Movie and TV Reviews - March 2023

Short reviews of TV shows and movies we watched in January. (Don't expect Pauline Kael. I do these posts mostly to keep track of what we've been watching). Now that baseball season is starting, the next few month's posts will likely be shorter.

Movies

• The Sound of 007: A documentary about the music of the James Bond movies. If you like the Bond flicks, you'll like this. (Amazon Prime)
• Little Feat - Celebrating Waiting for Columbus at the Ryman: Excellent concert movie with many special guests celebrating the classic Little Feat album. The last half hour, especially, is awesome (PBS)
• Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes. Excellent documentary filmed over several years outlining the life of the great Jazz bassist. Tidbit: He played on a Grace Slick album but never played with John Coltrane. (PBS)
• Elvis Costello in Memphis: This is a concert recorded in a club in Memphis in 2005. This isn't quite as high-energy as the shows I saw in 1978, but it's very watchable and includes a guest appearance by Emmy Lou Harris. (Prime)
• The Woman King: I doubt the historical accuracy of this, but it's an entertaining enough movie. (Crave)

TV Shows

• The Mandalorian (season 3): Not the most entertaining season so far, though the third episode was interesting and more like Andor. (Disney+).
• Nova: The Star Seekers of Senegal. A very interesting episode that shows both modern and ancient astronomy in Senegal. (PBS)
• Classic Albums: Rush - 2112 - Moving Pictures: If you like Rush, you'll enjoy this. If you don't, it won't change your mind. (Prime)
• Beyond Paradise: This is a spin-off from Death in Paradise. It's a bit darker in tone, but sill one of those "cozy mysteries". (BritBox)
• The Last of Us: I was expecting this to be good, based on the reviews and comments from friends. The first couple of episodes were well-done but standard zombie thrillers. The third episode was something else completely and blew me away. I'm looking forward to the rest of the season. 

A Promising New Treatment for Strokes

I just read a very interesting article in the New York Times about the Calgary Foothills hospital and how they are treating strokes with EVT (endovascular thrombectomy), which involves threading a device into an artery and removing the blood clot causing the stroke. If the patient is lucky, the chances of a complete recovery are very good. However, it does require a specialized team and coordination with paramedics and ER, so it will take a long time to implement widely. (Gifted article, no paywall)

Stroke kills about six and a half million people around the world annually. It’s the second most common cause of death worldwide, and it consistently ranks among the top five causes of death in Canada and the United States. Beyond the raw death toll, stroke is also a leading global cause of disability — too often, it leaves behind the kinds of severe deficits that force loved ones to become full-time caregivers. Even smaller, less severe strokes are associated with the onset of dementia and many other complications.

Given that toll, it’s no exaggeration to call the EVT one of the most important medical innovations of the past decade, with the potential to save millions of lives and livelihoods. Neurointerventionalists in the United States now complete roughly 60,000 EVTs per year. (Last year, one of them appears to have been done on John Fetterman while he was a Democratic candidate for senator, which means the procedure may have helped determine control of the U.S. Senate.) But the overall number of Americans who could have benefited from an EVT is at least twice that.

Some Good Advice About Computer Security

Ed Bott is a technology journalist who's been writing for more than twenty years. He's also a frequent guess on podcasts on the Twit.tv podcast network. As the saying goes, he's been around the block a few times, and he knows what he's talking about.

He's recently written a series of articles about computer security, focusing on managing your passwords, that are well worth reading. 

Getting your online security in order. "The LastPass data breach should be a wake-up call for all of us, but simply advising people to use a password manager isn’t enough."

Get your passwords organized (in 30 minutes or less). "Set aside a half-hour, follow this three-step program. and you can dramatically improve your online security."

How to choose (and use) a password manager. "A good password manager app helps keep your personal data safer online and makes it easier for you to work with secure apps and services. Here's what to look for."

Multi-factor authentication is easier than you think. "Having a strong, unique password is a good start, but it's not enough. Adding a second layer of protection is worth the extra effort."

Do you need advanced security options? "You've already installed a password manager and turned on 2-factor authentication. Do you need to do more?"

Online Image Tools

There are quite a few online image editing tools out there, but many of them require you to upload your image for processing on their server. Online Image Tools is a site that does all of its processing using your browser's JavaScript in a simple interface.

Just find the task you want to perform and click, then select your file. Each page contains an example and some instructions. Not everything is that simple; for example, the feature to add text to an image requires you to input the coordinates of the text box, and they don't give you the image size. Drawing it onscreen would be much simpler but that doesn't seem to work. 

