I suppose that one of these days the city will come along and remove this tree, though perhaps not if it manages to produce a few leaves again this year. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
Struggling tree on the beach |
Neil Young and Crazy Horse started their tour Wednesday night in San Diego and according to Rolling Stone they rocked like nobody's business. Judge for yourself. Here's a few reasonably good quality audience videos from the concert. The final chorus of Down by the River has some SERIOUS crunch. Play it loud!
Down by the River
Cortez the Killer
Powderfinger
Hey Hey My My
I'm getting worried about bird flu (aka H5N1 avian influenza). Calling it bird flu is a bit of a misnomer now, as recent news makes it clear that it is spreading widely in mammals, now including cows. This has been happening for a while now, but it's getting widespread enough that the mainstream media is picking up on it.
The New York Times looks at recent large outbreaks (gift link), especially among sea lions, that have devastated colonies along the coast of North and South America.
What they found was staggering: The virus had killed an estimated 17,400 seal pups, more than 95 percent of the colony’s young animals.
The catastrophe was the latest in a bird flu epidemic that has whipped around the world since 2020, prompting authorities on multiple continents to kill poultry and other birds by the millions. In the United States alone, more than 90 million birds have been culled in a futile attempt to deter the virus.
There has been no stopping H5N1. Avian flu viruses tend to be picky about their hosts, typically sticking to one kind of wild bird. But this one has rapidly infiltrated an astonishingly wide array of birds and animals, from squirrels and skunks to bottlenose dolphins, polar bears and, most recently, dairy cows.
The worry here, of course, is that the virus may mutate in a way that makes it easily transmissible among humans, where it has a mortality rate of at least 33 percent.
In his Ground Truths blog, Eric Topol provides a more detailed summary of what we know about how H5N1 is spreading, starting with this.
Confirmation of H5N1 infected dairy cattle herds in 8 states. But the FDA report yesterday of commerical milk PCR positivity strongly supports that the cattle spread is far wider than these 8 states. Important to emphasize that (PCR) is testing for remnants of virus, not live virus, which would be unlikely with pasteurization. Other tests, assessing potential evidence for any live virus (egg viability and culture), are to be reported by the FDA going forward. Limited culture tests are all negative to date for any live virus in milk.
Gizomdo has more details on the spread to cows and the response by the FDA.
Genetic evidence released to the outside science community on Sunday suggests that the initial spillover event from birds to cows may have occurred as early as December 2023, months before the first known cases were reported by local officials. And, coupled with the discovery of H5N1 in store-bought milk, it’s now looking likely that outbreaks are much more widespread than currently tallied.
“The dissemination to cows is far greater than we have been led to believe,” Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told CNN on Tuesday.
The major worry with avian influenza strains such as H5N1 is that they could someday develop the right assortment of mutations that would allow the virus to spread easily between humans while also causing severe illness in many. So, the longer it’s able to remain in cows, the greater the likelihood that some strains will adapt and become better at transmitting between mammals, humans included.
I'm not worried about finding genetic material from the virus in milk (pasteurization will kill any live virus), but I wouldn't drink unpasteurized milk (never a good idea even without the threat of H5N1). And keep a good stock of N95 masks around, even if you aren't using them now.
There may be people out there who love Windows 11 but I have yet to find one. The prevalent attitude online seems to range from grudging acceptance to outright hate. I fall into the first category but the more I use it, the more I wonder if I should take a closer look at Linux.
Kyle Barr reviews computers for a living so he has to use Windows 11, but he's not happy about it. On Gizmodo*, he's compiled a list of the eight things he finds most annoying about Windows 11 along with some suggestions about how Microsoft could make it better.
Here are the first three items on his list:
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
A renovation instead of a new condo tower in Toronto |
This week's Saturday Sounds post is the latest album from The Black Crowes, Hopeless Bastards. I've always enjoyed their music though I've never seen one of their live shows. This album is about what you'd expect from them – crunchy, blues based Southern rock. Play it loud.
Here are some links to articles about photography that I found interesting or useful.
Spring trees |
Now that I'm retired, I don't use Microsoft Word as much as I did when I was working, when I sometimes would be spending entire days working with it (and sometimes against it). The last version I used at work was Word 2013; I'm now using the version that comes with Microsoft 365, which has many new features compared to Word 2013.
