Entries from December 2021 ↓

• Ikaria—The Island of Mysterious Longevity – NEO.LIFE
  Why do the inhabitants of this tiny Greek island live so long? It may be something in the rocks.
• Opinion | Do We Have the Supreme Court We Deserve?
  It has become a willing participant in a war for the soul of the country.
• The Secret to Love Is Just Kindness – The Atlantic
• A New Ban on Surprise Medical Bills Starts This Week
  If you have a medical emergency, you will no longer need to worry about a large bill from a doctor you did not choose.
• A Neuroscientist Prepares for Death — The Atlantic
  Lessons my terminal cancer have taught me about the mind
• The Ten Most Significant Science Stories of 2021 | Science | Smithsonian Magazine
• How children are spoofing Covid-19 tests with soft drinks – BBC Future
• NFT Project Bored Ape Yacht Club Spawns ‘Left-Facing’ Copycats
  The parody projects expose the absurdity of NFT communities and intellectual property concerns surrounding digital images.
• Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning – The Marginalian
  On Oliver Burkeman’s book
• In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives – The Marginalian

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• Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning – The Marginalian
• A fossil site reveals an ancient sinkhole and its enormous occupant | Ars Technica
  A road project in Tennessee revealed an enigmatic fossil of an enormous mastodon
• Using Datasette for an ELT Personal Twitter Data Warehouse – DEV Community
  Twitter publishes some analytics for you, and I check them about once a month, but they are extremely limited when it comes to the important things, like exploring your follower graph.

  This is where Datasette comes in. Datasette is a great EDA (exploratory data analysis) tool for any arbitrary SQLite dataset. You can use it to build your own Twitter analytics!

  Today, at Simon Willison’s prompting, I decided to try to replicate his 2018 work in analyzing his own Twitter network.

• LastPass users warned their master passwords are compromised
• A drawing sold for $30 at a Concord estate sale. It is believed to be an original Dürer worth $50 million – The Boston Globe
• Vaccinated by Jericho Brown – Poems | Academy of American Poets

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• What the creators of Contagion, World War Z, and Palm Springs think now – Vox
• (400) https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1475960735213645826
  RT @ezraklein: The implied population-level infection numbers here are just wild. Avoiding this thing will be very, very hard, in a way I’m not sure our public conversation has caught up to.

  Strong case for being very, very cautious if you have immunocompromised people in your life.

• Privacy Policy | Edison Software
• Paul McCartney: the musical genius with staying power — The Times and The Sunday Times
• Paul McCartney: the musical genius with staying power — The Times and The Sunday Times
  ‘Why would Paul McCartney be one of the people of the year in 2021?” you might ask. Which is a silly question, really. Paul McCartney is one of the people of the year every year simply by still being alive. In the future, when he’s gone – like Prince, David Bowie, Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury and George Michael – we will really, really miss him. We’ll mourn living in a world where he doesn’t send us new songs; doesn’t pop up on TV, telling amusing anecdotes; doesn’t headline festivals where we

  Caitlin Moran

• Thomas Lovejoy, Wide-Ranging Ecologist and Amazon Rescuer, Dies at 80
  His ambitious, long-running project in Brazil explored the impact of deforestation on animals and plants — and how to deal with it.
• 10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic – STAT
  RT @dylanbgeorge: Excellent, if slightly depressing read from the incomparable ⁦@HelenBranswell⁩ …

  10 lessons I’ve learned from the Covid–19 pandemic – STAT

• The Political Life of Dr. Oz
• A Lavish Tax Dodge for the Ultrawealthy Is Easily Multiplied
  Once aimed at small businesses, a 1990s-era tax break has become a popular way for Silicon Valley founders and investors to avoid taxes on their investment profits.
• The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive
  In the end, we’re all bored apes
• Dear Tiff: How do I rebuild my social life after a break up?
• is it a resolution or is it capitalism
  This is the Sunday edition of Culture Study — the newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen, which you can read about here. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing. Americans love New Year’s resolutions because we are perpetual strivers obsessed with self-improvement. The tradition of a New Year’s celebration, paired with the desire to clear one’s debts, dates back to both the Babylonians and, later, the Romans, who pegged it to the two-faced god Janus (god of dualities and transitions!) All of that makes sense, in a Wikipedia history sort of way, but I think the contemporary understanding of resolutions has a lot more to do with how the holiday, like all American holidays, has been overloaded with significance intended to simultaneously make us feel like we’re failing personally
• The New York Times: Here's What the CDC Got Wrong With its New Covid-19 Guidelines
• When You Can’t Change the World, Change Your Feelings