Out of the current features, the most useful are probably the file conversions. They do show a table of many features that they plan to add in the future. 

I would use this for converting formats or resizing though.

Thanks to the Android Intelligence newsletter for the tip. 

Some Articles About ChatGPT

I'm seeing a LOT of articles about the new release of ChatGPT, generative AI systems, and Large Language Models. I've played around with the ChatGPT built into Microsoft's Edge and have been impressed with some of the things it can do, like writing a Microsoft Word macro that took me a day of work to figure out when I tried it at the TMX Group. On the other hand, it's clear that anyone using it has to be extremely careful to check the accuracy of the results.

I do think that we are on the cusp of an inflection point similar to the development of the world-wide-web or the release of the iPhone. It's going to be interesting to see how it all turns out. 

Here are a few articles worth reading.

• Cheating is All You Need. "There is something legendary and historic happening in software engineering, right now as we speak, and yet most of you don’t realize at all how big it is. LLMs aren’t just the biggest change since social, mobile, or cloud–they’re the biggest thing since the World Wide Web. And on the coding front, they’re the biggest thing since IDEs and Stack Overflow, and may well eclipse them both." I think he's right, at least as far as the effects of LLMs on software engineering. You can skip the last quarter of the article, which is basically a plug for his compary. 
• scrapeghost is an experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT. "The library provides a means to scrape structured data from HTML without writing page-specific code." This is pretty technical, but it shows the power of the new systems, and how easy it is to build on them if you have a moderate amount of programmig ability. Put it this way: I can understand what he did here, and I could probably do something similar with a month or so of study, based on the Javascript and web design skills I learned during my technical writing career. An experienced programmer could knock it off in a day or two. 
• Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow. " Microsoft’s Bing said Google’s Bard had been shut down after it misread a story citing a tweet sourced from a joke. It’s not a good sign for the future of online misinformation." 
• The GPT-x Revolution in Medicine. "Review of a new book with 6 months of assessing GPT-4 for medical applications." 
• 11 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level. "Sure, anyone can use OpenAI’s chatbot. But with smart engineering, you can get way more interesting results."

Featured Links - March 27, 2023

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

CJ relaxing

• Deceptive Design. "Deceptive design patterns (also known as "dark patterns") are tricks used in websites and apps that make you do things that you didn't mean to, like buying or signing up for something. The purpose of this site is to spread awareness and to shame companies that use these patterns."
• How Does COVID-19 Affect the Heart? "The ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 variants and vast numbers of recovered COVID-19 patients portend a burgeoning global cardiovascular disease burden." Keep those masks on!
• Do AI generators infringe? Three new lawsuits consider this mega question. "The legal implications of AI are varied, evolving, and complex, but the focus of this post is AI’s intersection with intellectual property—in particular, the IP and IP-adjacent issues raised by AI’s input—i.e., the content used to train AI." CHatGPT and its ilk are going to keep many lawyers gainfully employed.
• None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use. "A sobering new study finds that the world's biggest industries burn through $7.3 trillion worth of free natural capital a year. And it's the only reason they turn a profit."
• I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory. "As the US boosts production of silicon chips, an American journalist goes inside TSMC, the mysterious Taiwanese company at the center of the global industry."
• Norton Space Props Is El Dorado For a Burgeoning Space Industry. "This unassuming business has been a low-key destination in the space world for more than seven decades. What looks at first glance like just another cut-rate junkyard was actually a vital bridge connecting the first space age to the current new space era. Thanks to some prescient hoarding and canny engineering, this salvage outlet became a site where old technology, once lost, came roaring back to life."

Photo of the Week - March 26, 2023

This is a picture of my mother, Jeannine Soltys, who we buried yesterday. She was a wonderful mother and her death leaves a big hole in our lives. She lived to 94 and was the last of her generation on both sides of my family.

Jeannine Soltys

 

Saturday Sounds - Metric - Formentera

I first saw Metric duing the summer of 2010 when they gave a free concert at Union Station. My daughter was a fan of their music and I was working downtown so I offered to go with her. At the time I was only vaguely familiar with the band (mostly as an offshoot of Broken Social Scene who we both loved), but I really enjoyed it. A few years later, she took me to a Metric show at the Air Canada Centre for my birthday and again, I enjoyed it.  They're a powerful and exciting live band, and Emily Haines has incredible stage presence.