For a several years, I subscribed to the WordTips Newsletter and bought some of their collections of tips and macros. I generally don't need to dig that deep into Word's idiosyncrasies now, but when I do the WordTips site has many useful articles that cover most of Word's features. If you're still using an older (pre-ribbon) version of Word, there's a separate site for help with those versions. (I would not recommend that these days because of security concerns; you would be better off switching to Libre Office).
I am tempted to subscribe to WordTips again, just out of curiousity.
It's no secret that the police generally did not like the Grateful Dead. There were exceptions (the police in Hamilton, Ontario were quite cool as I recall), but the travelling crowd of Deadheads that followed the band were often subjected to harassment.
Here's a report from 1991 posted on Reddit titled: The Grateful Dead And LSD A Study Into The Phenomenon by The Maryland State Police Criminal Intelligence Division.
Unfortunately, it's presented as a slideshow so I can't copy out excepts but in a nutshell it tries to make the case that Deadheads are LSD fiends and the parking lot scene is full of drug vendors.
As several commenters pointed out, the parking lot scene was generally peaceful and there were more arrests at an average NFL football game.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Living the life on the bay |
Earlier this week, I was listening to the jazz channel on SiriusXM and they played a song that really grabbed me by an artist who goes by the name of Somi. I found her on Spotify and am listening now to her latest album, Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba.
Spotify has this to say about her: "Somi Kakoma is a Billboard charting and Grammy-nominated vocalist, composer, and writer. Born in Illinois to immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda, she is known in the jazz world simply as ‘Somi’. Having built a career of transatlantic storytelling, she is the first African woman ever nominated in any Grammy jazz category (2021 Best Jazz Vocal Album) for her live album Holy Room."
I like African music and have seen several major African performers (among them Femi Kuti, Hugh Masekela, King Sunny Ade, and Miriam Makeba, the inspiration for this album). But I had never heard of Somi until now, and I am very glad that I have discovered her music.
Zenzile is a lovely album and I recommend it highly, especially if you like jazz vocalists or African music. If you don't have time to listen to the whole album, I recommend 'Kwedini'; it's gorgeous.
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.
During totality, looking towards the edge of the shadow |
A couple of weeks ago the world dodged a bullet. Not a giant asteroid or a super-sized solar flare, but hidden backdoor in a widely used Linux software program. If it hadn't been detected by an eagle-eyed Microsoft software developer, virtually every Linux-based computer in the world could have been at the mercy of a hacker or hacking group.
Steve Gibson, host of the long-running Security Now! podcast, discussed the exploit at length in episode 968. This is just a bit of what he had to say (from the show's transcript):
So the runner-up title for today's podcast, which I decided, I settled on "A Cautionary Tale," was "A Close Call for Linux" because it was only due to some very small mistakes made by an otherwise very clever malicious developer that the scheme was discovered. What was discovered was that by employing a diabolically circuitous route, the system SSH daemon, which is to say the SSH incoming connection accepting server for Linux, would have had a secret and invisible backdoor installed in it that would have then allowed someone, anyone, anywhere, using a specific RSA public key, to authenticate and login to any Linux system on the planet and also provide their own code for it to run. So to say that this would have been huge hardly does it justice.
In other words, had the exploit not been discovered and gone into widespread distribution, the owner of the exploit could have shut down every affected computer on the internet with a single command.
The exploit was serious enough that it rated coverage in the New York Times.
The saga began earlier this year, when Mr. Freund was flying back from a visit to his parents in Germany. While reviewing a log of automated tests, he noticed a few error messages he didn’t recognize. He was jet-lagged, and the messages didn’t seem urgent, so he filed them away in his memory.
But a few weeks later, while running some more tests at home, he noticed that an application called SSH, which is used to log into computers remotely, was using more processing power than normal. He traced the issue to a set of data compression tools called xz Utils, and wondered if it was related to the earlier errors he’d seen.
(Don’t worry if these names are Greek to you. All you really need to know is that these are all small pieces of the Linux operating system, which is probably the most important piece of open-source software in the world. The vast majority of the world’s servers — including those used by banks, hospitals, governments and Fortune 500 companies — run on Linux, which makes its security a matter of global importance.)