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• COVID Can Cause Strange Eye and Ear Symptoms – Scientific American
• Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Women Warriors | Women's History Matters
  One especially fearless warrior was Kaúxuma Núpika, a Kootenai woman who was also a cultural intermediary and prophet. In 1808, young Kaúxuma Núpika married a Frenchman working for the explorer David Thompson. She was so rowdy that Thompson exiled her from his camp. She divorced her husband, claimed to have been changed into a man, and then took a succession of wives.

  Dressing as a man, Kaúxuma Núpika traveled from tribe to tribe throughout the Northwest, predicting epidemics, the invasion by Europeans, and the destruction of tribal villages by a great force that would “bury them under the ground.”

• (400) https://twitter.com/tithenai/status/1071135301873987584
  RT @tithenai: I am just going to retweet this every year until it happens
• 'Early Morning Riser' And 'Secrets of Happiness' Review: Love And Family Collide : NPR
• NLRB Invites Briefs Regarding Independent Contractor Standard | National Labor Relations Board
  RT @greenhousenyt: Important > Looks like Biden’s National Labor Relations Board may finally be moving toward declaring that Uber & Lyft drivers & DoorDash delivery workers are not independent contractors who can’t unionize, but are instead employees with a right to unionize
• Celebrate Your Unique Flaws – by Heather Havrilesky
  Stop trying to kill half of your moods and most of your personality.
• Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking | The New Yorker
  You didn’t have to agree with her, but you had to submit to her sentences.
  By Zadie Smith
• Project N95 – The National Clearinghouse for personal protective equipment and COVID-19 tests.
• Black and Hispanic students in Philly suburbs are disciplined more harshly than white peers, underrepresented in AP classes, report finds
  The report by Public Citizens for Children and Youth lays out sweeping achievement gaps in Philadelphia’s increasingly diverse collar counties.
• Junkyard Dragon: The Rolling Stones at SoFi Stadium
• 1 Green Planet
  "Free & Easy E-Recycling for Everyone"
  Recycle electronics
• Le Pichet
  Milk Street rec
• Frankie & Jo's | A Plant-Based Ice Cream Shop

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• (400) https://twitter.com/LeahabShaffer/status/1473823457943109638
  RT @LeahabShaffer: ICYMI, I wrote about a vaccine that targets opioids. That’s right, we can make antibodies to rip apart opioid molecules before they reach the brain. This would work as a safety net in case of relapse. And vaccines against painkillers are just the start.
• Tech That Will Change Your Life in 2022 — The Wall Street Journal
  Our tech columnists look ahead to electric cars that don’t break the bank, earbuds that gauge your health, a fix for social media’s harms, package deliveries from above and more
• EV sales have doubled. Is a 'tidal wave' coming?
  The electric vehicle market in the United States is booming. As of last month, EV sales were up 94 percent compared to last year — a near doubling of consumer demand.
• E.O. Wilson, a Pioneer of Evolutionary Biology, Dies at 92
  A Harvard professor for 46 years, he was an expert on insects and explored how natural selection and other forces could influence animal behavior. He then applied his research to humans.
• What January 6 Insurrectionists Wanted — and What They Lost
• The Best Movies of 2021 in an Odd Year for Film – The Atlantic
• Inner Workings: Using vaccines to harness the immune system and fight drugs of abuse | PNAS
• 'Letterkenny' Review: Wonderfully Weird Canadian Comedy Comes to Hulu – Rolling Stone
• COVID-19 virus can spread to organs, including brain; live there for months | Fortune
• A Facebook Christmas Love Story (Published 2009)
  How Facebook cured my holiday loneliness.
  Walter Kirn
• Race, Policing, and the Limits of Social Science – Boston Review
• The Whole Country is the Reichstag – Nonsite.org
• Rosa Lyster · Diary: Along the Water · LRB 6 May 2021
• Verso
  Breaking Things at Work
  The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job
  by Gavin Mueller
• A Move for 'Algorithmic Reparation' Calls for Racial Justice in AI | WIRED
• Speeding up geodata processing – DEV Community
  I’ve been using the excellent geopandas for working with largish geodata sets and CSV files.

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• the blockchain
• Non-Fungible Olive Gardens
• The New Get-Rich-Faster Job in Silicon Valley: Crypto Start-Ups – The New York Times
• Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021 | Best books of the year | The Guardian
• Algorithmic amplification of politics on Twitter | PNAS
  The role of social media in political discourse has been the topic of intense scholarly and public debate. Politicians and commentators from all sides allege that Twitter’s algorithms amplify their opponents’ voices, or silence theirs. Policy makers and researchers have thus called for increased transparency on how algorithms influence exposure to political content on the platform. Based on a massive-scale experiment involving millions of Twitter users, a fine-grained analysis of political parties in seven countries, and 6.2 million news articles shared in the United States, this study carries out the most comprehensive audit of an algorithmic recommender system and its effects on political content. Results unveil that the political right enjoys higher amplification compared to the political left.
• Trump's 'Big Lie' endures and poses a threat to U.S. democracy : NPR
  RT @NPR: Experts warn that Trump’s "Big Lie" has grown even more entrenched in the past year — posing a serious threat to democracy.

  "I kind of feel like a climate scientist from 5 years ago … just hoping we’re not too late already," says one election law expert.

• They Lost Three Daughters to Sickle Cell. Can They Save a Fourth?
  About 150,000 babies are born each year in Nigeria with sickle cell, a deadly disease. Tens of thousands of them die annually before their fifth birthdays.
• Get Back: Paul McCartney Is the Most Interesting TV Character of 2021 – Paste
• Hunt is on for more accurate in-home antigen testing – The Washington Post
  Rothberg, 58, is the founder of Detect, a company whose eponymous product holds the promise of a new and potentially far superior approach to the current tangled system. Detect has come up with an at-home covid test that uses the advanced tool of molecular analysis instead of the more common — and oft-derided — antigen method. As of last week, thanks to an emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, a Detect test can be bought on the company’s website. It costs $75 for a pack that includes the “hub” (a reader-like device that can be reused for any future Detect test) and one individual covid test. Bought separately a hub is $39, with each covid test $49.

  …Cue Health, a publicly traded biomed firm, also recently released an at-home covid test. It uses a molecular process similar to Detect’s, creating an “amplification reaction," in which small bits of RNA are multiplied in such a way that they can be scanned for covid evidence. (Cue’s electronics-based swab-cartridge-reader system is slightly slicker than Detect’s.) Less than a half-hour later, the results are analyzed by Cue’s software and beamed via Bluetooth to a person’s phone.

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• Topographical mapping of α- and β-keratins on developing chicken skin integuments: Functional interaction and evolutionary perspectives | PNAS
  Avian skin appendages include feathers, scales, claws, and beaks. They are mainly composed of α-keratins, found in all vertebrates, and β-keratins, found only in birds and reptiles. Scientists have wondered how keratins are interwoven to form different skin appendages. By studying keratin gene expression patterns in different chicken skin appendages, we found α- and β-keratin interactions crucial for appendage morphogenesis. Mutations in either α- or β-keratins can disrupt keratin expression and cause structural defects. Thus, different combinations of α- and β-keratins contribute to the structural diversity of feathers. The expansion of β-keratin genes during bird evolution might have greatly increased skin appendage diversity because it increased the possible interactions between α- and β-keratins
• The science news that shaped 2021: Nature’s picks
• Roche's at-home COVID-19 rapid test gets emergency FDA approval – The Jerusalem Post
• Ten tech predictions for 2022: what’s next for Twitter, Uber and NFTs | Technology | The Guardian
• Letter from 'Manhattan' | by Joan Didion | The New York Review of Books
• Trump's 'Big Lie' endures and poses a threat to U.S. democracy : NPR
• Toward a Unified Theory of Joan Didion
• Paul McCartney Doesn’t Really Want to Stop the Show
  Half a century after the Beatles broke up, he’s still correcting the record— €”and making new ones.
• (400) https://twitter.com/SukhSDubb/status/1474052265237487627/photo/1
  RT @SukhSDubb: Quite possibly the best sign I have seen before the day ends 😂
• In Memoriam: Joan Didion’s Greatest Two-Word Sentence
• Order your COVID-19 Antigen Self-Test | On/Go
• Giant fossil found in Nevada is first of its kind — CBS News
  It’s the largest animal found from that time period, both in the sea and on land, and currently holds the title of first giant animal to ever inhabit Earth.
• The iPhone Feature to Turn On Before You Die — The Wall Street Journal
  The new Legacy Contact setting in iOS 15.2 lets you specify who can access your Apple iCloud information after you die. Here’s how to set it up.
• Australian man asked his neighbour to take the bins out – so he did, literally — The Guardian
  Carl Stanojevic got a text asking him to take his Queensland neighbour’s bins out. So the 54-year-old Mackay photographer took wheelie bin number 6 for a spin around the town

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• Securing your digital life, part two: The bigger picture—and special circumstances | Ars Technica
• Securing your digital life, part one: The basics | Ars Technica
• Securing your digital life, part three: How smartphones make us vulnerable | Ars Technica
• Former Teacher Gives Special Needs Student His First Christmas
• America is now in fascism’s legal phase | The far right | The Guardian
  RT @nhannahjones: .⁦@jasonintrator⁩ is one of the people I rely on to help me understand the dangerous fragility of America democracy in this moment. Please read his chilling assessment. A warning.
• A New, Cheaper Form of Meth Is Wreaking Havoc on America – The Atlantic
• How The Atlantic's Big Piece on Meth and Homelessness Gets It Wrong | Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative
• Eric Idle Blog » Latest Reading. Fall 2021
• Hospitals Scramble as Antibody Treatments Fail Against Omicron
  The single remaining monoclonal antibody therapy effective against the variant is now in short supply in the U.S., imperiling an option that doctors and hospitals have relied on.
• ASPR pauses allocation of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, etesevimab alone, and REGEN-COV
  ASPR pauses allocation of bamlanivimab and etesevimab together, etesevimab alone, and REGEN-COV
• Which Covid Test Should I Get? When Should I Test? What If I Can’t Find One? Answers About Testing and Omicron.
  Facing long lines and shortages of home test kits during the latest surge, people are searching for answers about Covid tests.
• Patricia Lockwood · Strap on an ox-head: Christ comes to Stockholm · LRB 6 January 2022
• Modern America’s Most Successful Secessionist Movement — The Atlantic
  In rural Oregon, voters fed up with their state’s leftward turn have embraced a simple and outlandish idea: What if we were just Idaho?
• Booster Protection Wanes Against Omicron Within 10 Weeks, Data Suggests – The New York Times
• Patricia Lockwood · It was gold: Joan Didion’s Pointillism · LRB 4 January 2018
  the familiar feeling of reading a patricia lockwood essay on something and coming away saying "goddamn, patricia lockwood"
• Our 2021 in Perspective. Our 2021 reflections and all we… | by MEST Africa | The GPS | Dec, 2021 | Medium
  MEST Africa
• My father was dying – and the kindness of NHS staff felt like a miracle
  When I was a child, my GP father took us to visit lonely patients in hospital each Christmas Day. I was so grateful to see the care he was given in return
• On/Go COVID-19 Antigen Self-Test – Roman
  The On/Goâ„¢ COVID-19 Antigen Self-Test uses a comfortable shallow nasal swab and gives you results in 10 minutes, all from home. The On/Go app will guide you through the steps and let you share your results seamlessly
• With omicron, many vaccinated Americans will at some point test positive. Here’s what to do. — The Washington Post
  From at-home care to evaluating an emergency, here’s what to do if you get a breakthrough coronavirus infection.
• The Things I Would Never Do — The Atlantic
  I’d survived two decades of cancer. But there was one loss I couldn’t accept.
• We’re About to Lose Track of the Pandemic — The Atlantic
  Again.
• He wore a wire, risked his life to expose who was in the KKK
  JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) — For nearly 10 years, Joseph Moore lived a secret double life. At times the U.S. Army veteran donned a white robe and hood as a hit man for the Ku Klux Klan in North Florida.

