Featured Links - February 18, 2026

Personal Note:  My eyes have improved enough that I can read comfortably (most of the  time) so I'm going to tyry to get back to a bit of blogging. 

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

A foggy February

Medical Fan Fiction, National Consequences, and What Happens When We Lose the Shared Shield. "Measles, declining vaccination rates, and the revival of preventable disease." ... "This is what breaks my heart. We had the answer, we still have the answer, we are watching people try to throw it away and call that freedom. And I simply will not stand by this. I will not be quiet while preventable disease is welcomed back like it deserves a seat at the table. I will make my voice loud and known, and I hope you do the same."

In Cuba, wellies shed light on the island’s hardships as Canada suspends flights. (gift link) It's sad to see what Cuba and Cubans are going through right now, through no fault of their own. "The footwear, it turns out, is a symbol of the island’s hardships. Pandemic-related declines in tourism and six decades of U.S. sanctions – including embargoes tightened by the Trump administration in 2025 – have pushed the island’s economy to collapse. Staples such as clothing are hard to find. These days, rubber boots are cheaper and easier to find than leather shoes or sneakers. Many Cubans pair their wellies with colourful socks, a testament to their resilience and flair."

Is 2026 the year buttons come back to cars? Crash testers say yes.  "The requirements won’t go far enough for many, but it’s a start." It can't come soon enough for me. Putting all controls into a screen interface is a recipe for distracted driving. 

Consumptive Capitalism. "On MAHA and Expensive Suffering -- A Guest Post by Sara Silverstein. An essay exposing the similarities between the MAHA movement and the tuberculosis treatments of the early 20th century. ' MAHA depends on the “again,” the fantasy of a better past. But it also depends on the “America,” the notion that we are in some way exceptional. But we are as vulnerable as everyone else without investment in medical science and public health. Valuing profit above life undermines our progress, and doing so under misleading appeals to myth only makes matters worse.'

Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can (archive link). 'People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures  of fat, and physicians are finally using them.' 

Inside the quest to build the ultimate nonalcoholic beer. "Scientists in Belgium—that celebrated bastion of ancient beer culture—are harnessing genetic breakthroughs and machine learning to reimagine how great booze gets built. Here’s how their revelations in the lab could transform the global beer industry." As a consumer of regular beer, I found this article quite interesting. A quality non-alcoholic beer would definitely get some of my money.

Featured Links - May 5, 2025

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

Chinatown East, Toronto

Fitting a round peg into a genre-sized hole. "Two authors talk about things not often talked about." Genre has always been a big point of discussion in the science fiction and fantasy field.

New images of Soviet Venus lander falling to Earth suggest its parachute may be out. "The soon-to-reenter Soviet Cosmos 482 Venus probe is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details." 

The Sliding State of the TTC. "Torontonians should expect a high-quality and reliable transit system from our well-compensated, civic and transit leaders, not an unreliable, low-ridership, low-frequency system that you might expect in an American city (outside of New York). The issues with the Toronto subway depress me, and are one of the things that makes me worry about our ability to deliver good transit — and they are likely mostly organizational, not technical." It's sad to see what's been happening with the TTC; transit in Toronto has been declining over the last decade despite several big, new projects.

Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish. "Year after year, document formats like .docx, .ppt, and pdf lose a little bit of steam. You might not have noticed… But Markdown is growing over and into the old formats, slowly, and nicely, like moss on a stranded star destroyer. Notes on a revolution in slow motion." If I need a text format that preserves some formatting, I prefer to write in HTML. 

Please, for the love of all things holy, update your BIOS. "I don't care if you call this a PSA, an explainer, or even a hot take. If you leave this article and decide it's time to update your BIOS, I've done my job. Despite how useful new BIOS releases can be for your system overall, there's still a reluctance to update unless something has gone seriously wrong with your system. That's outdated advice, and it's high time to address it."

Deep Research with AI: 9 Ways to Get Started. "Practical strategies for thorough, citation-rich AI research." There are some useful tips here.

Step up measles vaccinations, say doctors as outbreaks accelerate in Ontario, Alberta. "Despite surge in measles cases, getting more people immunized hasn't been easy for public health."