Recently, I came across an article from Relix about their latest album, Formentera, which I had not yet heard. 

For years, the band has held a unique position within the world of indie music: popular enough to continuously make a dent in the Billboard charts—2012’s Synthetica notably hit No. 12 overall—hip enough to attract tastemaker reviews and versatile enough to open Smashing Pumpkins’ partial reunion tour in 2018. But Formentera expanded the band’s universe past gleaming New Wave hooks and synth-pop atmospheres, arriving at some unique combinations. The title track is somehow funky and muted, built for stoned stargazing and romantic swiveling—a combination of vibes that Shaw astutely describes as “space Bee[1]Gees.” Elsewhere, the slow-churning, light-show-worthy “Enemies of the Ocean” is lifted by the swooning strings of the Budapest Art Orchestra, recorded through a live conference session.

It's a good album and I'll listen to it again, I'm sure. Enjoy.

We're Toast 37

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 branches

• How Fungi Could Cause the Next Pandemic. "The Last of Us may be more real than you think. The spread of fungal pathogens in humans and other species are a disaster waiting to happen."
• Activist Group Spreads Misinformation to Stop US Solar Projects. "An energy company's plans for a solar plant powering 25,000 homes were thwarted after a four-year battle with a nonprofit that teamed with locals to restrict large-scale solar projects, reports NPR. That non-profit's name? Citizens for Responsible Solar."
• The Christian Nationalist Machine Turning Hate Into Law. "The National Association of Christian Lawmakers is enacting its "biblical worldview," one state legislature at a time."
• Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19. "Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial. Care pathways of those surviving the acute episode of COVID-19 should include attention to cardiovascular health and disease."
• Absence from work at record high as Americans feel strain from Covid. "More than a million people have called out sick for the past three years, and CDC says long Covid probably a contributor too."
• Data-driven predictions of the time remaining until critical global warming thresholds are reached. "Our results confirm that global warming is already on the verge of crossing the 1.5 °C threshold, even if the climate forcing pathway is substantially reduced in the near-term. Our predictions also suggest that even with substantial greenhouse gas mitigation, there is still a possibility of failing to hold global warming below the 2 °C threshold."
• COVID survivors at increased risk of long-term gastrointestinal conditions. "Although people with severe COVID had highest risk, mild cases also upped risks."

Some Useful Coding Tutorials for Tech Writers

Some years ago, at one of my annual performance reviews, my boss said: "I didn't realize how technical your job is". That's despite my title being Senior Technical Writer. While I had to produce and edit numerous specification smf design documents, I was also building online help, designing and maintaining a departmental website and documentation archive, and writing Word and FrameMaker macros to streamline my workflow. All that meant that I had be be able to work with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and VBA at a minimum, and be able to read and understand Linux shell scripts.

I relied on many web resources to help me learn some of this. One of the better ones is freeCodeCamp, which publishes thousands of articles, tutorials, and courses about a wide range of programming languages and topics. I still subscribe to their weekly newsletter. Here are links to a few articles that I think might help you if you are a technical writer who is on the more technical side of the spectrum or you need to learn a new skill. 

• Introduction to Algorithms with JavaScript Examples. "If you are new to algorithms, this is handbook is a great place to start. It's chock-full of JavaScript algorithm code examples. And it explains key concepts like Time Complexity and Big O Notation. (full-length handbook)."
• How to Extract Pages from a PDF and Render Them with JavaScript. "PDF files are great for certain types of documents. But they can be hard to work with as a developer. This tutorial will give you an overview of popular libraries for working with PDF files. Then it will show you how to extract pages from a PDF and render them using JavaScript. (20-minute read)."
• An Introduction to Software Architecture Patterns. "What is Software Architecture? What are Design Patterns? This handbook will answer these questions. It will also teach you some of the more common patterns, with code examples to help you better understand. You'll learn about Microservice Architecture, the Client-Server Model, Load Balancing, and other practical concepts you can use in your own coding. (1-hour read)"
• Regular Expressions for Beginners. "Regular Expressions (often abbreviated as RegEx) can help you with everyday tasks like find/replace in your text editor, filtering Trello cards, or web searches with DuckDuckGo. This tutorial will teach you the RegEx basics. You can then naturally expand on your RegEx skills over the years as you use them."
• Learn CSS in 11 Hours. "freeCodeCamp just published an in-depth CSS for Beginners course, taught by an experienced developer and software architect. You'lllearn Selectors, Typography, Variables, CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, and other key concepts. You don't have to rely on templates and copy-pasted CSS examples. If you put in the time, you can understand how CSS really works under the hood. This course is a solid starting point. (11 hour YouTube course)"
• How to Use CSS Grid Layout "CSS Grid is built into CSS, and helps you create responsive website layouts. It's a 2-dimensional grid that can dramatically simplify your web design process. This tutorial will teach you how to use CSS Grid through a series of examples. It will really help you solidify your understanding of the key concepts. (12 minute read)."

