Posts Tagged ‘inventions’
Feeling a Little Coronavirusty — Links
* This Twitter thread on the Imperial College modeling calling for 18 months or more of suppressive action was some of the most bracing reading on coronavirus I’ve seen yet. (This Buzzfeed article has a summary if that’s more your speed.) We are living through a nightmare. We’re not going back to normal. (UDPATE: Here’s a critique of the Imperial College study that got a lot of people spooked, including me, arguing that a few weeks of lockdown plus contact tracing and monitoring *can* prevent reemergence of the outbreak.)
* How long will social distancing for coronavirus have to last? Deciphering the pandemic: a guide to understanding the coronavirus numbers. How the US stacks up to other countries in confirmed coronavirus cases. The Single Most Important Lesson From the 1918 Influenza.
* 18% have lost jobs or hours in the last month. You Should Be Absolutely Terrified About the Economy. A Frantic Few Days for Restaurants Is Only the Beginning. Baseball Shutdown Sends Minor Leaguers Into Uncertain Future. The World of Books Braces for a Newly Ominous Future. Amazon’s Supply Chain Is Breaking and Small Businesses Are Screwed. There’s no one to pick the fruit. As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread. It Has All Gone to Hell. Coronavirus is an indictment of our way of life. America is a sham. Big Pharma is ready.
* To stop a coronavirus quarantine recession, economists say send everyone cash—now. Romney! Dem Senators! Bernie Sanders Proposal for $2 Trillion Coronavirus Emergency Plan Includes $2,000 Direct Monthly Payments to Every American. He’ll just have to beat the Democrats to do it.
* First confirmed patient in R.I. talks about surviving coronavirus. A Frontline Physician Speaks Out on the Coronavirus.
* Evers orders bars, restaurants closed; schools closed indefinitely. Vegas shuts down. Then: Spring breakers pack Florida beach despite coronavirus pandemic. Now: $6 flights to Fort Lauderdale.
* New York Is Now the Epicenter of the Coronavirus Crisis in the U.S. New York Will Be The Next Italy, But Doesn’t Have to Be.
* They Went Off the Grid. They Came Back to the Coronavirus.
* COVID-19 and Collective Childcare.
* Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918.’ How Trump snapped out of coronavirus delusion mode. The Mar-a-Lago hot zone. Priorities. With masks at the ready, ICE agents make arrests on first day of California coronavirus lockdown.
* Some good news: Ventilator Maker: We Can Ramp Up Production Five-Fold. Coronavirus vaccine test opens with 1st doses. New cases and deaths in Italy may have reached their plateau.
* Isis issues coronavirus travel advice: terrorists should avoid Europe.
* Student advocates say coronavirus-related directives to move off campus threaten to reinforce existing inequalities and put disproportionate burdens on low-income and international students, among others. Why not simply make your online courses as human as possible? Coronavirus and the ruptured narrative of campus life.
* Social media giants warn of AI moderation errors as coronavirus empties offices. Coronavirus Is Changing Podcasting, Fast.
* Now is the time to overreact.
* …a properly dialectical critique does not criticise the reality of capitalism for failing to live up to its ideals; it criticises the ideals of capitalism for their, more or less hidden, reflection of that reality. What a dialectical critique shows is that better things aren’t possible, if we index possibilities to what appears possible according to the world as it is. But what it also shows is that better things are not only necessary, but real: a better world does not exist in the thwarted ideals of the present, but in the real processes that might abolish that present.
* Planet Plastic: How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. The Mad Men of Climate Denial. Coronavirus Lockdown May Save More Lives By Preventing Pollution Than By Preventing Infection. Welcome to the LEGOpocene.
* Chindogu are inventions that defy concise explanation. They aren’t useful. But they aren’t completely useless either. Their creator, Kenji Kawakami, describes them as “un-useless.” The Ten Tenets of Chindogu.
* The Rise of Impossibly Cute and Wholesome Games.
* Joe Biden has now essentially won the Democratic nomination. Ugh.
* Wrestlemania in a time of coronavirus.
* And Friday can’t get here fast enough. Save us, Nintendo!
Christmas Leftovers Links
* Listen, when Chris Ware tells you to buy a book, you buy it.
* For a small group of comedy writers, however, their yearly viewing couldn’t be further from Bedford Falls. Instead, they gather ’round a never-aired 1996 Comedy Central special: Escape From It’s A Wonderful Life.
* Caganer — the strangest, most scatological part of Catalan nativity scenes — explained.
* Jacobin remembers the Christmas truce, one hundred years old yesterday.
