is horribly intrusive. It starts playing videos as soon as you open it and there is no way to turn it off or pause what's playing without closing the app. 

There is no cast button which means you cannot send a program from the phone to a TV that uses a Google Chromecast. It is possible to cast from a computer if you open Pluto TV in Chrome and use the Cast Desktop option. 

I'll keep it in mind if I get possessed with a sudden urge to watch Gunsmoke or Mork and Mindy, but I can't recommend it.

Movie and TV Reviews - November 2022

 Short reviews of TV shows and movies we watched in November. 

Movies

• Enola Holmes 2: This is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche with a teenage girl as the detective. Light fluff, but well made except for the very dark colour grading that makes indoor scenes hard to watch. (Netflix)

TV Shows

• Slow Horses: Set in London, this spy thriller features Gary Oldman as the boss of a group of bottom-of-the-barrel MI5 spies. It's one of the best dramas I've seen in a while, on a par with Line of Duty and Manhunt. Excellent acting, tight dialog and plotting, and lots of action. There's a satirical bite to it that helps to relieve some of the tension. Highly recommended. A second season starts December 2nd and we will be watching. (Apple TV+)
• Andor: This is the best Star Wars series to date, by a wide margin, and it's better than almost all of the movies. I had no idea that a Star Wars story could be this intense and nuanced. (Disney+)
• Doc Martin (season 10): The doctor returns to his practice in the final season of the show. There will be a final episode on Christmas day.  (Acorn TV)
• Antiques Road Trip: There's a little too much silliness in this show but if you like reality shows based on antiques, this is for you. (PBS)
• Annika: I watched this a couple of weeks ago and I can remember nothing about it other than it was filmed in Scotland. (Amazon Prime)
• The English: This show is good enough that it could spark a resurgence in the western genre. Intense, gritty, occasionally gory, and beautifully filmed. (Amazon Prime)
• Warrior Nun (season 2): No redeeming social merit at all, but it has nuns with guns. What more could you ask for. (Netflix)
• 1899:  The show had an interesting premise and ended up in a very different place from where it started, but I gave up watching it because it was SO DARK. This seems to be a trend in recent movies (no, it is not my TV, which is fine). (Netflix)

Where Cardboard Comes From and Where It's Going

I've never thought much about cardboard, except when I have to cut apart a box to put it into the recycling bin. But if you stop to think about all the boxes that get shipped out just from Amazon, it's worth taking a look at where it comes from and what happens to it after you're done with it.

The New York Times Magazine just published a long article about cardboard manufacturing. Like much modern manufacturing, the scale is amazing. 

Every day, Walls told me proudly, the exercise was repeated enough times to paper over a two-lane highway from the gates of the mill almost to El Paso, Texas, 1,350 miles. Impressive in itself, but to get a real sense of the scale of the modern corrugated industry, you have to do some extrapolation: Take those 1,350 miles and add the output of the 25 other paper mills I.P. maintains from Georgia all the way out to Washington State. Add again the yield from the dozens of paper mills owned by the company’s competitors. Suddenly, you’re no longer talking about thousands of miles of paper, but millions of miles.

And it’s barely enough to meet demand: Cardboard manufacturers broke production records in 2021, and they’ve been breaking them basically every quarter since. By 2025, according to one estimate, the size of the international market for corrugated packaging will reach $205 billion, commensurate with the gross domestic product of New Zealand or Greece.

As well as describing the manufacturing process, the article describes the environmental impact. It may not be as much as you might suspect, as most of the trees are now farmed and about 91 percent of cardboard is recycled. 

I've gifted the article from my subscription so it is outside of the paywall.  

Changing the Order of Styles in Word's Style Gallery

Microsoft has never prioritized the use of styles in Microsoft Word. I've always used them and found them to be a great timesaver, but in my long experience with Word, I've found few people who use them often and consistently (most of them are fellow technical writers). 

When Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Word 2007, I thought that having a chunk of the ribbon devoted to styles would get more people using them, but that turned out no to be the case. After working with the ribbon for a while, I found out how to modify the styles displayed in my Gallery. That made it easier to show people how to use them.