My Miserable Week in the 'Happiest Country on Earth' (gift link). "For eight years running, Finland has topped the World Happiness Report — but what exactly does it measure?" I would like to visit Finland, but not as the author did, in February. 

Movie and TV Reviews - June 2022

Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in June. Despite it being baseball season, we seem to have watched a lot of shows this month, probably because most of them only had a few episodes. 

Movies

• I Want You Back: A slightly better than average rom-com. (Amazon Prime)
• The Contractor: B-grade action flick. I watched it three weeks ago and I cannot remember anything about it. (Amazon Prime)
• Interceptor: The only reason to watch this is to watch a buff woman beat up on a bunch of bad guys. Don't even try to rationalize the plot or your brain will melt. (Netflix)
• Doctor Stange in the Multiverse of Madness: I am mad at myself for spending two hours watching this. I enjoyed the first Doctor Strange movie but this one is just an effects-heavy mess. 

TV Shows

• Bosch: Legacy. This season continues with Bosch being a private detective and his daughter a police trainee. If you liked the original series (I did), you'll like this. (Amazon Prime)
• Obi-Wan Kenobi: This should have been a 2-hour movie. It reinforced my dislike of most of the Star Wars stories. Trying to do character development in what is essentially a fairy tale just doesn't work. (Disney+)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: It is very much a modern version of the original series without the darker elements that showed up in Discovery. So far it hasn't grabbed me. I do wish producers would stop trying to recreate the past and move on to something new. Written SF moved on a long time ago. 
• Stranger Things, season 4: I do hope this is the final season. The show has lost the charm of the first couple of seasons. (Netflix)
• Prehistoric Planet: A dead-on recreation of the classic nature films with David Attenborough and dinosaurs. What more could you ask for? (Apple+)
• London Kills, season 3: One of the better British police procedurals.  Almost as intense as Line of Duty. (Acorn TV)
• Fifty Shades of Green: A fast tour of the 50 best gardens in Britain featuring some truly beautiful and unique gardens. I wish it had been spread out over several episodes instead of crammed into an hour.
• Signora Volpe: A British spy takes a vacation in Italy and hijinks ensure. Worth watching for the gorgeous Umbrian scenery if nothing else. (Acorn TV)
• Martin Klunes: Islands of the Pacific. A three-episode travelogue conducted by the actor, Martin Klunes, star of Doc Martin and Manhunt. I enjoyed it a lot. I learned something about a part of the world I will probably never visit and it's gorgeous to look at. (Acorn TV)

Is It Time to Scale Back Travel?

The pandemic has drastically reduced the number of people travelling, especially by air or on cruises. That's hard for industries and cities that rely on travel, but it's a good thing for the environment. Now that people are beginning to travel again, is it time to consider scaling back on travel to reduce the impacts on the planet? That's the point made in this New York Times opinion piece. 

I have written already about how the pandemic should prompt a rethinking of air travel. This is most true in the business world. Sure, there’s something magical about meeting face to face, but in an age of pretty good videoconferencing, there isn’t magic enough to justify the extreme environmental costs of routine flight. But flying is so carbon intensive — your share of the emissions from a single round-trip trans-Atlantic flight is almost enough to wipe out the gains you might get from living car-free for a year — that it’s worth considering limiting leisure plane trips, too. Some people can afford to travel to Europe every year, maybe even several times a year. I’m not one for flight shaming, but that level of indulgence ought to earn some measure of social opprobrium.

Cruises present an even better target for radical reform, if not outright prohibition. The early days of the pandemic highlighted the cruise industry’s vulnerability to contagion, but getting disease under control should be just the first step for this most polluting of conveyances. According to one study, a midsize cruise ship can emit as much particulate as one million cars. One cruise company alone, Carnival, was responsible for 10 times as much sulfur oxide as that emitted by the roughly 260 million passenger cars on European roads in 2017, a 2019 analysis found.

There may be a solution of sorts to some travel. I've been watching quite a few walking tour videos recently. People are creating videos of their walks in cities like London; some are even live streaming them. Given good internet access during a walk, it should be possible to hire a "personal walker" who could walk along a route that you pick and change the view to include things that you suggest during the walk. Perhaps it wouldn't be as pleasant as a walk in a foreign city, but it would be a lot better for the environment than flying on a jet for eight hours.