Featured Links - January 15, 2024

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

Winter walking hazards

• Huge ancient city found in the Amazon. "A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation. The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon."
• Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? (gift link): "After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again." This probably applies to Canada as well as we drive the same cars and drivers are just as badly behaved.
• I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script. "It was only about halfway done, but the script David Lynch wrote for the sequel to his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, was still better than Dune Messiah."
• Why You Should Rest—a Lot—If You Have COVID-19. 'The only guaranteed way to avoid Long COVID is not to get infected by SARS-CoV-2. But if someone does get sick, "Rest is incredibly important to give your body and your immune system a chance to fight off the acute infection,” says Dr. Janna Friedly, a post-COVID rehabilitation specialist at the University of Washington who recovered from Long COVID herself.' 
• Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app. "Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app." This is sad news. I liked Artifact a lot and found it quite useful. 
• The Space Force is changing the way it thinks about spaceports. "There's not much available real estate to grow Cape Canaveral's launch capacity."
• How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse. "This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything."
• Quantum mechanics model unveils hidden patterns in stock markets. "A new study published in Financial Innovation has developed a novel quantum model for stock market fluctuations that incorporates economic uncertainty and herding behavior. The study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the origins and implications of stock market anomalies such as fat tails, volatility clustering, and contrarian effects." There's a some people call stock market analysts quants.