Featured Links - October 10, 2023

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

Harmony Bay

• Microsoft’s font substitution for Aptos really sucks. "Microsoft’s alternatives for the new Aptos fonts range are very poor. In some cases, the substitions make no sense at all.  We’ve looked at what happens if a document with Aptos fonts is opened Office 2016 and earlier versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."
• The Plain View. "The best virtual reality experience I’ve had this year was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion. But it came with a live soundtrack from an iconic rock band." Attending a concert at The Sphere is now on my bucket list.
• How to add Markdown support to Google Docs. "You have an alternative to keyboard shortcuts." Markdown continues its inexorable march to world domination. 
• Cats first finagled their way into human hearts and homes thousands of years ago – here’s how. If you are a cat person, you will find this article quite interesting.
• Disney+ censoring classic Disney cartoons to reflect modern sensibilities. This is just wrong.
• Adobe and Microsoft break some old files by removing PostScript font support. "PostScript Type 1 fonts are decades old, but apps supported them until recently." This could be a problem if you have old documents that you are trying to open.
• Terry Bisson’s History of the Future. "For more than two decades, one of pulp sci-fi’s masters has delivered headlines from a time line defined by the absurd." Bisson gets profiled in the New Yorker. See my blog post about his novel, Fire on the Mountain. 

Off for Canadian Thanksgiving

This coming Monday is Thanksgiving here in the Great Red and Orange North. I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging to help Nancy get the house straightened up for our big dinner on Monday.

Posts have been slow the last while because I've just been too busy. Things will hopefully settle down but I don't expect to be able to post daily until the end of the month. 

Here's a picture I took with my Pixel 4a (soon to be replaced by a Pixel 8 Pro) of Haviland Bay north of Sault Ste Marie. I do miss the north in the fall. 

Haviland Bay

 

The New Hot War

With the rise in world tensions between the West, Russia, and China, the phrase "the new Cold War" has been cropping up in the media. But trade, political, and military tensions aren't the most important conflict that's going on right now. What we are in should be titled "the new Hot War", as this article from Tim Bray's blog points out.

As it happens, industrializing countries first began to, in essence, make war on our world in the late eighteenth century, but had no idea they were doing so until deep into the twentieth century. These days, however, it should be anything but a secret that humanity is all too knowingly at war — and there’s nothing “cold” about it — with and on our very own world. Sadly enough, however, in the United States, the leading politicians of one of the two major political parties seem remarkably intent not just on refusing to recognize that reality, but on supporting the release of carbon into the atmosphere in ever more major ways. Its presidential candidates, especially Donald Trump (whose last presidential campaign was heavily financed by the fossil fuel industry) and the failing, flailing Ron DeSantis, are, in fact, remarkably eager to deny the reality of our present world. Worse yet, they seem hell-bent on encouraging the further development and use of coal, natural gas, and oil on a staggering scale, while shredding what regulations exist to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, from the heart of Texas oil country, as the New York Times recently reported, DeSantis announced a plan he called “the freedom to fuel.” He promised “to remove subsidies for electric vehicles, take the U.S. out of global climate agreements — including the Paris accords — and cancel net-zero emission promises. He also vowed to increase American oil and natural gas production and ‘replace the phrase climate change with energy dominance’ in policy guidance.”

God help us if the Republicans form the next US administration. It will be them, Great Britain, and Alberta and Saskatchewan against the rest of the world. I know which side I'll be on.  

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz

The Terraformers is the third science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz. I've read both the previous novels (Autonomous and The Future of Another Timeline) and enjoyed them, and I enjoyed The Terraformers even more.

It's set about 60,000 years in the future (more on that later) in an era where there is star travel, intelligent robots, advanced genetic engineering, and ubiquitous networking. People live for hundreds or thousands of years and the term 'people' includes animal species like moose, naked mole rats, cats, and biologically engineered flying trains. Yet the plot of the book revolves around very current issues like preserving the environment and fighting rapacious development corporations. 

I'm not sure why Newitz set the book that far in the future. It pushed my willing suspension of disbelief past its limits as it could easily have been set much closer to our present. I finally decided that it didn't matter and ignored it as I was having too much fun. It's a book that made me feel like I was 12 and discovering science fiction for the first time, although my 12-year-old self probably would have had trouble dealing with the interspecies sex and LGBTQ+ characters. None of that gets in the way of the story, which moves along quickly and kept me interested right to the end. 

I expect to see The Terraformers on the ballots for next year's major science fiction  awards. 

 

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2023

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in September.

Movies 

• Elemental: I didn't like this as much as Turning Red, which we watched last month. The animation was spectacular, and often quite trippy, but the story didn't click with me. But I'm hardly their target audience. (Disney+)
  

TV Shows

• Silent Witness (seaons 24-26): We are still watching and enjoying this show, though I did not like season 25 and the beginning of season 26 as much, because it turned into a political thriller instead of a police/forensic procedural, although the last episodes of season 26 were quite good. (Amazon Prime)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 23): Still watching and enjoying this. The trip though Wales was especially interesting.
• The Wheel of Time (seasaon 2): The second season of this show is much more interesting than the first season, now that the characters and background have been established. 
• Ashoka: I don't think this is the best of the Star Wars live action series so far, but it is revealing some interesting details about the Jedi.  (Disney+)
• Foundation (season 2): This show bears little relation to the Isaac Asimov series that inspired it. I didn't like the first season very much, but the second season has gotten off to a better start, though I'm still finding the storyline hard to follow.

Saturday Sounds - September 30, 2023

The Jefferson Airplane were the first band that I became a real fan of. Part of that was an adolescent crush on Grace Slick, part was a fascination with the San Francisco hippie scene, but mostly it was the propulsive, guitar-driven sound of the band and their wonderful harmonies. I was lucky enough to see them perform twice in Detroit in 1968 and 1968; I still consider their November 1969 performance at the East Towne Threater to be the best single rock performance I've seen. 

The Airplane disbanded before portable taping equipment and the taper movement became widespread, so there aren't many good audience recordings of their concerts. Some soundboards of varying quality circulate and this week's Saturday Sounds post is one of them, from a performance at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, CA, on May 19th, 1967. 

