Omnium Gatherum: 26may2021

An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for May 26, 2021

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• This is happening right now, as I write this. But, not really visible to me where I am, I’m afraid. Also, by the time I finish this and post is, it will have been a couple hours ago. “A “supermoon” and a lunar eclipse are both happening on May 26. Here’s why. The blood moon is appearing for the first time since 2019.”—”On May 26, the Earth will pass between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow across the moon’s surface and making it appear a deep red color for 14 minutes and 30 seconds. Around moonset — right before sunrise — the West Coast of the United States will be able to see a nearly total eclipse. Many parts of the Americas and Asia will be able to see a partial eclipse. And if you’re in Eastern Australia, you’re in luck: The entire eclipse will be visible to you. If you’re in an area that can see the eclipse, its total phase will begin at 11:11 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on May 26 and end at 11:25 UTC.”
• “Mike Lindell’s Expert Claims He Hired ‘Mission Impossible-Type Secret Agents’ To Break Into Computer Facilities.”—”I think Lindell’s efforts are probably closer to Airplane! or Police Story than to Mission Impossible, if we are to judge from the quality of his three mockumentaries. This guy Frank just makes it all up out of whole cloth. PolitiFact did a piece on Frank’s hyperbolic claim that he had discovered a “key” which “unlocks the door and uncovers the ability to manipulate data and results” from a “sixth degree polynomial.” What’s that you say? It sounds like Aleister Crowley meets the Twilight Zone? How right you are.”
• “Brad Stone: What Happened to Jeff Bezos?” Podcast episode with Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]—”From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.”
• “Does a Color Exist If We Don’t Have a Name For It?” Excerpt from Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Adam Rogers—”A lively account of our age-old quest for brighter colors, which changed the way we see the world, from the best-selling author of Proof: The Science of Booze. From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. In Full Spectrum, Rogers takes us on that globe-trotting journey, tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever.”
• “Michael Lewis on Writing an “Oddly Reassuring Story About American Government’.” Podcast episode with Michael Lewis, author of The Premonition: A Pandemic Story [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]—”For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19.”
• “A Witness to the Human Experience: Why Medicine Needs Storytellers.” About Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by David Weill—”Exhale is the riveting memoir of a top transplant doctor who rode the emotional rollercoaster of saving and losing lives—until it was time to step back and reassess his own life.”
• “Mary Wollstonecraft is a Double Taurus, Or: How an Astrologer Helped Unstick My Novel.” About Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Samantha Silva—”From the acclaimed author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol, a richly-imagined reckoning with the life of another cherished literary legend: Mary Wollstonecraft – arguably the world’s first feminist”
• “John le Carré Fans Are Getting One More Novel. Viking plans to release ‘Silverview,’ a spy novel set in an English seaside town, nearly a year after the famed writer’s death.” About Silverview [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by John le Carré, due October, 2021—”In Silverview, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years—the secret world itself.”
• “Detailed cross-section of another galaxy reveals surprising similarities to our home.”—”The first detailed cross-section of a galaxy broadly similar to the Milky Way, published today, reveals that our galaxy evolved gradually, instead of being the result of a violent mash-up. The finding throws the origin story of our home into doubt.”
• “Biodiversity devastation: human-driven decline requires millions of years of recovery. A new study shows that the current rate of biodiversity decline in freshwater ecosystems outcompetes that at the end-Cretaceous extinction that killed the dinosaurs: damage now being done in decades to centuries may take millions of years to undo.”
• “Neutrons show a connection between lithium concentration and depression. Making the gray cells happy. Depressive disorders are among the most frequent illnesses worldwide. The causes are complex and to date only partially understood. The trace element lithium appears to play a role. Using neutrons of the research neutron source at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), a research team has now proved that the distribution of lithium in the brains of depressive people is different from the distribution found in healthy humans.”
• “Step closer to nasal spray drug delivery for Parkinson’s disease. Scientists at the University of York have made significant progress in the development of a nasal spray treatment for patients with Parkinson’s disease.”
• “Diabetes vaccine gives promising results in a genetic subgroup. A clinical study has investigated whether immunotherapy against type 1 diabetes can preserve the body’s own production of insulin. The results suggest that injection of a protein, GAD, into lymph nodes can be effective in a subgroup of individuals.”
• “NASA Rocket Mission Studying Escaping Radio Waves.”—”A NASA rocket mission, launching May 26, 2021, will study radio waves that escape through the Earth’s ionosphere impacting the environment surrounding GPS and geosynchronous satellites, such as those for weather monitoring and communications.”
• “Researchers find Greenland glacial meltwaters rich in mercury.”—”New research shows that concentrations of the toxic element mercury in rivers and fjords connected to the Greenland Ice Sheet are comparable to rivers in industrial China, an unexpected finding that is raising questions about the effects of glacial melting in an area that is a major exporter of seafood.”
• “Intermittent fasting in mice effective at promoting long term memory retention. Intermittent fasting in mice demonstrably more effective at promoting long term memory retention.”
• “For the First Time, Optogenetic Therapy Partially Restores Patient’s Vision.”—”Optogenetic therapy, or manipulating proteins and cells with light, is an advanced technology developed in the early 2000s that drove major discoveries about the inner workings of our brains. Yet, while actively researched in experimental animals, functional improvement using this method was never reported in humans—until now.” Also “Scientists partially restore blind man’s vision with breakthrough gene therapy. The case marks the first time sight has been partially restored using optogenetics, a type of biological research aimed at controlling nerve cells via light.”
• “First-of-its-kind flower smells like dead insects to imprison ‘coffin flies’. First plant found to deceive pollinators by mimicking decomposing insects.”
• “NIST, Collaborators Develop New Method to Better Study Microscopic Plastics in the Ocean. Multistep technique uses small marine invertebrate to detect, count and characterize nanoplastics.”
• “LHAASO Discovers a Dozen PeVatrons and Photons Exceeding 1 PeV and Launches Ultra-high-energy Gamma Astronomy Era.”—”These findings overturn the traditional understanding of the Milky Way and open up an era of UHE gamma astronomy. These observations will prompt people to rethink the mechanism by which high-energy particles are generated and propagated in the Milky Way, and will encourage people to explore more deeply violent celestial phenomena and their physical processes as well as test basic physical laws under extreme conditions.”
• “Tasmanian devils born on Australian mainland in rewilding push. Tasmanian devils have been born in the wild on Australia’s mainland 3,000 years after the marsupials disappeared from the continent, conservation groups said Tuesday, raising hopes that a major rewilding effort could succeed.”
• “Eating chocolate could help people with fatty liver disease, study of cocoa powder’s benefits suggests. One in four people have fatty liver disease. Eating foods high in cocoa powder, such as chocolate, could reduce the disease’s severity, a study shows. The study of mice fed a high-fat diet which had the disease showed giving them cocoa powder significantly reduced its severity.”
• Ugh. Not now solar storms! “Solar storms are back, threatening life as we know it on Earth.”
• Tissues, not blood, are where immune cells function. COVID has shown we must study immunity in the whole body — let’s sort the logistics to acquire the right samples.”
• Down to just 2,038 from 38 million! “Flu cases were at an all-time low during the 2020-2021 season. What experts say to expect in next season’s vaccine.”—”Public health and clinical laboratories reported 2,038 flu cases during the season from Sept. 27, 2020, to April 24, 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency estimated about 38 million people were sick with the flu during the 2019-2020 season.”
• “A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more.”
• From The Call is Coming from Inside the … wait. Um, no, it’s not even cosmically close. “We’ve Tracked 5 Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts to The Arms of Distant Spiral Galaxies.”
• “What the “Nefertiti Hack” Tells Us About Digital Colonialism. A hacked 3D scan of the famous sculpture shows how traditional models of heritage ownership might change in museums.” Also “Nefertiti and Digital Colonialism: A Short Bibliography.”
• “Scientists Fired Tardigrades Out of a Gun to See if They Can Survive Space Impacts.”—”We can now add ‘being fired out of a gun at high speeds’ to the growing list of weird things tardigrades can survive.”
• From the It’s a Dirty Job dept: “’Smart Toilet’ Uses Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Bowel Health. AI vision of flushes enables long-term tracking and management of chronic GI ills.”
• “Fisker Set to Make First All-electric Papal Transport.”
• Look, all I’m saying is that Spaceport America is 30 minutes from where I was born. So, clearly, I should be given rides into space for free, for life. “Virgin Galactic Completes First Human Spaceflight from Spaceport America, New Mexico . Welcomes Astronauts and Payloads Home After Third Spaceflight.”
• “Bernie Sanders is trying to block Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin from getting $10 billion NASA funding for a moon-landing mission.”
• “DARPA pitted 500+ hackers against this computer chip. The chip won.“—”The U-M team achieved its results by abandoning a cornerstone of traditional computer security—finding and eliminating software bugs, explained Todd Austin, the team’s leader and the S. Jack Hu Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. MORPHEUS works by reconfiguring key bits of its code and data dozens of times per second, turning any vulnerabilities into dead ends for hackers. ‘Imagine trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube that rearranges itself every time you blink,’ Austin said. ‘That’s what hackers are up against with MORPHEUS. It makes the computer an unsolvable puzzle.’”