Like other popular open-source software, Linux gets updated all the time, and most bugs are the result of innocent mistakes. But when Mr. Freund looked closely at the source code for xz Utils, he saw clues that it had been intentionally tampered with.
In particular, he found that someone had planted malicious code in the latest versions of xz Utils. The code, known as a backdoor, would allow its creator to hijack a user’s SSH connection and secretly run their own code on that user’s machine.
I highly recommend listening to Gibson's podcast, or at least the last half, where he discusses the exploit and some of its implications. They're not good.
What has just been discovered present in Linux demonstrates that the same asymmetric principle applies to large-scale software development, where just one bad seed, just one sufficiently clever malicious developer, can have an outsized effect upon the security of everything else. Okay, now, I'm going to give everyone the TL;DR first because this is just so cool and so diabolically clever.
How do you go about hiding malicious code in a highly scrutinized open source environment which worships code in its source form, so that no one can see what you've done? You focus your efforts upon a compression library project. Compression library projects contain test files which are used to verify the still-proper behavior of recently modified and recompiled source code. These compression test files are, and are expected to be, opaque binary blobs. So you very cleverly arrange to place your malicious binary code into one of the supposedly compressed compression test files for that library, where no one would ever think to look.
I mean, again, one of the points here that I didn't put into the show notes is unfortunately, once something is seen to have been done, people who wouldn't have had this idea originally, you know, wouldn't have the original idea, they're like, oh. That's interesting. I wonder what mischief I can get up to? So we may be seeing more of this in the future.
Let's hope he's wrong.
Toronto and the eastern GTA was just to the north of the path of totality for today's eclipse, so we drove east to Port Hope in the hope that we might have clear skies. Port Hope was just inside the path of totality, but the sky was overcast and the sun not visible at all behind a solid bank of cloud. Still, it was a cool and eerie experience. It was strange hearing the birds coming in to nest as it got dark and then realizing it wasn't really night as it got brighter again
These pictures were taken right around the short period of totality (maybe a minute). I used manual exposure mode on my phone as otherwise it would have made the scene brighter than it looked to the eye. These are pretty much exactly the way it looked.
Looking southwest as totality started |
Looking northeast during totality |
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
The hydro marsh |
One of the regrets of my concert-going life is that I never got to see Led Zeppelin. I almost did in 1970. The brother of one of my university residence friends had a bunch of tickets to see them in Montreal and a some of us were going to take the train to Montreal to see them. Unfortunately, my friend decided to leave early and hitchhike there and got killed on the highway by a drunk driver.
So this week's music treat is a tribute to Jim Hawley who died much to young around this time in 1970. It's a video of Led Zeppelin's concert at Knebworth in 1979. It's pro shot so my guess is that it was filmed either for a concert movie or TV broadcast. The sound is a bit thin but quite listenable and the performance is vintage Zep. Enjoy.
The Reactor Magazine (formerly Tor.com) has published an interesting article about SF writer Arkady Martine and her reactions to visiting Singapore, a city that has sometimes been described as a "city of the future". Martine, the author of the Hugo winning novels A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace (two books that I very much liked), is a trained city planner, something that comes across in her fiction.
The article goes into some detail about her reactions to Singapore and how cities have been represented in science fiction. (Singapore has been used as the setting for several movies and TV shows including the third season of Westworld.
“I don’t feel like you can sanitize a city, that it’s possible to do so,” she says. “Cities inevitably complicate… they’re full of a lot of people very close together; it’s the best thing about them and the worst thing about them at the same time.” And so in this dense mess of humanity, spontaneity and practicality tend to arise in unexpected ways – the use and reuse of space by its actual inhabitants rather than its designers. “So can a writer write a city of the future that isn’t authentic? Of course. If you’re thinking about designing an actual one, as soon as you’ve got it, it’s going to be used by people in it and it will develop forms of authenticity anyway.”
Martine, who has spent years living in multiple cities around the world, is still impressed by Singapore’s futuristic architecture, especially in the way greenery and nature are functionally incorporated into buildings to improve ventilation, air circulation, and heat management. “I’d only read about it in theory, I hadn’t seen it, and I’m really glad I got to,” she adds. “It’s an interesting place, it’s different than others I’ve been in.” She doesn’t feel like Singapore is a definitive city of the future or a “science fictional” place in the way that it is sometimes discussed, in games of online broken telephone about the payoff between the will of a one-party state and having omnipresent “smart” future-forward infrastructure. I agree with her that being here is easy; it is easy to be told what to do on the train or how to take the bus, where to stand or buy a ticket, but yet, Martine also finds it more complicated than the cities of her childhood.