Considering the era, the recording is of decent quality. Unfortunately, there are several cuts (notably in White Rabbit and Somebody to Love), but from what I remember after more than 50 years, this recording is as close to what they sounded like live as any I've heard. The best part of the set is the jam that follows This Is My Life, starting about 45:00 followed by their first live performance of Won't You Try/Saturday Afternoon. 

For better sound quality, both their performances at the Monterey Pop Festival later in 1967 and at Woodstock in 1969 have been commercially released and are available for streaming.

Photo of the Week - October 1, 2023

Here's a house in our neighbourhood. The somewhat overgrown front yard makes me suspect that it may be soon sold and replaced by a soulless monster home, a fate that has befallen several properties on its street. The lighting and lack of variety in the scene's colours prompted me to use black and white for this shot. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 34 mm., F5.6 at 1/340 second, ISO 320, TriX 400 filrm simulation

 

Featured Links - September 25, 2023

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

Frenchman's Bay 

• How to use Google News like an RSS reader. There are some useful tips in this article, although I wouldn't do as the article suggests and ditch my RSS feed reader.  
• Best LastPass Alternatives Of 2023. If you are still using LastPass, or not using a password manager at all, you should read this.
• Microsoft Sysinternals: The best Windows troubleshooting tools. "Microsoft Sysinternals provides the best tools you need to troubleshoot Windows systems." 
• 50 programs that fix Windows problems with just a few clicks. "All you need is the right software to quickly fix common Windows headaches. Here are 50 ultra-handy tools."
• The Long Goodbye. A long article about the final Dead and Company tour. Wish I could have seen them.
• When the Breakthrough G-Agonists Exceed Expectations. "The expanding GLP-1 family of drugs and their expanded potential use cases."
• The Summer That Reality Caught Up to Climate Fiction. "Once deemed outlandish and fitting for a dystopian novel, today's unfolding events challenge fiction writers to redefine their narratives."

Photo of the Week

I took the camera down to the bay earlier this week in hope of some bird pictures. There were a few swans, ducks,  and geese enjoying the calm, sunny morning.

Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm F4 at 80 mm, F5.6, 1/2900 second, ISO 320, Astia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - September 23, 2023

This week's musical treat is a 1977 performance by Little Feat from the Rockpalast TV  show. The video quality is very good for 1977 (maybe upscaled?), the sound quality is good, and the performance first rate. As a bonus, the video includes a pre-show interview, a warmup song by Ry Cooder, and a song from the soundcheck. Enjoy.

Featured Links - September 18. 2023

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

Frenchman's Bay

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On. "And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text—and tools to evade detection."

1987 Nuclear Mars Mission. "A crewed Mars mission requiring 5 Energia launches." They dreamed big. But the Soviet Union collapsed before they could become reality.

AI-Assisted Language Translation of Speaking, Including Mouth Movements. "HeyGen's Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements." This is amazing but has disturbing implications. 

Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty. "A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community."

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix. "Alive and still quite vigorous considering its age." I was on USENET a lot up until about 2000 and wrote this article about it. I may revisit it if I can find a decent free server. 

Welcome to the Unapocalypse. "Where SciFi and Design intersect." New Substack from SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder. 

A 350-Year-Old Theorem Can Explain The Quantum Properties Of Light. "Physicists have applied classical mechanics rules to light – with success."

Photo of the Week - September 17, 2023

This week's picture is of some swans and ducks on Frenchman's Bay on Friday morning. It was a lovely day, and I wish I'd brought my camera. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Birds on Frenchman's Bay

 

Saturday Sounds - Dave McMurray - Grateful Deadication 2

The Grateful Dead always had a love of and appreciation for jazz and they often played with jazz musicians, most notably Ornette Coleman and Branford Marsalis, so it's not surprising that jazz musicians have covered their music. Today's treat is Grateful Deadicated 2, an album by saxophonist Dave McMurray in which he covers nine Grateful Dead songs. 

It isn't the most out there jazz, but I like it. As you might expect from the title, there is a previous album of more Grateful Dead songs.

We're Toast 43

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Today's post is a departure from my normal format as it concentrates on a couple pf recent news items that do not bode well for our future.

First, a new paper in Science Advances titled Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Here's the abstract.

This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped. As primary production drives Earth system biosphere functions, human appropriation of net primary production is proposed as a control variable for functional biosphere integrity. This boundary is also transgressed. Earth system modeling of different levels of the transgression of the climate and land system change boundaries illustrates that these anthropogenic impacts on Earth system must be considered in a systemic context.

This is a graphic from the article.

The State of Earth's Boundaries

The paper has received quite a bit of notice in the general press. There's a good summary in The Guardian. Here's a quote from that article.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilisation arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first of all nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet”, the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

Today, the Eye on the Storm blog on the Yale Climate Connections site reports that August 2023 was the hottest August on record and this year is likely to be the warmest year on record. 

According to an analysis by Climate Central, 3.9 billion people across the world suffered extreme temperatures made at least three times more likely by climate change for over 30 days during the June-August period; 1.5 billion people experienced extreme temperatures at this level for all 92 days of the June-August period. About 98% of the global population was exposed to extreme heat made at least two times more likely by human-caused global warming during this period.

Meanwhile, in the province of Ontario, it's business as usual as the government buries a report on the effects on climate change on the province for eight months. 

A new report commissioned by Premier Doug Ford's government warns that climate change poses high risks to Ontario, with impacts on everything from food production to infrastructure to businesses. 

The report – called the Provincial Climate Change Impact Assessment – projects a soaring number of days with extreme heat across Ontario, as well as increases in flooding and more frequent wildfires. 

Presented to the government in January but only posted publicly in late August, the government did not issue a news release about the report. It follows a summer where Ontarians faced at times extreme heat, heavy rainstorms and unprecedented wildfire smoke.    

Finally, again in Ontario, the government appears to be doubling down on its plans to develop portions of the greenbelt which were set aside years ago to discourage urban sprawl and protect the environment. 

Ford’s government has so far stonewalled on the auditor general’s key recommendation that the removal of the lands from the Greenbelt be “reconsidered.”

In fact, the government seems to be moving in the opposite direction. It is pressuring developers to accelerate construction on the removed lands.

New Housing Minister Paul Calandra is now advancing a wholesale review of the Greenbelt plan. That seems to include consideration of the possibility of further land removals, if not a complete reconsideration of the Greenbelt as a whole.

