Featured Links - August 6, 2024

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

Cover for Torus 3 by Taral Wayne

• Taral Wayne (1951-2024). A tribute to the late Toronto fanartist from Mike Glyer at File 770. Taral provided several covers to my fanzine, Torus, when I was publishing it in the late 1980s. His cover for Torus 3 is above. 
• The Indomitable Covid Virus. An overview of where we stand with the current COVID wave (it's getting worse) and vaccine development (the research is promising but the development is far too slow). 
• Consensus.app. This is an AI-powered search engine that gets its answers solely from published scientific research. It looks like it will be very useful for certain search topics. Find out more about it in the Cool Tools newsletter.
• More of America’s homeless are clocking into jobs each day. 'Homelessness, already at a record high last year, appears to be worsening among workers." It's happening here in Canada too.
• The missing introduction to A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown. The book will be published later this month. Brown says: "This is the most personal work I have written, a distillation of a lifetime of outdoor exploration, reading, and living into a manifesto for rethinking how we live in the world and care for it—and for each other."
• How I learned to use my PC with a broken wrist. "After fracturing my wrist in a recent fall, I had to figure out how to use the accessibility features built into Windows to work and write."
• Surprising element found in traces of Tycho Brahe’s alchemy lab confounds scientists. "While Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is best known for his celestial discoveries made in the 16th century — before the invention of the telescope — he was also an alchemist who brewed secret medicines for elite clients. But what exactly Brahe worked on in his alchemical laboratory, located beneath his castle residence and observatory called Uraniborg, has be
  en something of a historical enigma."
• Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum. "I visited the fantastic exhibit about Mad Magazine at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its collection of Mad original art and artifacts is absolutely amazing." I would love to see this exhibition. I wonder if it will be travelling to other galleries?
• Take your dog on a "sniff walk". "I recently learned how important sniffing is for dogs, and it's changed my entire approach to dog walking for the better!" Our dog is a small dog, close to the ground, and spends most of her time outdoors on "walks" sniffing everything she can get close to. It obviously matters to her a lot more than to us.