• “Raspberry Pi Bonded Router Boosts Speed for Rural Networks. A network for your network.”
• “Domino’s 180M order data breach is now a searchable portal. That’s a big pie of data.”—”As a customer, there’s nothing you can do about this type of data breach, but demand better security from the companies that serve you.”
• “Apple’s Fortnite Antitrust Trial Ends With Pointed Questions.”
• “Jeff Bezos, a Real-Life Bond Villain, May Own James Bond Very Soon.”
• Tweet—”We need to talk. What should our next default font be?” Seaford is clearly the only and best font in the bunch. Right after Typography McTypoFace.
• “Tired of Boring CAPTCHAs, This Developer Created a Doom-Themed One. Forget clicking on crosswalks or trucks in a grid. A web developer in Spain created a CAPTCHA test featuring a short and simple Doom game to prove that you’re human.”
• Watch “We know what you did during lockdown.”—”We gave up our privacy to fight Covid-19, can we get it back? An FT film starring Lydia West and Arthur Darvill in collaboration with Sonia Friedman Productions and supported by Luminate. An interrogation scene explores how Covid-19 has exposed the tension between the need for data to track and trace, and the right to privacy and justice.” Dir. Juliet Riddell, written by James Graham, with Lydia West and Arthur Darvill.
• “People Are Using an Ancient Method of Writing Arabic to Combat AI Censors.”—”Social media users who have reported shadow banning and AI restrictions of Palestinian content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram have found an ingenious way to elude these censorial algorithms. In recent days, an increasing number of Arabic-speaking users online have been reverting to at least a thousand-year-old version of the language, which eliminates all dots (diacritics) from the modern alphabet.”
• More on this: “Kansas Republican Accused Of Kicking Teen In Testicles Says It Was God’s Plan. State Rep. Mark Samsel allegedly assaulted a 16-year-old student while substitute teaching at a public school in his hometown last month.”
• “Cult Capitalism. To understand how NXIVM’s members went from the pursuit of professional success to facilitating and enduring horrific wrongs requires examining the world of contemporary business from which the cult emerged.”
• More on this: “Academics, Writers, Athletes Stand By ‘1619 Project’ Founder Who Still Isn’t Tenured. The University of North Carolina’s failure to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones upon her appointment is shameful, several public figures wrote.”
• “The Odds Are Stacked Against Black People Who Forage For Food. Here’s Why. Alexis Nikole Nelson, aka “Black Forager,” explains how racist laws from 150 years ago have affected the way she lives today.”
• “Hating Jews—the Enduring Curse. Introduction to the pathology of Jew-hating.”
• Free e-book from Verso: Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe. “The myths—and reality—behind the state of Israel. In this groundbreaking book, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. The “ten myths” that Pappe explores—repeated endlessly in the media, enforced by the military, accepted without question by the world’s governments—reinforce the regional status quo. He explores the claim that Palestine was an empty land at the time of the Balfour Declaration, as well as the formation of Zionism and its role in the early decades of nation building. He asks whether the Palestinians voluntarily left their homeland in 1948, and whether June 1967 was a war of “no choice.” Turning to the myths surrounding the failures of the Camp David Accords and the official reasons for the attacks on Gaza, Pappe explains why the two-state solution is no longer viable.”
• “USPS trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning. They get 10 mpg. And they were revolutionary. The Postal Service’s “Long Life Vehicles” are going out in a blaze of glory: ‘Everybody has their own LLV story.’”
• More on this: “Why People Don’t Stay In Restaurant Jobs. Republicans blame unemployment benefits, but there’s a simpler reason: the jobs are hard and they don’t pay great.” Also “The Myth of Labor Shortages. Is the U.S. suffering from a labor shortage? If so, capitalism has an answer.”—”The idea that the United States suffers from a labor shortage is fast becoming conventional wisdom. But before you accept the idea, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think it through. nOnce you do, you may realize that the labor shortage is more myth than reality.”
• “RR Auction: The Einstein Archives of Ludwik Silberstein. RR Auction is proud to present the Einstein Archives of Ludwik Silberstein—a remarkable collection of correspondence focused on the theory of relativity. The sale is highlighted by a rare letter in which Einstein writes his famous equation, “E = mc2,” the only known example in private hands. In Einstein’s other letters, he examines a spacetime metric, writes out his gravitational field equations, and comments on the rise of Hitler and Nazism in 1934. Other featured items include many letters by Max Planck—often defending Einstein’s theory of relativity —and other Nobel Prize winners, including Thomson, Bragg, Michelson, and Lorentz.”
