Can a Musician Make a Living Touring?

The pandemic has been especially hard on touring musicians, with most music venues being closed for the last couple of years and only reopening now. But even before that, it wasn't an easy way to make a living.

Here's a long Facebook* post from Janis Ian, who has been a singer-songwriter and touring musician since the 1960s. She's managed to have a successful career, but it took a lot of skill and effort, and not just for the music. In this post, she talks about the economics of touring and all the little details that a musician (or their manager, if they have one) has to manage. I know a few musicians and it gave me a greater appreciation for what they have to deal with to get their music heard.

Today's question: "Can you make a living touring, and could you ever?" 

Hm. Yes, and no. Yes, because if you reach a certain earning point, and you are savvy, have good help, and really watch your expenses, you'll get to keep somewhere between 20-50% of what you earn. No, because the world takes a big chunk out of it before you ever get to see a dime.

For instance, my own daily costs. Fees are based on venue size, ticket pricing, and what it costs the venue to put the show on. So before anything else, the agent and venue have to work out what's left after venue staff (from box office personnel to sound people), catering (we do need to eat before a show), hall rental (often an outside promoter is putting on the show and running the risk, and they're paying to rent the actual hall), lights and sound (if those aren't already in place, and even then), advertising, stagehands, security, fees to ASCAP/BMI/SESAC (look it up!), credit card charges, box office fees, ticket printing if any... it goes on and on. 

Once that's calculated and negotiated (I may say "Why is there a charge here for an opening act when there is none?" for instance), my own fee is reckoned from what remains. Sometimes it's a "flat fee" - if I sell out or there are three people in the audience, I get paid the same thing. Sometimes it's a straight percentage of what's left after expenses; particularly with smaller venues, that lets them stay open while giving all of us incentive to sell more tickets, do more press, hire more publicists. Sometimes, it's the greater of either. 

*The post is public, so you should be able to view it without a Facebook account.  

Supply Chain Problems Are Going To Get Worse

If you think the supply chain problems we've been suffering through now that the pandemic seems to be subsiding somewhat, think again. Not only is the pandemic still affecting production and shipping out of China, but the invasion of Ukraine and sanctions against Russia is now having a major affect on global supply chains. 

And it's going to get a lot worse.

More than a million containers due to travel to Europe from China by train—on a route that goes through Russia—must now make their journey by sea as sanctions bite. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also severed key supply lines for nickel, aluminum, wheat, and sunflower oil, causing commodity prices to skyrocket. Countries in the Middle East and Africa that rely on produce from Ukraine are likely to experience serious food shortages in the coming weeks and months. Some European automotive production lines have cut their output due to a shortage of wiring normally sourced from factories in Ukraine. If the pandemic, which triggered a surge in purchasing of goods, caused the global supply chain to buckle, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s continuing zero-Covid policy risk breaking it completely.

There's more in this report from Deloitte.

 It’s not just oil and agricultural commodities that are under stress. As Deloitte noted in a recent report, “The principal reason that Russia plays above its weight is that it is a major exporter of some of the world’s most important commodities.”1 Russia is a significant source of many of the 35 critical minerals that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) deems vital to the nation’s economic and national security interests, including 30% of the globe’s supply of platinum-group elements (including palladium), 13% of titanium, and 11% of nickel. Russia is also a major source of neon, used for etching circuits on silicon wafers. Palladium, a critical component of catalytic converters for cars, has climbed as much as 80% in price since the conflict started. Moreover, as a result of the Ukraine conflict, LMC Automotive has cut its forecast of light vehicle sales in Europe by 2 million units a year over the next two years.2

The interconnectedness of economies and businesses has both exacerbated the growing supply chain crisis and to some extent masked it. According to Dun & Bradstreet, there are fewer than 15,000 Tier 1 suppliers in Russia. Dig a little deeper, however, and there are 7.6 million Tier 2 supplier relationships with Russian entities globally.3 More than 374,000 businesses—90% of which are in the United States— rely on Russian suppliers. Now consider that in Deloitte’s most recent annual survey of chief procurement officers, while 70% believed they had good visibility into risks in their Tier 1 suppliers, only 15% had the same confidence about Tier 2 and beyond.

Finally, here's more from Forbes.

 The first type of supply chain risk derives from the fact that modern manufacturing requires the orchestration of an innumerable variety of inputs that are non-substitutable. In the last two years, the world has experienced a severe disruption in the semi-conductor sector due to factors ranging from shifting demand, labor shortages due to Covid-19-related lockdowns and even a drought in Taiwan.