 

 

 

Microsoft Word and Adjective Order

Despite having worked for more than 30 years as a technical writer, I have to admit that I've never come across the concept of adjective order. That's probably because technical documentation doesn't use many adjectives and certainly not long strings of them. 

English grammar does have an established order for adjectives: Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, Material, and Purpose. So we write "the big brown cat" instead of "the brown big cat". 

I had never come across the rule for adjective order until I read this article from Office Watch about Microsoft Word and the problem that its grammar checker has with adjectives. Word will suggest the correct order for three adjectives, for example, but if you string together six of them, you are out of luck. 

I don't see this as a big problem as I don't usually write long strings of adjectives, even outside of technical documentation. But it is something to be aware of if you are using Word for something like marketing copy. 

A Disinformation Campaign About the Maui Wildfires

The wildfires that devastated the town of Lahaina and other locations on Maui were likely caused by high winds and electric power lines, a bad combination that's caused fires in many other locations. But that's not stopping bad actors from circulating  conspiracy theories about the fires. 

NewsGuard says it traced the conspiracy theory back to a post on the Chinese platform called 163.com in early August. From there, the accounts reportedly jumped platforms and made their way to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and around 10 other sites by mid-August. By September, the posts appeared on over a dozen platforms with posts attempting to target users from a wide variety of countries. Some of the shady accounts interacted with each other to boost their content and used the hashtag #meteorologicalweapon to amplify the falsehoods. Many of the posts appeared to have replies and likes generated by bot accounts trying to make it appear as if humans were organically interacting with them.

In an email to Gizmodo, Meta confirmed the accounts shared by NewsGuard were part of a disinformation operation called Spamouflage that originated in China. That campaign, which dates back to 2019, was linked to another trove of inauthentic Facebook accounts and pages detected recently highlighted by Meta researchers. Meta said the accounts mentioned in the NewsGuard report were unsuccessful in their attempts to reach real audiences on Facebook.

Can Large Language Models Reason?

I am bothered by the common use of the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to refer to Large Language Model (LLM) products like ChatGPT. It's clear that they are good at predicting text, but people are equating that with thinking, and that's clearly wrong.

Here's a good article by Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe institute that looks at the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in detail. It's one of the better articles on the subject that I've seen recently.  

What should we believe about the reasoning abilities of today’s large language models?  As the headlines above illustrate, there’s a debate raging over whether these enormous pre-trained neural networks have achieved humanlike reasoning abilities, or whether their skills are in fact “a mirage.”

Reasoning is a central aspect of human intelligence, and robust domain-independent reasoning abilities have long been a key goal for AI systems. While large language models (LLMs) are not explicitly trained to reason, they have exhibited “emergent” behaviors that sometimes look like reasoning. But are these behaviors actually driven by true abstract reasoning abilities, or by some other less robust and generalizable mechanism—for example, by memorizing their training data and later matching patterns in a given problem to those found in training data? 

Why does this matter? If robust general-purpose reasoning abilities have emerged in LLMs, this bolsters the claim that such systems are an important step on the way to trustworthy general intelligence.  On the other hand, if LLMs rely primarily on memorization and pattern-matching rather than true reasoning, then they will not be generalizable—we can’t trust them to perform well on “out of distribution” tasks, those that are not sufficiently similar to tasks they’ve seen in the training data. 

Featured Links - September 11, 2023

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

Eroded tree by the lakeshore

The Energia-Buran Archive. More than 1000 photos of the Soviet Union's heavy-lift rocket and orbiter. 

The End Will Come For The Cult of MAGA. "The next generation isn’t buying it." Let's hope that's true.

Fish doorbells! Historic sandwiches! "50 of the weirdest, most wonderful corners of the web – picked by an expert." 

If Corporations Bore the True Cost of Their Emissions, They’d Owe Trillions. "And that doesn’t even include “downstream” carbon spewing." Corporations are getting a free ride by not having to include the environmental impact of both the production of their products and their eventual disposal.

Coercion versus Care. "It’s irrational and costly, and spreading everywhere, this 4:1 or 5:1 ratio of coercion to care. Witness the recent decision of a US school district to replace libraries with ‘discipline centers’, or the UK Tory politician Robert Jenrick’s purely sadistic instruction for a child refugee centre to paint over the cartoons on the wall. Or indeed, the appetite of the UK’s Department of Work and Pensions, to target £8 billion in ‘fraud’, when £20-30 billion of welfare that people need and deserve goes unpaid each year because its systems are so user-hostile."

'Rich Men North Of Richmond' Singer Rips GOP Candidates After Song Is Played At Debate. "Oliver Anthony, whose song 'Rich Men North of Richmond' became a conservative rallying cry, clarified that he wrote the hit song 'about the people on that stage' for the GOP presidential debate."

Rufus and ExplorerPatcher: Tools to remove Windows 11 TPM pain and more. "Turn off chip detection, bypass need for a Microsoft account, change how Explorer works."

Photo of the Week - September 10, 2023

Here's a late blooming rose from our front yard. I took with with my Pixel 4a and used Portrait mode to blur the background. I rather like the effect. The colour is quite accurate.

Late blooming rose

Saturday Sounds - Phish - August 26, 2023 - Saratoga Springs

This week's musical treat is from Phish, one of my favourite bands. They recently played for two nights at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in Saratoga Springs, NY. The concerts were webcast as part of a Flood Relief Benefit and you can still watch them on YouTube. 

The show from the 26th features slide guitar ace Derek Trucks joining in on several songs in the second set for some truly excellent guitar jams. Enjoy. 

You can watch the concert from the 25th here. 

The Water Crisis

Although it]s editorial stance sometimes make me cringe, the New York Times continues to publish deeply researched (and sometimes deeply disturbing) articles that require deep pockets and a large pool of journalists. The latest looks at what the times is calling "the water crisis" – the increasing depletion and pollution of groundwater in the United States. (paywall-free link)

From their Climate Forward newsletter:

One of the startling things about the climate crisis is just how quickly we’ve brought it upon ourselves. In a relatively short period of time — just 150 years or so — humans have dramatically heated up the planet, ushering in the Anthropocene.

A similarly rapid transformation is taking place beneath our feet. The aquifers that supply 90 percent of America’s water systems are being damaged and depleted by industrial farms and urbanization. Reserves of groundwater that took eons to form are drying up in a matter of years. Cities and farms are running short on water. And experts say it could take centuries or millenniums for some of these aquifers to replenish themselves, if they recover at all.