Office Watch has published a good article on how to change the order of the styles displayed in the Style Gallery. Setting this up properly is key to helping people use styles. As the article shows, Microsoft doesn't make it obvious, but it's easy enough to do once you see how.

If you aren't using styles in Word, why not start now? It will save you a lot of time and help to keep your document formatting consistent. I've published quite a few articles about styles; find them in the Microsoft Word topic on this blog. 

Featured Links - November 28, 2022

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

Frenchman's Bay 

Canadian carrier apps include trackers from Facebook, Google, more. "DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection feature blocked hundreds of tracking attempts from carrier apps on my phone." I am definitely going to have to look at this. 

A {Twitter] thread for those who think we're going to be importing lots of hydrogen over vast distances. Hydrogen is not like LNG, propane, or gasoline. Transporting it is difficult, expensive, dangerous, and energy intensive. 

Some Very Basics Basics About Writing Novels. Advice from Margaret Atwood who does know what she is talking about.

Google Is About To Stop Answering Your Stupid Questions. "This actually seems like a pretty good idea."

Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse". Just in case you're thinking there might be something to the show. 

Should I join Mastodon? A scientists’ guide to Twitter’s rival. "The open-source platform has added nearly half a million users in little more than a week — but should scientists make the leap? We examine the pros and cons."

Tonga's strange volcanic eruption was even more massive than we knew. "The ferocious 2021 explosion blew out 2.3 cubic miles of rock, unleashing a 35-mile-high plume and a global tsunami that sent scientists racing to understand the blast. Now they're finally putting together the pieces."

Photo of the Week - November 27, 2022

I am fascinated by the shapes and patterns made by the bare branches of the trees now that all the leaves have fallen. Taken with my Pixel 4a.

Bare branches

 

Saturday Sounds - TajMo': The Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' Band Live at Jazz San Javier 2017

Here's a lovely concert featuring two great musicians, Taj Mahal and Keb Mo, filmed at Jazz San Javier in Spain in 2017. This is a professional recording with great sound highlighting the considerable talents of these two musicians and their crackerjack band. 

We're Toast 32

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Fallen Trees

Industrial Meat and Dairy Is Destroying the Planet. "Just 15 of the world's biggest meat and dairy companies are responsible for an overwhelming amount of methane emissions, a new report has found."

Sea level rise to dramatically speed up erosion of rock coastlines by 2100.* "Rock coasts, which make up over half the world's coastlines, could retreat more rapidly in the future due to accelerating sea level rise."

Beyond Catastrophe.* "A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View."

I’m No Longer Sure New York Will Protect Itself From Rising Waters.* "What I’ve learned over the past 10 years is that we have the ability to defend our city in the face of climate change. But what is also clear, given the funding gaps and ever-extending deadlines, is that we won’t do it in time. In that case, is it better to be realistic?"

World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies. "The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe."

380 Million Tons of Plastic Are Made Every Year. None of It Is Truly Recyclable. "Not even water bottles and milk jugs meet standards for recyclability, a new report finds."

A MAGA America Would Be Ugly. "If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.” An opinion piece by Paul Krugman. 

What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?* "Today’s mess is better understood as a global polycrisis, a term the historian Adam Tooze at Columbia has recently popularized. The term implies that humanity is dealing with a complex knot of seemingly distinct but actually deeply entangled crises. Precisely because these crises are so entangled, they’re causing worldwide damage much greater than the sum of their individual harms."

* Paywall free-article gifted from NY Times subscription. 

Did Pandemic Fatigue Make Political Dissatisfaction Worse?

It does seem like politics has gotten angrier and uglier during the last few years. Certainly, ever since Trump got elected in 2016, US politics has gotten kind of crazy, and that's spilled over into Canada, most notably with the "Freedom Convoy" earlier this year. 

I just saw a clip on the TV news about a school board meeting in Ottawa that turned into an angry fracas over masking, of all things. 

Did the pandemic have a negative effect on politics? Based on this journal article, perhaps it did. 