The conflict in Ukraine is likely to prolong this on-going semiconductor shortage. Ukraine supplies more than 90% of the U.S.’s semiconductor-grade neon, a gas integral to the lasers used in the chip-making process. Russia, on the other hand, supplies 35% of the U.S.’s palla

Stopping COVID-19 In Your Home

There's a lot of COVID-19 going around right now. I've heard of more than half a dozen cases in my family or friends in the last week. So what do you do if someone in your household gets it? It is possible to avoid further transmission, even in a close household, but there are some things you need to do.

This Twitter thread from a HVAC engineer focuses, as you might expect, on avoiding transmission by improving ventilation as much as possible. Given that COVID-19 is mostly spread by airborne particles, this makes a lot of sense. Here's some of it:

Right away - N95s, open windows, turn on filters. 

If you can, setup an isolation room.

Here are some things to do:

1. Run a filter in the isolation room. If any air escapes, it will have less virus.

 2. Try to block any paths that the air can leak into the house at the door.

3. Create negative pressure in the room - turn on an exhaust fan in an adjacent bathroom or have a fan blowing air out a window. This will cause air to leak into the room and not out.

4. Run a humidifier in the room if the air is dry.

5. If a return vent is located in the isolation room, block it by taping plastic around it. They look like this: 

 

Featured Links - March 28, 2022

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

• In Search Of A Flood Like No Other. "Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
• "Mars and Beyond" is a 1957 Disney show about life on other planets. (YouTube link). I remember watching this as a kid. It's worth watching if just for the wonderful animation.
• The internet’s funniest doctor is in on the joke. "Will Flanary’s days are spent conducting eye exams and cataract surgeries at a private practice outside Portland, Ore. The evenings are for family, and a standing commitment to make dinner for his wife and two daughters. That leaves nights and weekends for the ring light, the iPhone, and Flanary’s alter ego, an internet celebrity known as Dr. Glaucomflecken."
• The Red State Murder Problem. "The rate of murders in the US has gone up at an alarming rate. But, despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions."
• Coronal Loops Might Not Be Loops at All – “When I Saw the Results, My Mind Exploded.” 
• Sydney to Perth in five days in a short-range BYD T3 electric van. "When Steve Gill decided to buy one of a very limited number of electric T3 vans from BYD importer EV Direct he had to make the unusual decision of driving it unregistered (but with a permit) from its pickup point in Sydney to Perth in just five days, the longest time period a permit can cover."
• The Mystery at the Heart of Physics That Only Math Can Solve. "The accelerating effort to understand the mathematics of quantum field theory will have profound consequences for both math and physics." This is the best article on quantum physics that I've seen in a very long time. 
• When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death. "Pie charts and scatter plots seem like ordinary tools, but they revolutionized the way we solve problems."

Photo of the Week - March 27, 2022

This is along the shore of Lake Ontario between Pickering and Ajax. It's a lovely walk. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 at F8, 1/800 second, ISO 160, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Hot Tuna Live

Hot Tuna is an offshoot of the Jefferson Airplane featuring Jorma Kaukonen on guitar and Jack Casady on bass. They've been playing together and recording since the 1970s and are still performing their blend of acoustic blues, country, and rock. Unfortunately, I've never managed to see them live (I did see the Airplane a couple of times, thank god). 

Recently, I've seen a bunch of (apparently official) live releases show up on Spotify. This is the most recent from the Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida recorded earlier this year. It's a nice mix of some newer songs and old favourites.

If you're looking for something with a little more punch, try this show from Portland, Oregon recorded in 2019. This one is Electric Hot Tuna, with a drummer. Crank the bass! 

Finally, here's an electric show recorded in 2011 with blues great Charlie Musselwhite playing guitar and harmonica on a few tracks. The sound quality isn't quite as good as the other two shows, but the playing is energetic. 

 

Fujifilm 27 mm. F2.8 WR Lens Review

I made a spur-of-the-moment trip downtown last Friday. I've been looking for a 27 mm. lens for my Fujifilm X-S10 camera. It's a pancake lens, only about 25 mm. thick and is about a quarter the weight of the 16-80 mm. zoom lens I've been using since I got the camera. This is the second version of the lens. It adds an aperture ring, weather sealing, and improved autofocus to the original version, but is the same optically.

But it's been in very short supply, and I've been looking for it for a couple of months. On a whim, I called Aden Camera in downtown Toronto, and they had just gotten one in this morning. So I said hold it for me and I hopped the GO Train downtown to get the lens (only the third time I've been downtown since the before times). 