Over the past several months, The Times analyzed water levels at tens of thousands of sites and arrived at a dire conclusion: Almost half of the sites have seen significant declines over the past 40 years, and last year was the worst yet.

In the first part of a new series on the water crisis, my colleagues Mira Rojanasakul, Christopher Flavelle, Blacki Migliozzi and Eli Murray took a sweeping look at the depletion of groundwater across the country. They found corn yields plummeting in parts of Kansas, drinking water running short in Long Island and cities unable to grow in Arizona.

Fair warning: reading this article may cause sleepless nights. 

Some Useful VLC Tips

I've been using VLC as my main media player for many years. It's interface isn't the friendliest, but it will play virtually anything you throw at it. 

As this article shows, it also has a lot of features buried in the menus and dialogs, most of which I didn't know about despite being a frequent user of the program. Among the more useful ones:

• Download videos from YouTube (or pretty much anywhere else)
• Convert videos to any format
• Play internet radio and podcasts

 

New Fonts in Microsoft Office

If you subscribe to Microsoft 365 you will see that Microsoft has added some new default fonts and themes. The Aptos font family replaces Calibri. Aptos has several variations, including a narrow (compressed) font, a serif version, and a monospaced font as well as several different weights. There are also new Office themes with some changes to colours. 

This article from the Ask Woody Newsletter has a good explanation of how to use the new fonts, where you can find them, and which versions of Office include them. 

I don't see a lot of difference between the standard Aptos font and Calibri, but it is good to have the extra variants and font weights. 

2023 Dragon Award Winners

The winners of the 2023 Dragon Awards were announced at Dragoncon in Atlanta on September 3rd. 

These are the winners of the various awards for Best Novel.

Best Science Fiction Novel: The Icarus Plot by Timothy Zahn

Best Fantasy Novel (Including Paranormal): Witch King by Martha Wells

Best Young Adult / Middle Grade Novel: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Best Alternate History Novel: Lost In Time by A.G. Riddle

Best Horror Novel: A House With Good Bones by T. Kingfisher

I have not read any of them (I've not read much of anything this year), but the A. G. Riddle novel sounds interesting. 

 

Off for the Weekend and More

I'm a little behind on this. I thought I had published it but it never showed up. 

So here it is now, better late than never.

It's Labour Day weekend up here in the still green Great White North, so I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. 

Also, posts on this blog may be quite sparse over the next month or more. We just sold my late mother-in-law's house, and there's a lot to do before closing. If I see something especially interesting, I may do a quick post about it, but I won't be trying to keep to my usual schedule.

In the meantime, here's a picture of Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors, who we saw perform last weekend and enjoyed immensely. 

Colin Linden and the Rotting Matadors

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2023

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in August.

Movies

• Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: I liked the first movie a lot, the second one not as much, and this one not very much at all. (Disney+)
• Without Remorse: A standard thriller, part of Jack Ryan's origin story in Tom Clancy's universe. I watched it a week ago and I can hardly remember anything about it. (Amazon Prime)
• Turning Red: From Pixar, a story about a teenage girl in Toronto who turns into a giant red Panda when she gets angry or emotional. This got dissed by certain elements of the net culture for no good reason. The animation is up to Pixar's usual high standards, the story OK for what it is, and we enjoyed it. Bonus points for being set in Toronto and not hiding it. (Disney+)

TV Shows

• Good Omens (season 1): This was a rewatch in preparation for watching season 2. I enjoyed it quite a bit more the second time around, and honestly, I could watch it again (although I really should get around to reading the book first). (Amazon Prime)
• Good Omens (season 2): This season was enjoyable but somewhat unfocused compared. The plot didn't have the urgency of the first season and I found my attention flagging. David Tennant was particularly good.  (Amazon Prime)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season 2). The second half of the season was much better than the first half or the first season though the last episode was unfortunate. (Crave)
• Silent Witness (seasons 22-23): We're continuing with this show, which may remind you of CSI, although it's much better. (BritBox)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 22): Continuing on with this too. (PBS)
• Endeavour (season 8): This is a prequel to Inspector Morse and Inspector Lewis, set in Oxford, that notorious den of iniquity. The lead characters in this one are especially good. (PBS)
• Ashoka (season 1): So far, we've only seen the first two episodes, but we like what we've seen. It reminds me of the first Star Wars movies, but more there's more of a steam punk influence. (Disney+)

Meta's News Block Causing Chaos as Canada Burns

You may have heard that Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has blocked posting of links to Canadian news sites after the government passed Bill C-18, which mandates that platforms like Facebook pay Canadian news sites for the privilege of linking to them.

As this article from Wired points out, it's causing lots of problems for people, especially those who need to get news out to people in danger from wildfires and other disasters.

Cabin Radio has been struggling with two major barriers that have gone up between it and its audience. Earlier in the year, Canada’s broadcast regulator denied the outlet a place on the FM dial because it decided there wasn’t enough demand in Yellowknife. Then, Meta’s news ban meant that the station couldn’t reach locals with up-to-the-minute fire and evacuation developments.

The Cabin Radio live blog quickly became a reverse-chronological lifeline for people from the Northwest Territories, and for the hundreds of journalists covering the fires from abroad. And, now that more than half of the population of Northwest Territories is under evacuation orders, Cabin Radio is a reliable tether to home for displaced evacuees. “People can refresh that thing every half-hour or hour and know that they're not going to miss a trick in terms of our efforts to understand what's happening on their behalf,” Williams says.

He is also broadcasting the station’s live morning show through public posts on his personal Facebook account. “If I can undercut the ban and stay on Facebook and give all this information to our audience, I will. Meta can make all the stupid and wrong decisions it likes, but we shouldn't,” he says.

I've noticed the sudden absence of posts about local news in my feed. Personally, I think the government is way off base with this one and in typical Liberal fashion, has fallen victim to a lobbying campaign from big business. 

I'm going to try something here and post this article to Facebook and see what happens. 

Featured Links - August 28, 2023

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

Tree at the beach

Can Dogs Use Language? 'The “button dogs” of TikTok seem to be learning human words. What’s really going on?' Anyone who has a dog knows that they understand some words. The question is how much and can they create phrases or sentences.

