2001: A Space Odyssey Tried to Break Us Out of Our Comfort Zone | Tor.com:

But of all the genres, science fiction seems the most suited to the task. Straight drama, or comedy, or even musicals remain rooted in our earthly, observable realities; what can be glimpsed outside your window can also be up on the screen. SF—by dint of reaching beyond, by speculating on the possible, by asking, What if…?—can break through the simple equation of “what is seen is what is,” can prompt us to imagine alternatives, and can get us to question whether what we know about ourselves is as absolute as we believe.

Miniature Life:

This is hard-core relevant to my interests.

CODA - Apple TV+ Press:

Seventeen-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the sole hearing member of a deaf family – a CODA, child of deaf adults.

This is on my to-watch shortlist… But everything I hear about it is amazing.

Apple TV+ has been punching way above its weight on delivering great content.

Netflix Rolling Out Spatial Audio Support - MacRumors:

Netflix is rolling out support for Spatial Audio on the iPhone and the iPad, based on reports shared by MacRumors readers and on Reddit. A Netflix spokesperson also confirmed to MacRumors that the rollout is underway.

More of this please…

Living Wage Calculator - Living Wage Calculation for Hennepin County, Minnesota:

The living wage shown is the hourly rate that an individual in a household must earn to support his or herself and their family. The assumption is the sole provider is working full-time (2080 hours per year). The tool provides information for individuals, and households with one or two working adults and zero to three children. In the case of households with two working adults, all values are per working adult, single or in a family unless otherwise noted.

Require vaccines at family gatherings like Thanksgiving:

It’s time to start making those phone calls and texts telling your guests to get their official vaccine cards or verification apps ready because they’ll have to show proof at the door.

Instructions for the Zero Gravity Toilet in 2001 | Boing Boing:

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, natural calls for Heywood Floyd. Fortunately, there are very detailed instructions posted on how to use the Zero Gravity Toilet. (This is Kurbick, after all.) Also fortunately, the toilet is apparently the "standard zero-gravity type" so one should be familiar with its operations. Below are the instructions as captured by 2001 obsessives.

Have an iPhone? Here’s why you shouldn’t close apps | Boing Boing:

People have told me I should shut down apps on my phone to conserve the battery charge and improve performance. But this video says the phone's operating system is designed to manage open apps to optimize memory, performance, and battery charge and that I should let it do its thing. The only time to close an app, according to this video, is when the app is frozen or is not running properly.

The embedded Youtube video link

How Fermented Foods May Alter Your Microbiome and Improve Your Health - The New York Times:

1. Apologies if the source is paywalled, but in this case I'm not overly concerned because...
2. This isn't necessarily good science. 36 adults isn't enough to identify results well, and using 2 separate variables with no control group for either means and measuring for different outcomes makes this suspect.

For the study, the researchers recruited 36 healthy adults and randomly split them into groups. One group was assigned to increase their consumption of fiber-rich plant foods, while a second group was instructed to eat plenty of fermented foods, including yogurt, sauerkraut, kefir, kombucha and kimchi.

(Original Cell article summary)

I don’t mean to say that the outcomes aren’t useful per-se, but this isn’t enough data to make any kinds of decisions.

Afghanistan pullout: Biden’s biggest call yet - will it be his most calamitous? - BBC News:

Afghanistan… The decision of the President to withdraw from the region is no doubt hard, but I think there’s good reason to understand that lasting change there can’t be made from the outside.

As a mystery reader/viewer, I was … struck… when watching Sherlock the first time, specifically for how little one thing had changed.

“Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind, that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, ‘Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’ The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.”

A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle

I didn't know, I saw. Your haircut, the way you hold yourself says military. But your conversation... Bit different from my day. ...said trained at Barts - so Army doctor, obvious. Your face is tanned... but no tan above the wrists. You've been abroad, but not sunbathing. Your limp's bad when you walk, but you don't ask for a chair when you stand, like you've forgotten about it, so it's at least partly psychosomatic. That says the original circumstances of the injury were traumatic. Wounded in action, then. Wounded in action, suntan - Afghanistan or Iraq.

Sherlock - s1e1 - A Study in Pink

It’s a neat narrative trick, but it belies… Over a hundred years different, but embroiled in essentially the same conflict.

Plymouth shooting: Who can own a firearm or shotgun in the UK? - BBC News:

Clearly something there is working.

Mass shootings are extremely rare in the UK. Before this year, there had been four in modern times - the last one was in Cumbria in 2010, when a gunman killed 12 people. Meanwhile, in 2019 alone, there were 417 shootings in the US where at least four people were shot.

The U.S.’s Deep Partisan Divide on COVID Vaccinations:

The Hill, reporting on a new Fox News poll:

32 percent of Trump voters say they have no plans to receive one of the three coronavirus vaccines available in the U.S., compared to only 3 percent of Biden voters, the poll found.

