Featured Links - March 18, 2024

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

Light on the bay

• US Citizens Are Strikingly Bad At Sorting Facts From Opinions. "There’s a huge amount of research on misinformation. But what we found is that, even before we get to the stage of labeling something misinformation, people often have trouble discerning the difference between statements of fact and opinion." This is worrisome, though I am not at all surprised. 
• Kate Middleton’s Story Is About So Much More Than Kate Middleton (gift link). "But the frenzy around Catherine, Princess of Wales, raises important questions that go well beyond the usual concerns of royal watchers. Those questions stem from the extreme deference with which Catherine has previously been treated, in Britain at least, compared with the thrashing bestowed on her sister-in-law, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex." The Royal Family and the British Press do not come off well. 
• AI is growing in the food-service industry — and nothing will stop it. "These technologies are spreading fast, despite breaches of privacy and the biases baked into software."
  
• Covid, 4 years on. "As we recently hit—March 11, 2020—the 4-year anniversary of when WHO finally declared Covid a global pandemic, and today, March 13th, when the US declared it a national emergency, we’re still learning every day about SARS-CoV-2’s impact, its evolution, protection from vaccination, and more. Here’s a quick summary of what I think is worth reviewing."
• America's Cheyenne Mountain Complex Can Withstand A 30-Megaton Nuclear Bomb. "693,000 tons of granite were blasted out of the mountain to make the bunker at the height of the Cold War." I've been in the NORAD SAGE base in North Bay, a similar facility, now decommissioned. 
• Climate Change Is Bad for Your Health, Wherever You Are. "Rising temperatures are a threat regardless of where you live on the planet—they’re just dangerous in different ways."
• Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much? "Comparing notes with other unsatisfied owners of the Peggy sofa." Modern furniture isn't what it used to be. 
• Las Vegas Sphere has 4,000TB SSD storage delivering 400GB/s throughput — World's only 16K display requires some exquisite technology to keep it going. "

Photo of the Week - March 17, 2024

This week's photo is of the west shore of Frenchman's Bay taken late in the afternoon on a mild but cloudy and windy day. I like the contrast of the light in the sky and the dapples on the water. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro 5x zoom and not modified.  

Late afternoon on the bay

Saturday Sounds - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - 2022/07/16 -Jazzopen Stuttgart

This week's musical treat is a concert webcast from Robert Plant and Allison Krause in Stuttgart, Germany in 2022. Being a webcast capture, video and sound are excellent. They will be touring this summer and perhaps seeing this will encourage you to see them. I certainly would; I like the direction Plant has taken with his music in the last few years as he ages.

Some Useful Links for Technical Writers

Here are a few links that should be useful for technical writers, especially those who want to improve their technical skills. The first four are from the excellent freeCodeCamp site. 

• How to Make Your Web Sites Accessible. " Roughly 1 out of every 7 Americans lives with a disability. As developers, we should keep these folks in mind when building our apps. Thankfully, there's a well-established field called Accessibility (sometimes shortened to “a11y” because there are 11 letters in the word that fall between the A and the Y). This nuts-and-bolts freeCodeCamp course will teach you about Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Accessible Rich Internet Applications, Semantic HTML, and other tools for your toolbox. (2 hour YouTube course)" This should be useful to those writers who are producing web-based help or documentation as well as web sites.
• JavaScript in the Browser – How the Document Object Model (DOM) and Events Work. " The Document Object Model (DOM) is like a big Christmas tree that you hang ornament-like HTML elements on. This front-end development handbook will teach you how the DOM works, and how you can use it to make interactive web pages. You'll learn about DOM Traversal, Class Manipulation, Event Bubbling, and other key concepts. (full-length handbook)." Most high-end writing tools now use JavaScript or something close to it as a macro language (Word excepted, of course).
• Regular Expressions (RegEx) in JavaScript – A Handbook for Beginners. "freeCodeCamp just published another full-length handbook – this time on Regular Expressions. RegEx are one of the most powerful – and most confusing – features of modern programming languages. You can use RegEx to search through data, validate user input, and even find complex patterns within text. This handbook will teach you key concepts like anchors, grouping, metacharacters, and lookahead. And you'll learn a lot of advanced JavaScript RegEx techniques, too. (full-length handbook)" Regular expression syntax can vary depending on the application but the basic concepts are similar. 
• Advanced Prompt Engineering for Content Creators – Full Handbook. "But you don't have to learn a ton of Statistics and Machine Learning to get more out of AI. You can first focus on just getting better at talking to AI. This new Prompt Engineering Handbook will give you practical tips for getting better images, text, and code out of Large Language Models like GPT-4. (full-length handbook)"
• BookMaker Demo for Desktop Publishing. "This video will demonstrate the use of BookMaker, a software developed by Jack Lyon, to create a professional book design using Microsoft Word, starting from your own manuscript. You will be able to create a properly formatted book according to industry standards with a minimum of effort. However, the more you know about proper book formatting, the better you will be able to use this tool." I haven't used this tool, but I have used other tools of Jack Lyon's and he produces high-quality software. 
• Making a LaTeX document appear as though it were typeset in MS Word. Some advice on how to dumb down LaTex. 
• Intel One Mono. "Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, the Intel One Mono typeface was designed for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors." I like it though my personal preference would be for a higher x-height. It is especially good at distinguishing symbols and brackets. 

Stop the FAA from Hobbling SpaceX

I watched the SpaceX Starship launch while shopping at Costco this morning. The launch looked good and they made it through staging but the booster appeared to lose control at the start of the landing burn and they lost the second stage Starship during reentry. 

It looked like both stages had attitude control problems which could have contributed to the failures. I was amazed that they had video and telemetry from Starship through at least part of the reentry. They did make it a lot further with this flight so their iterative development process seems to be working. 

Unfortunately, the FAA had stuck its fingers in the pie by ruling that the launch was a mishap, which means another five- or six-month wait while the bureaucrats generate more paperwork before SpaceX can launch again. The US needs to get the FAA out of the loop on these launches so they can spend their time on more important things like making sure Boeing's airliners are safe.

Ruminations on Anachronyms

Benjamin Dreyer, author of the wonderful book, Dreyer's English, has an article in the Washington Post (gift link) in which he ruminates on anachronyms, a term I have to admit I hadn't come across until reading the article. He starts off by talking about subtweets.

The coinage dates to 2009, when Twitter was still Twitter, and posts there were referred to as tweets. But if Twitter has been X’d out and tweets are no longer tweets but posts instead, what is to become of the useful coinage “subtweet”?

 Given that the word now has become a generic term used on other social-media platforms (hello, my friends at Bluesky), I suspect that “subtweet” will join the ranks of what are known as anachronyms: words that are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former or later time.”

That’s the way Wikipedia defines them, which will have to suffice for now, because the word is too new to have worked its way into dictionaries. Maybe when it does arrive, lexicographers will have identified its originator; linguist Ben Zimmer is often credited online, but he says he doubts he was the coiner.

He goes on to talk about several other similar terms, among them "subway token booths" (tokens now having been eliminated in New York and Toronto), and "podcasts" (the iPod having long been discontinued).

I wonder how long we will continue to call our omnipresent digital terminals "phones". How many phone calls have you made on your cell phone in the last week? 

Hopeland's The Music

I have just had my mind well and truly blown. I'm reading Ian McDonald's latest novel, Hopeland, and about a fifth of the way into the book he introduces the Music, a machine to play a piece of music that will take a thousand years to complete. 

It's like the Long Now Foundation's long clock in a way, but McDonald's conception is more evocative and his description in the book is stunning in its beauty and power. It's the most striking thing I've read in a decade. 

I found the beginning of the book a little hard to get into, but kept going because MdDonald is such a good writer, even if the story wasn't grabbing me. But he has me thoroughly hooked now. 

Featured Links - March 11, 2024

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

Birds on the lake

• Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power (gift link). "AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up."
• Dune: Part Two Asks Questions That the Original Never Dared. "Denis Villeneuve's new Dune film alters the arcs of key characters, but not everyone gets such careful treatment." This article echoes my feelings about the movie. 
• ‘The feelings are still there’: A disinformation expert on the legacy of the ‘Freedom Convoy’. "TVO Today speaks with University of Maryland researcher Caroline Orr Bueno about conspiracies, Russian influence, and why the convoy is part of a longer-term movement."
• Babylon 5 Was the Ultimate Exercise in Plotting vs. Pantsing. "With a possible reboot on the horizon, let's take a look back at what made the classic series so profoundly unique." Babylon 5 is still my favourite science fiction TV series. I do hope Straczynski gets to do his reboot.
• Losing Ice. "The trillions of tons of ice that moderates our climate is melting away." We could have ice-free Arctic winters before the end of the decade. This will have major effects on climate and the environment.
• The uncomfortable reality of life on Earth after we breach 1.5°C. (archive.ph link). "Passing 1.5°C of global warming isn't just a political disaster, it will have dire consequences for us all, as those living on the front line already know."
• Conscious AI Is the Second-Scariest Kind. "A cutting-edge theory of mind suggests a new type of doomsday scenario." The article is by Peter Watts, one of the best SF writers around, and whose stories are widely read in the AI development community.
• The Artist Who Visited 'Dune' and 'The Most Important Science Fiction Art Ever Created'. An appreciation of John Schoenherr's wonderful art for the Analog serialization of Dune with many illustrations. 
• US prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022, officials say. "In late 2022, the US began “preparing rigorously” for Russia potentially striking Ukraine with a nuclear weapon, in what would have been the first nuclear attack in war since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly eighty years before, two senior administration officials told CNN."

Photo of the Week - March 10, 2024

This weeks photo is of the clouds over Frenchman's Bay. I was struck by seeing clouds that you'd normally expect in summer in early March. This was taken with my Pixel 8 Pro using the 5x zoom and tweaked with the Dynamic filter in Google Photos. 

Summer clouds in March

 

Saturday Sounds - Jason Isbell andthe 400 Unit - 2024/02/27

This week's sonic treat is a recent concert from Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, recorded at the Kodak Center in Rochester, NY on February 27th. It's an audience recording but the quality is very good and the performance up to Isbell's usual high standards despite him recovering from a recent illness. You can view the setlist and recording info here. 

The recording is sourced from the sugarmegs.org site and is a single MP3 of the whole concert. 

We're Toast 47

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.

Abandoned shopping cart

The World’s Essential Aquifers Are in Deep Trouble. "New research finds that the groundwater systems that hydrate your life are in rapid, sometimes accelerating decline around the globe. Here’s how to stop the retreat."

New research shows that COVID-19 can cause "significant drops in IQ scores". Tje article has links to several sites citing this and similar research. It's not over folks. Mask up!

Scientists Are Freaking Out About Ocean Temperatures (gift link). “It’s like an omen of the future.” 

Imperiling Climate Goals, Global Resource Extraction Set to Surge 60% by 2060. "Wealthy nations are responsible for most of the consumption of natural resources, according to a new United Nations report."

Gab’s Racist AI Chatbots Have Been Instructed to Deny the Holocaust. "The proliferation of generative AI chatbots on extremist platforms could lead to increased radicalization, experts warn."

Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system. "The possibility that the Amazon forest system could soon reach a tipping point, inducing large-scale collapse, has raised global concern. For 65 million years, Amazonian forests remained relatively resilient to climatic variability. Now, the region is increasingly exposed to unprecedented stress from warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires, even in central and remote parts of the system."

Category 6 Hurricanes Are Already Here. "Some scientists say Category 5 is not enough to describe the monster storms that have battered us in recent years."

There's Plastic in My Plaque! "First report of micro/nano plastics in patients with atheroma and their link to worse clinical outcomes (composite of all-cause death, heart attack and stroke)."

Some Thoughts on Dune

Dune and its sequels has been a part of my life ever since I was a teenager; I first read part of it after it was serialized in Analog and I found copies of the magazine in a used bookstore. I was smitten and read the novel as soon as I could get my hands on it at the library. (You can read about the rather interesting publishing history of the book in this article by Andrew Liptak on his excellent Transfer Orbit blog.)

The Prophet of Dune from Analog

Since then I've reread Dune several times and read all of Herbert's sequels as well as several of those written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. Of course, I've seen the movies too.

Last weekend, Nancy and I rewatched Dune Part 1 and Tuesday we saw Dune Part 2 at an IMAX theatre. I do have mixed feelings about it as an adaptation, which probably won't matter if you haven't read the book. (Spoilers ahead). 