Health authorities have highlighted “pandemic fatigue” as a psychological consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that “fatigue” could demotivate compliance with health-related policies and mandates. Yet, fatigue from following the policies of authorities may have consequences far beyond the health domain. Theories from the social sciences have raised that real and perceived costs of policies can also drive sentiments of discontent with the entire political establishment. Integrating theories from the health and social sciences, we ask how pandemic fatigue (i.e., perceived inability to “keep up” with restrictions) developed over the pandemic and whether it fueled political discontent. Utilizing longitudinal and panel surveys collected from September 2020 to July 2021 in eight Western countries (N = 49,116), we analyze: 1) fatigue over time at the country level, 2) associations between pandemic fatigue and discontent, and 3) the effect of pandemic fatigue on political discontent using panel data. Pandemic fatigue significantly increased with time and the severity of interventions but also decreased with COVID-19 deaths. When triggered, fatigue elicited a broad range of discontent, including protest support and conspiratorial thinking. The results demonstrate the significant societal impact of the pandemic beyond the domain of health and raise concerns about the stability of democratic societies, which were already strained by strife prior to the pandemic.

More details are in this Twitter thread. 

Moving on from Twitter

Somewhat to my surprise, Twitter is still up and running despite losing more than half of its staff. I have noticed occasional glitches and dropouts in my feed, which leads me to suspect that not all is well in the dark, fetid recesses of the server rooms. All is certainly not well in the moderation department, especially now that troglodytes like 45 and Marjorie Taylor Greene have been allowed back on the service. (To his credit, Elon Musk draws the line at reinstating Alex Jones).

I'll keep following my Twitter feed for now, but I have set up an account on Mastodon: @ksoltys@twit.social. I've been laying low there, just following what people are posting, but I expect to be more active in the future. So far, Mastodon seems easy enough to use and many of the people I follow on Twitter have set up accounts there. Mostly I've been using the web interface because the Android client is rather limited in its features. Given that Mastodon is open source, I hope that will eventually change.

Although superficially similar to Twitter, Mastodon has a very different architecture. In this article, the original developer, Eugen Rochko, explains the philosophy behind Mastodon's development and what the future might hold for it.

If you're thinking about leaving Twitter for greener pastures, Mobile Syrup describes several of the alternatives. 

If you follow a lot of people on Twitter, it's likely that many of them will have accounts on Mastodon. If they've included their Mastodon account as part of their Twitter profile, it's easy to transfer them from your Twitter feed to Mastodon. There are a couple of utilities that will help you do this. You can use Feditfinder or DeBirdify. You'll have to allow them to access your Twitter account, but after that, the process is straightforward and documented on the apps' pages. 

How TikTok and the Pandemic Changed Language

A couple of articles recently have highlighted how fast our language is changing. 

First, the New York Times describes how users of TikTok have created their own jargon to get around TikTok's content moderation. I've gifted from my subscription so there's no paywall. 

TikTok creators have gotten into the habit of coming up with substitutes for words that they worry might either affect how their videos get promoted on the site or run afoul of moderation rules.

So, back in 2021, someone describing a pandemic hobby might have believed (perhaps erroneously) that TikTok would mistakenly flag it as part of a crackdown on pandemic misinformation. So the user could have said “panoramic” or a similar-sounding word instead. Likewise, a fear that sexual topics would trigger problems prompted some creators to use “leg booty” for L.G.B.T.Q. and “cornucopia” instead of “homophobia.” Sex became “seggs.”

On Twitter, Margaret Atwood pointed me to a new book, Pandexicon, that looks at how the pandemic has changed our language over the last couple of years.  

When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Wayne Grady started collecting the words and phrases that arose from our shared global experience. Some, such as "uptick" and "pivot," had existed before but now took on new meaning, and others, such as "covidivorce," "quarantini," "covexit," and "shecession," appeared for the first time, their meaning instantly clear. Through this new vocabulary, we became more able to adapt to change, to domesticate it in a sense, and to reduce our fears.

