How to Raise Kids Who Don’t Grow Up to Be Jerks (or Worse) - Scientific American:

In other words, “How can I make sure my kids don’t turn into selfish boors?” In her new book How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), coming out on July 20, Moyer probes the research on how to encourage kids to be generous, honest, helpful and kind. She reviews studies on how to instill egalitarian beliefs and make sure kids know how to stand up against racism and sexism. And she talks to scientists about perennial parental struggles such as sibling rivalry, teaching safe sex and moderating screen time. Scientific American spoke to Moyer about science-based strategies for raising good citizens.

The book Via - boingboing

The life cycle of a COVID-19 vaccine lie | MPR News:

Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines can appear almost anywhere: From an uncle's social media post to a well-trusted news commentator. But where does it come from and why do some myths spread further than others?

With the help of the Internet research firm Graphika, NPR analyzed the rise of one persistent set of lies about COVID-19 vaccines:

usb-c cable colour codes:

USB-C was supposed to be the answer to the chaos that is charge and data cable compatibility. And to an extent it was. It unified ports and reduced the amount of cables and chargers I need to travel with. The cables themselves, however, turned out to be a mess. They come in many varieties with obtuse names, confusing markers, and unclear compatibility rules. Yet they all look exactly the same.

Twenty percent of U.S. adults think Covid vaccine is a secret microchipping program:

One in five adults in the United States thinks the Covid vaccine contains microscopic tracking equipment, according to a poll The Economist and YouGov conducted to learn Americans' thoughts about vaccine resistance.

Those who reject vaccinations believe two negative theories about the effects of COVID-19 vaccines: half think it is likely that vaccines in general cause autism and that this vaccine in particular is being used by the government to microchip the population. 

— Read the rest

Covid: Younger adults still at risk of serious organ damage - study:

Adults below the age of 50 are almost as likely to suffer from medical complications as those over 50.

The worst volume control UI in the world | by Fabricio Teixeira | UX Collective:

A group of bored developers and designers has decided to start a thread on reddit to figure out who can come up with the worst volume control interface in the world:

ERmagerd the horrors…

Jackson Palmer on Twitter: “After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity.” / Twitter:

Public defender: Minneapolis police destroyed investigative files during last year’s riots | MPR News:

n a memo from last March recently made public, officer Logan Johansson said that he and others at the 2nd precinct decided to destroy "all non-active case files" as well as those containing information about confidential informants.

Johansson wrote “this was in direct response to the abandonment of the 3rd police precinct by in Minneapolis by city leadership."

Three Cheers for Socialism | Commonweal Magazine:

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

via - kottke.org

Tennessee halts vaccine outreach to minors, not just for COVID-19:

The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not just for coronavirus, but all diseases – amid pressure from Republican state lawmakers, according to an internal report and agency emails obtained by the Tennessean. If the health department must issue any information about vaccines, staff are instructed to strip the agency logo off the documents.

The health department will also stop all COVID-19 vaccine events on school property, despite holding at least one such event this month. The decisions to end vaccine outreach and school events come directly from Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey, the internal report states.

Additionally, the health department will take steps to ensure it no longer sends postcards or other notices reminding teenagers to get their second dose of the coronavirus vaccines. Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.

This is heinous, dirty…

Reaching people on the internet in 2021 - The Oatmeal:

Everything has been downhill from here…

More seriously - If you don’t follow The Oatmeal one way or another, you really should. They still have an RSS feed, and now email subscription… For those of us that resist the Facebook.

Here are the 2021 Emmy Award nominations | MPR News:

Outstanding drama series The Boys Bridgerton The Crown The Handmaid's Tale Lovecraft Country The Mandalorian Pose This Is Us

I’m amused by the fact that this year’s Emmy nominees are dominated by genre stuff… Horror, SciFi, Capes…

Retro Modern Movie Posters:

Check out these retro modern movie posters from Patrick Concepcion; the Groundhog Day one is simple perfection. You can check out Concepcion’s work on his website and Instagram or buy prints on Etsy.

The worst keyboard ever made | Revue:

At this point it’s probably clear that every time I say “the worst keyboard ever made,” I am being cheeky. These are not the worst keyboards ever made. There is no worst keyboard; the world of keyboards is just too complex for this to be possible. Even more importantly, though, I believe there is always something you can learn from a keyboard you don’t like. Sure, the Ukrainian keyboard has an atrocious build quality, the TI calculator keypad is weird to press, and the abKey is far from a Revolution.

I’ve come across the Shift Happens lists before, but the ones here were … Inspiring. So many of us live with our keyboards as tools for significant portions of our lives, but give no thought to what makes them good or bad, or at least interesting.

