Featured Links - July 22, 2025

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

Sunset along the 401

• Five days, 65 km, 86,000 steps — and one restless city: I walked all the way across Toronto. This is what I saw (archive link). I am waiting for the Eglinton Crosstown to open and plan to ride it across Toronto, perhaps with stops at some of the stations on the underground part of the line. 
• A Juicy Chronicle of the Fat Decades at Condé Nast (gift link). Empire of the Elite, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is a story of (mostly) insider-outsiders who helmed the glossiest American magazines in their heyday." I miss magazines and browsing the racks in stores like Lichtman's, now sadly defunct. 
• Why Did the Rich Pull Away from the Rest? 'This is Part I of Stone Center Senior Scholar Paul Krugman’s series “Understanding Inequality,” which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter.' This is an important series of articles and worth the time to read.
• Published Via Desktop. 'A list of programs from the all-too-brief golden era of desktop publishing that “didn’t make it.” The GUI’s killer app didn’t slay forever.' Out of the 10 programs listed in the article, I used two: Aldus PageMaker and Venture Publisher. 
• The Peptide Craze. "The Surge in Use of Off-Label and Non-FDA Approved Peptides." TANSTAAFL. 
• Terry Gilliam Reflects On ‘Brazil’ As Film Celebrates 40th Anniversary & The Challenges Of Getting Movies Made Today: “I Really Don’t Want Any More Fights” I really must rewatch Brazil; it's one of my favourite movies. 
• Alberta’s Book Ban Is a Blatant Act of Cultural Vandalism. "The push to sanitize school collections erases what literature is for: knowledge, discovery, the freedom to think." I am sad to see this happening in Canada. 
• The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations. "I would like to address the recent slander circulating on social media, in editorial Slack channels, and in the margins of otherwise decent Substack newsletters. Specifically, the baseless, libelous accusation that my usage is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence."
• Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe. "A new theory promises to simplify our approach to the universe's earliest moments, but some cosmologists say further mathematical scrutiny is warranted." Simplification is good. 

Featured Links - April 22, 2025

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

I am surprised this shed lasted the winter. 

• Just one exo-Earth pixel can reveal continents, oceans, and more. "Even from a single pixel, multiwavelength data taken over time can reveal clouds, icecaps, oceans, continents, and even signs of life."
  
• Association of self-reported and accelerometer-based walking pace with incident cardiac arrhythmias: a prospective cohort study using UK Biobank. "Average and brisk self-reported walking pace and time spent walking at moderate and brisk pace were associated with a decreased risk of cardiac arrhythmias, in part mediated via metabolic and inflammatory pathways. Our findings suggest brisk walking may be a safe and effective exercise to reduce arrhythmias, especially for higher risk groups."
• The iPhone 16 Pro Max helped me see – with a little help from the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. "Specifically, the 5x telephoto cameras on both flagship phones came in very handy, letting me zoom in on details on the Reichstag or the myriad of street art sprayed onto the walls and buildings of the city. But both phones really helped me and my poor eyes when visiting the Berlin Zoo." 
• DOJ's menacing letter to med journals "a chill down the spine of scientists". It will take a generation to repair the damage that the Trump regime has already done to US science and medicine. 
• 5 services I disabled to improve Windows performance. There are certainly many more services that could be disabled but this is a good start. 
• 'Bad Omen': Ancient Pyramid in Mexico Collapsed Into A Pile of Rubble. Extreme weather events and rising seas are putting precious heritage sites around the world in harm's way. "A stunning example of this phenomenon in 2024 was a stone pyramid in Mexico succumbing to an increasingly chaotic global climate."
• A three-storey home built in just three days? Why this Toronto tear down may hold the key to Canada’s house building strategy (archive link). "Construction of a prefabricated home just off the Danforth shows how the building technique can combat climate change." It's about time and I hope we see more of this. 
• 5 takeaways about NPR's reporting on the whistleblower report about DOGE at the NLRB. The security nightmare continues. IT security people must be tearing their hair out.
• Breakthrough gravity discovery challenges the existence of dark matter. "Richard Lieu offers a theory that could challenge one of the biggest assumptions in astrophysics. His idea: gravity can exist without any mass at all." Yet another theory that aims to eliminate the need for dark matter. 
• No, astronomers almost certainly didn’t find biosignatures of life on another planet. "I’m not even convinced they found the molecules they claim to have found." Some skepticism on recent news from astronomer Phil Plait. 
• Aylmer - The Canadian Soup. A commercial that's now showing on Canadian TV. Take that, Trump!

A Thanksgiving Comedy Classic

For my younger readers who, like my daughter, may not have seen this, here's the classic Thanksgiving turkey drop scene from WKRP in Cincinnati. It's one of the funniest single scenes in the history of television comedy. 

 

Here's a history of that episode and how it probably saved WKRP from cancellation. 