Tt was, needless to say, spectacular; and one of the most intense cinematic experiences I've had. For once, I was watching a movie on a screen that was big enough (it filled most of my field of view), bright enough, and with concert-quality sound. If you can possibly get to an IMAX theatre, it's definitely the way to go for big-budget spectacles like Dune. And the movie was full of spectacular set pieces that took my breath away. The scene where Paul rides a sandworm for the first time was jaw dropping and there were many others like it.

But I didn't find an emotional connection with the characters in this part of the story that I had when watching Dune Part 1. The characters were overpowered by the spectacle. Paul's transition from desert warrior to what is essentially a superhero was too abrupt to be convincing. I also didn't like the change to Chani's character at the end of the movie. It probably is a setup for Villeneuve's third Dune movie, but it's a major divergence from the original storyline and didn't work for me at all. My thoughts on the movie parallel those expressed by Carlos Morales in this article.

All that aside, I enjoyed the movie and will no doubt watch it again once it shows up on streaming services. It is a major achievement and one of the best adaptations ever of a major work of science fiction or fantasy, certainly on a par with Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. But it isn't the masterpiece that is the novel.

More on COVID-19's Effects on the Brain

More research is being published about the effects of COVID-19 on the brain. Eric Topol has published a Substack post summarizing two recent studies that were based on studying large groups of people.  

The 2 new studies are the largest to date to prospectively assess Covid impact on cognitive function, and both are consistent in showing declines as compared with controls without Covid. The assessment of cognition in the cohort from England was more in-depth, but of shorter duration, and demonstrated the favorable effect of symptom resolution. The extrapolation to a loss of 3 to 9 IQ points is difficult contextualize, and the risk of long-term sequelae is unknown. It is worthwhile noting that these IQ score losses represent averages, and there is considerable variability in cognitive deficit. In contrast, the Norwegian study only got into memory but had much longer, serial assessment up to 3 years. None of this is good news for Long Covid and the brain, folks.

I wonder what the long-term effects on society will be from this. Having a large percentage of people with measurable cognitive impairment cannot be a good thing. 

Featured Links - March 4, 2023

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

Sparkles on the bay

• Two giant US telescopes threatened by funding cap. "Thirty Meter Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope might need to compete for survival in face of federal spending limit."
• Look for these 9 red flags to identify food that is ultra-processed. "Free yourself from the grip of ultra-processed food by looking for these signs on the package label."
• Fiber optic cables transport petabytes of data every second around the world — scientists say they could also save lives by detecting tsunamis early. "Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have discovered a novel technique that can turn undersea power and telecom cables into arrays of environmental sensors, opening the door to extensive ocean monitoring."
• DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses. "Feds once again fix up compromised retail routers under court order." 
• The invisible campaign to censor the internet. "There’s an enormous and largely invisible campaign to use fraudulent notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to remove critical articles from the internet. We don’t know who is running the campaign, but we do know it’s facilitated by Google’s amazingly trustworthy approach to DMCA complaints made by companies that don’t exist."
• How Embedded Linux is used in spacecraft. "George Emad kicks off a series of posts to see how Embedded Linux is used in outer space. The Linux OS has gain some popularity in the space domain in applications including spacecraft, nano satellites, and astrophotography."
• Behind F1's Velvet Curtain. "If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the p"addock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever."

 

Photo of the Week - March 3, 2024

This week's photo is of a sunset taken just after a strong, stormy cold front passed through. The orange colour was enhanced by wildfire smoke from Texas high in the atmosphere. Wildfire smoke reaching here has become a part of our summers, but having it happen in February is unusual if not unprecedented. 

I took the picture with my Pixel 8 Pro using the 5x zoom.

Sunset after a storm

 

Saturday Sounds - Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets - Palmanova 2023

This just popped up in my YouTube feed yesterday and I'm very glad it did. I still haven't forgiven myself for missing Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets when they played Toronto a few years ago. Mason has been touring steadily, mostly in England and Europe, playing early Pink Floyd music. I was fortunate to see Pink Floyd in Detroit; their 1972 concert was the last one of my university days and was sonically spectacular, intense, and memorable. Floyd went on to huge commercial success, but with a few exceptions they lost the psychedelic edge that their early music had. 

This concert is from Palmanova, Italy on July 20, 2023. Video is 4K and probably fan shot. I'm not sure about the audio. It's very clean and may be a soundboard/audience matrix. It's two hours of psychedelic joy and I love it. 

Movie and TV Reviews – February 2024

Short reviews of movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in February.

Movies

• The Last Voyage of the Demeter: A horror flick based on a single chapter in Bram Stoker's Dracula. It's well done with good acting and pacing. Cory Hawkins as Clemens is particularly good. It's an interesting take on the Dracula legend and the ending leaves room for sequels. (Prime)
• Oppenheimer: I was afraid this would be a little dull and talky but found it moved quickly for a three-hour movie. I enjoyed it but probably wouldn't watch it again. (Prime)
• Argyll: We went to see this because we liked the director's previous work and it was $5 Tuesday. 

TV Shows

• Hope Street, season 3: A lighter show than some we've watched. I didn't realize that the 3rd season has been split into two parts, and I don't know when the second half is coming. (BritBox)
• Antiques Road Trip, season 26: This is the latest season, so I suppose we will have to work our way through the earliest episodes now to get our antiques fix. (PBS)
• Only Murders in the Building, seasons 1-3: The main reason I watched this show  was for the performances of Steve Martin and Martin Short. Comedies like this aren't usually my cup of tea, but I liked this one a lot. It is very funny and somewhat twisted and kept us surprised and engaged though the three seasons. (Disney+) 
• Severance, season 1: What happens in the office stays in the office, until it doesn't. This turned out to be much better than I expected and much stranger. It reminded me and Nacy of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. I do wish the season had resolved more instead of ending with a major cliffhanger.  (Apple TV+)
• Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. I may watch this again, just to see some of the Toronto locations, but I never much cared for original series, and my feelings haven't changed. (City TV)
• Unforgotten (season 1): Another good British police procedural focusing on cold cases. Good acting, twisty plot, and gritty settings. (BritBox)
• Death in Paradise (season 13). Murders in the beautiful Caribbean setting continue. (BritBox)

ACES Guide for New Editors

I was not aware of ACES, The Society For Editing while I was working as a technical writer. I do wish I'd known about them (editing was a large part of my job) as they publish some useful resources, including a new and free Guide for New Editors (PDF link). 