• “My dearest foe in heaven, or: not near but dear.”—”It was Hamlet who was ready to meet his dearest foe in heaven. In addition to dear “regarded with affection,” from dēor(e), English once had dear “savage, wild, grievous,” from dēor. Shakespeare used this word many times. It often occurred before him (for example, in Beowulf and in the Middle period) but slowly disappeared, possibly because having homonyms with two almost opposite meanings caused confusion, even though their coexistence had not bothered anyone for centuries and though such cases are known.”
• Is monogamy inherently sexist?“—”Culture is dynamic. It is on that dynamism, and on the ethos of democracy, that a transformative and empowering kraal can and should be built, with all acting together to roll back the scourge of gender-based violence, which persistently rears its ugly head on our shores. Perhaps the question to ask is, who is the “bull” in this instance? We should also ask ourselves: what discourses of marginalisation are imbedded in this notion of a man always being the only bull in the kraal and the woman being interpolated as a submissive, lowly cow? In fact, this sexual objectification and fascination with children and pregnancy evoke images of the maiden Leda being “mastered” by the male deity Zeus (who has assumed the form of a swan) in William Butler Yeats’ poem, Leda, and the Swan (based on the Greek myth in which the Aetolian princess Leda is raped by Zeus on the same night that she sleeps with her husband).” “It is about time society began to view every opportunity to develop new policy as an impetus for deepening the constitutional principles of equality, non-sexism, human dignity and non-discrimination, to build a vibrant, steadfast democracy.”
• Yeats album will delight trad fans.”—”In the media player this week is a very interesting album that I teased back in March called “I Am Of Ireland: Yeats in Song.” A collection of 23 poems by W.B. Yeats set to music and arranged by Raymond Driver, it’s an interesting idea that has been brought to great fruition and works quite well.” See I am of Ireland: Yeats in Song, 24 poems of W. B. Yeats set to music by Raymond Driver, performed by various Celtic folk artists, due July 23. Preview clips are available in a little media player on their site, at the bottom right of the page.
• “The CW Scraps Powerpuff Pilot, Reworking Show With the Same Cast. The CW’s Powerpuff, the gritty new live-action take on The Powerpuff Girls, will be getting a new pilot featuring the same cast and crew.”
• “Timothee Chalamet To Star In Willy Wonka Origin Film. The ‘Call Me by Your Name’ star beat out Tom Holland for the iconic role and will sing and dance in the film.”
• “‘Eternals’ Trailer Introduces A New Superhero Squad For A Post-Iron Man World. Marvel’s next big blockbuster from ‘Nomadland’ director Chloé Zhao stars Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Madden.”
• “Anger after high school alters girls’ photos to cover chests and shoulders. Bartram Trail high school in Florida censored 80 yearbook photos, while portraits of males were unchanged.”
• “What Does Untouchable Mean During India’s Covid Crisis?.”
• Welp. There’s goes plan C. Guess it will have to be the Foreign Legion then. “I Ran Away With The Circus But Quit After Confronting A Sad Truth I Learned There. The moment I wish I could most do over is working for Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus for a year.”
• “Meet The Linda Lindas, The Young Punk Band Whose Song About Racism Rocked The Internet. ‘All these emotions kind of bottle up, so it’s good to — it feels good to yell it out.’”
• “911 Calls About Ear-Splitting Cicada Eruption Are Bugging Authorities. Stop it!”
• Debris, S01E12, A Message from Ground Control, introduced the “Telesphere”. One of the ISPs I worked at in the 90s was called Telisphere. I had a double take. Luckily not a spit take. Or a double spit take!
• You win some, you lose some, and sometimes both at the same time? “$26 million SuperLotto Plus ticket was destroyed in the laundry, Norwalk store manager says.”
• “Man’s Best Justification for Existing“—”I know I’m supposed to want to be around people again, but…”
• “A New Spin On A Classic Video Game Gives Native Americans Better Representation.”—”A generation of kids like Halfmoon grew up playing settlers heading west on the Oregon Trail. They remember it mostly for the moment — wait for it — their party died of dysentery. Now, a new spin on the wagon train game focuses on more accurately representing Native Americans and includes new storylines and playable Native American characters.”
• “Everyone is Awesome. The LEGO Group is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive organization where everybody belongs, to help us reach and inspire every child (and grown-up…!) in the world. We believe that LEGO® play is for everyone, no matter your race, your gender, how you identify or who you love. This page shares just some of the ways we embody that belief. ♥.” Also “Why I designed “Everyone is Awesome” by Matthew Ashton.”