As you can see, it is a very small lens. It makes the camera much easier to carry around or use at home when I want a quick picture of a family member or a pet. I have yet to do a side-by-side comparison with my zoom, but based on close examination of some of the pictures I've taken, it is sharper than the zoom, as expected. I have seen some reviews that suggest the lens is a bit soft in the corners fully open, but since I normally shoot at F5.6 or F8 that's not a problem. Here's a picture I took earlier this week.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 R WR, F8, 1/400 second, ISO 320, Velvia film simulation

I like the 27 mm. focal length, which corresponds to 41 mm. on a full-frame camera. It's what is called a true normal focal length because the focal length is the same as the diagonal of the sensor. The perspective is very close to what you see with your eyes. However, for the last 35 years, every camera I've used has had some sort of a zoom lens, so adjusting to using a fixed-focal-length lens is requiring some adjustment to the way I approach taking a picture. But given how much easier it makes the camera to carry around, that's not a problem.

As has been noted elsewhere, the autofocus mechanism is a bit noisy. This might be a problem if you shoot video using the built-in microphone. It is fast and accurate. I don't consider the F2.8 aperture a limitation considering how good the X-Trans sensor is at high ISOs, but you won't get the creamy out-of-focus backgrounds that a faster lens would give you. The lens comes with a small screw-on lens hood, which you can see in the picture above, and lens caps that fit with and without the hood. 

So if you have a Fujifilm X-series camera, I would recommend this lens as a standard lens. 

The Threat of Melting Permafrost and Methane

Over the last year or two, I've been seeing more articles about melting permafrost and how it releases methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere about 20 times more than carbon dioxide. It isn't as persistent as CO2 but there is a lot of it trapped in permafrost in the arctic and antarctic. 

You may have seen pictures of arctic buildings that are leaning or have collapsed because the permafrost under their foundations has melted. But there's also permafrost under the seafloor (submarine permafrost) and that is beginning to thaw as the ocean warms. 

Yet submarine permafrost is largely unstudied, owing to its inaccessibility—renting out time on a research vessel is not cheap anywhere, much less in the Arctic, and it's much harder to reach for drilling samples. Now, in an alarming paper published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of scientists give us a rare look at what’s going on down there. The team used oceanic robots, which look like torpedoes, off the coast of northern Canada and mapped the seafloor with sonar. The scientists repeated this several times over the course of nine years to get a sense of how the topology of the seafloor might be changing and found that it’s undergoing massive upheaval.

 The result is the worrisome image shown above—a massive sinkhole indicating that the subsea permafrost has thawed and collapsed. This sinkhole is a giant among dozens of pockmarks the researchers found on the seafloor. Scientists have already documented this violent phenomenon, called thermokarst, on land. Because permafrost is made of soil suspended in a matrix of frozen water, when it thaws the land shrinks, gouging massive holes across the Arctic landscape. And as these images of the seafloor show, it’s also happening underwater.

“I think it's just absolutely remarkable that there are places on the seafloor where changes of this scale are happening at this rate,” says Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute marine geologist Charlie Paull, a coauthor on the paper. The entire survey covered an area that’s half the size of Manhattan and tallied 40 holes. (You can see a portion of the area in the image below.) The giant one, he says, “is equivalent to a whole New York City block composed of six-story apartment buildings.”

If you want a more visual exploration of the problem of melting permafrost releasing methane, watch the PBS Nova episode "Arctic Sinkholes". 

Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive craters. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future.

I watched this last night and the implications, understated as they are in the show, are quite terrifying.  

Review: The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you will know that I think the United States is in serious trouble. I was not surprised by the January 6th insurrection, and I would not surprised if there was more and more extreme political violence in 2022 and 2024. 

If you want an idea of how bad things could get, read The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future by Stephen Marche. 

In it, he outlines, in detail, several scenarios that could lead to the collapse or break up of the United States. Along with those scenarios a (a Bundy-style alt-right protest that gets suppressed by the military, a presidential assassination, and more), he provides copious background information to explain how and why each scenario could come to pass. 

It makes for some pretty grim reading and Marche isn't much of an optimist. There may be a path forward that doesn't end up in widespread civil unrest or a breakup of the country, but he thinks it's going to be very hard to find. It is also a very well-written book and very hard to put down. I plowed my way through it in five days, and that wasn't entirely due to the fact it was a library loan and had to be returned in seven. 

SpaceX To Use New Booster, Ship for Orbital Test

In a tweet yesterday, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX will use a new booster and ship for their first orbital test flight. The current compo of Booster 4 and Ship 20 will be retired without a test flight. This means that the first orbital test flight will occur no earlier than sometime in May, and that is likely an optimistic target.  

Crucially, Musk revealed that the first Starship to attempt an orbital-class launch will now feature upgraded Raptor V2 engines – engines that require an entirely new thrust structure design. That already all but guaranteed that B4 and S20 had been overtaken but Musk also explicitly confirmed that they would be replaced with a new pair in a later tweet.