Tech Billionaires Behind Secretive Plan for New California Metropolis. "A firm cloaked in mystery has bought up $800 million worth of land. Now the investors are unmasked."

Naomi Klein on following her ‘doppelganger’ down the conspiracy rabbit hole – and why millions of people have entered an alternative political reality. "For years the writer laughed off being mistaken for fellow author Naomi Wolf. Then her ‘double’ drifted into a world of conspiracy theories and became a favoured guest of Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. With the US standing on a political precipice, suddenly the stakes were a lot higher."

Reclaiming Control: The Internet Archive Empowers People. Gatekeepers Keep Suing. "To be clear: what the Internet Archive is doing is traditional library lending in a digital form, and frankly not radical – I can just get access to the materials I want much more quickly through the Archive, but I must also return them much more quickly. There is no situation in which acquiring a recipe from an obsolete edition of Brody’s first cookbook with no ebook equivalent would hurt her royalties. Libraries have traditionally bought one copy of a book and then lent it, much like they do with CDL, which maintains an “owned to loaned” ratio through sequestering materials."

Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website. Tips on how to block bots from AI platforms by Neal Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld magazine.

The new “science of reading” movement, explained. "A huge shift in how kids are taught to read is underway. But the reading wars probably aren’t gone for good."

‘Dangerously Rebellious’ Texas Nuns Ban Bishop From Monastery for ‘Spiritual Safety’. "The Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth called for prayers to stop the “open disobedience.” Good for the nuns.

 

Photo of the Week - August 27, 2023

Here are some phlox in our backyard. I took the picture with my Pixel 4a near sunset facing west so there's a bit of glare from the sun. Processed in Google Photos to bring out detail in the flowers and foliage.

Phlox at sunset

Saturday Sounds - Fairport Convention - Full House For Sale and More

Fairport Convention are one of those bands that have been around for what seems like forever and still keep truckin' on. I discovered them while I was in university and saw them at Convocation Hall in Toronto in the mid-70s. Last year, they celebrated, slightly belatedly, the 50th anniversary of their album, Full House, by performing it in full at the Cropredy Folk Festival. Fortunately for us, the performance was recorded and has been released as the album Full House For Sale.  

It was a treat that had been stuck in the pipeline for three years, blocked by the persistence of that wretched COVID thingy, but, at around 9:30pm on the evening of Saturday 13th August, Fairport’s 1970 lineup of Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg, Dave Mattacks and Richard Thompson, plus Chris Leslie who was standing in (wonderfully, as it turned out…) for the otherwise-occupied Dave Swarbrick reconvened on the Cropredy stage, and it was “Game On.”  And WHAT a performance they delivered.

And, happily, Fairport have had the good sense to preserve that magnificent performance – not in aspic – but the on digital optical information storage format that we know as a Compact Disc.  And, thank heavens they did, because Full House For Sale is destined to become a treasured memory of a landmark Fairport performance.  Already, I have a suspicion that this new album may well be Fairport’s best and most enduring “Live” album ever.

  

This is not the first time a live version of Full House has been released. The excellent album, House Full, recorded live at The Troubador in 1970, has most of the songs from Full House, and captures that version of the group at their best.  

The World's Myopia Epidemic

I've been nearsighted all my life so I tend to take it for granted. But I will agree that it's not a normal condition, in the sense that it's a departure from baseline health. And it is becoming more common, but until I read this article, I hadn't realized just how common. 

The article focuses (sorry, couldn't resist) on Taiwan, where more than half of children were myopic, and the efforts of one doctor to determine the cause and find a way to prevent it. It turns out that it's possible to reduce the incidence of myopia in children by having them spend more time outdoors and this has been determined to work. 

Myopia, or what we commonly call nearsightedness, happens when the eyeball gets too long—it deforms from soccer ball to American football—and then the eye focuses light not on the retina but slightly in front of it, making distant objects appear blurry. The longer the eyeball becomes, the worse vision gets. Ophthalmologists measure this distortion in diopters, which refer to the strength of the lens required to bring someone’s vision back to normal. Anything worse than minus 5 diopters is considered “high myopia”—somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of myopia diagnoses around the world are in this category. In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

If those trends continue, it’s likely that millions more people around the world will go blind much earlier in life than they—or the societies they live in—are prepared for. It’s a “ticking time bomb,” says Nicola Logan, an optometry professor at the UK’s Aston University. She wasn’t the only expert I talked to who used that phrase. Because so much of Taiwan’s population is already living life with myopia, the island nation has already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us. And in a rare confluence, the country may also be the best place to look for solutions.

Are We In the First Stages of Civilization's Collapse?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I am pessimistic about the future of our technological civilization. (See my We're Toast topic for reasons).  

There is a pattern to the collapse of civilizations, even successful ones, as described by Jared Diamond in his seminal book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  In this article by Michael Klare, he looks at the state of our civilization in the light of Diamond's framework. We are not looking good.

The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland?

As Diamond argues, each of those civilizations arose in a period of relatively benign climate conditions, when temperatures were moderate and food and water supplies adequate. In each case, however, the climate shifted wrenchingly, bringing persistent drought or, in Greenland’s case, much colder temperatures. Although no contemporary written records remain to tell us how the ruling elites responded, the archaeological evidence suggests that they persisted in their traditional ways until disintegration became unavoidable.

These historical examples of social disintegration spurred lively discussion among my students when, as a professor at Hampshire College, I regularly assigned Collapse as a required text. Even then, a decade ago, many of them suggested that we were beginning to face severe climate challenges akin to those encountered by earlier societies — and that our contemporary civilization also risked collapse if we failed to take adequate measures to slow global warming and adapt to its inescapable consequences.

But in those discussions (which continued until I retired from teaching in 2018), our analyses seemed entirely theoretical: Yes, contemporary civilization might collapse, but if so, not any time soon. Five years later, it’s increasingly difficult to support such a relatively optimistic outlook. Not only does the collapse of modern industrial civilization appear ever more likely, but the process already seems underway.

I'm afraid that I have to agree with him.  

Some Bad News about Long COVID

If you think that getting COVID is no big deal, you may want to read this article from Eric Topol's Ground Truths newsletter. Based on his analysis of some recent studies, the news is not good. 