Gordon Lightfoot, RIP

Gordon Lightfoot died last night, leaving a giant hole in the hearts of music-loving Canadians. His music has been part of the soundtrack of my life ever since I was a teenager. Sadly, I only saw him perform once, when I was in university. It wasn't an ideal concert setting, in a basketball gym, but he managed to win over an audience of rowdy university students. I heard later that he and his band had killed off most of a 24 between sets, and the second set was definitely much better.

Here's a tribute and a funny story about Lightfoot from SF author, Elizabeth Bear. 

I was pretty sure Gordon Lightfoot was going to live forever, but I see on the slowly entropizing Twitter machine that he’s passed away.

So this seems like a good time to tell a story I have from a man I used to work for (also now gone) who used to be the road manager for one Waylon Jennings (RIP, you may have heard of him).

So, my former boss had an awful lot of stories, including the one about Kris Kristofferson going AWOL and stealing a helicopter, which he landed on Johnny Cash’s lawn so he could hand Cash a sheaf of song lyrics before the MPs grabbed him. But his Gordon Lightfoot story was my favorite.

Featured Links - January 4, 2023

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

Tea Sea on New Year's Day 

• Three years on, the pandemic — and our response — have been jolting. "Here’s what even the experts didn’t see coming." By Helen Branswell, who is always worth reading.
• 22 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2022. "From spinal implants that allow paralyzed people to walk to smashing an asteroid off course with a rocket, this wasn’t just a year of negative headlines."
• The top science stories of 2022. "NASA nudges an asteroid, weird things emerge from water, and scientists tackle a new epidemic."
• Snow Crash: the 30-year-old novel that predicted today’s twisted Metaverse. "Prophetic sci-fi author Neal Stephenson tells Dazed what his seminal story got right and wrong about today’s terminally online world."
• The Best News Bloopers of 2022. Some light humour to start the year.
• Time for a pharmacology tweetorial (of sorts) on one-eyed sheep. "It’s an odyssey that began on Idaho ranches in the 1950s and ended over half a century later with the approval of several new cancer drugs for basal cell carcinoma and AML." This is a fascinating story that illustrates the roundabout way that scientific research sometimes takes to deliver results. 
• The sci-fi and fantasy books I'm looking forward to in 2023. "19 new reads to read this coming year" by Andrew Liptak.
• The Year Ahead in Energy. "In 2023 we will see the first real movement in a global energy transition—and will hit lots of bumps in the road along the way."

Featured Links - March 28, 2022

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

• In Search Of A Flood Like No Other. "Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
• "Mars and Beyond" is a 1957 Disney show about life on other planets. (YouTube link). I remember watching this as a kid. It's worth watching if just for the wonderful animation.
• The internet’s funniest doctor is in on the joke. "Will Flanary’s days are spent conducting eye exams and cataract surgeries at a private practice outside Portland, Ore. The evenings are for family, and a standing commitment to make dinner for his wife and two daughters. That leaves nights and weekends for the ring light, the iPhone, and Flanary’s alter ego, an internet celebrity known as Dr. Glaucomflecken."
• The Red State Murder Problem. "The rate of murders in the US has gone up at an alarming rate. But, despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions."
• Coronal Loops Might Not Be Loops at All – “When I Saw the Results, My Mind Exploded.” 
• Sydney to Perth in five days in a short-range BYD T3 electric van. "When Steve Gill decided to buy one of a very limited number of electric T3 vans from BYD importer EV Direct he had to make the unusual decision of driving it unregistered (but with a permit) from its pickup point in Sydney to Perth in just five days, the longest time period a permit can cover."
• The Mystery at the Heart of Physics That Only Math Can Solve. "The accelerating effort to understand the mathematics of quantum field theory will have profound consequences for both math and physics." This is the best article on quantum physics that I've seen in a very long time. 
• When Graphs Are a Matter of Life and Death. "Pie charts and scatter plots seem like ordinary tools, but they revolutionized the way we solve problems."

Featured Links - December 6. 2021

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

Why e, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best. "The solution to our puzzle about Euler’s number explains why e pops up in situations that involve optimality."

How to Download Anything on the Web for Free: 12 Tips and Tools. "Here's how to download anything from the web that you thought you couldn't for free... without breaking the law."

The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest. "Where 'www' means 'wretched writers welcome.'''

Neutron switches to methane/oxygen, 1 Meganewton Archimedes engine revealed. "Rocket Lab has provided a significant update in the progress of their Neutron rocket, a vehicle aimed primarily at the small-scale interplanetary and low Earth orbit mega-constellation markets at first."

Supersonic Projectile Exceeds Engineers Dreams: The Supersonic Trebuchet. Some people have too much time on their hands. 

On the pronunciation of Omicron. The authoritative word from the OED. 

Friday Funny: Monkey Reads the Manual

 I have, during my many years as a technical writer, heard users called disparaging names, including "monkey". Occasionally they deserved it. In this video, the user is a monkey, and he even reads the manual.