That new pair – widely assumed to be Super Heavy B7 and Starship S24 – feature a wide range of design changes, including substantially modified header tanks, an entirely new nosecone design, new layouts for secondary systems (pressurization, avionics, heat exchangers, etc.), and more. Most importantly, their thrust structures – giant ‘pucks’ machined out of steel – have been tweaked to support new Raptor V2 engines instead of the Raptor V1 and V1.5 engines that have been installed and tested on all Starship and Super Heavy prototypes to date.

Featured Links - March 21, 2022

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

• Wuhan market was epicentre of pandemic’s start, studies suggest. Report authors say that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 jumped to people from animals sold at the market on two occasions in late 2019 — but some scientists want more definitive evidence.
• 10 Cool Chromecast Tips You Need to Know. "Here are some great tips and tricks to make the most out of your Chromecast."
• Injectsense collects $1.7M grant for its eye implant smaller than a grain of rice. It's an interesting idea, but I doubt it will ever see wide use. 
• 10 Frank Lloyd Wright Houses You Can Visit Across the U.S. I would love to visit some of these.
• I Rode the Brand New Elizabeth Line (YouTube link). I will definitely take a ride on the new line if I ever make it back to London.
• Inadvertent Virtue. SF author Peter Watts on the state of his Russion editions and the Ukraine invasion.
• 106 Years, 4 Weeks, 1 Wreck: How Shackleton’s Ship Was Found. “Gents, I want to introduce you to the Endurance.” More than a century after sinking in Antarctic waters, the legendary ship was found with just days to spare.
• An Antimatter Experiment Shows Surprises Near Absolute Zero. "An experiment conducted on hybrid matter-antimatter atoms has defied researchers’ expectations."

Photo of the Week - March 20, 2022

I bought a new lens for my Fujifilm X-S10, a 27 mm. F2.8. Here's the first picture I took with it. Meet Tea Sea, who we inherited when my mother-in-law died earlier this year.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 at F5.6, 1/34 second, ISO 3200, Velvia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - The Firesign Theatre - I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus

The Firesign Theater were perhaps the premiere comedy troupe of the pyschedic era. Their best work was complex, funny, very twisted, and aimed squarely at the stoner counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

The Firesign Theatre was the brainchild of Peter Bergman, and all of its material was conceived, written, and performed by its members Bergman, Philip Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman. The group's name stems from astrology, because all four were born under the three "fire signs": Aries (Austin), Leo (Proctor), and Sagittarius (Bergman and Ossman). Their popularity peaked in the early 1970s and ebbed in the Reagan Era. They experienced a revival and second wave of popularity in the 1990s and continued to write, record and perform until Bergman's death in 2012.

In 1997, Entertainment Weekly ranked the Firesign Theatre among the "Thirty Greatest Comedy Acts of All Time". Their 1970 album Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers was nominated in 1971 for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation by the World Science Fiction Society, and their next album I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus received the same nomination in 1972. Later, they received nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for three of their albums: The Three Faces of Al (1984), Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death (1998), and Bride of Firesign (2001). In 2005, the US Library of Congress added Don't Crush That Dwarf to the National Recording Registry and called the group "the Beatles of comedy."

I've not listened to their albums in a long time, but I still remember their earlier work with fondness. I'm linking here to I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, which is probably the most accessible album to modern ears. 

The Latest Update to the OED

The Oxford English Dictionary, aka the OED, is the premiere dictionary of the English language. Given how fast the language changes, the lexicographers at the OED are constantly updating it. The March 2022 update has more than 700 new words and phrases.  

This update contains nearly 700 words, senses, and phrases which have been researched, defined, and included in OED for the first time, from absolute threshold to ydraw. Absolute threshold, the level or point at which a stimulus—such as sound, touch, or smell—reaches sufficient intensity to become consciously perceptible, is a loan translation of a German phrase, first used in English in 1892. Ydraw is a verb obsolete since the fifteenth century and first recorded in Old English with reference to the sweeping of the hem of a garment.

More recent linguistic developments covered in this update include burner phone, an inexpensive prepaid mobile phone, especially one used for a short time and then destroyed or discarded to protect the owner’s anonymity, first recorded in a 1996 song by rapper Kingpin Skinny Pimp, and the shortened burner in the same sense, first seen from 2002.

A trigger warning, a warning before a piece of writing or other content that may cause distress, especially by reviving upsetting memories in people who have experienced trauma, is first recorded in a 1993 Usenet newsgroup for survivors of abuse. Content warning, also added in this update, is now often used in the same sense, but its other current sense—denoting a notice accompanying a film, video game, or written publication, warning that it contains material potentially offensive to some audiences or unsuitable for children—is earlier, with evidence stretching back to 1977.