I will probably publish more of these links in the future.

Featured Links - March 20, 2023

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

A wintry flower basket

• Make ChatGPT Work for You With These Browser Extensions. "If the AI bot is going to stick around, you may as well get the most out of it." Or you could just use Microsoft Edge with Bing's implementation of ChatGPT, which is good enough to be unnerving. 
• Mystery of Ancient Space Superstorms Deepens. "A fresh analysis of tree-ring data suggests barrages of cosmic radiation that washed over Earth centuries ago may have come from sources besides our sun." If this happened now, it would not be good.
• Blue Origin claims its new method unlocks 'unlimited solar power'. "Jeff Bezos' private space firm developed a technique for building solar cells using only lunar regolith and sunlight." This could be a game change for lunar exploration and the development of Earth-orbiting solar power satellites.
• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? If you want to understand how ChatGPT and other large-language-model generative AI systems work, then this article by Stephen Wolfram is THE one to read. Note: It is very long and, as you might expect from the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, also quite technical. (No I haven't read it – yet).
• A Little-Known Inflammatory Disease Is Hiding in Plain Sight. "Genetic analyses show a newly discovered condition called Vexas is more common than previously thought—and could explain some patients’ undiagnosed symptoms."
• The Single-Staircase Radicals Have a Good Point. "A surprising theory of what’s wrong with North American apartment buildings."

 

Photo of the Week - March 19, 2023

We've had an odd winter here so far. February was unusually mild, then cold air, snow, and a series of storms moved in for March, reversing the usual pattern. I took this picture on one of my walks, during a thaw between two storms. It's from my Pixel 4a, converted to black-and-white in Google Photos.

This is the way

Saturday Sounds - Fairport Convention - August 13, 1985 - Vienna Folk Festival

It's time for more Fairport Convention, recorded at the Vienna Folk Festival in 1985. This one features guest appearances by Jerry Donahue and Richard Thompson. As you might expect, there's a lot of loud electric music in this set, including something new to me, a loud guitar medley of songs by The Shadows. The performance of Sloth near the end of the set is especially memorable. 

The video is VHS quality but the audio is fine. I wish I'd been there. Enjoy.

How The Nethlands Leads In Recycling Buildings

Most people have a TV show or genre that is their comfort viewing; something that's entertaining and not too taxing or intense. In my case, it's antiques shows like Antiques Roadshow or the British Antiques Road Trip, which Nancy and I have been watching recently.

One thing that has struck me repeatedly is the utility of some very old antiques, for example a 17th century crib or a 19th century water pump. They're utilitarian items, not really beautiful, but they are hundreds of years old and still useful.

How many of our modern home items would still be useful sometime in the 22nd or 23rd centuries. Not many, I think. And how many of our homes would still be liveable?

Which leads to the real subject of this blog post; an article published by the New York Times* last October about how the Netherlands leads the world in recycling buildings. It's a long article that I saved to my Pocket feed for later reading. Usually I'm not that far behind, but I just spent a couple of months slogging my way through Arkady Martine's Hugo Award-winning duology. 

It starts out describing why recycling building materials makes sense, explains the concepts behind what's now called a circular economy, and details the experiences of people in the Netherlands who are on the forefront of this new recycling economy. I found it fascinating and thought-provoking. Take the time to read it. You won't regret it. 

*I have gifted the article from my subscription, so it's outside the paywall.

AI Tools and Technical Writing - Updated

Although I am now retired, I'm still interested in following news and trends in the technical communication field. The biggest thing to affect the field recently has been the rise of language-generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Although they have notable weaknesses (they often lie and make things up) they have their uses, as noted by Rhonda Bracey in her CyberText Newsletter. 

A recent post by Tom Johnson in his I'd Rather Be Writing blog takes a more detailed look at how these tools might affect the field. After describing some of the more interesting AI-based writing tools, he looks at both their weaknesses and their strong points and describes some of the uses that writers might find for them.