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• Accurate prediction of protein structures and interactions using a three-track neural network
• Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold | Nature
• (400) https://twitter.com/cathywilcox1/status/1473753432129376257/photo/1
  RT @cathywilcox1: Advent calendar.
  My @smh @theage cartoon.
• ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ Movie Review: Matrix 4
• The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up  – Hungry and Frozen
• Joe Biden Should Accept Joe Manchin's Climate Deal – The Atlantic
  If Build Back Better fails, it will be a catastrophe for the Democratic Party too. Biden has argued that only his moderation, his experience, and his institutionalism can relieve the country’s crises. Congressional Democrats followed by electing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, geriatric pragmatists, to lead the House and the Senate, respectively. If this trio of moderates cannot deliver the goods—if they cannot, despite their decades of yammering, actually succeed in passing what is an aspirational but still insufficient climate law—then the center-left’s case for itself will collapse. The left will argue, more convincingly than ever, that only radicalism and political rupture constitute a sane response to the climate crisis
• America is now in fascism’s legal phase | The far right | The Guardian
  The contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as a social, political, and religious movement with roots in the Confederacy. As in all fascist movements, these forces have found a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy, this time in the figure of Donald Trump
• Uncanny Valley: A Hollywood Executive Reflects on What Her Industry and the Pandemic Have Done to Women's Faces | Vogue
• The Imperfectionist: Wisdom for the end of the year
  Wisdom for the end of the year Instead of a regular edition, here’s a holiday special, featuring seven of the most powerful snippets I’ve added recently to my digital equi…
• (400) https://twitter.com/tuna_suma/status/1404785742207877131/video/1
  RT @gunsnrosesgirl3: Look at this moth from the genus Phalera

  It looks like a fragment of twig complete with chipped bark and even the layering of wood tissue at the “cut” ends…

  perfectly resembling a broken piece of wood to avoid predation.

• A Year in Reading: Kat Chow – The Millions
• (400) https://twitter.com/SarahLustbader/status/1473479141244780547/photo/1
  RT @SarahLustbader: Here is the head of NYC corrections sounding the alarm: 1% of prisoners were COVID positive until recently, 9.5% yesterday, over 17% today. He “implores” us to stop sending people to rikers.
• Inverting PhotoDNA
  Ribosome shows that PhotoDNA does not perfectly hide information about the source image used to compute the signature, and that in fact, a PhotoDNA hash can be used to produce thumbnail-quality reproductions of the original image.

  Source code
  Code and pre-trained models are available on GitHub.

• Hilary Mantel · Diary: Meeting the Devil · LRB 4 November 2010
• Nine of the best fiction books of 2021 from Crossroads to The Promise | Metro News
• 2021.12.14.472719v1.full
  On omicron
• 2021: the review of the year in neuroscience | by Mark Humphries | The Spike | Dec, 2021 | Medium
• (400) https://twitter.com/repweinstein/status/1473339210199404552
  RT @MollyJongFast: Right wing media did this
• The Case for Joy | Dame Magazine

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• Texans Denied Abortion ‘Should Be Compensated by the Government’
• How to know what you really want | Psyche Guides
• The Year in Stupid Futures – by Max Read – Read Max
• How rising groundwater caused by climate change could devastate coastal communities | MIT Technology Review
• Bugs across globe are evolving to eat plastic, study finds | Plastics | The Guardian
• (400) https://twitter.com/Schwartzesque/status/1473039634972172296/photo/1
  RT @Schwartzesque: Let’s ban the manufacture of 2-stroke leaf-blowers.
• Nickel oxide is a material that can 'learn' like animals and could help further artificial intelligence research
• Opinion | The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Leaf Blowers
  Nearly everything about how Americans “care” for their lawns is deadly, but these machines exist in a category of environmental hell all their own.
• Martha Wells continues run of female Hugo award winners

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