Noted with sadness, John Sinclair has died at the age of 82. He was a major figure in the Detroit music scene when I was in university. The MC5, who he managed, were THE Detroit band at the time. If you want to hear some of the loudest, most intense, and political music ever recorded, check out their first album, Kick Out the Jams. Probably more important, he was a leader in the movement to legalize marijuana, something that still has to fully happen in the US.
Sinclair was arrested in 1969 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of two joints (this was his third possession charge). This served as the bedrock for his and others to protest. John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously attended a 1971 freedom rally in Ann Arbor in solidarity, which also included Stevie Wonder, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Seger among 15,000 people. Two days later, Sinclair was freed from jail.
He lived to see marijuana become legal in his home state in 2018 and in several across the country. He also had a hand working in the alternative press, writing for Detroit’s Fifth Estate, DownBeat and founding the Ann Arbor Sun.
The finalists for the 2024 Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2023 have been announced. The awards are nominated and voted on by members of the World Science Fiction convention which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland later this year.
These are the finalists for Best Novel:
Two lonely swans |
Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in March. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory.
It's Easter weekend up here in the Great (no longer) White North, and I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging. It'll be time spent with family and watching the Blue Jays, who are well ahead of the Rays in their season opener as I type this. I'll be back Tuesday.
In the meantime, here are a couple of geese enjoying the spring sunshine.
Two geese enjoying the spring sunshine |
If you follow British politics at all, you'll be familiar with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who is up for re-election in May. His campaign and the politics surrounding his current term are providing a glimpse of the craziness that is likely to come in the next six months before November's US elections.
Wired has taken a long look at what's been going on in London. It's not pretty.
Last summer, one of Khan’s flagship policies—a benign pollution reduction measure—was fused with the global conspiracy, sucked into a nightmarish mass delusion about climate authoritarianism, and co-opted by populist culture warriors to justify a rollback of carbon emissions targets. The chaos that ensued shows how the drip of online conspiracy and radicalization, driven by algorithms and exploited by opportunists, has warped political discourse in democratic societies. It is now much harder for elected leaders to manage the compromises needed to keep cities—and countries—together and functioning. That battle is becoming ever more one-sided, fueled by conspiracy theorists and cheap and convincing deepfakes. Khan’s bid for reelection in May will be the UK’s first major vote in this strange new world, a precursor to a national election happening some time this year—and, quite possibly, a warning sign of how dangerous the merging of populism, extremism, and technology has become.
There's a lot more in the article, including a sophisticated deep fake.
In the fake recording, an authentic-sounding version of Khan’s voice could be heard calling for the ceremony at the Cenotaph war memorial in London to be called off in favor of the Gaza rally. “I don’t give a flying shit about the Remembrance Weekend,” the voice said. The mayor, it said, controlled the police.
The message pressed every button on England’s paranoid fringes: an insinuation of support for Hamas, an apparent denigration of British history and memory by a Muslim left-winger, and a sense of backroom deals being done. A secret woke plot that plugged straight into the grand online conspiracy that unites the far right, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers.
There are obvious implications for the coming local, state, and federal elections.
I've come across a couple of interesting articles recently that examine the intersection of AI and photography.
In his weekly The Plain View column, Wired's Steven Levy looks at the controversy surrounding Princess Catherine's apparent manipulation of a family photo. As he points out, tools that let anyone do this are now ubiquitous. What will that mean for journalism going forward?
One might be tempted to say that the only proof now that something is real comes when you can see it for yourself. But consider Apple’s Vision Pro. When people don that headset, they view a mix of the real world intermingled with a digital layer. But that so-called “real” world isn’t directly visible to one’s eyes—instead a suite of cameras presents video images of what the eye would normally see. That videostream is prone to manipulation—in fact, recreating reality is the point of such devices. If you stroll out into the street wearing one of those, who knows—maybe the Royal Family Industrial Complex will hack your goggles to insert a convincing digital representation of Kate Middleton, shuffling through Wegman’s in her leggings.