For more details, see the article linked above. 

Weaponizing AI-Based Drug Development

Trigger warning: If you suffer from anxiety, you may want to skip this post. 

The trope of a mad-scientist or terrorist developing a bio-weapon has been around in science fiction for many years; see Frank Herbert's The White Plague for an early example. Now we have something else to worry about. 

Many companies and academic researchers use AI-based software to optimize drug development. Basically, the software helps them find chemicals that have low toxicity and high efficacy. But what happens if you instead, ask the software to optimize for high toxicity? You get a weapon. 

That's what a US-based company, Collaborative Pharmaceuticals Inc., found when they decided to tweak their software for toxicity as part of a presentation for a Swiss security conference. The results were, to put it mildly, troubling, as they describe in this article for Nature.

The Swiss Federal Institute for NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical) Protection —Spiez Laboratory— convenes the ‘convergence’ conference series1 set up by the Swiss government to identify developments in chemistry, biology and enabling technologies that may have implications for the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions. Meeting every two years, the conferences bring together an international group of scientific and disarmament experts to explore the current state of the art in the chemical and biological fields and their trajectories, to think through potential security implications and to consider how these implications can most effectively be managed internationally. The meeting convenes for three days of discussion on the possibilities of harm, should the intent be there, from cutting-edge chemical and biological technologies. Our drug discovery company received an invitation to contribute a presentation on how AI technologies for drug discovery could potentially be misused.

The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery. We have spent decades using computers and AI to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life. Even our projects on Ebola and neurotoxins, which could have sparked thoughts about the potential negative implications of our machine learning models, had not set our alarm bells ringing.

Our company—Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc.—had recently published computational machine learning models for toxicity prediction in different areas, and, in developing our presentation to the Spiez meeting, we opted to explore how AI could be used to design toxic molecules. It was a thought exercise we had not considered before that ultimately evolved into a computational proof of concept for making biochemical weapons.

This is the scariest article about potential misuse of technology that I've read in quite some time. It's the first time I've ever put a trigger warning on my blog. I rather wish I hadn't read it myself; my anxiety levels are high enough (COVID-19 and Ukraine) as they are. 

The Perils of Thought Scams

 Here's an interesting article about the perils of mis- and disinformation written from a Canadian perspective. The author uses the term "thought scams" which I haven't come across before but is a good descriptor. We Canadians have a tendency to be somewhat smug and dismissive about some of the political excesses that we seen in othe countries, especially  the United States. But as the recent "Freedom Convoy" and occupation of Ottawa have shown, we're not so different. 

In the face of an increasingly disastrous war in Ukraine, Russia is shutting down independent media outlets, and threatening massive punishments for anyone caught spreading “fake news.” But Russian citizens aren’t the only victims of that country’s propagandizing and disinformation campaigns: Russia, and other foreign regimes, have been pushing insidious thought scams on Canadians for years, robbing our institutions of trust and our citizens of informed thought.

Foreign bad actors have worked hard to sow conspiracy theories, distrust and division. They encouraged anger and disinformation to impact recent American elections, and they have become well-entrenched here in Canada too.

Researchers at Simon Fraser University found Russia and Iran have been “spreading disinformation around highly emotional and divisive issues to further their strategic interests” in Canada. 

But let’s be clear, the foreign, state-sponsored bad actors aren’t the only ones creating fake news. Often, their most effective attempts to amplify misinformation and lies begin with stories and claims that began right here at home. In a single week last month, as protesters descended on Ottawa and tensions around the country ran high, we saw a fake death by horse-trampling, a fake Governor General registry of 3.5 per cent of Canadians to secure a vote of no confidence, a fake frozen bank account, and a fake UN reinforcements story because a plane was getting maintenance in North Bay.

The Amazon Rainforest May Be in Trouble

News about climate change has been pushed into the background for a while because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But it's not going away and some of the news is not good.

We've known for some time the Amazon rainforest is in serious trouble, with deforestation destroying more and more of the forest. Now a new study suggests that the rainforest is losing it's ability to recover from external stresses like drought, not to mention the impacts of human settlement.

A paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change aims to provide more clarity on that tipping point, which may be rapidly approaching. While prior research used complicated modeling to predict how the decline might unfold, this new research is based on satellite data that shows 75 percent of the Amazon has become less resilient to disturbances like drought.

For a forest, one way to track resiliency is through a satellite measurement called vegetation optical depth, or VOD, which penetrates through the canopy and detects how much woody biomass there is. (Other satellite techniques just look at the tops of trees, but VOD gets a better picture of what’s hidden underneath.) These scientists also looked at a separate data set tracking changes in types of land cover—for instance, forest versus farms—which allowed them to pick out where urban areas and croplands have intruded on the rainforest. Because they had data going back to 1991, they could watch how long it took for a given plot of the Amazon to recover by growing its biomass back after a disturbance. This regrowth is resilience.

