Is omicron leading us closer to herd immunity against COVID? | MPR News:

Experts say it's not likely that the highly transmissible variant — or any other variant — will lead to herd immunity.

“Herd immunity is an elusive concept and doesn’t apply to coronavirus,” says Dr. Don Milton at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

DNA Lounge: 9-Feb-2022 (Wed): Wherein nobody’s boosted, and nobody believes that Long COVID exists:

Cholera cases are declining in our community. Now's the time for everyone to resume drinking fecal contaminated water from the Broad Street pump! #FecalUrgencyOfNormal

‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill would limit discussion of sexuality and gender in Florida schools | MPR News:

GOP - LGBTQI+ kids, we will only admit you exist when we’re actively trying to ruin your lives.

President Biden:

"I want every member of the LGBTQI+ community — especially the kids who will be impacted by this hateful bill — to know that you are loved and accepted just as you are," Biden tweeted on Tuesday. "I have your back, and my Administration will continue to fight for the protections and safety you deserve."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbot begins gruesome persecution of trans children and their parents | Boing Boing:

Texas Governor Greg Abbot has ordered Family and Protective Services to investigate all trans children in Texas and their parents. Threatening criminal action, Abbot is demanding teachers, doctors and caregivers report any child suspected of being trans and parents who support them.

Abbot’s letter to Family and Protective Services makes it clear that parents consenting to gender-conforming surgery or other medical, or therapeutic interventions for their child will be considered child abuse in Texas.

What a colossal horrifying excuse for humanity.

How a Book Is Made - The New York Times:

Here, we will show you how vats of ink and 800-pound rolls of paper become a printed book.

The title we will follow on its journey is “Moon Witch, Spider King,” a fantastical epic that draws on African mythology, the second book in a trilogy by Marlon James.

Let’s watch this book get born.

The Winners of 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year Contest:

All of the winners and shortlisted entries of the 2021 International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest look fantastic, but I managed to pull out a few favorites. From top to bottom, photos by Tanmay Sapkal, Wayne Sorensen, Takashi Nakazawa, and Tom Putt.

You can view the winners online, or in PDF form.

Tags: best of   best of 2021   photography

Father arrested after ordering son, 4, to shoot at officers in McDonald’s drive-thru, police say:

A man was arrested Monday after ordering his 4-year-old son to shoot at Utah police officers in a McDonald's drive-thru during an incident that began over an incorrect order, police said.

Is that the “good guy with a gun”? I’m so confused…

Best Sci-Fi Movies of the Last 15 Years | Den of Geek:

Fifteen years is a long time. We at Den of Geek can certainly attest to that as we’ve seen the industry change and grow, embrace streaming, and pivot toward intellectual property. Yet even as our present stays in a constant state of flux, our fascination with the future remains unwavering.

What dreams may come in 15 years? Or 30? Or a hundred as technology evolves and its relationship with humanity is renegotiated? If you told a room full of geeks in early 2007 that 2022 would be a world filled with smartphones and tablets, social media-shaped democracies, and something called “TikTok,” they might think you’d written a sci-fi movie. Still in that upheaval, we saw some pretty good science fiction stories come out in their own time, both Hollywood blockbuster big and intimately indie; iconic and underappreciated. It’s why we’ve polled our complete staff, along with thousands of reader votes, to determine what are the 25 best sci-fi movies to be released during our first 15 years.

Alone:

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After watching Guys & Dolls last night, got into the Wikipedia rabbit hole and found that Bill Condon is booked to direct a new adaptation of the classic musical. When discussing that… We started talking about dream casting for the leads….

Nate Diamond - Chiwetel Ejiofor Miss Adelaide - Carla Gugino Sky Masterson - Oscar Isaac Sarah Brown - Zendaya Nicely-Nicely Johnson - Tituss Burgess

Google Slides is Actually Hilarious | by Laura Javier | Feb, 2022 | Medium:

Perhaps like you, I naively started out thinking that Google Slides was just a poorly maintained product suffering from some questionable foundational decisions made ages ago that worshipped at the shrine of PowerPoint and which have never since been revisited, but now, after having had to use it so much in the past year, I believe that Google Slides is actually just trolling me.

This just hurts my Keynote loving soul, to the point where PowerPoint might be a better option.