86 percent of Biden voters say they’ve already been vaccinated, while 54 percent of Trump voters said the same.

The Republican Party is a death cult. There’s no other way to put it.

And the one person who could most affect this — a man who himself was vaccinated as soon as possible — refuses to say a word.

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Dangers Untold: Growing Up With Alice’s Wonderland and Sarah’s Labyrinth | Tor.com:

Between the bullying I faced at school and a slew of family problems at home, my teenaged self found an escape in portal fantasies.

A great essay on the power of certain movies to turn a mirror on coming-of-age…

Getting into the Delta Variant Mindset:

Vaccines are still the best way to protect yourself and your community from Covid-19. The vaccines are still really good, better than we could have hoped for. But they’re not magic and with the rise of Delta (and potentially worse variants on the horizon if the virus is allowed to continue to spread unchecked and mutate), we need to keep doing the other things (masking, distancing, ventilation, etc.) in order to keep the virus in check and avoid lockdowns, school closings, outbreaks, and mass death. We’ve got the tools; we just need to summon the will and be in the right mindset.

Apex Legends lead designer fired over old racist and sexist comments | Rock Paper Shotgun:

I don’t have a ton of pity for people in this situation… We all knew this kind of commentary was toxic 14 years ago, 20 years ago, and far beyond that. The only difference is that people are actually being held accountable for some portion of it now.

I think the best answer, if you know you have social-media-skeletons like this, is to make your own mea culpa - Before someone else airs that laundry for you, expose them yourself with an explanation of how you have grown past them and apologize for you actions before someone else has to bring them into the light.

I am having the same issue with James Gunn right now with his return to the spotlight over Suicide Squad… because I don’t feel like he ever actually apologized for his own toxic social media past, only for it being discovered and possibly affecting the people he’s worked with.

elementary OS 6 Odin Available Now ⋅ elementary Blog:

How do you get a bold, friendly new Linux UI? By shamelessly copying it from macOS apparently. Still, depending how faithfully they copied, it might actually make for a usable Linux distro.

Caffeine, the World’s Most Popular Psychoactive Drug:

The power of caffeine to keep us awake and alert, to stem the natural tide of exhaustion, freed us from the circadian rhythms of our biology and so, along with the advent of artificial light, opened the frontier of night to the possibilities of work.

Small takeaway on a part of Michal Pollen’s new book This is Your Mind on Plants which I’ll need to find a copy of at some point…

What’s the Point of Apple TV Hardware?:

With Apple TV+ available on everything now, anyone can enjoy the content, yes… But every other streaming box kinda sucks in other ways, and the Apple TV box still is the best experience I’ve had with a set-top device. Others capture your data, throw ads at you, have horrible interfaces… Whereas Apple TV really just gets out of your way.

Speaking of Mark Gurman, his Power On newsletter continues to be an excellent read. His main topic this week argues that Apple TV (hardware) is “mostly pointless”:

Most importantly, buying an Apple TV no longer gives users a content advantage. We are in the age of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, and business models have shifted so that every service is available on every device — phones, tablets, TV sets, streaming sticks and game consoles.

Apple, known for its closed ecosystem, is even embracing the shift by offering many services on smart TVs and boxes made by competitors. […] That made the Apple TV a mostly pointless accessory, and consumers seem to agree: 2020 data from Strategy Analytics found that the Apple TV holds 2% of the streaming device market.

The product isn’t without its benefits, though, for the Apple ecosystem’s most loyal users. Integration with HomeKit, Fitness+, AirPods and the iOS remote app is useful. The new remote control and faster chip in this year’s version are definite improvements, and the box is getting SharePlay and Spatial Audio support later this year. Still, I don’t see these enhancements moving the needle for most people.

I’d argue that Apple TV is a quintessential Apple product: its primary point is to deliver a superior user experience for those who care and are willing to pay a premium for it. If you look only at “content” there’s little reason to buy an iPhone or Mac or iPad, either. The Mac in particular seems an apt comparison. The reason to buy a Mac instead of a PC isn’t that the Mac can do things PCs can’t, but that what you do on a Mac is delivered through a superior experience. That’s Apple TV, too — especially now that Apple is shipping a good remote control. For a lot of us, it clearly delivers a superior and more private user experience that is worth paying a premium for.

2 percent market share is really low, no question about it, but if you look at those market share numbers from Strategy Analytics, no TV platform has a dominant position. It’s a remarkably diverse market, with no platform over 12 percent share. And Apple’s market share isn’t just any random 2 percent of the market, it’s 2 percent at the very high end of the market. It’s a premium product for Apple’s core customer base.

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Delta is surging as students get ready to go back to school. Here are 5 things to know | MPR News:

As students pick out backpacks and teachers set up their classroom spaces, here are five things health experts want you to know about going back to in-person classes in a pandemic.

Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope:

All of these features are fairly grouped together under a “child safety” umbrella, but I can’t help but wonder if it was a mistake to announce them together. Many people are clearly conflating them, including those reporting on the initiative for the news media. E.g. The Washington Post’s “never met an Apple story that couldn’t be painted in the worst possible light” Reed Albergotti’s report, the first three paragraphs of which are simply wrong1 and the headline for which is grossing misleading (“Apple Is Prying Into iPhones to Find Sexual Predators, but Privacy Activists Worry Governments Could Weaponize the Feature”).

Not surprisingly, this is the first really good, non-hyperbolic summary of everything Apple announced they’re doing on the topic.

• On-device, in the Messages app, neural analysis of images for possible sensitive content sent or recieved... If the user is under 12, parents can opt-in to recieve a warning, over 12 the user can be notified but parents won't be... And none of this is ever reported to any kind of authories, nor is any content sent to Apple or anyone else.

• Likewise on-device updates to Siri and Search around sensitive content, with the same kind of parental opt-in notifications for under 12 users, or just the users otherwise, similar to above.

• Most misunderstood... CSAM image fingerprint comparisons. Not sending images, not even scanning content of images, but creating a verifiable hash of images which can be compared with fingerprints in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) systems... And if enough of those match the MCMEC system triggering a human review of those fingerprints for confirmation, before finally potentially raising further alarms. These cryptographic hashes, depending on the algorythm, should be entirely unique to any given image and so should be worse than lottery odds of ever creating a single false positive that a photo in your library matches a sensitive image in the NCMEC database, much less enough to trigger further action.

These seem to be exteremely well thought out, best compromise answers to really difficult problems and by far the most pprivacy forward answers of anyone in the tech world so far.

I’m sure that’s a good look - “WhatsApp - The platform that’ll protect your kiddy porn”

Facebook’s WhatsApp Takes Aim At Apple Over Child Safety Software Plan:

Facebook's WhatsApp messaging unit blasted Apple's plan to monitor sexually exploitative images of children on iPhones as bad for privacy, opening a new front in the battle between two of the world's biggest tech companies. From a report: "This approach introduces something very concerning into the world," Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said Friday. "We will not adopt it at WhatsApp." Apple a day earlier said it planned to release an update for U.S. users later this year designed to identify and report collections of sexually exploitative images of children, as part of a series of changes it is preparing for the iPhone to protect children from sexual predators.

WhatsApp’s position deepens the battle between Facebook and Apple about data. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has long bemoaned what he sees as too much power Apple has over the social-media giant’s business. Apple has made the protection of user information on the iPhones and some other devices a key part of its pitch to consumers and taken shots at Facebook for its data-collection practices. Tensions have intensified in recent months as Apple rolled out a new privacy feature for the iPhone that restricts Facebook’s ability to collect data. Mr. Zuckerberg said Apple was using its platform to interfere with how Facebook apps work. At the heart of the latest dispute is the question of whether tech companies can insert software that identifies inappropriate or illegal content without compromising privacy. Apple claims to have found a way to do this. WhatsApp, and Apple’s critics, liken this software to a surveillance system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why is the English language so weird and inconsistent? Blame the printing press. | Boing Boing:

Refering to: Aeon - Typos, tricks and misprints

The same, however, cannot be said about the English language, which often feels like a clusterfuck of arbitrary rules. It's a difficult and confusing language, but also a malleable one. Grammar and pronunciations vary depending on location, because it's adaptable by design.

CNN Fires Three Employees for Going Into Office Without Vaccinations:

Ted Johnson, reporting for Deadline:

CNN head Jeff Zucker said that the network has fired three employees for going into the office without being vaccinated against Covid-19, and that parent WarnerMedia may ultimately require proof of the shots. […]

“In the past week, we have been made aware of three employees who were coming to the office unvaccinated,” Zucker wrote in an email to staff. “All three have been terminated. Let me be clear — we have a zero-tolerance policy on this. You need to be vaccinated to come to the office. And you need to be vaccinated to work in the field, with other employees, regardless of whether you enter an office or not. Period. We expect that in the weeks ahead, showing proof of vaccination may become a formal part of the WarnerMedia Passcard process. Regardless, our expectations remain in place.”

More like this, please.

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Jen Psaki zings Doocy and Trump in one fell swoop | Boing Boing:

While on the subject of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's sexual harassment allegations, Doocy, who had already asked several questions on the subject, decided to press on. "Does the administration want the Justice Department to initiate a civil rights investigation into these harassment allegations revealed today?" 

With many other reporters in the room waiting for their turn, the press secretary made a decision: the driest of Psaki bombs was in order. “We do something new here that feels foreign from the last four years and allow the Justice Department to act independently on investigations.” Deadpan at its finest.

Hollingsworth Hound in Space! | Boing Boing: