Featured Links - September 19, 2022

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

The marsh on a hot summer's morning

“Word Window” in trouble with Microsoft. "Microsoft has dropped down hard on a UK teacher with a little bit of plastic helping dyslexic students read.  It seems the company can’t learn from past mistakes."

Tolkien and the Horrors of the Great War. "The First World War left a lasting impression on Tolkien.

2022 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology."

Imagining COVID is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short. It’s time to wake up. "COVID is nothing at all like the flu. It is causing a vastly worse scale of damage. We must change our tactics to dramatically cut transmission. In addition to a more vigorous campaign to increase vaccine booster coverage, we need to invest in indoor ventilation and actively promote the benefits of wearing high-quality masks in crowded indoor settings."

‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug filled reality of life in an oil camp. "Before work like Hark! A Vagrant made her famous, the Canadian cartoonist spent two years in the Alberta wilderness, see-sawing between boredom and fear for her safety. Now she is finally ready to tell the story."

“It’s just what I did:” First woman to drive solo around Australia in a non-Tesla EV. "It’s a simple statement that belies some hard truths. One, that there have only been an estimated 20 people to date who are known to have completed the “Big Lap” in an EV – across remote expanses of the outback with little in the way of electric car chargers."

15 Reddit Acronyms Everyone Should Know. "Feel right at home while browsing Reddit by learning these popular acron yms that Redditors use.'  Having been on the internet for about 30 years, I knew some of these, but not all.

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms. "Worshippers are leaving the Church of Latter-day Saints in record numbers, and some are finding solace with an apostate band of psilocybin-loving spiritual explorers looking for God — one trip at a time."