All of this should have been apparent long ago. The trustworthiness of what we see no longer relies on images and videos themselves. Our belief in what we are presented with hinges on the credibility of who is presenting it. Maybe if the Windsors had a track record of straightforwardness, people would have accepted the image as a family photo, mildly rinsed by a Photoshop tweak.
But AI tools permit more than just simply tweaking someone's smile in a family picture.
There's been a long tradition of photographers colourizing old black-and-white photos. Originally that was done by an artist painting over the photo. Now you can easily do it in a tool like photoshop or by uploading your photo to a website. But What if the entire picture itself is a fake generated by an AI tool like Midjourney. How can you tell?
In "AI is creating fake historical photos, and that's a problem", Marina Amaral, a digital photo colourist looks at a new phenomena – digital fake historical images. I was startled at the realism of the examples she shows; I would certainly be fooled by them.
Just to give you a concrete example of how pervasive this issue is becoming, a few days ago, I stumbled upon two Instagram pages that have started sharing these fake historical photos, passing them off as real to their thousands of followers, complete with fabricated captions and all that. The last time I checked, the most recent of these photos had over 5,000 likes. Now, granted, not every single one of those likes was necessarily from someone who was completely deceived. Some people might have just been scrolling through their feed and hit the heart button without really thinking about it. Others might have recognized the photo as fake but still appreciated it on an artistic level. But even if we're being conservative and assuming that only a fraction of those 5,000 people have truly believed in the authenticity of the image, that's still a significant number of individuals who have been exposed to a piece of misinformation masquerading as historical fact. And that's just one post on one platform. Multiply that by the countless other social media accounts, websites, and even publications that could potentially be spreading these images, and you start to see the scale of the problem. The potential impact of such posts cannot be overstated. The more these fake images circulate, the harder it becomes to separate fact from fiction. Each new post or share distorts the truth a little bit more, until we're left with a version of the past that bears little resemblance to reality.
This is a big problem and it's only going to get worse.
In my own case, I now ignore any news, travel, or historical photos posted on the internet unless I am sure the source is legitimate. That rules out a large part of what's posted on Facebook or X, for example.
Here's a recipe to try if you like salads and are a fan of the Mediterranean diet. We used the recipe from the 30-Minute Mediterranean Diet cookbook that I got in a Humble Bundle recently, but this one is basically the same.
We mixed all the ingredients together instead of keeping them separate on a plate. I increased the quantities a bit because our can of chickpeas was larger and we have enough leftover for lunch tomorrow.
For the dressing, we didn't use any garlic, water, or salt and made an infusion of the oregano in the oil by heating them for a few minutes as suggested in the cookbook.
If you don't want to make your own dressing, Kraft's Greek with Feta and Oregano dressing would go well with it.
My nephew, Douglas Soltys, is the founder and editor-and-chief at BetaKit, the leading site for Canadian tech news. He's just interviewed Cory Doctorow and the interview is now live on BetaKit's site.
Before the interview, Doug asked me if I had any questions he could ask Cory. Of course I did. I wanted to know if he saw any relationship between his concept of enshittification and Jerry Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy. He asked Cory that, and Cory's answer takes up a good chunk of the podcast. Doug did mention my name, and Cory remembered me from back when he was living in Toronto and working at Bakka, much to my surprise.
It's a good podcast with some real insights into tech and the state of the internet and social media. Give it a listen.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Colourful sunset |
This week's photo is of our dog, Tea Sea, out in the backyard before bedtime to do her business. I wonder if anyone has ever trained a dog to use a toilet. I'm glad I'm not a dog. (Then again, I had to shovel the patio and a bit of the yard for her, which is almost as bad as having to pee in the snow).
Charles Lloyd is an American jazz musician (saxophone, flute), who has been active since the 1950s. I remember listening to his album, Forest Flower, when I was in university and in later years, some of his many albums for ECM. I have a very vague memory of seeing him at an early jazz festival in Toronto sometime in the 1980s, but I can't find any evidence of that online. I did find it interesting that he was part of the Beach Boys touring band in the 1970s, so it's possible that I saw him in 1975 at Maple Leaf Gardens.
Relix has published an appreciation of Lloyd and his music.