Moving from the very beginning of the pandemic (the "Before Times") and our early response to it through the peaks and troughs of the various waves in countries throughout the world, and ending with a contemplation of what the "After Times" might look like, this book takes us on a journey through the pandemic and illuminates both how this new language has unfolded and how it has changed the way we think about ourselves and each other.

Pandeixcon won't be published until March 2023, but you can pre-order it from the publisher. 

Featured Links - November 21, 2022

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

Meet CJ, one of the two feline heads of my family.

• Apple AirPods Can Work as More Affordable Hearing Aids, Study Finds. I wonder if Google Pixel Buds would work as well? Please leave a comment if you are using them as a hearing aid. 
• The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever broken. "An exciting concept, a laptop you can repair or upgrade yourself."
• Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man? "A good writer doesn't have to be a saint." That also applies to artists and musicians.
• The mysteries of the astronaut biome. "How might space travel change the human microbiome, which is linked to so many ailments?" This is what Elon Musk should be spending time on, not screwing up Twitter.
• Futura Doctrina: A New Hope. "A continuing discussion about war, competition and building effective military institutions." I have been following Mick Ryan on Twitter since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and he is very much worth reading.
• Your Cat Might Not Be Ignoring You When You Speak. "Cats have a reputation for being aloof, but a new study has found that their relationships with their owners may be stronger than we thought." All cat owners know this. 
• How a hunt for secret nuclear weapon tests led to the discovery of the most violent explosions in the Universe. There is a good reason for studying gamma-ray bursts. They are so powerful they can affect the Earth from millions or even billions of light years away. 

Greg Bear, RIP

SF author Greg Bear died yesterday after suffering a massive stroke after heart surgery. He was 71. 

Bear began publishing sometime in the 1970s and I remember reading several of his early novels when they appeared in paperback. He was a very successful author and won several Nebula and Hugo awards. Of all his books, I would recommend The Forge of God, which is one of the best first contact/alien invasion novels. 

Photo of the Week - November 20, 2022

One more picture of the last of the fall flowers, getting buried in leaves, and likely to be buried in snow tomorrow.

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 27 mm F2.8 WR at F9, 1/125 second, ISO 320, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Bill Frisell - Four

Bill Frisell is a jazz guitarist who I've been listening to for quite a long time. Describing him as a jazz guitarist might be a bit of a misnomer as, like John Scofield, his albums have crossed several musical genres. 

His latest album, Four, is definitely jazz, in the small combo mode and it's wonderful. As well as Frisell, players on the album include Gregory Tardy: tenor saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet; Gerald Clayton: piano; Johnathan Blake: drums. 

From JazzTrail.net:

The unmatchable American guitarist and composer Bill Frisell soars his six-string chords in the company of long-time collaborator Gregory Tardy on reeds, and recent partners: pianist Gerald Clayton and drummer Johnathan Blake. Four is Frisell’s third outing on the Blue Note imprint, and consists entirely of originals - nine newly composed and four taken from two previously recorded albums. They form a wonderful set of folk-rooted meditations on loss, renewal and friendship.

The record is dedicated to the late cornetist Ron Miles, but some specific tracks pay tribute to some of Frisell’s recently departed friends. The opener, “Dear Old Friend (for Alan Woodward)” is a solo-less, far-from-overwrought country song with a lullaby-ish melody. There’s also the gently persuasive “Waltz for Hal Willner”, and the wonderful collective work of “Claude Utley”, which celebrates the amazingly colorful painter of the same name, a native from Seattle who passed away in September 2021. This piece, carrying a post-bop leverage, incorporates the tenets of the bandleader’s style. Clayton gets the spotlight in the introductory section, after which an inducted three time feel stimulates Frisell and Tardy (on clarinet) to provide counterpoint.

This is beautiful contemplative music made by musicians who know how to listen as well as play. I like it very much and I hope you do too.  

Photography Links - November 18, 2022

Here are some articles about photography that I found interesting or useful.