Are you new to editing or transitioning to editing from another career? The ACES Guide for New Editors and accompanying list of resources are for you.

In this guide you'll be introduced to different types of editing, learn possible ways to begin your career, explore important topics editors consider in their roles (e.g., ethics, diversity and equity), gain an international perspective, and review a checklist to get started.

The ACES website has many resources for editors including their own style guide and a comprehensive list of diversity and inclusion resources. 

2023 Finalists from Analog's and Asimov's Readers' Polls

Analog Science Fiction Science Fact and Asimov's Science Fiction have announced the finalists for their annual readers' polls for stories published in 2023.

• Analog Analytical Laboratory Finalists
• Asimov's Readers' Award Finalists

The Analog contest (known as the AnLab) has been running since the 1940s and the Asimov's poll for 38 years. Winners receive a cash bonus and some egoboo.

The best part:  All the stories and articles are linked to PDFs that you can download or read online. There's lots of good science fiction, science fact, and poetry to go through here.  

Featured Links - February 26, 2023

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

A winter beach

• Dodge Lodge. "This week, we remember a Cinderella story gone wrong and learn why playing with dynamite is a bad idea." A fascinating bit of Northern Ontario history that I have not heard about before this article.
• ‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything. "The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?" From Cory Doctorow, who coined the term last year.
• Google is making a map of methane leaks for the whole world to see. "A satellite that measures methane leaks from oil and gas companies is set to start circulating the Earth 15 times a day next month. Google plans to have the data mapped by the end of the year for the whole world to see." This is a very good idea.
• The ultimate guide to using PowerToys. "Windows may not be perfect, but Microsoft gives you the tools to make the experience better with PowerToys. Here's everything you need to know." If you are using Windows, you need PowerToys and this article is the best guide I've seen.
• How to digitize and declutter your CDs and DVDs. "Save the content you still want, sell the discs you don't."
• Google's inconsistent Pixel experience makes its phones impossible to recommend. "Three generations into the Tensor experiment, the time has come to stop making excuses for Google's buggy software." I'm more concerned about Google's penchant for killing off apps and services. I've never forgiven them for sunsetting Google Reader. 
• Long Covid ‘brain fog’ may be due to leaky blood-brain barrier, study finds. "If barrier controlling substances entering and exiting brain is off balance, it can drive changes in neural function."
• Bluesky: An Open Social Web. "Today, we’re excited to announce that the Bluesky network is federating and opening up in a way that allows you to host your own data. What does this mean?" I have not signed up for BlueSky yet though I probably will at some point. But right now I spend too much time on Mastodon and I don't need another time sink in my life. If you use BlueSky, I'd be interested in your experience if you want to leave a comment.

Photo of the Week - February 25, 2024

This week's picture is of our cat, CJ, waiting patiently for me to finish getting ready for bed so he can hop up on me and get a snuggle. Taken with the Pixel 8 Pro. 

CJ

Saturday Sounds - Joshua Redman Tiny Desk Concert

This Saturday's musical treat is courtesy of NPR and their Tiny Desk Concert series featuring saxophone great Joshua Redman. Thanks to Little Green Footfalls for bringing this one to my attention. 

Back On the Moon

Yesterday, a robotic lander made by Intuitive Machines successfully landed near the south pole of the moon. It's the first time a US spacecraft has been there since the Apollo program. 

As I write this Friday morning, it's still not clear just how successful the mission will be is reaching its goals, but the lander is on the moon and sending back some data.

I was especially impressed by the ability of the mission team to overcome a last minute problem by patching the lander's software to use a different set of cameras needed for the landing. That was an epic hack.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment's three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

Featured Links – February 20, 2023

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

Cat in a window

Cannabis Extract Shows "Remarkable" Ability To Kill Skin Cancer Cells. "The results are promising, but preliminary."

Jim Collins: Discovery of the First New Structural Class of Antibiotics in Decades, Using A.I. "Starting from >12,000 compounds to find, with explainability, new drugs effective vs methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA)"

Vaccine Confidence Falls as Belief in Health Misinformation Grows. "Americans have less confidence in vaccines to address a variety of illnesses than they did just a year or two ago, and more people accept misinformation about vaccines and Covid-19, according to the latest health survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania."

Truths, Untruths, and the Realm of Belief in Between: Misinformation & Propaganda in Science Fiction. "A science fiction author looks at how the genre examines the role of truth and mistruth in the genre."

Staring At A Red Light In The Morning Improves Worsening Eyesight, Study Shows. Staring at a deep red light for just three minutes can drastically restore declining eyesight, according to a new study in the journal Scientific Reports. Impressively, improvements from a single session of light exposure lasted for a whole week, although the treatment is only effective if administered in the morning.

Router Security. "This site focuses on the security of routers. This includes both configuration changes to make a router more secure, and, picking a router that is more secure out of the box. If you are interested in faster WiFi, there is one page on extending the range of a Wi-Fi network."

The real problem with Google's new Gemini Android assistant. "The real problem with Gemini as the Android assistant is that Google's forgotten why a phone assistant actually matters — and what we, as actual users in the real world, need from such a service." He's absolutely right and I'm not installing it on my phone until they fix it.

DOJ quietly removed Russian malware from routers in US homes and businesses. "Feds once again fix up compromised retail routers under court order."

Researchers reveal lost library of Charles Darwin for the first time. "For the first time since his death in 1882, Charles Darwin’s impressive library has been virtually reassembled to reveal the multitude of books, pamphlets and journals cited and read by the influential naturalist."

Taking a few days off

It's a long weekend here in the Great White North, which suddenly became white again today. Monday is Family Day in Ontario, and I have a lot of stuff to catch up on around the house, so I'm taking the weekend off. 

Regular posts will resume Tuesday.

 In the meantime, enjoy this lakeshore scene, taken before the snow hit.

Lake Ontario in the afternoon

Verifying the Capacity of a USB Drive

I've seen a few reports recently about USB drives that are not what they seem. For example, a 1 TB USB drive may actually have a capacity of only 32 MB, but the drive appears to be 1 TB to the operating system. It'll appear to load your files, but when you go to retrieve them, they aren't there.