* Let 2015 be Year One of the post-carbon future. 4 Legal Battles This Year That Were All About Climate Change. Sewage in the streets of Miami. Could flooding finally wake Americans up to the climate crisis? Irreversible But Not Unstoppable: The Ghost Of Climate Change Yet To Come.
* The crazy history of Star Wars.
* The Class Struggle in the North Pole.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: A Milwaukee doctor says he has the answer to concussions.
* And, sadly: Milwaukee’s poet laureate passes away.
* Among recent graduates ages 22 to 27, the jobless rate for blacks last year was 12.4 percent versus 4.9 percent for whites, said John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
* I missed this one in August: Tobias Wolff on the heart of whiteness.
* Subway sandwiches and the halo effect.
* 90-Year-Old Vet Arrested For Feeding Homeless Will Hand Out Christmas Eve Dinner.
* I can’t believe they made a movie out of Bill, The Galactic Hero. I can’t wait to see it.
* A look inside 8chan, the worst place on the Internet: “The Mods Are Always Asleep.”
* There’s magical thinking, and then there’s “Believing in Santa Claus could help your kids develop a cure for cancer.”
* Behold, the baby in the sun from Teletubbies.
* This was a nice, short, readable explanation of how all the statistical analysis in The Bell Curve was bullshit.
* 10 Story Decisions Scifi And Fantasy Writers Ended Up Regretting. Tough list to get down to just ten!
* In the 1950s, Egypt and Britain played an old version of tit-for-tat. Egypt took the Suez Canal. The British decided to pay them back by stealing the river Nile itself. Yes, the whole Nile.
* A very J.R.R. Tolkien Christmas.
* Parents Are Moving To The Same Towns Where Their Kids Go To College. When my kids go to college, I’m enrolling in their freshman classes. I don’t want to miss a moment.
* New York City Sends $30 Million a Year to School With History of Giving Kids Electric Shocks.
* Pope Francis: ‘One in 50’ Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals is a paedophile.
* Pious Anxiety: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal.
* On Facebook and Algorithmic Cruelty.
* The Marvel Movie Universe, In Completely Chronological Order.
* The melancholy of all things done” is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars. Buzz Aldrin and the dark side of the Moon.
* Of course you had me at “There’s a serious proposal to send astronauts to a floating cloud city in Venus’s atmosphere before heading to Mars.”
* A public service announcement: Black Mirror: White Christmas was fantastic. Find a way to watch it!
* And if you squint just right it looks like the world isn’t ending. Happy Holidays indeed!
Sunday Reading, Accept No Imitations
* Timeline of Science Fiction Ideas, Technology and Inventions (sorted by Publication Date).
* Ill-considered, disastrous dam project “has given biologists the opportunity to measure the speed of mammal extinctions.” Well, that’s certainly looking at the glass half-full.
* Decadence watch: Emory University Closes its Visual Arts Department.
* Decadence watch, part two: “The Price Is Right” Airs All-Plinko Episode.
* ‘We Felt Like We Were Above the Law’: How the NCAA Endangers Women.
* Don’t be that dude: Handy tips for the male academic.
* Where Is The Place Of Anger In The University?
Everyday I walk past UC Berkeley’s newly renovated football stadium on my way to drop off my daughter at the Clark Kerr facility for toddlers, and everyday – after picking her up from school – I wait at a bus stop directly across from the same stadium. The stadium, which has put the university 445 million dollars in debt, is just down the street from my daughter’s UC preschool, which is housed in a double-wide trailer and sits on a parking lot in the northwest corner of Clark Kerr Campus. Its interior walls have been removed, and linoleum and carpet patchwork that are no longer contiguous with the layout of the room still show marks of these former walls – in some places adhesive still clings to the floor, marking where one of these walls once stood. This is the facility that we were not granted a tour of – a facility that houses only subsidized children. We do not know where the unsubsidized children receive their care.
* From the Daily Californian: School first, sports second.
* Austerity measures pushes Greek universities to point of collapse.
* America drunk-dials Iran, Iran picks up.
* LOVEINT: How NSA Spies Abused Their Powers to Snoop on Girlfriends, Lovers, and First Dates.
* The update of the damned: Apple’s iOS 7 Causing Motion Sickness And Even Vomiting In Users. This in a device (the iPad) that was originally marketed in part as an accessibility breakthrough.
* The fundamental law of media graph construction.
* A brief history of the Muppets’ very brief stint on Saturday Night Live.
* And a court orders same-sex marriage in my beloved home state of New Jersey. Meet me in a land of hope and dreams.