Chorded Keyboard:

Opinion | The Moral Danger of Declaring the Pandemic Over Too Soon - The New York Times:

The lesson of the AIDS pandemic is that it’s easy to leave people behind, even if it is at the cost of our collective peril. Coronavirus variants can develop in people with weakened immune systems who struggle to clear infections on their own, like those with untreated H.I.V. Think of the home we’ve then made for viruses like SARS-CoV-2 by impeding access to vaccines and by allowing millions to go without AIDS treatment even now. Variants can emerge because of our desire to put it all behind us. No one is truly safe until we all are. Yet might we act to save millions of people not just in the interest of self-preservation but also simply because it’s the right thing to do? That would be a signal that this pandemic has changed us. For good.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer: Does the Edge Still Bleed? | Tor.com:

Fiction, even science fiction, is not about the future: I think everybody knows that. So what is the “future” that Gibson describes here? It’s a future that in some ways looks remarkably like the present: the US hegemony is fading, the poor have gotten even poorer than they were in 1984, and the truly rich have power that the rest of us can’t even imagine. Although often described as glorifying computer programmers as a cohort of romantically wild console cowboys, Neuromancer pushes back at the idea that technical advance always results in progress. This book is still surprising, still relevant, and it still deals with unanswered questions.

Elon Musk making unfunny Hitler jokes in support of the Canadian anti-vax trucker convoy | Boing Boing:

Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk keeps telling us who he is, but his fans refuse to listen. He is so mad that Canada is taking non-violent measures against the disruptive protest against commonsense, ie not letting them fund their action with crypto, that he is tossing around images of Hitler as favorable.

Bond villian in training.

More than 7 percent of U.S. adults now identify as LGBTQ, doubling in a decade | Boing Boing:

Turns out Kinsey might have been right with 10% after all, after decades of that number being debunked. After all, that's how many Americans are expected to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or more in the coming years.

Daring Fireball: Spotify Is Acquiring Two Major Podcast Surveillance Ad Tech Platforms:

Spotify isn’t just trying to become the biggest name in podcasting (which has heretofore been, but may no longer be, Apple). They’re trying to usurp podcasting as we know it — one of the last and brightest bastions of the open, simple, private, transparent internet — and turn it into a privately-owned, gated, complicated, invasive, utterly closed platform. Spotify is trying to do to podcasting what Facebook did to “having your own website”.

The History of Blue Jeans:

Daina Berry, Historian: In fact we know the names of all the enslaved people that were owned by the Lucas and Pinckney family. These are generations of families. We’re not just talking about a husband and a wife, or a mom and a dad. We see grandparents on this list. They’re the ones that came from communities that dyed all kinds of cloth beautiful colors. They’re the ones that had the knowledge of indigo; they’re the ones that created generations of wealth for these white slave-holding families.

Reader Comments for The New York Times’ “Homestyle Spaghetti Carbonara” Recipe | by todd levin | Feb, 2022 | Medium:

Why I Reported Dr. Oz to His State Medical Board:

But I saw a clip of Oz a few weeks ago on Fox where he questioned the value of masks. Oz himself is on record earlier in the pandemic saying masks work, and yet now here he is lying in a way that could hurt someone immediately. I am sure some people see him as a credible source, so imagine if someone catches COVID because they took his advice? What if they give it to their immunocompromised mother? Or their unvaccinated child gets it and becomes sick? Or a pregnant person who then dies?

The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People - The Atlantic:

Two years later, COVID-19 is still all around us, everywhere, and millions of people like Landon are walking around with a compromised immune system. A significant proportion of them don’t respond to COVID vaccines, so despite being vaccinated, many are still unsure whether they’re actually protected—and some know that they aren’t. Much of the United States dropped COVID restrictions long ago; many more cities and states are now following. That means policies that protected Landon and other immunocompromised people, including mask mandates and vaccination requirements, are disappearing, while accommodations that benefited them, such as flexible working options, are being rolled back.

Friendly reminder that becuase so many people have chosen to jumpstart “returning to normal” instead of being responsible, swaths of people may never be able to return to normalcy the same way.

DSHR’s Blog: EE380 Talk:

I'm David Rosenthal. I worked with James Gosling on CMU's Andrew project in the early 80s. I was a DE with him at Sun later in the 80s working on window systems including X, and file systems. I quit to be employee #4 at Nvidia where Curtis Priem and I did the basic I/O architecture, then was an early employee at Vitria, the second company of founders of Tibco. Before I start talking about cryptocurrencies, I should stress that I hold no long or short positions in cryptocurrencies, their derivatives or related companies; I am long Nvidia. Unlike most people discussing them, I am not "talking my book".

Cryptocurrencies' roots lie deep in the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the cypherpunks. Libertarianism’s attraction is based on ignoring externalities, and cryptocurrencies are no exception.

Penny Arcade - Comic - Certainty:

Canada should be preparing for the end of American democracy:

The trucker convoy is one small example of what can happen here when the dangerous forms of anti-democratic rhetoric south of the border spread into Canada.

The people in Ottawa aren’t protesters, they’re occupiers. They reject the use of democratic rhetoric in favour of authoritarian rhetoric, and they aim to dismantle the system that makes protest and free speech possible in the first place.

Eunoia: Words that Don’t Translate:

Eunoia allows you to search for untranslatable words by language, tag, or the word itself. There are over 500 words in the database, across 50+ languages and 50+ tags.