Backlit trees

• Demolition Photographer Uses Large Format Camera to Capture Explosive Images. "A photographer who has been capturing demolitions on large format cameras for 15 years only gets one shot to capture the one-off explosion."
• The Best Printers for Making Professional Looking Photos at Home. "The best photo printers produce detailed, high-quality images that stand the test of time." 
• How to Edit Landscape Photos in Black and White. If it was good enough for Ansel Adams, it should be good enough for me.
• How to Combine Focus Stacking and Exposure Blending for Better Photos. More post-processing tools to play with. 
• 7 Tips for Better Cityscape Photos. I will read through this again before the next time I take my camera to Toronto. 
• A Deeper Understanding Low and High-Key Photography is Essential for Creative Photography. "They can change the ordinary to the extraordinary. However, there is a lot more to creating low- and high-key photographs than just under- and over-exposing. Discovering how they work can dramatically improve our photography. It's also the reason why cameras should have one specific feature."

Giving Up on Shadow Captain

I haven't posted much about what I've been reading recently, mainly because I haven't been reading much fiction. Most of my reading these days has been news-related or magazines from the library via the PressReader or Libby apps. I have been trying to catch up on the To Be Read collection on my Kindle, but without much success.

The latest book I've been reading is Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds. It's the middle book of a trilogy that started with Revenger, which I read a couple of years ago, and Bone Silence. Here's the précis of Revenger from Wikipedia.

Tens of millions of years in the future, sisters Adrana and Arafura ('Fura') Ness are skilled bone readers—the primary method by which spaceships communicate with one another. Their skill at bone reading leads them to be taken on as apprentices aboard Monetta's Mourn, a spaceship captained by Pol Rackamore. Rackamore and his crew engage in the practice of finding ancient technological artifacts, called "baubles". While in search of these artifacts, Monetta's Mourn is attacked by the infamous space pirate Bosa Sennen, separating the sisters and leaving Fura adrift on a ship in empty space.

I enjoyed Revenger, mostly for the setting that Reynolds developed. But Shadow Captain was another matter. I just couldn't get into the story and found the pseudo-archaic style that Reynolds used annoying. Halfway through the book. I gave up. Reynolds is one of my favourite authors, and I've read most of his books and enjoyed them. But this series just didn't work for me. 

So now I'm on the A Memory of Empire by Arkady Martine, winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2019. My initial impression is quite positive.

Understanding Word's New Commenting Features

I've been seeing references to Microsoft Word's new "modern comments" for a while now, but since I am still using Word 2013, I didn't know much about them. I'll probably have to upgrade my version of Word next year (or switch to Libre Office) when Microsoft stops supporting Office 2013, so I was glad to see this long explanation of the new commenting features written by Russel Harper, an editor for the Chicago Manual of Style. 

If you use Word, and especially if you are planning to upgrade to the new Office 365, this would be a good article to read or bookmark for future reference. 

The Demise of Twitter and the SFF Genre

I've been online since the 1980s, starting with BBSs and Compuserve. Following that were Genie, Usenet, and eventually FaceBook and Twitter. Of all of those, Twitter has been my favourite social media service. There's nothing else that comes close to it for following things I'm interested in, and of course, that includes science fiction and fantasy. 

I use Twitter to follow authors I like: John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, N. K. Jemisin, Paul McAuley, and several others. I am not sure what will happen to Twitter in the near future, though based on what's happened in the last couple of weeks, I don't think it will be good. I will be very sad indeed if Twitter goes away as it's been a big part of my life the last few years. 

Andrew Liptak has a good article in his latest newsletter about social media, the infrastructure of the Internet, and the science fiction and fantasy fan communities. It provides some much-needed perspective on what's happening now with Twitter. 

In particular, there's been quite a bit of introspection amidst the SF/F community, which has used Twitter as intended: an open square where we can talk about the books we like, shoot the shit, raise issues within the community, and so forth. They're understandably worried: Musk doesn't have a great track record with his online presence, and Twitter's long been a haven for trolls and bad-faith actors who stir up trouble, cause problems for everyone, and it doesn't seem like we have the best role model for dealing with this. Online communities are hard: there are a lot of things that go into it to ensure that users are protected and safe, and that bad habits don't get rooted into the community. The SF/F community has had an up and down relationship with Twitter over the years, but it's been a pretty constant thing, which makes this entire shift so notable.

