Featured Links - October 16,2023

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

Geese on the bay

• September 2023 was Earth’s most extreme month for heat ever recorded. "Climate scientist James Hansen says the world may soon exceed the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold."
• AI Is 'Unwrapping' Burnt Scrolls From Herculaneum. "Mount Vesuvius buried Herculaneum in volcanic ash 2,000 years ago. Modern tech is revealing lost texts from the town."
• Being a Republican can kill you; living in the same state with too many of them can kill you too. "The Washington Post conducted a study trying to get to the bottom of why American life expectancy was shrinking. What they found was that red-state politics was killing people at an alarming rate. They studied three adjacent counties along Lake Erie: Ashtabula in red Ohio; Erie in purple Pennsylvania; and Chautauqua in blue New York. The 2020 death rate in the Ohio county was 650 per 100,000 people, compared to about 490 in Pennsylvania and 540 in New York."
• A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (1860). Browsing through this could be a real time sink. It might also be a good resource for authors looking for unusual words for their stories.
• It's time to standardize smartwatch charging. "Smartphones have finally fallen in line, and it's time for wearables to do the same." The article suggests watches should support the new Qi2 wireless charging standard, which makes a lot of sense. 
• Staying ahead of virus mutations. "New AI tool can predict viral variants, ID most dangerous, help make vaccines ‘future-proof’."
• The Whole of the Whole Earth Catalog Is Now Online. "The seminal DIY catalogs, journals, and magazines printed by the techno-hippie publishing house are finally available online in digital form, all for free." I had several issues of this back in the day and spent many hours browsing through it.