From his list, these are some of the things I would have used these tools for:

Simulating reader responses to documentation based on personas

Mining through hundreds of support tickets to identify trends

Identifying the impact of the latest release on hundreds of existing documentation pages, including code samples.

Comparing API documentation against a best practices template and identifying areas of inconsistency.

Automatically linking related topics in the documentation for easy navigation.  

Tom identifies several other potential uses, most of which didn't apply to my job, but would certainly help in different work environments. Some of them are similar to tasks for which I used sophisticated macros provided by Paul Beverley, but the AI-based tools promise to be both more powerful and easier to use.

What worries me the most is the potential for uninformed managers to decide that these tools now guarantee that "anyone can write" and lay off experienced technical writers. I've seen the effects of that attitude in more than one company. 

Update: Here's a YouTube video from Candlelight Editing about how freelance editors can use ChatGPT. You can download the prompt file that includes the prompts used in the video. 

Wired Looks at Algorithms in Our Lives

The subject of algorithms has gone mainstream recently, with the startling fast proliferation of ChatGPT-based software and Congressional hearings and a Supreme Court hearing on Section 230 and YouTube, to name just ta few examples. 

People are getting worried that software is controlling more and more of our daily lives, and especially software that seems to be beyond human comprehension.

Wired, always looking at the leading edge of tech, has just published a four-part series called Suspicion Machine that looks at one algorithm that could potentially ruin peoples' lives.

Obscure government algorithms are making life-changing decisions about millions of people around the world. Now, for the first time, we can reveal how one of these systems works. For Suspicion Machine, a four-part series from WIRED and Lighthouse Reports, we gained unprecedented access to one of the world’s most sophisticated welfare fraud detection algorithms. 

We obtained not only the algorithm itself, but also the data that powered it and the handbook used by the data scientists who ran it. This allowed us to see how such a sophisticated system evaluated people as potentially committing benefits fraud. What we found was deeply concerning.

In our first story, we show you how algorithms discriminate against people based on their age and ethnicity. In our second story, we reveal the human impact of biased risk-scoring algorithms. Our third story interrogates the politics that has led to the rise of these broken systems. Finally, in our fourth story, we show how a combination of secretive governments and yet more secretive private companies has created a system in which lives are ruined—with little hope of justice.

 Articles like these are why I subscribe to Wired.

Featured Links - March 13, 2023

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

A snowy park

• A break from Covid waves and a breakthrough for preventing Long Covid. From Eric Topol, a biomedical researcher who has been writing consistently informative articles about the pandemic. 
• For Rare Book Libraries, It's Gloves Off. Seriously. When handling rare books, experts say that bare, just-cleaned hands are best. Why won’t the public believe them? (Gifted article, no paywall).
• The Mastodon’s Guide to the Fediverse. If you are just getting started, or want to get started with Mastodon, this is one of the best guides I've seen.
• Low Orbit Satellite Systems Like Starlink Continue To Harm Scientific Research. "Scientists say that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations like Starlink continue to pose a dire threat to astronomy and scientific research, and that too little is being done to address the issue."
• Turn your InDesign resume into an accessible PDF. The principles here apply to any PDF.
• Westinghouse eVinci: The Pint-Sized Mini Reactor Designed to Kick Diesel to the Curb. This is a technology that is worth widespread deployment.
• A Tough Weekend. "This past week, the federal regulators took over Silicon Valley Bank. I won’t repeat what has been reported in the media (Insider and Axios have ongoing coverage.) I won’t share how we got there — these two links explain the problem quite well. However, what I will do is share what I am feeling — this might be the worst weekend I have experienced as part of the technology community. "

Photo of the Week - March 12, 2023

This photo is from my Pixel 4a, touched up slightly with the Magic Eraser feature in Google Photos to remove little bits of lights on the edges of the photo. Hopefully, they will add that feature to the PC version of Photos. 

I wanted to get down to the sidewalk at the edge of the bay but Pickering doesn't plow it and it was too icy to risk. 

Frenchman's Bay

Saturday Sounds - Jackson Browne and David Lindley - Philadelphia Folk Festival, 2006

Today's musical treat is another concert video from YouTube that popped up in my feed earlier this week, probably because I had been reading articles about the late David Lindley. It's an acoustic performance by Jackson Browne and David Lindley from the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 2006. The  pro-shot video is of decent quality and has good sound, 

As was always the case, Lindley's playing was top-flight on a number of instruments. It's been a while since I've listened to anything by Jackson Browne and it was good to revisit his songs. Enjoy. 

