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."

2022 World Fantasy Awards

The winners of the 2022 World Fantasy Awards were announced over the weekend at the World Fantasy Convention in New Orleans. These are the fiction winners.

Best Novel: The Jasmine Throne, Tasha Suri (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Best Novella: And What Can We Offer You Tonight, Premee Mohamed (Neon Hemlock)

Best Short Fiction: “(emet)”, Lauren Ring (F&SF 7-8/21)

Best Anthology: The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, ed. (Jembefola)

Best Collection: Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan, Usman T. Malik (Kitab)

Samuel R. Delany and Terri Windling received Lifetime Achievement Awards.

Photo of the Week - November 6, 2022

We had a multi-day fog event earlier in the week. I took the camera out and walked around the park behind our house. It was quiet and a bit eerie. I used the Tri-X 400 film simulation from Fuji X Weekly to enhance the mood. When I was using film SLRs, Tri-X was my favourite black-and-white film and this simulation recreates the look quite closely. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm. WR at 25 mm., F5.6, 1/58 second,  ISO 12,800, -1 stop EV, Tri-X 400 film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Get More Down - Sci-Fi Soldier (Phish)

I got a surprise this week. Phish dropped a new album, Get More Down, under the moniker of Sci-Fi Soldier, which explains why I couldn't find it in Phish's catalog on Spotify. 

The album comes out of their October 2021 "musical costume" show, where they played a set as Sci-Fi Soldier, a band from a couple of thousand years in the future. Relix has some details about the release.

The project was announced on Sci-Fi Solider’s social media, where they wrote, “Objectively the most important and consequential album of all time, Get More Down was recorded by the band Sci-Fi Soldier in the year 4680 and sent back through time to save planet Earth from a cataclysmic event called The Howling. Sci-Fi Soldier learned the power of music from humans who traveled deep into space using the nine cubes of cosmic reality.”

Since the Halloween show, during which Phish shared a comic book detailing their story and dressed as their alter-egos (Clueless Wallob/Trey Anastasio, Pat Malone/Page McConnell, Half-Nelson/Mike Gordon and Paulie Roots/Jon Fishman), Phish have peppered their songs throughout live shows during their tours, but the release of Get More Down comes completely as a surprise, much like the Halloween show itself.

The band has yet to acknowledge the LP’s existence.

I've only had a chance to listen through it once, so my initial opinion that it's not one of my favourite Phish albums, may change. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.  

Wretched Excess

I've posted before about the problems that wealth inequality are causing. I could have posted quite a few more, like the 18-million-dollar Toronto mansion that recently sold. I wouldn't mind having a bigger house (preferably one without any stairs), but even if I had the money, I wouldn't buy something like that.  

It seems that having a lot of money can go to peoples' heads. This Washington Post article, inspired by the television show, White Lotus (which I have not watched) that has many examples of how money can turn people into assholes. Read it to know what not to do when you win the PowerBall lottery.

Sandra Weinacht, a travel planner and co-owner of Inside Europe Travel Experiences, regularly hears stories of extreme behavior from friends and business connections who work in Europe’s five-star hotels.

She says a hotelier in France told her that they had a guest request a huge amount of Sanpellegrino to be delivered from Italy in the same day. No other sparkling water would do; it had to be Sanpellegrino — and not because the guest loved the taste.

“His Russian client needed that water to wash her hair, and it could not be Perrier,” Weinacht says. “It had to be Sanpellegrino.”

Does this perhaps remind you of 1789? 

30 Days of Dead and More

Once more, it's time for 30 Days of Dead where for each day in November you can download a high-quality MP3 of a Grateful Dead song. Even better than that, it's free.  

We hope you've been brushing up on your live Grateful Dead and making room on all your devices because we're about to drop a motherload of high-quality MP3 downloads on you. Yes, there will once again be 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, one for every day in November, selected by archivist and producer David Lemieux. The tracks are yours, no strings attached, but we hope you’ll stick around for the challenge and the chance to win some sweet swag from the Dead.