George the monkey is curious about his new water bottle.  In this video you can see George remove a large metal water bottle from a cardboard box, unsuccessfully attempt to unscrew the lid, refer to the user manual (upside down), successfully unscrew the lid, peer into the bottle and sniff it, screw the lid back onto the bottle and immediately unscrew, and consult the user manual again.

The Far Side Is Back!

The Far Side, Gary Larson's wonderfully twisted comic series, finally is on the Internet. Those of you who were born after 1990 probably won't know what this means to some of us. All I can say is that you are in for a treat.

TheFarSide.com offers a deep dive into Gary’s offbeat sense of humor with The Daily Dose, an ever-changing, random selection of cartoons. Comic Collections offer a different themed collection of his classic cartoons updated weekly. You’ll also find exclusive, never-before-seen extras such as sketches straight from Gary’s personal Sketchbooks. And finally, beginning in 2020, and commemorating the fortieth anniversary of The Far Side, we will periodically unveil new work by the man himself! In truth, we really have no idea what might show up. But, on the other hand, what’s changed?

Spy Cats

There was some serious craziness going on during the Cold War and there's hardly a better example than the CIA's Project Acoustic Kitty, which tried to train cats as spies. Yes, it was a real project.

Cats are small, stealthy, and people who aren’t cat lovers will likely ignore a stray without a second glance. For the CIA in the 1960s, this meant cats were the perfect animals to be trained as spies.

The idea was born from B. F. Skinner’s work in operant psychology and behaviour modification. Burrhus Frederick Skinner was an American Psychologist who believed that an animal’s behaviour could be predicted and shaped through behavioural reinforcement in a controlled environment. The bulk of his work relied on what’s become known as a “Skinner Box.”

I wonder if any of the researchers were cat owners. As someone who has been living with cats for about 20 years, I cannot imagine how anyone with any experience with cats could have thought that the idea of training them was workable.

Alice's Restaurant

I wasn't going to do a post about Thanksgiving, being that we Canadians celebrated it six weeks ago, but someone posted a link to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant on my Facebook feed and I just had to share it.

Those of you of a younger generation may not have heard this. If not, you are missing one of the signature pieces of 1960's music. It is still hilariously funny, especially if you are in the proper state of mind 😁.

There is also a film version, directed by the great Arthur Penn. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be up on Netflix or Amazon Prime (at least in Canada) or I'd watch it again tonight.

Update: Here's a good interview with Arto Guthrie about his current life and plans for the future.

Near Toronto? Right!

According to the headline at BlogTO.com, the north shore of Lake Superior near Sault Ste. Marie is now "near Toronto". That's one of the best examples of Toronto centrism that I've seen in quite a while. Maybe Doug Ford will add the Sault to the list of destinations to which he's going to build a subway. Admittedly, the article does quality the term "near", but still.

Ice caves near Toronto ranked as one of the top places to visit in the world

The New York Times just dropped its ultra prestigious annual list of "52 Places to Go" in the world, and one of the spots to make the cut is right in your own backyard... relatively speaking.

Aside from Calgary, the scenic ice caves along Lake Superior's northern shore are the only destination in Canada to have made NYT's influential travel guide this year.

An Interview with Santa's Lawyer

John Scalzi is noted for humorous fiction, and this year he's given us a Christmas treat. Here's a link to "An Interview with Santa's Lawyer". Don't read this while eating or drinking.

Please state your name and occupation.

My name is Marta Pittman, and I’m a partner at Xavier, Masham, Abbott and Stevens.

And you’re Santa Claus’ lawyer.

That is correct. More accurately, I’m the partner in charge of our firm’s Seasonal Litigation and Clearances practice, which has as a client NicolasNorth LLC, Santa’s corporate entity.

I wasn’t aware that Santa needed to have his own corporation.

Of course he does. One, Santa heads a massive global enterprise, whose activities are spread over a wide range of areas. Having a corporate structure allows him a measure of organization and systematization. Two, Santa has a large number of employees, mostly elves, who have their own idiosyncratic employment issues and practices. The corporate structure simplifies hiring, benefits, and negotiation of labor disputes. Three, due to the nature of Santa’s work, he has immense exposure to liability. The corporate structure acts as a shield for Santa’s personal wealth and property.

Santa has liability issues?

Automated Customer Service: A Treat from John Scalzi

SF author John Scalzi was on a book tour last month. As a treat for his audiences, he read a new short story, "Automated Customer Service", about the dangers of automated customer service phone lines and the Internet of (Dangerous) Things.

He's now posted on his blog in both text and audio. it It's typical Scalzi, snappy and funny but also quite grim. If you have 12 minutes, I recommend listening to Scalzi's reading of it. Warning: Do not try eating or drinking while reading or listening to this.

Thank you for calling the customer service line of Vacuubot, purveyors of America’s finest automated vacuum cleaners! In order to more efficiently handle call volume, we rely on automated responses. To continue in English, press one. Para Espanol o prima dos.

Let's continue in English. Which Vacuubot product are you calling about? For the Vacuubot S10 model, press one. For the Vacuubot XL model, press two. For the Vacuubot Extreme Clean model, press three.