Jeannine Soltys, RIP

Jeannine Soltys, my beloved mother, passed away peacefully on Sunday at the age of 94. Even though we knew this day would come, as her health had been failing over the last year, we are still deeply saddened. This is her obituary. I took this picture at my youngest sister's university graduation and it is my favourite of all the many pictures I have of her.

Jeannine Soltys

A Good Discussion on AI, Also Last Pass

 A priest, a coder, and a science fiction writer walk into a podcast ...

This week's This Week in Tech (TWIT) podcast has some especially interesting discussions. It starts with a wide-ranging discussion on AI and the current news about ChatGPT and other large-language model AI systems. That's followed by an examination of the recent revelations about how badly LastPass was hacked and what it means for password managers in general and your security, including if you use or have used Last Pass. 

And that's just the beginning. 

Participants this week are the host, Leo Laporte, Louis Maresca (an engineering lead at Microsoft) Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ (the Digital Jesuit), and Dan Moren (author of the Galactic Cold War series of SF novels). 

TWIT is one of the longest-running podcasts, having begun in 2005. I've been listening to it for almost that long, and it is one of the handful of podcasts that I listen to every week. Check it out along with the other podcasts published by TWiT.tv network. You won't regret it.

2022 Nebula Award Finalists

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the finalists for the 2022 Nebula Awards. The awards are voted on by members of SFWA, and the winners will be announced during the 2023 Nebula Conference, May 12-14. 

These are the finalists for the best novel:

• Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree (Cryptid; Tor)
• Spear, Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom)
• Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)
• Babel, R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
• Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tordotcom)
• The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler (MCD; Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

I haven't yet read any of these, though I do plan to get Babel and The Mountains in the Sea.

Most of the finalists for the awards are are available to read on line, either in full or with excerpts, with links in the Locus article or from File 770. At least two (C. L. Polk and Kelly Robson) are Canadian. 

The list of finalists for the Ray Bradbury Award for drama is especially strong this year. My choice would be either Everything Everywhere All at Once or The Sandman, though I was surprised to see that The Peripheral wasn't nominated.

• Andor: “One Way Out”
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Nope
• Our Flag Means Death
• The Sandman: Season 1
• Severance

Congratulations to all the finalists. 

Gilead Rising - Updated

It has been clear for some time that if the United States slides into fascism, it will be driven by Christian extremism (Christofascism). Several recent articles look at what's happening in the US and it's not pretty.

• How big Christian nationalism has come courting in North Idaho. Earlier this month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia Republican, addressed the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, whose purview runs from this small resort city up along the Washington state border. Before she spoke, a local pastor and onetime Idaho state representative named Tim Remington, wearing an American flag-themed tie, revved up the crowd: “If we put God back in Idaho, then God will always protect Idaho.” 
• A long Twitter thread by the author of the article linked above that expands on some points raised in the article. "1. So, I recently took a trip out to North Idaho. I was tracking down rumors about Christian nationalism(s) rising in the region. But I wasn't prepared for just how *big* it'd become, how powerful it is in the state, and how it may impact the future GOP."
• How Montana Took a Hard Right Turn Toward Christian Nationalism. "“If you want to live here,” a chapter president of the Montana Federation of Republican Women said, “be a Christian.” 

There's a lot more out there to read, especially if you get into the crusade against trans and queer people and abortion. It's all tied together in s slimy morass of moral panic and misguided religious bigotry. Be very worried; this is looking a lot like Germany in the mid-1930s. And we know how that went.

Update: So just after I posted this, George Takei published a big article on Christian nationalism, which in the context of current events, is essentially the same as what I called Christian fascism. It is, of course, well worth reading. 

Separation of church and state. It’s a bedrock principle of our country, one which our founders emphasized would be critical to our future and hoped would endure the test of history.

Today we see, disturbingly, they were quite prescient in their concerns. 

Many on the right have openly embraced “Christian nationalism” as a goal, even though it is wholly anathema to our fundamental democratic values and cherished personal freedoms. 

How have we stumbled our way toward the Gilead America of The Handmaid’s Tale? And how do we fight back against it? 

That’s today’s subject in The Big Picture. 