I think it's safe to say that the Twitter that was around in 2009-2022 is gone, and what remains to be seen is what Twitter of 2022-beyond will look like. A social media platform is a tool like any other — it's just been a particularly useful tool for publicists, authors, fans, and everyone in between, which is why this feels like a real bookend to an era within the community.

Featured Links - November 14, 2022

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

Last of the fall leaves

• Looks Like We're Going to Have to Get Used to China's Crashing Rockets. "The core stages of the rocket have performed four uncontrolled reentries to date, posing a potential threat to human lives and property.
• Russia’s New Cyberwarfare in Ukraine Is Fast, Dirty, and Relentless. "Security researchers see updated tactics and tools—and a tempo change—in the cyberattacks Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency is inflicting on Ukraine."
• Giles Martin says that he could only remix The Beatles’ Revolver album in stereo because of Peter Jackson’s AI-powered audio separation technology: “It opened the door”.  The stereo remix is truly remarkable and the technology is a perfect example of Clarke's Law in action. 
• Who Is Working to End the Threat of AI-Generated Deepfakes, and Why Is It So Difficult? "MIT researchers say they have a way to guard pictures from AI image generators, but some experts argue that no fix can stop the march of progress."
• 14 Ways to Make Windows 10 Faster and Improve Performance. It's not hard to make Windows 10 faster. Here are several methods to improve the speed and performance of Windows 10.
• How to Bypass Windows 11 Minimum Installation Requirements. "Try these alternative solutions when your device does not meet Windows 11 minimum system requirements to install the latest OS."
• CRISPR cancer trial success paves the way for personalized treatments. ‘Most complicated therapy ever’ tailors bespoke, genome-edited immune cells to attack tumours."

Photo of the Week - November 13, 2022

This week's photo is from the last day of the three-day fog event that we had earlier in the month. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 24 mm., F8, 1/340 second, ISO 640, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Gasoline Alley - Rod Stewart

This week's post is another blast from the past, Rod Stewart's second album, Gasoline Alley. I'm not a big fan of his later music, but his first few albums were brilliant. Every Picture Tells a Story had the big hit ("Maggie May") but I prefer this one. Standout tracks are the title song, "It's All Over Now" and "Cut Across Shorty". The songs feature an all-star list of musicians, including Ronnie Lane, Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, Pete Sears, and Kenny Jones. 

We're Toast 31

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Waiting for the frost

• Ukraine Enters a Dark New Era of Drone Warfare. "A series of deadly attacks using Iranian “suicide drones” shows Russia is shifting gears in the conflict."
• How sea level rise contributes to billions in extra damage during hurricanes. "Sea levels have risen by about a foot along the coast of southwest Florida. That made Hurricane Ian’s storm surge even more dangerous."
• A Common Household Chemical May Be Creating Superbugs In Our Sewers. "Unbeknownst to consumers, flushing household chemicals down the drain could drive antibiotic resistance."
• Chinese military scientists simulated a nuclear blast in space to knock out satellite networks like Starlink. "A nuclear blast in near space could create a radioactive cloud over an area as big as New York state, crippling or destroying satellites in near-Earth orbit, according to a new computer simulation conducted by a team of Chinese military scientists."
• The west is ignoring Pakistan’s super-floods. "Heed this warning: tomorrow it will be you."
• Researchers Report a Staggering Decline in Wildlife. Here’s How to Understand It. "The latest update to an important assessment found that populations had declined by an average of 69 percent since 1970. But that might not mean what you think." I've unpaywalled this article.

Whither Twitter? - Updated

Now that Elon Musk owns Twitter, what can we expect for Twitter's future? According to one engineer still working at Twitter, the future looks dim.