And the Amazon is losing it. The researchers broke the rainforest up into an imaginary grid, allowing them to keep track of vegetation within the cells and to correlate that with stressors like droughts or nearby land development. 

They found that the vegetation in over three-quarters of the Amazon has been losing resilience since the early 2000s—a slower rate of return to normal after disruptions. Because the researchers also had that land-cover data, they could further show that areas that receive less rainfall or are closer to human disturbances, like farmland, are losing resilience faster than wetter, unsullied land. 

Featured Links - March 14, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. No politics or COVID-19 this week. 

• The 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. "Fantasy is the oldest genre of literature, but its best release ever landed just six years ago." It's an interesting list, but it ignores many major works written before 1985.
• Ursula K. Le Guin in My Own Time. "How Amal El-Mohtar Fell Completely in Love."
• Netflix Has Hidden Streaming Settings You've Probably Never Tried. "Even if you stream TV on a daily basis, chances are you haven't discovered all the tricks Netflix has to offer."
• A History of Indie Folk in 45 Albums. There are very few albums on this list that I would consider "folk music", but there's still a lot of good music to check out.
• Mass Effect 3's Ending Changed Fandom Forever. "A decade later, the final 10 minutes of BioWare's space RPG have left a ripple throughout pop culture."
• Pixar Employees Make Stunning Accusation: Disney Censors The Studio’s Films. One of the many reasons I will not subscribe to Disney+. 

Photo of the Week - March 13, 2022

I love looking at the bare tree branches overhead at this time of year. This photo was a grab shot with my Pixel 4a. 

 

Saturday Sounds - Rusty McCarthy - Great Lakes Nocturnes

Rusty McCarthy is a guitarist, songwriter, and producer living in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. When I was in high school he was in the biggest local band, the Polisi Bassoon, and went on to a successful musical career in Southern Ontario before moving back to the Sault. 

He has numerous solo albums and this week I'm featuring a collection of instrumentals called Great Lakes Nocturnes. With titles like "Harmony Bay", "St. Mary's River Fantasy" and "On Georgian Bay", the northern Ontario influences are obvious. This is a quieter album than some of his others and very pleasant. 

The Roots of Modern SF

It's a common belief that modern science fiction as a genre began with the publication of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories in 1926 and came to maturity in Astounding in the 1940s under the editorship of John W. Campbell. That's true, at least as far as the commercial development of SF, but ignores the many literary predecessors going back at least as far as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

MIT Press is launching a series of books, published under the banner of The Radium Age that will shed some light on the early works that influenced modern authors. Although it includes works by Wells and Doyle, most of the title will be unfamiliar to modern readers. 

MIT Press is launching a new project today: it's publishing a new series, The Radium Age, which'll be edited by Joshua Glenn, which will examine the works that came before the Golden Age of science fiction — works that he believes held a great influence on the genre that followed, and which have largely been forgotten.

The first installment, Voices from the Radium Age, comes out today. Edited by Glenn, it's a collection of shorter works by authors like Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, W. E. B. Du Bois, and more, all published between 1905 and 1931. After that, the press will release J.D. Beresford's A World of Women, originally published in 1913.

Other installments will hit bookstores later in the year. May brings E.V. Odle's 1920 novel The Clockwork Man, and H.G. Wells' The World Set Free, August will see Of One Blood by Pauline Hopkins and Nordenholt's Million by J.J. Connington, and Rose Macaulay's What Not will debut in October. Other titles, like Theodore Savage by Cicely Hamilton, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and The Poison Belt will come in 2023.

This is an interesting project. When I was in university studying English literature, I read a few books from that era but other than Wells, no works of science fiction and fantasy were on the curriculum. Maybe the series will help to change that.

And the covers are gorgeous. 

Thanks to Andrew Liptak and his Transfer Orbit newsletter for bringing this to my attention. I highly recommend subscribing.

2021 Nebula Awards Ballot

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have announced the nominees for the 2021 Nebula Awards. The winners will be announced on May 21, 2022 in a webcast, which will be part of the (virtual) Nebula Conference Online. 

These are the nominees for the Nebula Award for Novel:

The Unbroken, C.L. Clark (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

A Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom; Orbit UK)

Machinehood, S.B. Divya (Saga)

A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)

Plague Birds, Jason Sanford (Apex)

There are links to most of the short fiction nominees so you can read them online.  