Summer camps hit with COVID outbreaks — are schools next? | MPR News:

The U.S. has seen a string of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to summer camps in recent weeks in places such as Texas, Illinois, Florida, Missouri and Kansas, in what some fear could be a preview of the upcoming school year.

In some cases the outbreaks have spread from the camp to the broader community.

The clusters have come as the number of newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. has reversed course, surging more than 60 percent over the past two weeks from an average of about 12,000 a day to around 19,500, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Oh, however could anyone have predicted this… Oh… Pretty much anyone who might have thought it out.

Why You Shouldn’t Use Google Maps On Your iPhone After Update:

Clearly, the issue here is that all the data Google Maps says it may collect is linked back to your personal identity. This is how Google works. Everything links together to build your profile, your timeline. And while you can fish around in Google’s account settings to delete some of this data, most don’t bother and why should you need to?

Got my hands on the new Dune RPG collection!

Why Do Electric Cars Look The Way They Do? Because They Can:

Why Do Electric Cars Look The Way They Do? Because They Can

via - kottke.org

Google’s unfair performance advantage in Chrome:

This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google’s customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn’t going to search the web.

There’s just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it’s set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.

Just a quick thing I’ve noticed…

When I see (p)reviews of iPad OS 15, nearly every one says complains about the lack of an Apple weather app or calculator.

When I hear people talking about the all the legal complaints, they all talk about how Apple’s apps unfairly crowd out 3rd party apps.

What this suggests is that real people want 1st party apps from Apple, not to have to figure out what other apps are worth using.

I think for many, if not most, users who’ve chosen Apple products already know why they’re using them - Privacy first, intuitive design, etc. Forcing Apple to make things harder for those users seems like an invasive overreach.

P.S. As a technical, Unix-centric user, I will use Apple’s apps over others in nearly every case. I’ve tried many 3rd party mail apps, on macOS, iOS, iPad OS, Windows, and Linux, including some design winners heaped with praise, and none have been as stable, elegant, fast, as Mail.app and their iOS compatriots. The same with Calendars, with Terminal on macOS, with Safari, and on down the line.

There are categories where I do far prefer a 3rd party app. I use pcalc across all devices it’s available, Overcast for podcasts (including on macOS now via M1 macOS-iOS availability, emacs for a nearly everything dev over Xcode (bearing in mind I don’t dev for Apple languages yet, so that might change). I’m not against using 3rd party software, but in nearly every case where Apple has turned their eyes to a thing, their creations are the best of any breed.

We need to have a conversation about wombats - The Oatmeal:

Go for the comic, stay for the message:

The Northern Hairy-nosed wombat is considered one of the rarest mammals in the world -- there are only 80 of them left. If you can, please donate or follow any of these organizations. Upon publishing this comic, I personally donated $10,000 to help kick things off.

The Wombat Protection Society of Australia

Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary

Wombat Awareness Organisation

Cedar Creek Wombat Rescue Inc. & Hospital

If you’re unable to donate, please share this comic to help spread the word about these incredible marsupials with incredible buttocks.

(7.6.2021: updated with details on the outreach portion of the comic)

While I’ve seen plenty of hate around the Resident Evil movies, I find them to be fair adaptations (Though I’d love to have seen the final production of a George Romero Resident Evil based on the first game)

Being in mind the movie production started in 2000, The only properties to really work with were Resident Evil 1-3… If you’d only played those games, would you have assumed that the franchise would take the direction of the larger implications of Umbrella’s corporate corruption, or midivil cults and mind-control fungus? While certainly taking liberties, the films sometimes feel more in-keeping with the spirit of the first 3 games than the games post RE3 themselves do.

The Regular Expression Edition - by Guest Contributor - Why is this interesting?:

There is an old programmer joke (generally attributed to Jamie Zawinski) that goes: “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” In accidentally cutting off access to a large part of the Internet for an entire country (and in the process drawing embarrassing attention to Russia’s censorship efforts), our anonymous bureaucrat seems to have proven that old chestnut quite handily.

Via - kottke.org

Alex Schroeder: 2021-07-01 How to make conversation:

Anyway. All of this to say that we need to imagine positive outcomes for the things we say. It’s a bit like chess. There’s a thing somebody said. There’s the thought we’re holding in our mind. We’re ready to give that reply. Now, quick: imagine how the other person is going to react. Is this going to turn into an interesting conversation? If not, I’m already bored. Talk to somebody else. At the very least, ask a question. If you’re going to produce insults, or implied insults, or trying to score points on technicalities, I’m not interested. Learn about interacting with people, first.

Collin Donnell - Remove Duplicate Path Entries:

export PATH=$(echo $PATH | ruby -F: -ane 'puts $F.uniq.join(":").chomp')

This is beautiful.