Featured Links - October 28, 2024

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

A burning bush in full flame

•  ‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump. "Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in."
  
• Political Polarization and Health. "In addition to social determinants of health, such as economic resources, education, access to care and various environmental factors, there is growing evidence that political polarization poses a substantial risk to individual and collective well-being."
• Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health. "When dairy cows in Texas began falling ill with H5N1, alarmed veterinarians expected a fierce response to contain an outbreak with pandemic-sparking potential. Then politics—and, critics say, a key agency’s mandate to protect dairy-industry revenues—intervened."
• Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. "The limitations on Trump deploying the military in terrifying ways are almost non-existent."
• A Priceless Business Leadership Lesson From The Grateful Dead. "Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s singularly iconic and beloved bassist, died last week at age 84. He was a beautiful musician, a wonderful man, a sweet soul. He also – through his identifiably unique approach to his instrument and how it becomes so integral to the band’s creative development – exemplified more than just music. And the lessons we learned from him – and the boys – are more applicable to business than ever before. "
• How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town. "Over the course of 11 days, a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America." I hope this isn't a preview of coming chaos, but I am afraid it might be.
• How Google is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – And Why. "A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers. And maybe give you some insight as to why they are doing so."
• Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan. "Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today."

Photo of the Week - October 27, 2024

It's autumn and the summer flowers and plants are dying off. This picture is from our backyard flower garden. It's a bit sad, but still quite beautiful. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro and boosted the colours a bit in Google Photos. 

Autumn Colours

Saturday Sounds - Phil Lesh and Friends - April 1999 - The Warfield, San Francisco, CA

Sad news yesterday. Phil Lesh, founding member and bassist for the Grateful Dead, has died at the age of 84. I saw the Dead eight times but never managed to catch Lesh in any of his post-Dead bands, generally known as Phil and Friends. 

So this week's musical treat consists of three Phil and Friends shows from April 1999 at the Warfield in San Francisco. This version consists of Lesh on bass, Steve Kimock and Trey Anastasio on guitars, Page McConnell on keyboards, and John Molo on drums. Donna Jean Godchaux also sings on some of the songs..

Phil and Friends had many versions, but this is one of the earlier ones and my favourite of all of them. The setlists include Grateful Dead standards, songs by Phish, and a few judiciously chosen convers. The shows were professionally recorded on multitrack tape with the intention of releasing a live album, but that never happened. The recordings soon made their way into the wild and have been widely circulated. The sound is perfect, the video less so (at least by modern standards), but still watchable.

So sit back, light a fat one in Phil's memory, and enjoy.

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 15, 1999

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 16, 1999

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 17, 1999

Happy Birthday, Core Dump

Happy birthday, Core Dump. I started this blog 21 years ago today. It was originally on Google's Blogger platform, but I moved it to a self-hosted WordPress blog around 2010, then back to Blogger in 2018. 

I'm still at it, though I sometimes wonder why. I'm not posting as much as I used to and readership (assuming I can trust Google's stats) is way down, but it satisfies my creative itch. And it is a useful resource; I often find myself looking up old posts for reference.

At some point, I will probably have to shutter the WordPress site. If I can figure out how, I would like to have a local copy available for reference on my PC. For now though, I'm keeping it going; at least until Google kills of Blogger. 

Internet Life

Science fiction author Peter Watts has written an interesting blog post about the possibility life emerging spontaneously inside the internet. That's not a new idea; SF authors have been exploring the idea for years (Skynet in The Terminator series, Robert J. Sawyers WWW trilogy are just two examples), but now AI researchers are looking at how it might actually happen. 

Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital “primordial soup” of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint “Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction”[1]:

“when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.”

Apparently, self-replicators don’t even need random mutation to evolve. The code’s own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while

“…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy).”

Watts summarizes the research in (relatively) non-technical detail. It's fascinating and more than a little bit scary. After reading the post, do check out his novel, Maelstrom, cited in the post, in which he explored some of the implications 15 years ago. 

2024 World Fantasy Award Winners

The winners of the 2024 World Fantasy Awards were announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, NY last weekend. These are the winners for fiction.

• NOVEL: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (Saga Press/Titan UK)
• NOVELLA: “Half the House Is Haunted” by Josh Malerman (Spin a Black Yarn)
• SHORT FICTION: “Silk and Cotton and Linen and Blood” by Nghi Vo (New Suns 2)
• ANTHOLOGY: The Book of Witches edited by Jonathan Strahan (Harper Voyager US/Harper Voyager UK)
• COLLECTION: No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories by Premee Mohamed (Undertow Publications)

Featured Links - October 21, 2024

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

A setting harvest moon

• In an era when the natural world collides with the human, we must get to a truer vision of what life means on this planet (gift link). An opinion piece by Jeff VanderMeer, the Florida-based author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which is Absolution.
• Complete Planetary Destruction Is Not as Easy as It Seems. "Humans are very bad at taking care of the planet, but the Earth has survived bigger threats than us..." Earth will abide, but will humans?
• Technical Chernobyl animation shows how an RBMK reactor explodes. "Higgsino physics published a straightforward (if not exactly simple) animation showing what went wrong at Chernobyl. It's like a physics equivalent to those 'every day from your favorite war' animations showing the front lines advance and retreat across continents. Except this war happened in a big metal bucket in Pripyat. Turn on closed captions, but not until you have absorbed the legend at the bottom."
• Respiratory viruses: Wastewater monitoring dashboard. "This dashboard provides data about respiratory virus levels, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), influenza (flu) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in wastewater (sewage) in Canada." 
• Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. "Typst is similar in spirit and aims to LaTeX: it’s a typesetting tool that can be used to write and generate documents, usually PDF files. It intends to be used in academic/scientific environments, much like LaTeX is nowadays."
• Walport ahoy! "White smoke over the Health Canada rooftops. But Dr. Naylor has questions." Per Greg Wilson on my Mastodon feed: "The Walport Report on Canada's (mis)handling of the COVID pandemic has finally been released - on the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, with no official announcement." 
• World Concert Hall ... Every Online Concert in This World. A site that streams online classical music concerts. 