Or, as Tech Radar reports, the drive may be using a chip of dubious quality; for example, a chip rejected by a manufacturer because it failed quality control. Steve Gibson has created the ValiDrive utility that will scan the drive and report its actual capacity. It's small, requires no installationm, and free.

To use it, open the program and insert the drive you want to scan into your PC. It will start scanning the drive, scanning 576 sectors across the memory from beginning to end, logging read and write errors, and report the total actual (as opposed to reported) size. 

It's a useful utility and I will run it on any drives or cards that get. 

Featured Links – February 12, 2024

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

Ducks in the bay

• Do We Simply Not Care About Old People? In the last week of 2023 and the first two weeks of 2024 alone, 4,810 people 65 and older lost their lives to covid — a group that would fill more than 10 large airliners — according to data provided by the CDC. But the alarm that would attend plane crashes is notably absent. (During the same period, the flu killed an additional 1,201 seniors, and RSV killed 126.)
• 5 dark mode upgrades for your Windows 10 or 11 PC. "Microsoft is slowly making dark mode better on Windows, but these tips will give your dark mode a big upgrade today." I would have a hard time using my computer without dark mode. I second the recommendation in the article for using the Dark Reader extension. 
• Next-Generation Spaceplanes Are the Cutting-Edge Evolution of the Space Shuttle Dream. "Spaceplanes seemed out of favor when the Shuttle was retired in 2011. They now seem to be making a comeback."
• Moderately Advanced Aliens Could Easily Take Over A Milky Way-Like Galaxy, Simulations Show. "A new simulation has looked at how quickly a moderately advanced alien civilization would take to spread itself across a galaxy and the answer is not long at all, at least in relative cosmic terms. Even equipped with spaceships not much faster than our most advanced interplanetary probes, the whole ordeal could happen in just 1 billion years."
• Micromobility: An Urban Transportation Revolution. "E-bikes, E-motorcycles, E-scooters displacing oil use and improving urban living."
• Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything. "Physicists’ search for a theory that explains all reality in one framework appeared to have stalled. But now they are reinvigorating the hunt by exploring a wild landscape of abstract geometry."
• The Super Bowl will be watched by 100 million people. But not all of them will see the same game. "Two million Canadians and 13 million Americans live with colour blindness, and North American sports are behind on making their products accessible." Fortunately, I have normal colour vision, but I can understand how being colour blind would be a real problem for sports fans. 

Photo of the Week – February 11, 2024

I don't see as many sunrises now as I did when I was working. Taking my usual GO Train from Pickering, there were four times during the year when I could see the sun rising over lake Ontario. Now I have to remember to look up the sunrise time and walk outside and I can't see the actual moment of sunrise because of houses and trees in the way.

But nature occasionally puts on a light show, and that happened one morning last week when I was taking the weekly recycle material out to the curb for pickup. I ran back into the house to grab my phone before it faded. If I'd been five minutes later, I would have missed it.

Sunrise

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - Symphony 11

This week's musical post is another in honour of Philip Glass, who just celebrated his 87th birthday. It's a recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the baton on Riccardo Muti, and it won a Grammy Award last weekend for the best engineered classical recording. 

I haven't been a fan of most of Glass's symphonies, but I do like this one quite a lot. In a review, Classics Today calls it a "rollicking ride" and that's an apt description. It's much livelier and to my ear, much more enjoyable, than his 13th, which I saw performed last a couple of years ago. 

Yes, There Is Hope for Us 4

This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts contrasting my "We're Toast" series of posts, with links to articles that suggest that we might somehow pull through the coming crisis. I haven't done one of these in a while, and yes, there is some good news among all the horrible news that seem to dominate the news. 

A snowless, sunny park in February

• Clean Energy Has Displaced Coal. Gas is Next. "Last year Europe produced more electricity from wind turbines than its fossil gas plants. Wind and solar produced a record 27% of the European Union’s electricity- above a quarter for the first time."
• Global Emissions Could Peak Sooner Than You Think. "Global deployment of solar and wind power, plus a surge in EV sales, means emissions from fossil-fuel-derived energy will finally hit the downward slope."
• World-first blood test for brain cancer may increase survival rates, say experts. "Inexpensive test can help diagnose even ‘inaccessible’ tumours earlier, speeding up treatment and improving outcomes."
• Scientists Will Test a Cancer-Hunting mRNA Treatment. "Strand Therapeutics has figured out a way to turn the molecule on and off in certain tissues to more precisely treat tumors."
• Scientists tame chaotic protein fueling 75% of cancers. "MYC is the shapeless protein responsible for making the majority of human cancer cases worse. UC Riverside researchers have found a way to rein it in, offering hope for a new era of treatments."
• 20 Things That Made the World a Better Place in 2023. "From the falling costs of renewable energy to new treatments for a whole host of diseases, 2023 wasn’t all doom and gloom."
• Scientists discover the first new antibiotics in over 60 years using AI. "A new class of antibiotics for drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria which was discovered using more transparent deep learning models."

Are Space Settlements Realistic?

I recently finished watching season 4 of For All Mankind, a rather good science fiction series on Apple TV+. The premise of the show is that in 1969, the Soviet Union beat the United States to a lunar landing, touching off a decades long space race that eventually resulted in settlements in Earth orbit, on the moon, and eventually Mars. All this in about forty years. 

It's a wonderful dream but not very realistic, at least not in that timeframe. Which raises the question: are space settlements possible at all? 

That question is addressed in a new book, A City On Mars, by biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith. Cory Doctorow reviewed it recently in his Plurastic blog and comes down on the "not realistic" side of the question. 

The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that every aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool). 

My own take on it is that there's no way that we will have self-sustaining settlements in space, on the moon or on Mars, much before the end of this century. But I think we still need to start on a small scale, in Earth orbit and on the moon, to develop the ability to live in a self-sustaining environment that eventually can be scaled up to something larger. 

One of the things that will keep large scale space colonization from happening is the detrimental effects on the atmosphere of rocket launches. It's not a major problem right now, but lifting hundreds of thousands or millions of tons into orbit using chemical rockets, even ones using relatively "clean" fuels is going to affect the atmosphere and climate. The only way around this is probably a space elevator, but that needs materials that we don't yet have. 

It may be that humans can't survive away from the Earth (see Kim Stanley Robinsn's novel, Aurora, cited in Doctorow's post). The only way we'll find out is to try and I think we should.  

