Featured Links – February 12, 2024

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

Ducks in the bay

• Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that would attend plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
• 5 dark mode upgrades for your Windows 10 or 11 PC. "Microsoft is slowly making dark mode better on Windows, but these tips will give your dark mode a big upgrade today." I would have a hard time using my computer without dark mode. I second the recommendation in the article for using the Dark Reader extension. 
• Next-Generation Spaceplanes Are the Cutting-Edge Evolution of the Space Shuttle Dream. "Spaceplanes seemed out of favor when the Shuttle was retired in 2011. They now seem to be making a comeback."
• Moderately Advanced Aliens Could Easily Take Over A Milky Way-Like Galaxy, Simulations Show. "A new simulation has looked at how quickly a moderately advanced alien civilization would take to spread itself across a galaxy and the answer is not long at all, at least in relative cosmic terms. Even equipped with spaceships not much faster than our most advanced interplanetary probes, the whole ordeal could happen in just 1 billion years."
• Micromobility: An Urban Transportation Revolution. "E-bikes, E-motorcycles, E-scooters displacing oil use and improving urban living."
• Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything. "Physicists’ search for a theory that explains all reality in one framework appeared to have stalled. But now they are reinvigorating the hunt by exploring a wild landscape of abstract geometry."
• The Super Bowl will be watched by 100 million people. But not all of them will see the same game. "Two million Canadians and 13 million Americans live with colour blindness, and North American sports are behind on making their products accessible." Fortunately, I have normal colour vision, but I can understand how being colour blind would be a real problem for sports fans.