 “Sometimes you’ll get notifications that are a little off,” says one engineer currently working at Twitter, who’s concerned about the way the platform is reacting after vast swathes of his colleagues who were previously employed to keep the site running smoothly were fired. (That last sentence is why the engineer has been granted anonymity to talk for this story.) After struggling with downtime during its “Fail Whale” days, Twitter eventually became lauded for its team of site reliability engineers, or SREs. Yet this team has been decimated in the aftermath of Musk’s takeover. “It’s small things, at the moment, but they do really add up as far as the perception of stability,” says the engineer.

The small suggestions of something wrong will amplify and multiply as time goes on, he predicts—in part because the skeleton staff remaining to handle these issues will quickly burn out. “Round-the-clock is detrimental to quality, and we’re already kind of seeing this,” he says. 

I've seen some signs of degradation already. Most notably, several times I've tried to like a tweet but the button did nothing. (I use likes for bookmarking tweets because the Talon app I use on my phone doesn't support bookmarks). 

More serious is the loss of identity verification for the famous blue badge. Last night, I saw two cases where well-known people had their identity faked. Here's one example. This is causing me (and many others) to lose trust in the platform. If they don;'t get this issue straightened out soon, I think it will doom the platform faster than anything else. Perhaps I should have titled this post "Wither Twitter". 

Update: Here's a good article from Mobile Syrup that goes into more detail about what's going with the fake accounts. They have a serious problem and if they don't start offering verified accounts, Twitter will be dead in short order because nobody will be able to trust anything they see on the platform. 

You're Car May Not Be As Safe As You Think

Modern cars are loaded with safety features. We've had seat belts and air bags for years, but now our cars will warn us if we drift out of our lane or if another vehicle is approaching too closely, keep us from skidding on icy pavement, or even brake the car if someone walks in front of us.

But does this make us any safer?

That's the subject of this article from The Verge. If you own a newer car, you should read it. You might not be as safe as you think you are. 

But upon examination, these new features are hardly the panacea that their boosters imply. Some elements presented as safety enhancements (like lane keep assist) may be little more than driver conveniences. For now, at least, those technologies that could save the most lives (like pedestrian detection) remain deeply unreliable. And even if ADAS eventually works flawlessly, it is likely to have only a modest impact on annual traffic deaths. 

As the United States confronts a national crisis of traffic fatalities, carmakers and policymakers alike are focused on unproven and overhyped innovations. In reality, even the best technologies can’t compensate for the ways in which ill-conceived cars and poor street designs have made crashes more numerous and severe. We risk making our road safety crisis even worse by expecting car tech to bail us out.

Featured Links - November 7, 2022

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

The last of the fall leaves

• Ancient Egyptian “Lost Golden City” Called Biggest Find Since Tutankhamun's Tomb. "The city was discovered on the west bank of Luxor near the Colossi of Memnon, depicting Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who would have ruled over the city."
• The "Windcatcher": Bigger Than The Eiffel Tower And Can Power 80,000 Homes, Say Developers. One benefit of this design is that it should be more visible to birds.. 
• Font Survey: 42 of the Best Monospaced Programming Fonts. "This article presents commonly used programming fonts with examples of each font in ClearType and non-ClearType." FWIW, Consolas is my preferred monospaced font.
• Which COVID studies pose a biohazard? Lack of clarity hampers research. "Controversy surrounding a study that involved modifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus has prompted researchers to call for better guidance from funders."
• High-Tech Cars Are Killing the Auto Repair Shop. "New vehicles are rigged out with sensors and computer chips—and they're costlier for shop owners to fix. Get ready to wait longer for repairs."
• Doug Mastriano’s Prophets In Pennsylvania. "A shocking weekend with the supporters of the nominee for governor — full of swords, demons, and wild prophecies — shows the theocratic future of the GOP."
• How AI Brought Prime Video’s The Peripheral to Life. "The use of futuristic technology adds flavor to the dual futures of Prime Video sci-fi series The Peripheral."
• Far-Right Hindu Nationalism Is Gaining Ground In The U.S. "Hindutva, an extremist ideology, takes many cues from white nationalism — and it’s endangering millions of Muslims and other religious minorities."