Today there are 2 new papers published on the 2-year follow up of over 100,000 people with Covid and millions of uninfected controls. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the salient findings of the 2 studies, and highlight the uncertainties of our knowledge base for Long Covid, which has already compromised the lives of tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, what was seen at 6 months largely continues out to 2 years.

 

Reading on the Fire HD 8 Tablet

A couple of months ago, I bought an Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet to use as an ereader. I had intended to use it for occasional web browsing, mostly to read news sites, but I've found that Amazon's proprietary version of Android limits its use for me. So I'm using it mostly as a replacement for my Kindle Paperwhite. I do use the Paperwhite when reading outdoors because neither my phone or tablet are great for reading in bright sunlight.

There are four apps that I've used for reading.

Amazon's Kindle app

Given that this is an Amazon tablet, you might think that the Kindle app would be the best for reading books. That turned not to be the case for me, primarily due to an annoying feature (or possible a bug) in the app. There are 12 or 13 possible font sizes but there's a significant jump in size between the 6th and 7th. The 6th is too small and the 7th too large. I can read the smaller size if I use my reading glasses, but that's not always convenient and the larger font size drastically slows my reading speed. 

The app has other limitations. It won't expand or collapse subheadings in the table of contents if the book has them, margins are too wide, it doesn't offer control over justification in many books, and I can't add custom fonts. Some of these limitations can be worked around by formatting the book in Calibre, but then the app treats them as documents instead of as books, so it won't sync between the tablet and my phone.

The app is also cluttered and generally not as pleasant to use as the Kindle Paperwhite.

Google Play Books

I now use Google Play Books as my default for reading books. It addresses most of the limitations of the Kindle app mentioned above. I do have to format the book in Calibre if I want to use my preferred font (Atkinson Hyperlegible), but unlike the Kindle app, Play Books will sync between the tablet and my phone. 

The font selections available in Play Books are more limited than those in the Kindle app and it doesn't have the excellent fonts (like Amazon Ember) that Amazon designed for online reading. I haven't found a way of adding the Atkinson Hyperlegible font to Android's font list, either on my phone or on the tablet, which means I still need to format the book in Calibre to use that font. 

Kobo Books

I've purchased quite a few books from the Kobo bookstore. I run them through Calibre and then read them on the Kindle or in Play Books because the Kobo app is very basic and doesn't offer the many of the options available on Kobo's ereaders.

Libby

Libby, produced by Overdrive, is an app that you can use to download magazines and ebooks from your local library. I use it mostly for magazines, although I have read a couple of ebooks with it. (The three-week loan period isn't long enough for me to get through most books). 

I used to use an app called RB Digital for reading magazines, but that was shuttered after it was bought by Overdrive and the magazine collection folded into Libby. That was unfortunate, because Libby's selection interface is cluttered and harder to use than that of RB Digital. Fortunately, the app offers a usable text mode, which means that I can use it on the Fire 8 HD. (The 8" size is too small for comfortable reading when using the full-page view). I would like to have a larger font selection and a higher brightness level in text mode or more control over text contrast.

Conclusion

The Fire HD 8 is hobbled by Amazon's proprietary version of Android, which means that it's not great for general use as a tablet. However, it works well enough as an ereader now that I've found workarounds for some of the limitations of the various apps. I do regret not spending more money and getting an 8" Samsung tablet. 

Featured Links - August 21, 2023

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

Water lilies at the marina

• Patient advocates warn FDA proposal on salt intake could do fatal harm to people with kidney disease. "Kidney advocacy organizations are warning that the proposal could lead to unnecessary deaths because the regulation would increase the use of one popular salt substitute: potassium chloride. Patients with chronic kidney disease, including end-stage renal disease, can’t properly excrete potassium from their bodies and excess potassium levels in the blood, known as hyperkalemia, can lead to cardiac arrhythmias and sudden heart failure."
• Neuroscientists Re-create Pink Floyd Song from Listeners’ Brain Activity. "Artificial intelligence has turned the brain’s electrical signals into somewhat garbled classic rock." This is rather mind boggling. 
• The Peripheral Canceled After Prime Video Undoes Season 2 Renewal. "Months after getting approved for a second season, the sci-fi series has become a one-and-done as studios try to cut costs during the Hollywood strikes."
• Here’s the Plan to Take Montana’s Massive Climate Win Nationwide. "A Montana court ruled that youth have a right to a livable climate. Now, lawsuits around the country are working to build on that success." Shades of Kim Stanley Robinsons The Ministry for the Future.
• 2023 Aurora Awards and CSFFA Hall of Fame Inductees. "The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) today presented the 2023 Aurora Awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in a ceremony livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook. This year’s returning hosts were Mark Leslie Lefebvre and Liz May Anderson. The awards recognize works done by Canadians in 2022. CSFFA members submitted a total of 177 ballots. Awards administrator Clifford Samuels says complete voting statistics will be released in the next day or so."
• Babylon 5 Is a Perfect, Terrible Series. "Babylon 5 is one of the best science fiction shows ever made. It also kind of sucks, and that’s okay."
• The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries. "Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry." End stage capitalism will mean the end stage of libraries, and guess what that means for civilization.

Photo of the Week - August 20, 2023

This week's photo is of a couple of hibiscuses in our front yard. I took it with my Pixel 4a and tweaked it in Google Photos to try to get the colour closer to reality. In the original picture they are much more red; the actual colour is closer to burgandy. Neither my phone or my Fujifilm X-S10 seem to be able to reproduce it accurately.

Hibiscuses

Saturday Sounds - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - May 27, 2023, Amsterdam

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are out on a tour that started in February and will bring them to Toronto in November. And I have tickets! So in celebration of that, here's a video of their stop in Amsterdam in May. The video is pieced together from various fan recordings and combined with official audio. Enjoy!

We're Toast 42

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Inexpensive Add-on Spawns a New Era of Machine Guns. (paywall free): "Popular devices known as “switches” are turning ordinary pistols into fully automatic weapons, making them deadlier and a growing threat to bystanders."

Evangelicals Are Now Rejecting 'Liberal' Teachings of Jesus. How they can call themselves Christians is beyond me.

July 2023: Earth’s hottest month on record. "No other month in global recordkeeping has jumped so far ahead of the old record."