Photo of the Week - October 20, 2024

There was a comet in the sky this week and Nancy and I tried to view it on a couple of evenings without much success. It showed up very faintly in one picture that Nancy took but I couldn't find it either with the naked eye or in any of my photos. This picture is of the view over Frenchman's Bay. There may be a comet in there somewhere but I can't see it. Nonetheless, it's a pretty shot. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Frenchman's Bay after sunset

 

Saturday Sounds - The Tragically Hip - Fully Completely

In this week's musical treat I want to revisit The Tragically Hip. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the wonderful documentary, No Dress Rehearsal, which chronicles their career. This week, it's the deluxe release of Fully Completely, which has some of their best songs. 

The original album came out in 1992 and was rereleased in 2014, just a couple of years before their final tour. It features several songs, "Courage (For Hugh MacLennan)", "At the Hundredth Meridian", "Fully Completely", "Fifty Mission Cap", and "Wheat Kings", that became anthems in their concerts and burned themselves into the brains of a generation of Canadians. The rerelease also includes live versions of most of the songs. Enjoy.

More About Disinformation

It's time to publish links to several articles about misinformation and disinformation. I don't know if it's just that there's more of it or people are paying more attention to it. As you might expect, most of the articles are about politics and not just the US election as Canada gets in there too. 

Halloween decorations

• The Russians had money. The Canadian had far-right influencers. The U.S. Department of Justice says it has a criminal case. "A U.S. indictment alleges that two Russians helped funnel millions of dollars into a media company in order to spread misinformation that would benefit Moscow."
• From the Storm to the Stormtroopers. "Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response.  Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice.  And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe."
• The Climate Clowns. "An outrageous new lie is being spread about hurricanes, and I can’t even." I don't know which is scarier: that a politician would have the nerve to spout garbage like that, or that people are stupid enough to believe them.
• A Disinformation Trial Run. "The conspiracies and false claims surrounding hurricane relief efforts carry an important silver lining." About the only positive side to the flood of disinformation is that the media seem to be catching on to the nonsense.
• The Media Is Finally Calling Trump Out. But Is It Too Late? "The double standard Kamala Harris is being held to by the media is mind numbing."
• A fringe party packed with conspiracy theorists could soon be leading one of Canada’s largest provinces. Here’s why I’m not surprised. "British Columbia’s provincial election is getting extremely weird, and it might be a sign something’s deeply broken in Canadian democracy. The Conservative Party of B.C. — led by a man who had to issue a mea culpa after discussing the idea of prosecuting doctors in “Nuremberg”-style COVID-19 trials — has been surging in the polls. The party now looks set to make significant gains or perhaps even replace the incumbent B.C. NDP."
• Weaponized Polling Is More Dangerous Than Ever. "Right-leaning outfits are skewing the polls for Trump for quite sinister reasons."
• What Keeps Latino Voting-Rights Activists Up at Night? Disinformation (gift link). Activists say the nefarious material is more widespread, sophisticated and complex than ever.

Featured Links - October 15, 2024

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

The moon over Frenchman's Bay

• Jim’s Toolbox — So many nifty tools in one collection. A simple utility that provides a front-end to many Windows' settings and features in one place Easier and faster to use than digging through the Windows 11 interface. 
• Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah (gift link). "New details emerge of Israel’s elaborate plan to sabotage Hezbollah  communications devices to kill or maim thousands of its operatives."
• Conceptual models of space colonization. From SFF author Charlie Stross: "And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?"
• The Wilderness Hidden in the Heart of Toronto (gift link). "A sprawling network of ravines threaded through Canada’s largest city offers urban explorers an oasis of birdsong, burbling creeks and whispering trees." The ravine system really is a natural wonder and extends out of Toronto; see the Rouge River system to the east which is a national urban park.
• One of the busiest emergency departments in Ontario also has some of the shortest wait times. "On a tour this week, Peter Voros, Humber River’s vice-president of clinical programs, showed off how the command centre and its staff keep patients flowing. One of the big-screen TVs displayed how long patients had been sitting in the ER’s “O-zone,” where patients wait if they are expected to be examined and sent home. Experienced nurses known as clinical expediters monitor the screens and intervene if a patient waits longer than the targeted time for their health complaint."
• Missing immune cells may explain why COVID-19 vaccine protection quickly wanes. "New insights on what stimulates long-lived antibody production could spur better vaccines."
• Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. "It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers."
• COVID-19 raises the stakes for heart attacks, strokes, and even death long after infection, new study finds. "The study, involving nearly a quarter-million adults, found that those with any type of COVID-19 infection in 2020 had twice the risk of suffering a major cardiac event—a heart attack, stroke, or even death—in the three years after a diagnosis than those who weren’t infected. People whose infections were severe enough to warrant hospitalization faced nearly a four times greater risk of a major cardiac event or death than the uninfected group."
• 'It went horribly wrong': DNA analysis sheds light on lost Arctic expedition's grisly end. "By comparing DNA from the bones with a sample from a living relative, the new research revealed the skeletal remains belonged to James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus. The Royal Navy vessel and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, had been under the command of Sir John Franklin, who led the voyage to explore unnavigated areas of the Northwest Passage. The treacherous shortcut across the top of North America meanders through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago."
• The politically incorrect guide to saving NASA’s floundering Artemis Program. "To get somewhere, Artemis must avoid going nowhere."

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Great White North. We're not quite white yet, but nights are getting down to the freezing point so it won't be long. I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. Regular posts will resume on Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy these fall flowers.

Fall flowers

 

A Journey Across a Divided America

There's always been division and polarization in US politics, but I'm not sure if there's been a time since the Civil War when the country has been so evenly divided. Most of the coverage of current politics seems to focus on the politicians and the "chattering classes", but not what's going on in the lives of average Americans.

Recently, author and journalist Ian Brown spent two weeks riding a Greyhound bus across the US from Los Angeles to New York followed by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson. He writes about the trip and the people he encountered in this long article in the Globe and Mail. 

“On a plane, you have first-class and economy,” a rider would say to me on the first day of the trip. “On a bus, you have no idea who’s on there with you.”

The bus is also the last truly democratic way to get from here to there, at a time when a critical slice of Americans can’t decide which road to take. There were 168 million registered American voters in the last presidential election. Polls suggest they are deadlocked between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The election will be decided by an estimated three million undecided voters in swing states – among them Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all places I plan to debus for a glance around before I reach New York City. (Georgia and North Carolina are also swing states, but I have only two weeks, so they’re off the itinerary.)

All of which is to explain why, on a Saturday in late summer, I was standing in the doorway of a four-person tent pitched on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a short walk from my hotel and the nearby Greyhound station.

It's a brilliant, sharp piece of writing coupled with memorable photos and I strongly encourage you to take the time to read it. (It's a gift link from my subscription, so no paywall. Articles like this are why I subscribe to the Globe and a few other newspapers). 

Featured Links - October 7, 2024

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

The Scarborough bluffs

• Prime's enshittified advertising. "Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money." From Cory Doctorow. 
• ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning. "Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife."
• Escalating contest over South China Sea disrupts international cable system (gift link). "China’s effort to dominate the disputed waterway is taking a toll on the network of underwater cables that provide essential internet connectivity in Asia."
• College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time. "The demo highlights the dark side of AR glasses."
• Mark Shapiro doesn’t even talk a good game. "The Blue Jays are a disaster. And the boss has to go (gift link)." As usual, Rosie DiMano doesn't pull any punches.
• License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars. "From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more."
• The 1912 War On Fake Photos. "Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated."
• Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’. "It’s a policy approach gaining momentum around the world. It aims to avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water, and ensure wellbeing for all humans, while staying within planetary boundaries."

Photo of the Week - October 6, 2024

It's fall, which means time to harvest. We have a garden in the backyard and this year planted tomatoes, zucchini, squash, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and garlic. Most of the flowering/climbing plants were a disaster. The tomato plants didn't produce and the cucumbers and beets got eaten (despite having chicken wire fencing around the garden). We did get a couple of small peppers and squash and a few zucchini.. 

The garlic, which we planted last fall, and the potatoes turned out well. (The potatoes were in planters). 

The last crop wasn't strictly a garden crop. We've had Jerusalem artichokes growing along the fences for several years and have harvested them before. You can mash them just like potatoes. This year we got a bumper crop.

I roasted some for supper, following this recipe, and they were delicious.

This week's photo is in honour of our final harvest. It wasn't such a bad year after all.

Jerusalem artichokes

Saturday Sounds - Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band - 2024/09/22 - Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls, ON

This week's musical treat is a concert that I wish I could have been at: Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls Ontario on Septermber 22nd.  Ringo has played in the area several times over the years, often kicking off his tours at Fallsview or Casino Rama, but I've never managed to get to one. 

Per Wikipedia, the current lineup of the band is:

• Ringo Starr – vocals, drums, piano (1989–present)[5]
• Colin Hay – guitar, harmonica, vocals (2003, 2008, 2018–present)[6]
• Hamish Stuart – bass, guitar, vocals (2006–2008, 2019–present)
• Buck Johnson (musician) – Keyboards, guitar, vocals (2024–present)
• Gregg Bissonette – drums, percussion, trumpet, backing vocals (2008–present)
• Steve Lukather – guitars, bass, vocals (2012–present)
• Warren Ham – saxophone, percussion, keyboards, harmonica, vocals (2014–present) 

As is typical for his shows, the songs include some classic rock numbers, songs from Ringo's post-Beatles career, and a few Beatles hits. The concert video is a fan production with stable video and decent sound. I hope I'm in as good shape at 84 as Ringo is now. Enjoy.

The Last Dangerous Visions Is Finally Published

The Last Dangerous Visions is probably the most famous book that (almost) never was. The third in a series of legendary anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison was supposed to be published in 1974, but the publication date kept slipping, Ellison died in 2018 and the anthology has finally been published thanks to the efforts of Ellison's friend and literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5, among many other things). 

I can still remember the impact that reading Dangerous Visions had on me as a teenager and I'm certainly not alone in that. It's unlikely that The Last Dangerous Visions will have the same impact, but it's still an important book and deserves ntoice. In Rolling Stone, Jason Sheehan writes about the book's history and why it still matters. (archive.ph link)

That original Dangerous Visions was legendary. It featured new writers alongside famous ones (a collaborative model more or less unheard of at the time), took on topics like race and god and war and freaky space sex. It celebrated the New Wave movement in science fiction that would go on to invent the future we’re living in today, and stuck sparklers and road flares in it so no one could possibly claim they didn’t see it coming. The book was kinked to the frequency of chaos and revolution at a time when mainstream writers were afraid to speak truth to power lest it upset their ability to eat, and publishers were afraid to take chances on new voices. And since we find ourselves again in a similar moment, it’s only fitting that this final installment of Harlan’s anthology comes to the table with the same kind of blood on its teeth.

So here, now, in this cursed year, at history’s dumbest inflection point, we have the capstone to Harlan’s 50-year project. The Last Dangerous Visions gives us Stephen Robinett doing a school kid’s “What I Did Over The Summer” essay on the nightmare warehousing of the elderly and Max Brooks’s epistolary document on the asymetric warfare of hunger and panic. There’s stochastic, structural weirdness from John Morressy; a short, sharp wake-up call from all the things we refuse to see by David Brin; Cory Doctorow on forgiveness and robots; and Cecil Castellucci’s tale of a galactic food critic arriving at a terrible conclusion about how one might come to truly appreciate a culture through their food. With TLDV, Joe followed the model originally established by Harlan — new voices right next to the established ones, young outlaws and old masters together. From the universe of stories that Harlan selected for inclusion in TLDV (in all of its various iterations), Joe kept 24, plus a four-page introduction to Ed Bryant’s trippy “War Stories” written by Harlan himself and never before published. He then added seven more stories, newly commissioned for this publication — including “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum which is about isolation, the loss of definition in the absence of societal constructs, and the conditional immortality of being useful to capitalism. It’s the first story that Kayo ever sold, and that, too, is in keeping with Harlan’s model because, 50 years ago, Harlan bought a story about torture and resistance called “Leveled Best” from a then-19-year-old unpublished writer named Steve Herbst that was supposed to be included in the original, non-existent 1974 edition. Joe included that one in TLDV, too.

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2024

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in September. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. 

Movies

• Pink Floyd: Reflections and Echoes. A documentary covering the career of Pink Floyd. The parts about the beginnings of the band and Syd Barret were interesting but the rest of it was rather superficial. It really needed to be at least twice as long. (YouTube)
• The Space Shuttle that Feel to Earth: This is an excellent 3-part documentary about the demise of the Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew of seven in 2003. I've read a couple of books about it and seen other documentaries, but this covered more ground and had more interviews with people involved than anything else about the Columbia that I've seen. (BBC)
• The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal.  A four-part documentary and wonderful tribute about Canada's favourite band. See my post from last Saturday for more about it.
• Wolfs: I expected a little bit more from this. There were good moments but it never quite came together. It gets a solid B with A+ for cinematography that might be difficult to watch if you don't have a good TV as it is entirely shot at night and indoors. (Apple TV+)

TV Shows

• Monsieur Spade: This imagines that Sam Spade ended up living in post-war France, but of course he couldn't really retire. I thought this was going to be a light romp, but it has a dark side. (Acorn TV)
• The Capture (season 2): A British police procedural/political thriller in which deepfake technology plays a key role. You won't want to stop watching. I liked the first season and this was even better.  (Amazon Prime)
• Rings of Power (season 2): Given how much money Amazon is rumoured to have spent on this, I can't believe how bad it is. Watch for the eye candy only. Tolkien must be spinning in his grave. 
• The Moonflower Murders: This is really a sequel to The Magpie Murders. It's light entertainment with a somewhat more complicated plot than usual for this kind of show. (PBS)
• The Steeltown Murders: Another British police procedural, this one about a small team of officers working to solve a 30-year-old cold case in Wales. Very well written and acted. It started out a bit slow, but had us hooked by after the first couple of episodes. (Acorn TV)
• Outer Range (season 2): This show is like a cross between Yellowstone and Lost. At least some of the time travel elements are becoming clearer in the second season. (Amazon Prime)

Featured Links - September 30. 2024

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

Seagulls at the beach

• iPhone, Android Users Warned After 50,000 Message Email Bomb Attack. It doesn't sound like a common problem, but it could be really messy if you get hit by it.
• The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself. "The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away." I am appalled at the way big business is attacking the Internet Archive. 
• Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. 'A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move.'
• "The fall of Kodak wasn't because of digital cameras" says History in the Dark.  "The once-mighty camera giant was actually an early pioneer of digital tech, and if it wasn't for the iPhone things could have been so different."
• The Tragically Hip: The small-town band that united Canada. If you don't know about The Hip, you are missing something special. The new documentary about them on Amazon Prime is wonderful.
• Marvel and DC lose trademark on "superhero". "Marvel and DC have jointly held the trademark for the word "superhero" since 1980, but no longer. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, in response to a petition from Superbabies, Limited, has canceled the trademark. Anyone can now produce works using "superhero" without fear of a lawsuit from either of the entertainment behemoths." Another blow against the evil empire.
• 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web. CompuServe was my introduction to online life, sometime in 1985. 
• Canada’s Leaders Must Reject Overbroad Age Verification Bill. "Canadian lawmakers are considering a bill, S-210, that’s meant to benefit children, but would sacrifice the security, privacy, and free speech of all internet users." It seems that legislative ignorance and stupidity about the internet is not limited to the US and Britain.
• Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability To Walk After Manufacturer Refuses To Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton. "traight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public."

Photo of the Week - September 29, 2024

This week's photo is of Lake Ontario on a blustery afternoon earlier in the week. I took it during a short visit to Toronto's Bluffer's Park with my Pixel 8 Pro. The only adjustment was to straighten the horizon. 

White caps on a windy day

Saturday Sounds - The Tragically Hip - No Dress Rehearsal

This week's musical treat is something a little different than what I usually post here.

The Tragically Hip were, by any measure, the most popular band in Canada. They started out as a bar band in Kingston, Ontario and ended up so popular that roughly a third of the country watched the broadcast of their final concert. When their lead singer, Gord Downie, died of brain cancer a year after their last concert, the nation mourned. 

They were a band that embodied the soul of Canada more than any other group. I was trying to think of a US analog and the closest I came up with was the Drive-by Truckers, who sing about Southerners the way that the Hip sang about Canadians.  As for their popularity in Canada, the closest American equivalent is Bruce Springsteen, but their audience in Canada was deeper and broader. 

The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal is a four-part documentary. I can recommend it unreservedly. If you don't know their music, you are missing out on something very special.  And if you're a Hip gan, you'll enjoy it immensely. 

It's showing on Amazon Prime.  This is the trailer.

We're Toast 53

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. 

Lake Ontario on a blustery day

Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows. "Ocean acidification close to critical threshold, say scientists, posing threat to marine ecosystems and global liveability."

Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including significant drops in IQ scores. "A large and growing body of evidence amassed throughout the pandemic details the many ways that COVID-19 leaves an indelible mark on the brain. But the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent. Now, two new studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine shed further light on the profound toll of COVID-19 on cognitive health." Given how many people have had COVID-19, and some several times, this is not good news and will have substantial long-term social effects.

Antarctica’s 'doomsday' glacier is heading for catastrophic collapse. "As a six-year investigation into the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica wraps up, the scientists involved are pessimistic for the future of this glacier and the consequences for sea level rise."

First Israel’s Exploding Pagers Maimed and Killed. Now Comes the Paranoia. "The explosion of thousands of rigged pagers and walkie-talkies will likely make Hezbollah operatives fear any means of electronic communication. It’s having the same effect on the Lebanese population."

Where the sea wall ends (gift link). "At a time of fast-rising seas, the ocean is eating away at this barrier island and others like it. But humans, who have held their ground here for over a century, are planning new condos." 

I’ve studied geopolitics all my life: climate breakdown is a bigger threat than China and Russia. "‘Risk’ analyses largely ignore the dangers of the climate crisis. Unless we wake up to them, they will soon outweigh all others."

Droughts likely to be even longer in the future due to climate change. "Major climate reports may be underselling the risks of rising emissions." Not good news for the US southwest.

US Militarism Is a Leading Cause of the Climate Catastrophe. "US military interventions are not just wars on people — they’re also wars on the climate."

Cutting Back on Meat in Your Diet

Cutting back on meat, especially red meat, in your diet is both good for your health and the health of the planet. This article has links to many good recipes that you can use to replace meat in your diet with healthier alternatives. (Paywall free gift link). 

The biggest change most people would have to make is eating some more legumes, nuts and whole grains.

That’s according to a team of medical researchers, environmental scientists and policy experts who crafted a loose set of food guidelines they call the “Planetary Health Diet.” If everyone ate this way, scientists say it would shave about 5 percent off global greenhouse emissions and prevent more than 7 million premature deaths per year from illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes.

“If consumers were to adjust their diet … that would have huge implications on carbon emissions and climate change,” said Klaus Hubacek, a Dutch environmental scientist who was not involved in designing the Planetary Health Diet, but published a paper estimating food-related emissions would fall by a sixth if people followed it.

Here’s how you can work these guidelines into your weekly meal plan — and a round up of recipes that can help you get started.

Over the last couple of years Nancy and I have tried to cut back on red meat and now only have it a couple of times a week. And it hasn't damaged our taste buds at all.

Featured Links - September 23, 2024

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

Sunset clouds

•  ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker. "The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023." This should be no surprise to anyone.
• Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship. "Slicing huge cruise ships in half, then welding in an extra segment to lengthen them, is more or less a license to print money for cruise operators – so this 'jumboization' surgery is becoming very common. Let's take a look at how it's done."
• Chinese researchers figure out how to detect stealth aircraft using Starlink satellites. The US military must be very worried about this. 
• The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country. It's an interesting idea but I can't see how it could be implemented in practice. It's a bit reminiscent of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities. 
• 20 Million Cards: A Sports Memorabilia Gold Mine Uncovered in Virginia (gift link). "Three years ago, a businessman bought a collection of roughly 20 million sports cards from its reclusive owner. Now he wants to show it to the world." He has 5 Babe Ruth cards!
• How Google Chrome is declaring war against ad blockers. "Ghostery's CEO and Director of Engineering break down the new Manifest V3 changes, and why they're bad news for anyone who wants to block ads."
• Massive China-state IoT botnet went undetected for four years—until now. "75% of infected devices were located in homes and offices in North America and Europe."
• The Searchers (gift link). "Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab."
• Lawsuit wants Canadian lake to be legally defined as a person. "A court has been asked to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person in a case that may go further than any other in trying to establish the rights of nature in Canada." This is a central idea in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I hope it gains traction. If corporations can be legal people, why not lakes?

Photo of the Week - September 22, 2024

This week's photo is of the full moon earlier in the week, a couple of hours before the start of the partial eclipse. I took this with my Pixel 9 Pro in the professional mode so I could dial back the exposure to compensate for the dark sky, then used the Dynamic filter in Google Photos to bring out the shadows a bit. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a good photo of the eclipse later in the evening.

The September supermoon

 

Saturday Sounds - Bob Dylan and The Band - 1974 Live Recordings Sampler

This week's musical treat is a blast from the past – a sampler of tracks from the box set of Bob Dylan's and The Band's 1974 tour. Recordings from this tour were originally released on the album, Before the Flood, but now all of Dylan's sets from the tour are being released on a giant box set. 

I saw one of the shows at Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens and still remember some of it quite vividly. I was impressed by The Band's musicianship, especially Robbie Robertson's blazing guitar, the impact of the drummers, and how Dylan could hold the attention of the audience. The sampler doesn't include anything from the two Toronto shows, unfortunately, but it's still a treat to hear Dylan from one of his best tours.

Some Short Book Reviews

Here are some short reviews of books I've read recently. 

I've been a fan of Alastair Reynolds ever since his first novel, Revelation Space, came out in 2000. That novel ended up being the first in a series set in a future with slower-than-light-speed interstellar travel, strange and sometimes deadly aliens, and intelligent hyperpigs, all in a vivid setting with gothic and horror elements. Inhibitor Phase takes place near the end of the chronology given in the book's appendix and gives us a closer look at the Pattern Jugglers and their strange water world and the terrifying and implacable Inhibitors. I enjoyed the story but I wouldn't rank it as an essential read. My main gripe was the length; like many novels these days it would have benefitted from a serious trim. 

As a palate cleanser, I read John Scalzi's Starter Villain next. This is typical of most of Scalzi's books with lots of snappy dialog, interesting sfnal elements (the cats and the dolphins were my favourite things in the book), and a fast-paced plot that goes quickly enough that you don't stop to think how implausible it is. Scalzi has described this kind of book as a "popcorn novel" and that's a good description. I enjoyed it a lot and read it in a few days but I won't be going back to reread it. 

The last thing I read by Harry Turtledove quite a few years ago was his supervolcano trilogy in which Yellowstone pops its cork. His latest book, The Wages of Sin, is an alternate history in which AIDS is introduced into Europe in the early 1500s by an unfortunate pair of Portuguese traders and completely changes the course of history. In this world, women are sequestered much the same way they are in Taliban-controlled countries to prevent the spread of "the wasting", the Catholic church is the state religion, and the industrial revolution hasn't happened. The main characters, a doctor's daughter and a lawyer's son in 1850's England, have to navigate the tricky road to marriage without much experience of the other sex. It's not a deep book but the characters are interesting and likeable and the setting both familiar and strange. I hope there will be a sequel.

Next in the queue is Christopher Brown's Tropic of Kansas. 

Featured Links - September 16, 2024

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

The entrance to Frenchman's Bay

Why Does The Fibonacci Sequence Appear So Frequently In Nature? "The rationale behind irrationality." A good explanation of a simple mathematic sequence that has hidden complexities.

650-Foot High Megatsunami in Greenland Sends Seismic Waves Worldwide. "In September 2023, a megatsunami in Greenland triggered seismic waves worldwide, caused by a landslide in Dickson Fjord. The event generated two seismic signals: a high-energy signal from the landslide and a long-lasting VLP signal from a seiche in the fjord. The findings offer new insights into the risks posed by climate change and landslides in Greenland."

Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives. "Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services sounds the alarm: Aging tracks created through an all-digital workflow aren't guaranteed to play back." This has been a known issue with recording tape for many years and now it's happening with hard drives and optical media. We need a long-term (hundreds of years or more) storage media for digital data.  

When bats were wiped out, more human babies died, a study found. Here's why. "Researchers find infant deaths increased after farmers used more pesticides to compensate for rise of pests." Unintended consequences are killing children.

AI can now replicate the human brain to solve the 'cocktail party problem' – and it has led to criminal convictions. "The human brain can single out noises in a busy room, but technology can't, which makes using recordings as proof tricky."

Brick and Roses: How Community-Led Development Shapes Design. "Across North America and the U.K., community land trusts, co-ops and co-housing groups are nourishing bold, aspirational design paradigms — and a new generation of urban advocacy." High-density developments don't have to be ugly and soulless.

An AI May Have Just Invented "Alternative" Physics. "An AI shown videos of physical phenomena and instructed to identify the variables involved produced answers different from our own." This is really interesting and brings to mind a number of science fiction stories with exactly that idea. 

The 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow: Some Thoughts. A report on the Glasgow Worldcon by Abigail Nussbaun. Wish I could have been there. 

Photo of the Week - September 15, 2024

This week's photo is of an old cottage/house in our neighbourhood that looks like it is slated for demolition to be replaced by another soulless McMansion. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro and cropped and adjusted the contrast and colour in Google Photos. 

Another one for the history books

Saturday Sounds - Memphis '69: The 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival

Although for many, the musical highlight of 1969 was the Woodstock Peace and Music Featival, there were other notable musical events that year. This week's musical treat is a documentary about the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival. It was a much, much smaller event than Woodstock, but there was a lot of good country, folk, and blues played over the weekend.

This is the full playlist from the documentary:

03:14 Rufus Thomas with The Bar-Kays
08:01 Bukka White
09:58 Nathan Beauregard
12:01 Sleepy John Estes & Yank Rachell
14:00 Jo Ann Kelly & "Backwards" Sam Firk
17:20 Son Thomas
20:20 Sleepy John Estes & Yank Rachell
22:07 Lum Guffin
23:21 Rev. Robert Wilkins & Family
26:09 John Fahey
28:56 Sid Selvidge with Moloch
30:53 John D. Loudermilk
35:43 Furry Lewis
42:35 Bukka White
43:53 Piano Red
47:05 Jefferson Street Jug Band with John Fahey and Robert Palmer
50:26 Insect Trust
52:25 Moloch
56:22 Johnny Winter
01:02:40 The Salem Harmonizers
01:05:34 Mississippi Fred McDowell

Highlights for me were Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Johnny Winter, and Mississippi Fred McDowell. Enjoy. 

The FAA Is STILL Hobbling SpaceX

Back in March, I posted about how the FAA was holding back SpaceX's revolutionary Starship program. Now, after a reasonably successful test flight in June, SpaceX has issued a statement outlining its disagreements with the way that the FAA is holding up a license for the next launch. 

If you don't want to read the whole thing, Ars Technica has a good article (with lots of links) summarizing the current situation. 

Tuesday's update from SpaceX was the most aggressive statement the company has released about the FAA's slow processing of launch license applications, and it touched on a deeper complaint than the FAA's lack of resources for oversight of commercial space activities. The company suggested the hold-up for launching Starship's next test flight isn't SpaceX's technical readiness or even that an understaffed FAA is overwhelmed with regulating a fast-growing commercial launch industry.

Instead, SpaceX wrote in a statement to the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics that licensing delays are caused by bureaucratic sluggishness, a lack of transparency, poor methodologies, and regulatory inefficiency and duplication. As an example, SpaceX cited roadblocks with its ongoing application for a launch license for the fifth Starship test flight.

"This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis," SpaceX said. "The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing."

I'm not a fan of Elon Musk these days (I will never forgive him for what he's done to Twitter and his behaviour there has been abhorrent), but I do think SpaceX is right to complain here. 

 

About That Cebate

I did not watch the presidential candidate's debate last night; I have an extremely low tolerance for watching anything that Trump says. I figured I'd get the highlights today and I was right. From what I've seen and read, it looks like Harris definitely got the better of Trump. It remains to be seen if that makes any difference. 

The best comments on the debate that I've seen are from SF author John Scalzi. from a post on his blog. Here's some of it.

It’s unlikely Trump will do another debate, because Trump doesn’t like being a loser, and he lost this debate even more comprehensively than he lost the 2020 election. From here he’ll retreat into the safe little world of right-wing media, where even his most unhinged pronouncements are met with respectful nodding and agreement. He’ll double down on his hate and his ranting and his inability to censor even the most embarrassing of thoughts. And if, after all of that, he’s still rewarded with a second term, then all his resentment and seething inadequacy will find a focus on anyone and everyone who ever made him feel a fool, and this time, he won’t bother having anyone around him who will tell him no.

A Tribute to the Original Star Trek

It's been 58 years since the first episode of Star Trek was broadcast. I still remember going over to my friend Chris Coggon's house to watch it because his family had a colour TV and being completely entranced by the show. 

On File 770, Chris Barkley has listed his favourite 15 episodes from the three seasons of the original series and describes how they influenced his life. It's a lovely tribute to one of the great and most influential TV shows.

Featured Links - September 9, 2024

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

Family home - for a family of foxes

• A new era in hurricane tracking begins. "Inside the dangerous mission that could revolutionize how we hunt nature’s most terrifying storms."
• Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal. "We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). These are very rare events that depend on special conditions and alignments, where these clouds might become much brighter for seconds to minutes. The original source or the cloud might not be detectable, depending on the sensitivity of the telescope." Another LGM contact bites the dust. 
• NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format. An important piece of computing history has been preserved.
• Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free. "What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the extremely useful Open Library from the Internet Archive."
• After seeing Wi-Fi network named “STINKY,” Navy found hidden Starlink dish on US warship. "It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions."
• A Word, Please: Coffee-shop prompt stirs ChatGPT to brew up bland copy. "A short article about a new coffee place prompted grammar expert June Casagrande to check her work against AI. The latter created tepid copy that included weak sentences and left out relevant details."
• Russia Bought the Right. "The cost was around $10 million so far, but this might just be the first of many bombshells." 
• Meet the right-wing Canadian influencers accused of collaborating with an alleged Russian propaganda scheme. "Tenet Media founder Lauren Chen allegedly took funds from pro-Moscow outlet." The Canadian connection to the previous story. 
• Are Some Ultraprocessed Foods Worse Than Others? (gift link) "A new study may offer the biggest clues yet."
• A window into the body: New technique makes skin invisible. "Researchers have developed a new way to see organs within a body by rendering overlying tissues transparent to visible light. The counterintuitive process—a topical application of food-safe dye—was reversible in tests with animal subjects, and may ultimately apply to a wide range of medical diagnostics, from locating injuries to monitoring digestive disorders to identifying cancers."
• Tonga eruption that poured 150 metric tons of water vapor into the stratosphere affected the atmosphere for years. "A new study builds on previous research into the underwater volcano's effects on the climate."

Photo of the Week - September 8, 2024

This week's photo is of a rather decrepit looking shed that is on a property that was scheduled to be redeveloped. I now see that the signs announcing the redevelopment are gone so perhaps it has a little more life left, though given the condition of the building, perhaps not a lot. 

I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro and cropped and straightened the original image. 

A descript shed

Saturday Sounds - Monteverdi VESPERS of 1610 | The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge

This week's musical treat is something a little different: a choral performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 by the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge. One of my Facebook friends posted a link to this and I thought I'd give it a listen. I'm glad I did. 

Having been raised a Catholic, I was exposed to religious classical music at an early age and I still enjoy it. This is quite a lovely performance of a piece that I don't recall having heard before, at least not in its entirety.  

From Planet Hugill, a site I must look at in more depth. 

In April this year, Graham Ross directed the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge in a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 at Smith Square Hall (formerly St John's Smith Square). The performance featured the English Cornett & Sackbutt Ensemble, plus Margaret Faultless, violin, Jonathan Manson, bass violin, William Hunt, violone, Elizabeth Kenny, theorbo and Silas Wollston, organ, alongside instrumentalists from Cambridge University. Nicholas Mulroy did the heavy lifting as soloist alongside other soloists from the choir.

The result was filmed, beautifully, by Andrew Staples for Studio 2359, with recorded sound by John Rutter. The film has now been released and is available the Choir of Clare College's YouTube channel. The results are nothing less than astonishing and extremely engaging. Despite using a college choir, this is a relatively intimate performance and I have great admiration for the way a series of soloists step out from the choir and perform all those solos with terrific aplomb. 

 

Going Green at Algoma Steel

Steel plants are dirty places. I was quite aware of that when I was growing up in the Sault. Even living a few miles away from "the plant", our snow would occasionally get darkened by dust blowing off the coal piles at Algoma Steel. And you could see (abd sometimes smell) the smoke and steam from the blast furnaces that were the plant's glowing heart.

Now most of those blast furnaces are shuttered or torn down and soon they will all be gone, replaced by mammoth electric arc furnaces that will melt scrap metal and iron to make steel, drastically reducing the pollution, and especially carbon dioxide, coming from the plant. 

The Globe and Mail looks at Algoma Steel's new venture and what it will mean to help meet Canada's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

When fully operational, Algoma’s project is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by three million tonnes annually, or 70 per cent. That equates to more than a tenth of Canada’s 2030 goal under the Paris Agreement. It will also eliminate smokestack and fugitive emissions, the company says. The first furnace is expected to begin startup operations at the end of this year.

It's a laudable goal but it's going to be hard on the already shaky economy of the Sault.

One of the of the tough aspects of the changeover for the community is the plant will require fewer workers, because of the efficiency of the technology. It currently employs about 3,000 people, and once it makes the transition, that number will fall to 1,600 to 1,700, Mr. Garcia says.

When I worked there as a summer student during my university days, Algoma Steel employed more than 4,000 people, and that was down quite a bit from its peak. The transition to "green steel" is going to be a hard one for the Sault, but it is necessary, and just one of the many that Canada's resource-driven economy has to make in the future. 

Review: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, Penguin Random House, 2024, ISBN 9780593476093 (ebook)

I'm a child of the Cold War. I grew up in the shadow of a SAC bomber base about 15 miles south of us across the border in Michigan and B-52 bombers regularly flew over my uncle's cottage on their landing approach to Kincheloe. There was an air raid siren on the hill overlooking the high school near our home and it was tested regularly. Of course, I remember the uncertainty and fear of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

I've understood the power of nuclear weapon ever since studying physics in university and reading books like The Effects of Nuclear Weapons and Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb.. But in the past 50 years, the fear of nuclear war has faded into the background, with periodic flareups like the Ukraine war and sabre rattling by North Korea. 

But reading Nuclear War made me seriously afraid. It's clear that we are living in a world where nuclear conflict could be started and escalate into an all-out war in 90 minutes or less. The triggering event could be a deliberate attack, as postulated in the scenario laid out in the book, but it could also be something unintentional. Given the hair-trigger launch on warning policies of the major powers (something I wasn't aware of before reading this book), a full scale conflict would be almost inevitable.

Nuclear War is a fast paced and compulsively readable descent into hell. It's thoroughly researched, with more than 200 pages of notes and references, which helps to make it scarier than the best horror movie. Recommended, but with a very strong trigger warning.

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2024

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in August. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. 

Movies

• The American Society of Magical Negroes: I hadn't heard of this one until my daughter mentioned it. It's a combination of rom com, satire, and pointed social commentary. Worth watching if you like any of those tropes. (Amazon Prime).
• Jackpot: The premise is dystopian and almost believable but the movie plays it for laughs. Very much light entertainment. The best part was the blooper/gag reel which was integrated into the credits. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• House of the Dragon (season 2): I enjoyed this season, somewhat to my surprise. (I didn't like the first season though it did get better towards the end.) However, the finale was ... disappointing. (Crave)
• Presumed Innocent: I've not read the Scott Turrow movie this was based on nor am I likely to after the twisty ending of the show was revealed. We enjoyed it and it kept us guessing but it's still not as good as the better British shows. (Apple TV+)
• Antiques Road Trip (season 3): Our comfort/relaxation watching. We'll probably get to season 15 sometime in 2026. (When we started watching the show, we worked our way backwards from the current season 26). (PBS)
• Black Snow:  A detective from Brisbane travels to a small farming town to solve a 25-year-old cold case. This is one of the best shows we've seen in a while. I liked the way it dealt with issues surrounding Australia's treatment of indigenous and Islander peoples. I'm glad to see there will be a second season. (Acorn TV)
• My Lady Jane: A light alternate-history fantasy with shape shifters. I enjoyed it, though the voice-over narration is overdone. Too bad there won't be a second season. (Amazon Prime)
• Signora Volpe (season 2): A British spy retires in Italy but can't stay out of other people's business. A bit darker in tone than season 1. (Acorn TV)
• Collision: A British police procedural about an investigation into a freeway accident that affects many lives. After watching a couple of episodes, we realized that we may have watched this before (it came out in 2009) but we didn't remember enough to spoil it, so we kept watching and enjoyed it. (Acorn TV). 
• Hidden Assets (season 2): We watched the first season of this and liked it and the second season is just as good. (Acorn TV)

Featured Links - Septermber 3, 2027

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

Summer flowers beginning to fade

• Minimal Influenza Virus Transmission from Touching Contaminated Face Masks: a Laboratory Study. "Somewhat reassuringly, today we've a study in Nature that suggests that concerns over viral transfer from touching a contaminated face mask may be overblown." If I could have gotten COVID by touching my mask, I'd have had it long ago. 
• Financialisation: a 21st century commercial determinant of health equity. " The aim of this Viewpoint is to expand the understanding of the commercial determinants of health to explicitly include the financial system and present key plausible pathways via which the financialisation of advanced economies influences public health and planetary health equity. The global public health community must pay close attention to these key commercial determinants of health. It is now crucial to reduce the power of financial actors and hold financial actors accountable."
• R.I.P. Journalist, Editor and Counterculture Enthusiast, Steve Silberman. I never met Steve Silberman but I have been reading him for years and have corresponded with him a bit here Mastodon. I always enjoyed reading what he had to say. I will miss seeing him his posts and I am sure  I won't be the only one.
• 2024 Dragon Awards Winners. These were awarded at DragonCon in Atlanta over the Labour Day Weekend. Starter Villain by John Scalzi won the Best Science Fiction Novel Award and is the next book on my TBR list.
• MAGA attacks on Kamala Harris' stepdaughter threaten to backfire on Donald Trump. "Ella Emhoff has triggered Trump's bitter bro fanbase — but an embrace of the incel vote could come back to hurt him. "
• 'Everything we found shattered our expectations': Archaeologists discover 1st astronomical observatory from ancient Egypt. "This first ancient Egyptian observatory discovered in modern times showcases advanced knowledge of astronomy and its profound link to the Egyptians' spiritual and ritualistic practices."
• String Theorists Accidentally Find a New Formula for Pi (archive.ph link). "Two physicists have come across infinitely many novel equations for pi while trying to develop a unifying theory of the fundamental forces."
• Is digital technology really swaying voters and undermining democracy? (archive.ph link) "Many fear that voters are being manipulated by political campaigns that use Facebook ads, TikTok and YouTube videos, but research reveals a more surprising story."