Earlier this month, he released his latest album, The Sky Will Still Be Here Tomorrow, and it is lovely. In their review, The Guardian says: 'Lloyd well knows he’s in the twilight of a great career – he recently remarked to Jazzwise that he’s “in the last stages of the journey now”. But you’d never know it from the light and joy glowing through this music.' If it is his last album, he's going out on a high note.
I woke up this morning to the sad news that Vernor Vinge has died at the age of 79. Unfortunately, I never met him in person, but thoroughly enjoyed his books, especially his "zones of thought" novels. I've read A Fire Upon the Deep several times and could happily read it again. If ideas had weight, you'd need steel beams to hold a shelf of his books.
I try not to pay too much attention to US politics but it's getting hard to avoid and even harder not to worry about it. As former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau said about the US back in 1969: "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt".
This week has been especially notable with Trump going full fascist in a campaign speech in Vandalia, Ohio last Saturday. I've seen detailed commentary on this from Timothy Snyder, Jay Kuo, and Heather Cox Richardson, as well as what's been reported in the mainstream press, who thankfully are beginning to wake up to the danger presented by Trump.
From Timothy Snyder, who analyzed the speech in detail:
So, right at the beginning, Americans at the rally are told to identify themselves with people who tried to overthrow an election by force, who are celebrated as "unbelievable patriots." That is perhaps the most essential element of context to Trump's later reference to a bloodbath. He has already made clear, in a the collective performance, that violent insurrection is the best form of politics. Well before he actually used the word, he had instructed his audience that bloodbaths are the right form of politics. (This is, by the way, not just the context of this rally, but of his rallies generally.)
Snyder has also written an article describing the strongman fantasy behind Trump's appeal to many Americans.
Quite a few Americans like the idea of strongman rule. Why not a dictator who will get things done?
I lived in eastern Europe when memories of communism were fresh. I have visited regions in Ukraine where Russia imposed its occupation regime. I have spent decades reading testimonies of people who lived under Nazi or Stalinist rule. I have seen death pits, some old, some freshly dug. And I have friends who have lived under authoritarian regimes, including political prisoners and survivors of torture. Some of the people I trusted most have been assassinated.
So I think that there is an answer to this question.
Strongman rule is a fantasy. Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman. He won't. In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents. We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance. The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing. We get abused and we get used to it.
On another front, Trump's fantasy about winning the 2020 election continues to spread chaos across the US electoral system.
From Rolling Stone:
Across the country — in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania — Republican officials have refused to certify or delayed certification of results for the election of local, state, and national candidates, over debunked claims that mail-in ballots aren’t secure, conspiracies about voting machines, claims of unsecured ballot drop boxes, and myriad other claims rooted in election denier beliefs.
If local election officials nationwide decide en masse to refuse to certify election results this year, it could slow the certification of statewide tallies crucial to determining the next president — and create chaos.
And from the Washington Post (gift link):
The scene at the Feb. 28 meeting terrified many Maricopa employees and others who were reminded of what happened after Joe Biden won the county — and, with it, Arizona — in the 2020 presidential race. Back then, Trump supporters used baseless fraud claims to try to pressure or scare elected leaders into changing the results for the metro Phoenix county, which is home to more than half of Arizona’s residents.
Now, with another presidential election quickly approaching and Arizona again likely to be central to Donald Trump’s electoral strategy, the incident late last month has revived fears that officials responsible for running Maricopa County elections will be targeted with a campaign of threats and abuse — or worse.
The news is not all bad. Jay Kuo believes that there is reason for cautious optimism:
First, as the previous primaries have shown, Trump continues to underperform with voters in GOP primaries relative to how Biden is doing with voters in Democratic primaries. Even with Nikki Haley and the other challengers dropping out of the race, Trump is still losing between one-in-five and one-in-six GOP primary voters to other candidates. And a good chunk of those voters he will never get back.
Second, it appears MAGA either hasn’t learned the lesson of 2022 or it is wholly incapable of changing its spots when it comes to nominating extremist candidates. Those candidates are more likely to lose general elections, but they keep putting them up. In this case, they have nominated another extremist to represent the GOP in the crucial Ohio Senate seat race—a man named Bernie Moreno. He’ll face off against incumbent Sherrod Brown. And from where I sit, our chances of holding the Senate just ticked upward as a result.