As usual, it's a diverse list. It will likely be somewhat different from the Hugu Award ballot though I expect that the books by P. Djeli Clark and Arkady Martine will make the Hugo ballot. Also as usual, I haven't yet read any of the nominees, though I will certainly read A Desolation Called Peace in due course.

When Is It Safe To Go Maskless?

As the latest COVID-19 wave begins to recede, many jurisdictions are removing their mask mandates. That doesn't mean that you can't still wear a mask though, but you might wonder when it's safe to do.

For some time, I've been following Dr. Wachter on Twitter. He's the chair of the department of medicine at UCSF (University of California San Francisco) and is both knowledgeable and a good communicator. In this article, he explains some of the factors you should think about when deciding whether or not to wear a mask in various situations.

SFGATE: When and where are you still wearing a mask and why?

Wachter: I am now comfortable eating indoors in restaurants. I also am fine getting together in small to mid-sized groups (up to 10 or so) of people who I’m pretty confident are vaccinated. (For example, I’ve resumed, maskless, my eight-person poker game.) I haven’t worn a mask outdoors since early in the pandemic. But in larger indoor groups or in places where it seems unnecessary to accept any risk of catching COVID, I’ll still wear a mask. So I wear one when I’m shopping, and would wear one if I went to a movie or indoor sporting event. I’m still required to wear one in the hospital. Flying: I keep it on for as much of the flight as I can, and try to remove it (briefly) to eat when others around me have their masks on.

SFGATE: What factors should people consider when determining whether or not to wear a mask in certain situations?

Wachter: How much COVID is there in your region, what is your own personal risk from COVID (have you had three shots or, if you’ve had a documented infection, at least one to two shots; and also are you older, immunosuppressed, have medical co-morbidities or live with people who meet any of these categories). It’s also worth understanding how risk-averse you are.

As for myself, I have several boxes of KN95 masks and will continue to wear them indoors or crowded outdoor situations for some time to come. COVID-19 rates in Souther Ontario are coming down and I now feel comfortable enough to eat indoors in a restaurant. But I will still wear them shopping or going to a concert or movie, probably until the summer, depending on where we stand with infection rates. 

Featured Links - March 7, 2022

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

• 460 Free Textbooks – Math, Science, and More [Online PDF for College and High School]. " These high school and university textbooks are Creative Commons-licensed by their authors, and you can use them freely."
• Toronto man came up with invention to fix every Canadian kid's worst nightmare. Canadian innovation at it's best.
• Implications to Space Science from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. The implications are many and varied and affect more than the ISS, which has been getting all the news.
• A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws. "For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff."
• Hackers stoke pandemonium amid Russia’s war in Ukraine. "A wave of cyberattacks meant to buoy Ukraine could have unintended consequences."
• What if the Mid-Atlantic’s worst nor’easter on record struck today? "Sea levels from Virginia to New Jersey are up to a foot higher now than they were when the Ash Wednesday storm struck in 1962."

Photo of the Week - March 6. 2022

My god, it's full of ... birds.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 68 mm., F8, 1/3000 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulatoin

 

Saturday Sounds - Steve Kimock Band - Live in Colorado, Vol. 3

Steve Kimock is one of those musicians who deserves to be a lot better known than he is. He's been playing around with various and sundry musicians in the San Francisco music scene since the 1980s, in bands like Zero, with his own groups, and as a hired guitarist with people like Bruce Hornsby and Bob Weir. He's a superb guitarist with a delicate touch and able to play in a wide variety of styles. 

Here's a fine live concert recording from Colorado in 2003 that features some of his best material.  

It's Time to Cancel the SLS Program

I've said here before that NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) is a giant boondoggle, a waste of money that could better be spent on other programs. Now, it's become even clearer on just how ridiculously expensive the SLS is and how little value for the money it offers.

Earlier this week, NASA's inspector general revealed that an SLS launch will cost at least $4 billion, and that doesn't include amortization of the development costs. Factor those in, and you might be looking at more than double that cost. Compare that to the cost of SpaceX's SuperHeavy/Starship combo, which will be under $10 million per launch, and the booster and Starship will be reusable. 

Appearing before a House Science Committee hearing on NASA's Artemis program, Martin revealed the operational costs of the big rocket and spacecraft for the first time. Moreover, he took aim at NASA and particularly its large aerospace contractors for their "very poor" performance in developing these vehicles.

Martin said that the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion. This is, he said, "a price tag that strikes us as unsustainable." With this comment, Martin essentially threw down his gauntlet and said NASA cannot have a meaningful exploration program based around SLS and Orion at this cost.

There's no justification for spending this amount of money on the SLS. It should be cancelled immediately and the money reallocated to SpaceX, Blue Orgin, and the other private companies working on reusable space launch systems.  