Cities Aren’t Supposed to Burn Like This Anymore—Especially Lahaina. "Humans figured out how to prevent huge fires in urban areas over a century ago. Why have they gotten so bad again?"

Bird flu researchers turn to Finland’s mink farms, tracking a virus with pandemic potential. "As it stands now, the H5N1 virus does not infect people easily. But the fear is that uncontrolled spread in animals like mink gives the virus plenty of chances to evolve in ways that could enable it to spill over into people. Already in Finland, a paper from government researchers indicated the virus has spread from mammal to mammal at the farms — and in some cases has picked up mutations indicating an adaptation toward replicating in mammalian cells."

Putin’s Hunger Games: The Ukraine War Is Forcing Millions to Face Starvation and ‘Look Death in the Eyes’. "Russia’s decision to withdraw from a key humanitarian accord puts tens of millions of people at risk of acute food crisis around the world."

Idaho’s Teacher of the Year flees state after being attacked for LGBTQ+ allyship. "Karen Lauritzen said it has been the hardest year in her 20 years of teaching."

More COVID-19 News

It's time to post links to more news about COVID-19. No, the pandemic is not over, the virus keeps mutating in new and unpleasant ways, and cases are increasing after a lull. In my region, cases have tripled in about four weeks.

I'm starting with two posts from Eric Topol's Ground Truths newsletter. 

The Virus is Learning New Tricks and We Humans Keep Falling Behind. "This week the CDC genomic surveillance showed continued rise of the EG.5.1 variant with near doubling over the past couple of weeks, showing significant growth advantage compared to its prevailing XBB variant precursors (such as XBB.1.5, XBB.1.16, XBB.1.9). "

Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope. "This week there was news on Long Covid in two very different directions—emergence of strong data to support mitochondrial dysfunction as the basis for the condition in some people—and learning how the $1.15 billion allocation to the NIH RECOVER initiative has largely been wasted. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review this news and offer a plan to get clinical trials testing treatments into high gear."

SARS-CoV-2 Neutralizing Antibodies Following a Second BA.5 Bivalent Booster. "Our results suggest that a second dose of the BA.5 bivalent booster is not sufficient to broaden antibody responses and to overcome immunological imprinting. A monovalent vaccine targeting only the spike of the recently dominant SARS-CoV-2 may mitigate the back boosting associated with the original antigenic sin."

Multimodal Molecular Imaging Reveals Tissue-Based T Cell Activation and Viral RNA Persistence for Up to 2 Years Following COVID-19. "We identified cellular SARS-CoV-2 RNA in rectosigmoid lamina propria tissue in all these participants, ranging from 158 to 676 days following initial COVID-19 illness, suggesting that tissue viral persistence could be associated with long-term immunological perturbations."

No, Covid can never, ever be 'just a cold.' Here's why. "But if we keep pretending covid is something that it isn't, we're going to end up in ever-deeper trouble as a society." This article makes the best case I've seen for continuing to take precautions against COVID-19. 

Covid Complexities. "The official data on deaths are now lagging by a full year, so while death numbers may look low (about 1500 per year based on the most recent week) the correct numbers will be much higher. Given what we know of the disease, there is no universe in which hospitalizations behave as they have while deaths drop by a factor of ten."

The Last Days of Arecibo

The Arecibo Observatory is no more. It officially closed its doors on August 14. There were plans to turn it into a science education centre, but funding for that has not been approved.

Nature has an article about the last days of the observatory. It's a sad article though it does mention some plans that in the long-term may result in science being done there again.  

The observatory’s main attraction — a 305-metre-wide dish that was responsible for, among other things, studying near-Earth asteroids, discovering exoplanets and observing gravitational waves — was destroyed in 2020 when some support cables snapped following years of delayed maintenance. In 2022, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which runs the facility, announced it would not rebuild the dish, citing community recommendations to put the agency’s limited budget into other, newer astronomical facilities. Instead, the NSF said it would convert the observatory into the Arecibo Center for STEM Education and Research (ACSER).

Under this plan, the agency would award between US$1 million and $3 million per year to an institution to manage the centre on a day-to-day basis. Before the telescope's collapse, the NSF was contributing $7.5 million annually to Arecibo, and management of the site was led by the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

When calling for proposals to manage ACSER, the NSF projected that the centre might open this year. But Monya Ruffin, deputy director of the NSF’s Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings Division, now says that the agency hopes to “make an award in 2023”.

Now the world's largest radio telescope is a 500-metre dish in China. Other even larger telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Arrary, are under construction. 

Some Good Newsletters from Authors

I get a lot (probably too many) email newsletters, most of which are tech related. But a few are from authors, primarily science fiction authors. The ones I'm highlighting here are free, though you can contribute to the authors if you wish to get extra content.

• The Hypothesis by Annalee Newitz: I'm currently reading and enjoying her latest novel, The Terraformers, and have read her other two novels. Her latest newsletter talks about applied science fiction; that is using science fiction to test solutions to problems thar are arising in the present or might arise in the future. As usual with authors' newsletters, she also describes some of her recent publications. 
• Transfer Orbit by Andrew Liptak: Liptak is a "writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2022)" and his writing has appeared in numerous publications. The newsletter is mostly about science fiction and fantasy in various media. 
• Throwingthebearinthecanoe by Elisabeth Bear: She writes about many topics including her books, recovery from cancer surgery and horses. 
• Field Notes by Christopher Brown. I have blogged about this newsletter before but it's worth mentioning again. I should note that it's no longer weekly, unfortunately.

Featured Links - August 14, 2023

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

A classic Jaguar

AI Is Building Highly Effective Antibodies That Humans Can’t Even Imagine. "Robots, computers, and algorithms are hunting for potential new therapies in ways humans can’t—by processing huge volumes of data and building previously unimagined molecules." AI does have some good uses and this is one them.

How NASA Nearly Lost the Voyager 2 Spacecraft Forever. "The space agency lost touch with the beloved spacecraft following a faulty command signal. Here’s how it happened—and how engineers worked to bring it back."

The Sweep and Force of Section Three. A long, comprehensive, reasoned explanation of why Trump (and possibly many of his associates) is not eligible to run for office. Thanks to Timothy Snyder for pointing this out.

Smoking-gun evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration from Gaia observations of wide binary stars. "A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astronomy and astrophysics." If confirmed, this could be Nobel-prize winning research. 