You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C's, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic "comeback" tour from a spacey 70s show? Each day we'll post a song from one of the Dead's coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in '93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen's harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? If you think you know, lob your answer in and you just might find yourself taking home our daily prize of a 2023 Grateful Dead wall calendar or the grand prize - both, YES BOTH - of this year's coveted boxed set.

If you want even more of the Grateful Dead, this Saturday you can attend this year's Meet-Up at the Movies, featuring a performance from the Tivoli Concert Hall on April 17, 1972. I went to the Tuesday night screening and loved it; it was the Grateful Dead at their rocking best. 

Windows' Built-In Accessibility Features

Although many people consider Apple to be the leader in accessibility, Microsoft Windows does have a wide-ranging set of accessibility features. I use some of them daily, including larger fonts, dark mode, a large inverse mouse cursor and the "sonar" setting my mouse that displays an animation where my mouse cursor is when I hit the CTRL key. But there's much more, as this article from the Ask Woody newsletter points out. 

Windows’ built-in accessibility features are found in Settings. For Windows 10, look for Ease of Access. For Windows 11, the panel has been rebranded Accessibility, with a new icon shaped like a person. Regardless of its name, you can get directly to the settings with the keyboard shortcut WinKey+U, a shortcut that has been around since at least Windows 7. (See the Microsoft support article Windows keyboard shortcuts for accessibility for all the keyboard shortcuts associated with accessibility in Windows 7, 8.1, 10, and 11.)

Even the Windows sign-in screen has accessibility support. On the screen, three icons appear in the lower-right corner. The center one, which differs in appearance between Windows 10 and 11, brings up a menu of features you can enable to assist your sign-in.

Windows 11 has one more way to get to Accessibility settings. By default, the taskbar has a group of three icons representing connectivity, sound, and battery status. Clicking on the group (the individual icons are not clickable) pops up a small dialog that includes a button for Accessibility.

Movie and TV Reviews - October 2022

Short reviews of TV shows we watched in October. The Blue Jays didn't make the playoffs, so we watched quite a bit more TV.

Movies

• Anthropocene: The Human Epoch. Another movie from epochal photographer Edward Burtynsky. See this on a big screen if you ever get the chance. (TVO)
• Morbius. A mildly diverting popcorn movie for Saturday night. (Amazon Prime)
• Twister: We needed something mindless and familiar. (Crave)
• Bullet Train: Totally silly and over-the-top in a Tarantino sort of way. Enjoyable as long as you don't stop to think about it and you're OK with wanton violence. (VOD)

TV Shows

• Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Visually spectacular with absolutely nothing else to recommend it. (Amazon Prime)
• Andor: This is definitely the best of the new live-action Star Wars series that Disney has been producing. More like this, please. (Disney+)
• House of the Dragon: I came down hard on this after the first episode. It's gotten better as it progressed but is still deeply flawed. It is better than the awful Rings of Power. (Crave)
  
• The Peripheral: I will probably have more to say about his once the series finishes, but after three episodes I am blown away. (Amazon Prime)
• Mystery Road: Origin. A gritty (literally) Australian drama set in a dusty, outback mining town. This is a prequel to the previous two series. We liked it a lot. Now, maybe we'll go back and finish season 2, which we stopped watching halfway through the season for no particular reason. (Acorn TV)
• She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. I am not a big fan of most Marvel productions, but I really enjoyed this. It isn't to be taken seriously and it doesn't take itself seriously either. Tatiana Maslany is wasted in the role; watch Orphan Black to see how good she can be. (Disney+)
• My Life Is Murder (season 3): The most saturated show on television. It does make me want to visit Melbourne. (Acorn TV). Otherwise, meh. 
• Doctor Who: The Power of the Doctor. So we get a new (old) Doctor for the next season. Yippee s**t. As this article points out, it's time for a bigger change than that. (BBC)
• Whistable Pearl: Another cozy British mystery set in the fishing port of Whistable. Mainly worth watching for the scenery. It is a place I would like to visit. (Acorn TV)