Featured Links - March 6, 2023

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

McGee relaxing

• Yes, everything in physics is completely made up – that’s the whole point. "A physicist's task is to constantly create equations that keep up with our observations of physical phenomena."
• High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity. "We demonstrate that our simple framework can reconstruct high-resolution images from brain activity with high semantic fidelity, without the need for training or fine-tuning of complex deep generative models."
• The gray swan: model-based assessment of the risk of sudden failure of hybrid immunity to SARS-CoV-2. "Our findings suggest large jumps in viral evolution may cause failure of population immunity resulting in sudden increases in mortality. As a rise in mortality will only become apparent in the weeks following a wave of disease, reactive public health strategies will not be able to provide meaningful risk mitigation."
• Apparently the AI wants me dead. When science fiction writers are getting scared of AI, it's time to worry.
• We tested 43 old USB-C to USB-A cables. 1 was great. 10 were dangerous. "Here’s why you may want to destroy your entire collection of USB-C to USB-A cables."
• "The narrative had to be baked into the corridors": Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life. "Also yeah, he does regret posting that Episode 3 story."
• You thought quantum mechanics was weird: check out entangled time. They aren't kidding; this is truly strange.
• Recent Submissions to the Oxford English Dictionary. A look about some terms used in printing and typography. My favourite word: "flong".

Photo of the Week - March 5, 2023

This is Yonge Street in downtown Toronto looking north from Shuter Street. I took this with my Pixel 4a on the way to Massey Hall to see Regina Spektor. I applied the Alpaca filter in Google Photos to give it a bit more contrast. 

The Pixel camera does a pretty good job in this kind of lighting, but was totally useless in the concert because there was no way to dial down the exposure. I have to find a better 3rd-party camera app. I was using Hedge Camera (formerly OpenCamera) but the interface has gotten too complex and hard to use. 

Yonge and Shuter, Torooto

 

Saturday Sounds - Regina Spektor - Tiny Desk Concert

My daughter is a big fan of Regina Spektor and has turned me into a fan as well. Earlier this week, for a belated birthday present, she took me to see her play a solo concert a Massey Hall. It was a wonderful performance. I liked seeing her more as a solo performer than with her band as it made it easier to hear her lyrics, which are often both funny and profound at the same time. 

Regina Spektor at Massey Hall

So this week's music is Regina Spektor performing a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR. It's only six songs, but it is a good sample of her music. Enjoy.

Some More Links and Articles About COVID-19

I haven't posted much recently about COVID-19. That isn't because I think the pandemic is over. Far from it. Other things have been taking up my time. But it's time for some more articles and resources, posted here partly for easy future reference, and in the hope that you find them useful. 

Articles

• Don’t believe those who claim science proves masks don’t work. "A new scientific review of the efficacy of masks is deeply flawed. That hasn’t stopped some from touting it." I am still masking in public indoor settings and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
• Excess cardiovascular mortality across multiple COVID-19 waves in the United States from March 2020 to March 2022. "In summary, excess cardiovascular mortality has been persistently observed in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States and its peaks were coincident with the peaks of COVID-19 mortality. This highlights the consistent burden of CVD deaths posed in healthcare systems even when COVID-19 activities waned in the community."
• There is no clear economic trade-off for saving lives during the pandemic. "Contrary to popular belief, it seems that countries that have protected their residents better during COVID-19 have not experienced a worse economic outcome."
• We got some key things wrong about long COVID. Here are 5 things we’ve learned.
• COVID-19 linked to 40% increase in autoimmune disease risk in huge study. "COVID-19 was most strongly linked to an increased risk of vasculitis, which causes inflammation of the blood vessels; the previously infected group had a 63% higher rate of a type of vasculitis called arteritis temporalis than the uninfected group did. Autoimmune-driven problems with the thyroid, a butterfly-shaped organ in the throat that releases hormones, and the skin condition psoriasis were also strongly linked to prior COVID-19 infection, as was rheumatoid arthritis, which causes swelling in the joints."

Resources

• COVID-19 Aerosol Transmission - evidence! "This site exists as a resource to outline that there has been scientific evidence for some time to first predict then support COVID-19 infection being driven by airborne/aerosol transmission. As some point there will be a number of judicial inquires as to how the approach for stopping the pandemic was so bad. its-airborne.org has collected evidence and organized into timelines."
• Masks to Prevent Respiratory Infection. Resources about masks, mask use, and research. Produced by a team from McMaster University with many international contributors
• Bill Comeau's Tableaux Site. "Number-cruncher, chart-maker, blog-writer, mask-wearer, hyphen-fan." He publishes many data-driven graphs about COVID-19."
• Indoor Air Quality Reports from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers.  "In 2022, OSPE formed the Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Advisory Group, responding to the need for evidence-based guidance around indoor air quality and transmission of COVID-19. The Advisory Group produced the following reports, identifying how COVID spreads and how Ontarians can combat its spread."
• COVID-19 deaths in the US continue to be undercounted, research shows, despite claims of ‘overcounts’. "Explaining the discrepancy between excess deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths is a more challenging task. But several threads of evidence support the idea that the difference largely reflects uncounted COVID-19 deaths."

An Appreciation of Everything Everywhere All at Once

I watched Everything Everywhere All at Once a couple of months ago and enjoyed it. Despite not knowing exactly what was going on for most of the movie, I kept watching. It is an absolutely bravura piece of filmmaking, and I must find time to watch it again. 

When I do watch it again, I will have a better appreciation of some of the ideas and themes thanks to this appreciation of the movie written by Soon Lee. If you are averse to spoilers, obviously you'll want to watch the movie first before reading this, but do read it. 

It is the most remarkable movie I have seen in years. It straddles multiple genres, Science Fiction, you can ‘Verse Jump’ to access the skills and abilities of alternate universe versions of yourself, Drama, exploring family relationships, Action, with spectacular martial arts fight sequences, lowbrow Comedy, with dildo and buttplug fights, all in a surprisingly cohesive whole. It is also a quintessential Chinese-American immigrant story. I can talk about its technical brilliance like its use of visual symbology, aspect ratios, or color palettes, and I will. But none of that brilliance matters without the core story. At heart Everything Everywhere All at Once is about finding meaning amongst the noise and chaos of modern life. It’s about the power of kindness. Everything Everywhere All at Once is the movie we didn’t know we needed in 2022.

I do hope it wins the Best Picture Oscar this year. And definitely, Michelle Yeoh should win for her acting. 

Movie and TV Reviews - February 2023

Short reviews of TV shows and movies we watched in January. (Don't expect Pauline Kael. I do these posts mostly to keep track of what we've been watching). 

Movies

• Hunter Killer: A standard action flick in the Top Gunn mold but with submarines instead of jets. It's not as good as The Hunt for Red October but well made and watchable, if implausible. (Netflix)
• Downton Abbey: A New Era. It's the end of the 1920s and big changes are happening at Downton Abbey. We enjoyed this though the sentimentality did get a bit cloying at times. (Crave_

TV Shows

• Shetland (season 7): This has become one of our favourite shows, both for the quality of the acting and the complexity of the plots. The stark setting doesn't hurt either. I'm glad to see there will be a season 8, though with changes. (.BritBox)
• Vera (season 12). We get a new pathologist but otherwise not much has changed in Newcastle. The plots are as gripping and twisty as usual. (BritBox)
• Nova: London's Super Tunnel. Some of the engineering problems that had to be overcome in building London's $25 billion Elizabeth fast rail line. I hope to ride that line if I ever make it back to London. (PBS)
• Death in Paradise (season 12): Basically Midsomer Murders in the Carribean. (BritBox)
• Treason: A very implausible spy thriller set in London, but with an American plot and style. We watched the first two episodes but gave up on it after that. This will be the last Netflix show we watch for a while as we have cancelled our subscription. (Netflix)
• Picard (season 3): It moves along quickly enough and it's nice to see some of the old Enterprise crew back, but I'd still rather have had season 7 of The Expanse. (Crave)
• Nova: Ancient Builders of the Amazon. I had NO idea that there was any city-building civilization in the Amazon, though given recent discoveries in Honduras and Costa Rica, I shouldn't have been surprised. This was one of the most interesting Nova episodes in a long time. (PBS)
• Magpie Murders: This one has an unusual structure with a murder story that is part of a novel being critical to solving an actual murder. It's twisty and not too heavy. I did have trouble following the interlinked plots but still enjoyed it. (PBS)
• Nova: New Eyes on the Universe. Nova looks at some of the findings from the first year of operating the James Webb space telescope. Awe inpirting and exciting. (PBS)
• Carnival Row (season 2): This may be the best of all the recent fantasy series. It certainly has the best setting and special effects and complex characters. (Amazon Prime)
• A Spy Among Friends: A dramatization of the 1960s Kim Philby spy scandal. This one is a throwback to the classic spy thriller. It's complex, well-acted (especially Guy Pearce), and well-made. You do have to watch it carefully though as there are constant temporal and point-of-view changes. (Amazon Prime)