How Editors Blend Art and Science to Bring NASA’s Space Photos to Life. "Webb’s stunning images are not beamed to Earth from the $10 billion space telescope in full color. In fact, Webb’s detectors capture monochromatic photos that are exceedingly dark. Thanks to expert image processors Joe DePasquale and Alyssa Pagan at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, the dark gray raw images come to life in unbelievable ways."

Good Omens (BBC Radio). "Adaptation of the 1990 fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. An angel and a demon try to save the world from an apocalypse. Starring Peter Serafinowicz and Mark Heap."

Who Needs Meta or Google for News? Use ‘Really Simple Syndication’. "RSS is a universal, open, algorithm-free news feed you can have for free. Silicon Valley giants treat it like a secret." I can't imagine using the internet without a feed reader. 

7 Easy Food Swaps That Help the Planet. "Consider ditching resource-hungry foods for these delicious alternatives that leave a lighter footprint."

Photo of the Week - August 13, 2023

Nancy and I walked down to the lake Thursday night for an ice cream cone and some free live music. Along with that I managed to catch a lovely sunset over the marina. This was taken with my Pixel 4a and enhanced lightly in Google Photos.

Marina at sunset

Time for a Blogging Holiday

Here in the Great White North, it's almost time for another long weekend; this one being known (in Ontario, at least) as Simcoe Day or just the Civic Holiday. I'm going to start a longer hiatus with that and take a week, or possibly more, off from blogging.

We've been busy trying to get my later mother-in-law's house ready for sale. We're almost there, but the next week will be busy. If I'm not over there helping, then I'm going to be busy here keeping this place going. And a week from Saturday we have Bell coming in to switch our internet and TV over from Rogers, which means we have to empty and move two filing cabinets because they're blocking access to where all the external connections come into the house.

So I'm taking some time off from Core Dump. If all goes well, I'll be back here sometime around August 14. In the meantime, here are some flowers.

Backyard flowers

Canada's COVID-19 Response

The worst of the COVID-19 pandemic being behind us (At least I hope so!), it's possible to look back and have a good, hard look at Canada's response to the disease. The BMJ (British Medical Journal) has published an analysis that looks at the high and low points of the Canadian response. It's worth a read, especially if you're Canadian, though I'm sure it would be useful no matter what country you live in.

Here are some of the key points:

Highs

• Public health leadership included women at each level of decision making.20
• Canada became one of the most vaccinated countries with >83% of the population receiving at least one vaccine dose in February 2023.21 After Health Canada approved Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna covid-19 vaccine in December 2020, rollout was prioritised for Indigenous populations and those living and working in long term care homes
• Research collaborations from basic science through to clinical and health services research emerged rapidly to address urgent questions of seroprevalence 22(eg, covid-19 Immunity Task Force), correlates of infection and immunity, and outbreak mitigation factors and engagement of patients in research conduct such as knowledge synthesis

Lows

• Failure to learn from previous reports led to failure to protect older adults and staff in long term care hoes and among the highest proportions of deaths in this sector globally
• Challenges to access and delivery of effective covid-19 medications such as tocilizumab, remdesivir, and ritonavir-nirmatrelvir resulted in provinces and hospitals rationing use
• An exodus of exhausted and distressed healthcare workers, coupled with inadequate training paths for replacements, produced a critical workforce shortage that is ongoing

There are more, but you can read the article. 

Why Google Killed Google Reader

I still miss Google Reader. For a fwe years, it was my primary interface to the internet because it made it possible to quickly scan through a tremendous volume of news and web posts in much less time than it would take to visit individual sites. 

I've always wondered why Google killed it off, and this article from the Verge explains why, or at least provides the gory details of what happened. 

Google’s bad reputation for killing and abandoning products started with Reader and has only gotten worse over time. But the real tragedy of Reader was that it had all the signs of being something big, and Google just couldn’t see it. Desperate to play catch-up to Facebook and Twitter, the company shut down one of its most prescient projects; you can see in Reader shades of everything from Twitter to the newsletter boom to the rising social web. To executives, Google Reader may have seemed like a humble feed aggregator built on boring technology. But for users, it was a way of organizing the internet, for making sense of the web, for collecting all the things you care about no matter its location or type, and helping you make the most of it.

A decade later, the people who worked on Reader still look back fondly on the project. It was a small group that built the app not because it was a flashy product or a savvy career move — it was decidedly neither — but because they loved trying to find better ways to curate and share the web. They fought through corporate politics and endless red tape just to make the thing they wanted to use. They found a way to make the web better, and all they wanted to do was keep it alive.

RSS feed readers have not gone away, thank goodness, although with the fragmentation of the web into (sometimes paywalled) niches, the number  of sites that support RSS or Atom feeds has decreased. I use Feedly, which works well on both my desktop PC and phone. There are others. Here are a couple of review articles from Wired and Zapier that are reasonably current. If you aren't using a feed reader, I strongly recommend checking out Feedly or one of the other tools mentioned in the articles. You will wonder how you ever got along without one. 

Movie and TV Reviews - July 2023

 Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in July. 

Movies

• John Wick 4: This was a decent Saturday night popcorn movie with lots of action and not much to think about. The fight scenes were way over the top and would have been more effective had they been shorter. (Amazon Prime)
• Ticket to Paradise: I'm not a big fan of rom coms. This one was pretty standard but at least it was short enough that it didn't get too annoying. I expected a bit more from Clooney and Roberts than what they delivered. (Crave)

TV Shows

• Inspector Lewis (seasons 7 & 8): I think we may have watched this years ago, but only one of the episodes really seemed familiar. It's a sequel to Inspector Morse, set in Oxford, which is apparently a seething den of crime and resentment. (PBS)
• Antiques Road Trip (seasons 21 and 22): We are continually amazed at the number of antique shops in Britain. We like this show more for the tours of the countryside and the interesting bits of local history that they feature than the antiques themselves. (PBS)
• Silo (season 1): A post-apocalyptic SF series based on a series of books by Hugh Howey. It has really stretched my willing suspension of disbelief, but it is compelling drama, and the setting is amazing. (Apple TV+)
• Jack Ryan (season 4): Another seriously implausible thriller. It moves along quickly enough that it's watchable as long as you don't stop to think about it too much. Still, I'm glad this is the final season. (Amazon Prime)