 

Featured Links - February 5, 2024

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

Toronto General Hospital lobby

• Toki Pona: The Unique Language With Less Than 150 Words. "There are apparently thousands of speakers, but can Toki Pona be considered a language?"
• Bizarre Virus-like 'Obelisks' Found in Human Mouths and Guts. "Stanford University scientists say they’ve discovered virus-like agents in the body that are unlike anything seen before."
• NASA could have tried to Launch Space Shuttle Atlantis on a rescue mission if they had known Columbia was going to disintegrate on re-entry. 
• How Astronomers Are Saving Astronomy From Satellites — For Now. "Even the most powerful telescopes are in peril as orbits above Earth fill with thousands of new satellites. But scientists aren’t ready to give up the night sky."
• Your Google Pixel has a secret diagnostics menu — how to find it. Unfortunately it's only available to US users. And no, using a VPN with a US end point doesn't work. 
• ​$1.1B deals signed at Worldcon's 1st industrial development summit. "Investment deals valued at approximately 8 billion yuan ($1.09 billion) were signed during the 81st World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) held in Chengdu, Sichuan province, last week at its inaugural industrial development summit, marking significant progress in the advancement of sci-fi development in China." Science fiction fans who thought there wouldn't be Chinese state involvement in the Worldcon were very naive. 
• Pentagon moves to declassify some secret space programs and technologies. "Some officials at the Pentagon have been calling for such a new classification policy for years."
• We keep making the same mistakes with spreadsheets, despite bad consequences. "Errors with spreadsheets are not only frustrating but can have serious consequences."

Photo of the Week - February 4, 2024

This week's photo is of a barge used to clear the channel between Frenchman's Bay and Lake Ontario. This was taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and it's 5x telephoto and not edited.

Dredge in Frenchman's Bay

Wayne Kramer, RIP

Wayne Kramer, the guitarist for the Detroit rock band, The MC5, has died at the age of 75. From Rolling Stone:

"Formed in Detroit in the mid-Sixties, MC5 (shorthand for Motor City Five) first came to prominence as the house band for left-wing rallies in the city at the time. Following a performance outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, Kramer and company returned to Detroit and its Grande Ballroom in October of that year to lay down what would become their landmark album Kick Out the Jams.

The live LP — with its rallying cry “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers” — would ultimately land on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. “Kick Out the Jams writhes and screams with the belief that rock & roll is a necessary act of civil disobedience. The proof: It was banned by a Michigan department store,” Rolling Stone wrote of the album. “The MC5 proved their lefty credentials the summer before the album was recorded when they were the only band that showed up to play for the Yippies protesting the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.”

While MC5’s tenure was short-lived — the band only released two studio albums, 1970’s Back in the USA and 1971’s High Time before their initial break-up — the group had a lasting impact on what would become punk rock, both in its overtly political lyrics and the Kramer/Smith tandem’s explosive riffs."

I never managed to see them perform, much to my regret. But I did wear out my copy of "Kick Out the Jams", one of the loudest, rawest, and political albums of the 1960s. Kick out a few jams in his honour.

Saturday Sounds - U2 - The Spere, Las Vegas - January 26, 2024

This week, we have something rather special. U2 has been performing at The Sphere in Las Vegas, perhaps the most incredible concert venue in the world. Seeing a concert there is now near the top of my bucket list.

This is the full show in which they perform their Achtung Baby album and more. It's fan shot video with very good sound. (I'm assuming the audio is an audience source though it might be from an in-house feed. In any case, it's quite listenable.) The video is occasionally jaw-dropping and the performance is up to U2's usual high standards. 

 

Locus 2023 Recommended Reading List

Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has published their recommended reading list for 2023. As usual, it's a great place to start if you're looking to find high quality science fiction, fantasy, or horror to read.

These are the books I've read (*) or plan to read from the science fiction novels list. 

• Creation Node, Stephen Baxter
• Infinity Gate, M.R. Carey 
• Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow
• The Deluge, Stephen Markley
• Hopeland, Ian McDonald
• The Terraformers*, Annalee Newitz 
• Him, Geoff Ryman 
• Starter Villain, John Scalzi

Some of the novelette and short story items are available to read online and links are provided. 

Movie and TV Reviews - January 2024

Short reviews of what Nancy and I watched in January 2024.

Movies

• Underwater: This was a pretty standard and predictable thriller with monsters. The last third looked like they had used up the SFX budget. The IMDB rating of 5.6 was too generous. (Disney+)
• The Creator: This was a rewatch as we had seen it at the cinema last fall. It was worth rewatching. It also looked much better on our LG OLED than it did at Cineplex. I do wish there were more original big-budget SF movies like this; I could happily live without seeing another MCU, Star Wars, or Star Trek movie. (Disney+)
• Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny. Another rewatch (my daughter wanted to see it). It wasn't any better the second time around. (Disney+)
• Hamilton: We watched about twenty minutes and decided it wasn't for us. The music is good but we had no interest in the story. I'd just as soon listen to the soundtrack album. (Disney+)
• Killers of the Flower Moon. I think this was the best movie I've seen in the last year, with the possible exception of Barbie. Despite the length, the movie held our attention. The acting, writing, cinematography, production values, and directing are all first rate. From what I've read online, it's reasonably historically accurate, much more so than many big-name US films. And a special shout out to the late Robbie Robertson for a superb score. (Apple TV+)
• Totally Killer. Back to the Future meets Halloween. OK if you don't mind the slasher scenes. (Amazon Prime)
• Elton John Live at Dogers' Stadium: I was an Elton John fan from his first album, but kind of lost interest when he started having mega hits. But I now really wish I had gone to see him perform at some point. Just an amazing concert, all the more so when you realize he's in his mid-70s. (Disney+)

TV Shows

• Shetland, season 8: Dark and bleak, like the islands with first-rate acting. The plot in this one was unusually complex (maybe too complex) and left us guessing until the end. (BritBox)
• Antiques Road Trip, season 25: More comfort watching. We find the embedded bits of local history quite fascinating. (PBS)
• Vera, season 12 episode 5. I don't know why this episode didn't show up with the others in season 12, but it was worth the wait. (BritBox)
• Slow Horses (season 3): The plot of this one was even more implausible than last season but we still enjoyed it. Gary Oldman's performance is the best thing about the show. (Apple TV+)
• For All Mankind (season 4): My only reservation about this show is that the time frame is unrealistically compressed. I can't believe that there could have been that much technological progress in 40 years. Still it's eminently watchable and I loved the optimistic spirit. It's the best SF show going right now by far. (Apple TV+)
• Reacher (season 2): This is the action equivalent of the "cozy mysteries" we like to watch. Not to be taken seriously. It was interesting seeing the local settings subbing for some US locations. (Amazon Prime)
• The Sixth Commandment: Slow, grim, and quite unsettling, all the more so for being based on a true crime. (BritBox)
• Hope Street (seasons 1 and 2): More of a soap opera than a police procedural with a lovely setting in Northern Ireland. (BritBox)
• Emergency Vet (season 1): A documentary series based on the behind-scenes-care at Toronto's Veterinary Emergency Clinic (VEC). We've had to take our dog to the VEC for an eye problem, so we are quite familiar with them, but I had no idea how extensive the clinic's facilities are. 

Microsoft Is Forcing Copilot Onto Word Users

According to an article on Office Watch, Microsoft is forcing Copilot, its generative AI product, onto Word users – whether they want it or not.

The paid versions of Copilot AI in Microsoft Word often appear when it’s not wanted and Microsoft isn’t giving their paying customers any choice.

Microsoft is assuming that anytime there’s a blank document or even paragraph that customers want Copilot to jump in. So they’ve put Copilot ‘front and center’ on the screen with no way remove it.

Users are presented with a Copilot prompt when they open a blank document and a Copilot icon appears beside blank paragraphs. 

I don't see this happening, although I do have a Microsoft 365 license, because I'm not using the paid version of Copilot (nor do I plan to get it). But I can understand how annoying this would be to some Word users; it would certainly annoy me, especially since there doesn't seem to be any way of stopping it from happening. 

My use of Word has declined quite a bit since I retired and it may reach the point that I decide that the free Libre Office may suit my needs. (I've already moved most of my spreadsheets over to Google Sheets). 

It's Time to Start Shutting Down Canada's Carbon Bomb

I have thought for years that it was beyond time to start shutting down oil production from Alberta's tar sands, which have been described, quite accurately, as a carbon bomb. That opinion has more than been confirmed by a study published in Science on January 25th. Here's the editor's summary from Science.

Air pollution from gaseous organic compounds generated by petrochemical extraction typically is estimated using measurements of a subset of those species, volatile organic compounds. He et al. showed that this approach can vastly underestimate the true magnitude of the problem. Their aircraft-based measurements of total gas-phase organic carbon concentrations over the Athabasca oil sands region of Alberta, Canada, revealed that emissions from that region alone were much larger than estimates made on the basis of more limited arrays of species by as much as a factor of 64. The underreported species included abundant precursors to secondary air pollution that must be included in organic carbon pollution monitoring and reporting. —H. Jesse Smith

That rather bloodless summary doesn't give a good idea of the scale of the problem that the study uncovered. Here's some commentary from Nature. 

Canada’s controversial oil-producing tar sands generate a substantial amount of unaccounted-for carbon-based emissions that can affect air quality, according to measurements taken by aircraft. The sands release more of these pollution-causing gases than megacities such as Los Angeles, California, and about the same as the rest of Canada’s human-generated sources combined — including emissions from motor traffic and all other industries.

Wrap your head around that. One, admittedly large, industrial site generates more carbon-based emissions than a country of 40 million people. No wonder climate models are having trouble keeping up with the pace of global warming.

The original article has gotten noticed by more media, including ArsTechnica, and The Guardian, though I'm seeing nothing in the mainstream Canadian press (it may be too early for them to pick up on it, or it could be that the story will get buried to avoid embarrassing the big energy company advertisers).

The best commentary I've seen so far comes from Steven Leahy's Need to Know. He provides background information about the tar sands and their effects and information about how concerned Canadians can provide public comments to the Canadian government. You can bet I will be doing so. 

 

It's Time to Start Shutting Down Canada's Oil Sands

Featured Links - January 29, 2023

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

Old and new

• 500,000 years ago was 15 times bigger than record-breaking Tonga eruption. "A 500-foot-thick layer of pumice rock on the Mediterranean seabed indicates Santorini volcano ejected 15 times more material than Hunga-Tonga during a previously unknown eruption." It was even bigger than the eruption that led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization. 
• Are induction stoves that much safer than gas? We tested them. "Scientists’ best answer, at the moment, to whether you should ditch your gas stove is: We’re not sure yet." I would get one if it didn't mean replacing most of our cookware. 
• The Oxygen Bottleneck: Astronomers Find Huge New Problem For Alien Civilizations. "Some aliens may be cursed with intelligence, but unable to progress technologically." This is the first time I've heard of this idea and it's rather upsetting me. 
• How to Use Google’s Fact Check Explorer to Verify Claims on the Web. "True? False? Somewhere in between? Google's online tool will tell you."
• What would the late heavy bombardment have done to the Earth’s surface? "Early in Earth's history, bombardment by enormous asteroids was common." Geologists have been able to find traces of impacts as far back as 3.5 billion years. 
• Welcome to Reactor! Here’s Where Everything Went and How to Use It. Reactor is the rebranded website of Tor.com, the pre-eminent online publisher of science fiction and fantasy. 
• We Need Your Email Address. 404 Media are asking people to provide their email address before they can read articles on their site. Why? Because they are being ripped off by AI bots cloning their site. The article explains what is happening and it's horrifying. 

Photo of the Week - January 28, 2024

This week's photo is of the end of a small dead-end street in my neighbourhood that's had some problems with people dumping their garbage. This was taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

End of the road

Hugo Shenanigans - Updated

The Hugo Awards, the science fiction genre's oldest and most prestigious awards, are no stranger to controversy; most notably the Sad Puppies affair in 2015. Now, the publication of the detailed voting statistics from the 2022 Chengdu Worldcon has started another one.

The voting statistics showed that several nominees were disqualified with no reasons given other than a statement that they had violated the Hugo's voting rules. One of the disqualifications was for Babel, by R. F. Kuang, a book that won last year's Nebula and Locus awards. 

John Scalzi has a summary of the events on his Whatever blog in which he links to this longer post by Cora Buhlert.

This is the most unusual Hugo longlist I’ve ever seen, including the puppy years, and we really, really need some answers here:

Why were Babel, Paul Weimer, Xiran Jay Zhao and that Sandman episode declared ineligible, when they absolutely should have been eligible? Most of the Chinese nominees declared ineligible likely actually were ineligible due to prior publication, at least according to Neil Clarke who recognised several of the titles and authors. Though “Fogong Temple Pagoda” appears to be a 2022 publication, i.e. eligible. We definitely need answers here.

And what’s the reason behind the very strange voting patterns and sharp drop-off between first and fifteenth place nominations? Normally, this sort of pattern indicates slating, but a) EPH was supposed to reduce the impact of slates, and b) we have seen no public evidence of slates apart from a recommendation list (which is not against the rules) by Science Fiction World. And the Science Fiction World list alone does not explain these patterns.

Finally, while occasionally a nominee will fall victim to EPH*, we have had several nominees knocked out by EPH, which is extremely unusual. That said, this might be explained by the very different voting patterns of Chinese and Western fans.

 *EPH is the rather complex voting scheme designed to stop the kind of ballot manipulation used by the Sad Puppies back in 2015. 

Most recently, the Hugo administrator for Chengdu fielded questions on Facebook. File 770 has a summary. 

I do hope more details will be forthcoming. I think the fan community and the nominees are owed an explanation. 

Update: The story is now hitting the mainstream press. The Guardian, a British newspaper, has an article about it today. Neil Gaiman is quoted. An episode of the series based on his Sandman graphic novels was ruled ineligible. 

Writing on Facebook, Gaiman said: “Until now, one of the things that’s always been refreshing about the Hugos has been the transparency and clarity of the process … This is obfuscatory, and without some clarity it means that whatever has gone wrong here is unfixable, or may be unfixable in ways that don’t damage the respect the Hugos have earned over the last 70 years.”

Update 2:  On his blog, SF author Charles Stross has published an overview of the Hugo controversy. It's a good one to read if you aren't familiar with how the Hugo Awards and the World Science Fiction Conventions are organized. 

My understanding is that a bunch of Chinese fans who ran a successful regional convention in Chengdu (population 21 million; slightly more than the New York metropolitan area, about 30% more than London and suburbs) heard about the worldcon and thought "wouldn't it be great if we could call ourselves the world science fiction convention?"

They put together a bid, then got a bunch of their regulars to cough up $50 each to buy a supporting membership in the 2021 worldcon and vote in site selection. It doesn't take that many people to "buy" a worldcon—I seem to recall it's on the order of 500-700 votes—so they bought themselves the right to run the worldcon in 2023. And that's when the fun and games started.

And from author and journalist Andrew Liptak, we have another overview with some suggestions on how to move forward.  

A big part of this problem comes from the structural nature of the World Science Fiction Society, and how it's not an organization that directly oversees conventions or awards, but handles the administrative elements. Transforming this organization (or phasing it out and replacing it with a successor) into one that has more control over its programming strikes me as a way to remove some of the uncertainty and bring about a more professional approach to the planning and administration of the awards, one that would prevent folks from gaming or meddling with the awards, and restore some element of trust into them by actually being able to enforce its rules and constitutions with its conventions. It needs administrators that do more than throw up their hands and give non-statements to a frustrated group of people.

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - Solo

Philip Glass is probably the pre-eminent living American composer of classical music, though his oeuvre is much wider than that. I've been a fan of his ever since hearing some of his music on FM radio in the 1970s, and I've seen him perform, in various formats, eight times. There is something about his music that strikes a chord, so to speak, in me. 

Years ago, I passed up an opportunity to see him perform some of his solo piano pieces; something that I now very much regret. Initially, I found them rather boring, but they've grown on me over the years. He's released a new album of some of his solo piano works, rerecorded and reinterpreted in 2021 at the age of 84. They're lovely, contemplative pieces, and despite their surface simplicity, you can get lost in them. 

More About Disinformation

Sadly, it's time to post more links to articles about disinformation and misinformation. It's clear that it's not going away any time soon; indeed, with the US election campaigns in full swing and two major wars, it's going to be a banner year. 

• The Murky Campaign to Discredit Lab-Grown Meat. "A new ad campaign is targeting the cultivated meat industry on TV and online. Industry supporters criticize it as unscientific." It appears to be sponsored by the food and drink industry. 
• Why weird ads about Sophie Trudeau, Howie Mandel — and Mary Berg — mean we're in trouble online. (archive,ph link) "They show how easy it is to borrow name recognition of news companies and celebrities and feed false information into the void."
• Since 2023, right-wing organizations, backed by Republican state attorneys general, have argued that banks are discriminating against them on religious and political grounds. But the attack on banks stuck among MAGA Republicans, especially as other financial platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe have declined to accept business from right-wing figures who spout hate speech, thus cutting off their ability to raise money from their followers. The attempt to create distrust of large financial institutions is part of a larger attempt to destabilize the institutions of democracy. Trump is the figurehead for that attempt, but it is larger than him, and it will outlast him."
• Interview with Jonathan Howard, author of We Want Them Infected. "A physician diligently tracked physician and researcher propagated misinformation during the pandemic."
• Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone. 'Civil rights lawyers and Democrats are sounding alarms about Mr. Musk’s claims about voting. The Biden campaign called his posts “profoundly irresponsible.”'
• A new kind of climate change denialism has taken hold on YouTube, says research group. "Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, says the center's new report shows that climate misinformation has evolved in ways that make it possible for a lot of it to evade YouTube’s advertising ban on content that denies climate change while generating millions of dollars of revenue in the process." (podcast link)
• Deepfake Dirty Tricks Descend on New Hampshire Ahead of Primary. "Long-time fears about AI-driven misinformation are now a reality with robocalls from AI Biden."
• MAGA grifters cash in selling fake cures to imaginary disease. "This time around, the grifters are telling their suckers that Hillary Clinton and the round-earthers have cooked up a diabolical pathogen called "Disease X" to rid the planet of "excess population," "install a corporate world government," and "enslave humanity." If you don't want your body to get covered in festering boils and carbuncles the size of chicken eggs, you need to buy a "medical contagion kit" with vials of life-saving ivermectin manufactured right here in God's most favorite country in the whole universe." Of course, "Disease X" is just a placeholder used by the WHO to indicate that there will someday be another pandemic.