Help With Understanding Risk

Risk can be a hard thing to understand and evaluate. What does it mean when someone says that the chance of dying from COVID-19 is about .1% (roughly the case for my age group)? How does that compare with other activities,  like taking a drive out of town to visit friends or having surgery under anesthetic?

In Understanding Risk, Katelyn Jetelina looks at the risk of dying from COVID-19 and provides a framework for comparing it to other activities. It's one of the best articles I've read on the subject. To help explain things, she uses the concept of a MicroMort (MM), or one chance in a million of dying, originally developed in the book Norm Chronicles. For example, for people in my age group, contracting COVID-19, the "cost" is about 6,000 MM. That's roughly equivalent to the risk of a US baby dying during the first year of life. 

Because “dying from COVID-19” is new in our risk repertoire, we can contextualize it by comparing it to other activities, which may help calibrate risk. For example:

• The risk of a 0-4 year old dying from a COVID-19 infection (227 MM) is about the same as the risk of a mom dying from childbirth in the U.S. (210 MM).
• For a vaccinated 18-49 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (90/48 MM) is less than the annual risk of dying on the road (100 MM).
• For a boosted 50-64 year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (516 MM) is about the same risk as driving for 5 years in the U.S. (500 MM).
• For an unvaccinated 65+ year old, the risk of dying from an Omicron infection (28,978 MM) is about as risky as 1.5 years of heroin use (29,550 MM).
• For a boosted 65+ year old, the risk of dying after an infection (6,023 MM) is about as risky as a baby’s first year of life (6,600 MM). Or, it’s a little more risky than one year of active service in Afghanistan in 2011 (5,000 MM).

The Dark Side of Space Disinformation

I've been a space nerd since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. So I have a pretty good understanding of what's real in the space program and what's not (no, Stanley Kubrick did not film the Apollo moon landings on a backlot) and astronomy (no, Mars is not suddenly going to appear as big as the moon).  Generally, I haven't paid that much attention to space-related disinformation, writing it off as plain silliness. 

But it does have a dark side, as this interview with cosmologist Katie Mack points out. 

Q: On the face of it, this seems frustrating, but not necessarily as troubling as health misinformation.

A: The way it goes is that you see something that’s false and you believe it. Right? Some physics or astronomy thing that is false, but for whatever reason you think it’s true. And then you discover that it’s not an accepted idea. All the experts say it’s wrong. And then at that point, either you accept what the experts say, or—if you still think that thing is true—then the experts are lying. And if the experts are lying, then that leads you directly to the conspiracies, right? Because you have to say, what else are they lying about? Why are they lying? Who are these people running the show?

That’s what happens with things like the flat Earth conspiracy, which is not something you can believe in if you don’t believe that everybody involved in the space community is a liar. And if they’re lying, they must be coordinated by some high-up conspiracy, and then that leads into all of the other conspiracies that require some kind of global leader. Once you dig down into it, they all kind of look the same. They all get you to paranoid conspiracies, anti-Semitism, “the elites are holding us down” … that kind of thing. 

Movie and TV Reviews - February 2022

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in February. Mostly it was TV shows this month as we worked our way through several series.

Movies

• Come From Away: This musical is based on what happened in Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11 when the small town was inundated with passengers from more than 30 airliners that had to make emergency landings. I am not a big fan of musicals but I really enjoyed this; it's one of the best theatrical productions of any sort that I've seen. (Apple TV+)

TV Shows

• Doom Patrol (Seasons 2 and 3): This show got stranger and more gonzo as it went along. It's a credit to the producers, writers, and actors that I enjoyed it as much as I did even though I often had trouble following what was going on (mostly due to my lack of knowledge of the DC comic universe and not paying enough attention). 
• Doctor Who (Season 12): I didn't enjoy this season very much. There's too much time running around yelling, on both the part of Jodie Whittaker and her companions. She's a capable enough actor, but the writing isn't up to the level of some of the previous seasons, although it did get better towards the end of the season.(BBC)
• Reacher (Season 1): I enjoyed this series though more for the quality of the supporting actors than Alan Ritchson. (He's a good actor, but the role didn't work for me). It was nice to see some local places show up at various points. (Amazon Prime)
• Line of Duty (Season 6): This is one of the very best British crime dramas with superb acting and tight, engaging, and tense plots. The only series that comes close to matching it is the recent Manhunt with Martin Clunes. The ending of the season leaves it open as to whether it will continue, although if it does, it may be without some of the current actors. (BBC)
• Grantchester (Season 1 and 2). Here's another British crime dramas, this with a vicar as the main character. I thought it would be lighter than it turned out to be. It's good, but would benefit from longer episodes as the one-hour format compresses too much into a show. (PBS Masterpiece)