tingilinde

so good

really old dna

From the lush forests of Greenland two million years ago.

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As it turned out, some of those samples had been sitting in a freezer in Copenhagen since 2006, when Willerslev visited northern Greenland looking for ancient human remains. While there, the team collected sediment from the region’s Kap København Formation, a 100-metre-thick deposit of frozen mud and sand that built up around 2 million years ago.

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los angeles - a mirror of the country

Apathy

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But this time around, even as the numbers in Los Angeles become the highest in California, many have grown weary of warnings and talk of precautions. Covid updates do not elicit the unease they once did — in part because cases and hospitalizations during the current outbreak are nowhere near where they were during the worst stretches. But also because the subject has grown tiresome, residents said.

“I think it’s just kind of run its course with me,” said Kirk Carter, 60, a retired television writer who lives in Los Angeles. “It’s become normalized.”

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keep the lid on

What happens when you flush a toilet with the lid up?

 

comparing flu seasons - 4th week in november

 

 

 

60,000 sq mile optical digital telecommunications network in the southwest in 1891

From the Park Service

 

on the future of twitter

A nice piece by danah.

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The funny thing about Twitter’s feed algorithms is that they were designed to amplify the content that triggered the most reaction, those emotionally sticky posts. This is why boring but informative content never has a chance against that which prompts fury. But it also means that we’re all watching how our little universe of content is changing (or not). Are you still seeing the things that give you pleasure? Or just the stuff that makes you angry? Why can’t you resist looking away from the things that give you pain? (That question isn’t a new one… it’s the question that underlies our toxic social media ecology more generally.)

I have to give Musk and gang some credit for knowing that drama brings traffic. The drama that unfolds in the World Cup is wholesome compared to the drama of watching public acts of humiliation, cruelty, and hate. We’re in a modern day Coliseum watching a theater of suffering performed for the king under the rubric of “justice.” And just like the ancient Romans, we can’t look away.

But how long can the spectacle last? Even the Roman Empire eventually collapsed, but perhaps the theater of the absurd can persist for a while. Still, there are other factors to consider.

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on apple's e2e encryption

Matt Green has a thoughtful early reaction.

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I am struggling to try to find an analogy for how crazy this is. Imagine your country held a national referendum to decide whether most citizens should be compelled to photocopy their private photos and store them in a centralized library — one that was available to both police and motivated criminals alike. Would anyone vote in favor of that, even if there was technically an annoying way to opt out? As ridiculous as this sounds, it’s effectively what we’ve done to ourselves over the past ten years: but of course we didn’t choose any of it. A handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for us, in pursuit of adoption metrics and a “magical” user experience.

What’s done is done, and those repositories now exist.

And that should scare you. It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon. However much damage as we’ve done to our privacy with search engines and cellphone location data, the private content of our papers is the final frontier in the battle for our privacy. And in less than a decade, we’ve already lost the war.

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probiotics

There are times when they can help - Greg on dealing with bursitis.

 

wildfires and dust

Making air quality worse.

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And although the majority of large landscape fires in the United States occur in the West, the smoke’s impacts don’t stay there. “Smoke in the eastern US, coming from both local fires and wildfires in the West, leads to more deaths,” says Katelyn O’Dell, an atmospheric scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC. She and her colleagues found that some three-quarters of deaths attributable to smoke PM2.5 in the United States occur in the east, owing to the region’s high population densities9.

Growing evidence suggests that wildfire smoke is even more hazardous than conventional sources of PM2.5. The leading hypothesis is that today’s wildfire smoke is more frequently tainted with the incinerated remnants of modern homes. “Smoke is not just from trees anymore,” says Nadeau.

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it's that time of year

Jonathan Coulton's Christmas song time. 

Somehow it feels particularly relevant - especially for workers in places like Amazon, Musk's businesses, a many companies in China...

fixing dangerous streets

A piece by Jeff Speck.

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On the twin blights of the traffic-overrun main street and the traffic-clogged suburban strip, he reminds us that there should be only two types of throughfares: streets and roads. Streets are for local wealth generation and welcome traffic only at slow speed, because high speeds destroy the value of place. Roads are for moving vehicles quickly, and should be kept free of businesses, because every curb cut impacts speed and also threatens safety. Our mistake over the years is that we have allowed streets to become half roads and roads to become half streets. On one, commerce has been sacrificed to speed. On the other, speed has been sacrificed to commerce. Chuck calls these places “stroads.”

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accurate, but uselesdd

 

 

 

hack an exoplanet

This could be a nice activity for high school STEM classes and motivated teens.  More detail here.

 

what china's zero-covid approach means for china and the world

A sobering assessment on In the Bubble.  An embattled dictator may jin up external grievances to unify a frustrated population.   There also may be a window for attacking Taiwan.