Sorry, Been Traveling, Here Are Some Links
* Arrested Development Season 4 Timeline. We’re still working our way through, but I’m significantly more bullish on the season than most reviewers, to the point where I feel as though I literally don’t know what some of these people are talking about. I’m talking about this on Twitter now; maybe a post of some sort later. Subtle jokes of season 4. And more.
* Dan Harmon asked to return to Community. If it happens, I think I’d like for him to just use a Remedial Chaos Theory gag to undo the entirety of the fourth season. Nice and easy.
* A new study from Emory Sports Marketing Analytics concludes that Marquette University has the 9th best fan base in the country among collegiate basketball programs.
* An internal faculty report generated by professors in the College of Computing says there were “significant internal disagreements,” despite Georgia Tech’s portrayal of the deal as heavily supported by faculty.
* “You are all going to die”: Joss Whedon’s 2013 Wesleyan Commencement Speech.
* Eesha Khare, 18-Year-Old, Invents Device That Charges Cell Phone Battery In Under 30 Seconds.
* It is the one moment of genuine interest in Frank Marshall’s hilarious 1995 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s laughable 1980 novel. Marshall’s decision to replace Crichton’s white mercenary with a black character is the only time either book or film acknowledges the problem of working in a genre — the colonial adventure narrative — fundamentally constituted around imperialist-racist ideology. Admittedly, Marshall does nothing more, but even this very little sets his film apart from such epic racefails as the Indiana Jonesfilms and Peter Jackson’s inept attempt to not make a racist King Kong. But can such pulp fictions be redeemed? Or when revived are they destined merely to be, in Lavie Tidhar’s infamous description of steampunk, “fascism for nice people”? Mark Bould reviews Black Pulp.
* During the decade 2000-10 in the USA, for the first time the number of poor people in major metropolitan suburbs surpassed the number in cities. Between 2000 and 2011, the poor population in suburbs grew by 64% — more than twice the rate of growth in cities (29%). By 2011, almost 16.4 million residents in suburbia lived below the poverty line, outstripping the poor population in cities by almost 3 million people. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.
And Two More
* A brief history of the left.
* A brief history of MOOSE, “Man Out of Space Easiest,” a personal re-entry device. You know, for astronauts…
Saturday! 2
* You had me at “worst sci-fi/fantasy covers.”
* You might not like him when he’s angry: Obama flexes his muscles with the first recess appointments of his term. And Kevin Drum points out a nice detail:
This is pretty fascinating. Years ago, after Republicans filibustered a Carter nominee to the NLRB, the two parties made a deal: the board would have three appointees from the president’s party and two from the other party. So after he took office Obama nominated two Democrats and one Republican to fill the NLRB’s three vacant seats and got support from a couple of Republicans on the HELP committee for the entire slate. But when it got to the Senate floor John McCain put a hold on Becker, and his nomination — along with the others — died.
Fast forward today and Obama finally decides to fill the board using recess appointments. But what does he do? He only appoints the two Democrats. This is not what you do if you’re trying to make nice. It’s what you do if you’re playing hardball and you want to send a pointed message to the GOP caucus. You won’t act on my nominees? Fine. I’ll appoint my guys and then leave it up to you to round up 50 votes in the Senate for yours. Have fun.
* No wonder the intensity gap between Republicans and Democrats is starting to close.
* Rachel Maddow takes out full page ad to debunk Scott Brown’s fantasies break my heart.
* Glenn Beck tearing Fox News apart?
* “I want to know what the Vatican knew and when they knew it,” said William McMurry, who is representing alleged abuse victims in the Kentucky case. “Whether it’s letters from bishops or conversations with bishops. I want to know what [the Vatican’s doctrinal office] knew and what they instructed U.S. bishops to do. We’re trying to get what’s never been uncovered before — documents only the Vatican has. That’s the linchpin of liability.” Taibbi had an epic rant on this subject earlier today.
* What if the United States had the population density of Brooklyn, NY? For one, we’d all fit inside New Hampshire.
* Presenting the human hair additive in your food.
* And 10 great medical inventions. Below: the birthing centrifuge.
Friday Night!
* A Canadian SF writer has come down with a tough case of good old-fashioned American justice. Stay safe, Peter.
* Is Sci-Fi Wire really right about this? How can a Romero zombie movie not get a distribution deal?
* Tim Fernholz fact-checks the Matt Taibbi piece I linked earlier and finds it somewhat wanting.
* “I found the Nobel speech disappointing … To use the Nobel dais to justify the use of military force is unseemly. The president’s characterization of the historic role of US military power was distorted, and his interpretation of just war theory was incomplete.”
* Joe Conason with some more details on those propagandized ACORN tapes.
* ‘What Was Popular Mechanics Thinking?’ Via MeFi.
Gerry Canavan 