This week's photo is of a hasta in our front yard that has spent most of the winter buried under a waist-high mound of the snow. It has been struggling the last couple of years, so I hope this winter hasn't killed it off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and edited in Google Photos to improve the contrast.
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| Leaves of a hasta mostly buried in the snow |
It's hard to believe that it's been six years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concern about COVID-19 has faded into the background for most people, but it's still out there, lurking in the air when you go our shopping or go to a concert.
So what's the real situation with COVID-19 right now? Your Local Epidemiologist has published an article that looks at the current disease landscape; how much COVID is out there right now, how it's affecting people, and what are the current trends.
Six years! Six years with a complicated data story of real progress alongside real stubbornness. This anniversary is striking to me for two reasons. The first is the virus itself: it continues to surprise us, and we remain humbled by how much we still don’t understand. The second is what has happened to us in its wake.
For myself, I'm still being careful, masking in crowded situations and in medical facilities like doctors' offices and hospitals. (A good rule of thumb is that if the staff are masking then you should be too.) I'll keep getting vaccinated twice a year and keep hoping for a vaccine that protects against infection. And I'll keep reading YLE and other reputable sites for reliable information about COVID and any other nasties that might be out there.
The Canadian government has announced that it will fund the construction of a space launch site near Canso, Nova Scotia. Canada has been building satellites and other space hardware, like the Canadarms on the Shuttle and ISS, but has not had it's own dedicated launch site.
The government will also be funding the development of a made-in-Canada launch vehicle.
A spaceport in Nova Scotia. A spaceport in Newfoundland. Three funded Canadian rocket companies. A $105 million competitive grant program with more rounds coming. The global space economy is projected to reach approximately $2 trillion by 2040. Canada is planting its flag in that economy right now, while the ground is still moving — instead of letting a billionaire cult leader control the on-ramp.
Here’s the piece that most coverage is either missing or treating as a footnote, and it absolutely shouldn’t be.
Alongside the Spaceport deal, Defence Minister McGuinty announced that Canada plans to become a full member of the NATO Starlift initiative — a program designed to create a space-launch network across alliance members, allowing allies to get payloads into orbit on short notice, especially during a crisis or active conflict.
All I can say is that it's about time.
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| Birds wintering on the Bay |
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the finalists for the 2025 Nebula Awards. The finalists will be announced in Chicago and online during the Nebula Conference and Awards, June 3-7.
These are the finalists for the Best Novel award.
My vision is gradually getting better, so I've been taking the occasional picture, mostly using my Pixel 8 Pro. This is a picture of the ice on Frenchman's Bay, gradually breaking up and melting on a warm spring morning.
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| Ice melting on Frenchman's Bay |
This week's musical treat is piece of music that links the horrors of the Holocaust to the terrorizing of immigrant communities by ICE raids in the United States. "For Anne in the Attic" was performed in Spokane, WA earlier this month. From The Globe and Mail article (gift link) titled "Chorus of Discontent"
Dressed in church choir black, the women standing at the front of the Unity Spiritual Center in Spokane, Wash., last Sunday began to sing a new song that likens the U.S. treatment of asylum seekers to the Holocaust.
“Could they see you run for your lives as the forces of hatred pursued you, found you,” the choir sang.
“Where was their humanity?”
Midway through, the pronouns shifted − no longer “they,” but “we,” a switch from the past to the present. “Do we know? Do we know?” they sang. “Can we hear your pleas for asylum when fleeing, afraid for your lives?”
The choral arrangement, For Anne in the Attic, was written by Janice Mayfield, a local woman who penned the words after rereading The Diary of Anne Frank amid the cou--ntless headlines about U.S. immigration enforcement
I have been wondering why the current political situation hasn't generated more protest songs. There have been some, as pointed out by NPR. I blogged about Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" recently, but you're more likely to the 60-year-old Stephen Stills classic, "For What It's Worth" than the Springsteen song on what passes for radio these days.
You probably won't hear "For Anne in the Attic" on the radio, but it may become a modern standard in church and choral performances. (If anyone can find the lyrics online, please let me know in the comments).
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| 1st issue of Amazing Stories |
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| Lactose-free cat |
How do we address the firehose of inaccurate information that is flooding the internet right now? It’s tempting to try to play whack-a-mole, tackling one rumor after another, and there is certainly value in addressing individual claims.But emerging research shows that a better (and less exhausting) method —“prebunking,” or teaching people to recognize falsehoods before they encounter them—is highly effective. If you can teach people to recognize the common rhetorical tricks that are used to sell falsehoods, they can identify them for themselves in the wild, instead of relying on scientists and doctors to chase down every individual claim, meme, or video (which is impossible).With that, here’s a prebunking lesson for you.
I can't recommend this article highly enough. Read it, remember it, and apply it in your daily reading. You won't regret it.
It's easy to get depressed when looking at the news and thinking that everything is getting worse. But there are some trends that provide some hope, at least in the middle and long-term futures.
Science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, has published a blog post in which he highlights some things that might lead to cautious optimism about our future prospects. It's long but worth a read.
Today I’m going to describe some hard, apocalyptic truths about our short-term future. Basically, using fossil fuels for geopolitical extortion is resulting in catastrophe. But then I’m going to make three unapocalyptic claims: first, that fossil fuel coercion is becoming structurally self-defeating; second, that future material scarcities that can be used to coerce weaker nations are shallower and shorter-lived than their predecessors; and third, that the limiting constraint on industrial civilization is ultimately ecological rather than technological or political. Finally, I’ll show how this is cause for a (cautious) optimism about our mid- to long-term future.
A week ago, the markets had a bad day. The Dow dropped by about 800 points. In a blog post, Paul Krugman made the case that the cause was a science fiction story in the form of a fictional financial report from 2028.
Last weekend Citrini Research released a report — on Substack! — titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. The report, which rapidly went viral, laid out a scenario for economic and financial chaos caused by AI, written as if it were a retrospective published after the dire developments it projected. Although it’s always hard to know why financial markets move on any given day, the report may have played a role in Monday’s 800-point decline in the Dow. Science fiction moving markets? Why not?
There are two distinct questions about the huge reaction to a report that didn’t actually contain any news. It was just opinion, albeit cleverly presented. The first is whether the economic scenario the report laid out makes sense, to which the answer is no. The second is why investors are so on edge that such a report could elicit such an extreme reaction.
The report, which is really a rather dry science fiction story in disguise, makes the case that AI will completely disrupt the economy over the next few years. Not being a financial analyst, I can't comment on the accuracy of the report's predictions, but Krugman, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, doesn't think they make much sense.
Still, the fact that the report might have contributed to a large and sudden (albeit temporary) market decline shows that there is widespread concern about the long-term effects of AI technology on the economy.
It'll be interesting to see if the report makes it into any year's best science fiction anthologies next year.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in February. A bit shorter than usual because we watched a lot of winter Olympics.