Third, while I don’t want to focus too much on polls, I do want to point out two things. To the extent that people care, the national polling averages now show Biden with a slight lead over Trump, who had led in these averages since September. More importantly, within the separate polls over time, many show that voters have moved toward Biden by a few points. While polls are not predictive of final results this far out, it is still useful to see how things have moved relatively within the same poll, even if absolutely speaking, it may be way off.
I do hope that Kuo is right and enough Americans come to their senses that the absolute disaster of another Trump presidency can be avoided. As Jerry Pournelle often commented: "Remember, despair is a sin."
Brexit was supposed to free Britain from onerous EU regulations and inefficiencies. In reality, the inefficiencies are still there and the regulations were protecting British citizens from toxic waste and deadly chemicals in the environment. The Guardian has a well-researched report into the current state of the environment in Britain. It's not good.
As the campaign group Chem Trust documents, our shadow version of the EU system, called UK Reach, is beset by underfunding, understaffing, a skills crisis and an impossible workload. It looks to me like the kind of failure-by-design that afflicts so much of environmental regulation in the UK.
This dysfunction leaves us exposed to toxins now being banned or restricted in Europe. For example, tetraethyl lead has long been banned from fuel for surface vehicles. But it continues to be used in aircraft fuel, ensuring we are sprayed with a chemical that causes neurological disorders. The EU, after long resisting the obvious step, has at last ruled that it must be phased out. But the UK hasn’t. It will remain legal here. The same goes for endocrine-disrupting chemicals in children’s toys, formaldehyde, brominated flame retardants and the microplastics intentionally added to fertilisers and artificial sport surfaces.
US readers should note that this is a precursor to what will happen to environmental regulations should the Trump and the Republicans take power in November.
The finalists for the 2023 Nebula Awards have been announced by SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association). The awards are voted on by members of SFWA and will be announced at the 2024 Nebula Awards conference in Pasadena, CA in early June.
These are the finalists for the Novel award.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Light on the bay |
This week's musical treat is a concert webcast from Robert Plant and Allison Krause in Stuttgart, Germany in 2022. Being a webcast capture, video and sound are excellent. They will be touring this summer and perhaps seeing this will encourage you to see them. I certainly would; I like the direction Plant has taken with his music in the last few years as he ages.
Here are a few links that should be useful for technical writers, especially those who want to improve their technical skills. The first four are from the excellent freeCodeCamp site.
I watched the SpaceX Starship launch while shopping at Costco this morning. The launch looked good and they made it through staging but the booster appeared to lose control at the start of the landing burn and they lost the second stage Starship during reentry.
It looked like both stages had attitude control problems which could have contributed to the failures. I was amazed that they had video and telemetry from Starship through at least part of the reentry. They did make it a lot further with this flight so their iterative development process seems to be working.
Unfortunately, the FAA had stuck its fingers in the pie by ruling that the launch was a mishap, which means another five- or six-month wait while the bureaucrats generate more paperwork before SpaceX can launch again. The US needs to get the FAA out of the loop on these launches so they can spend their time on more important things like making sure Boeing's airliners are safe.
Benjamin Dreyer, author of the wonderful book, Dreyer's English, has an article in the Washington Post (gift link) in which he ruminates on anachronyms, a term I have to admit I hadn't come across until reading the article. He starts off by talking about subtweets.
The coinage dates to 2009, when Twitter was still Twitter, and posts there were referred to as tweets. But if Twitter has been X’d out and tweets are no longer tweets but posts instead, what is to become of the useful coinage “subtweet”?
Given that the word now has become a generic term used on other social-media platforms (hello, my friends at Bluesky), I suspect that “subtweet” will join the ranks of what are known as anachronyms: words that are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former or later time.”
That’s the way Wikipedia defines them, which will have to suffice for now, because the word is too new to have worked its way into dictionaries. Maybe when it does arrive, lexicographers will have identified its originator; linguist Ben Zimmer is often credited online, but he says he doubts he was the coiner.
He goes on to talk about several other similar terms, among them "subway token booths" (tokens now having been eliminated in New York and Toronto), and "podcasts" (the iPod having long been discontinued).
I wonder how long we will continue to call our omnipresent digital terminals "phones". How many phone calls have you made on your cell phone in the last week?