A new analysis published in JAMA puts the number of excess deaths in the US between March 1 and August 1 at 225,530. Only ~150K were officially attributed to Covid-19 (so the true death toll is 50% more than the “official” count).
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for October 2020
Was reminded of the limits of self-preservation by this Atul Gawande interview: Trump could have easily won re-election had he taken even moderately effective action against Covid-19 in March or April. It was a gimme and he just. couldn’t. do it.
The Real Trolley Problem
The trolley problem is an ethical thought experiment that’s fun to think and argue about but is often not that applicable to real-world situations (and has been memed to death in recent years). However, I think this one has a certain resonance to with current events.
It’s a Dialect Quiz!
Remember when dialect quizzes and maps were a thing? XKCD is joining the fun with their own quiz. Reader, I giggled when I got to “lawn buddies” and full-on laughed at “longwich”. Longwich is totally going in my vocabulary arsenal.
A New Online Archive of 374 Treaties Between Indigenous Peoples and the United States
Thanks to an anonymous donation, the US National Archives has digitized and put online their collection of 374 treaties between indigenous peoples and the United States (and its predecessor colonies). You can also explore maps and see which tribes are associated with which treaties. I am sure the meaning of the words on these pages is different depending on who you ask but being able access them freely is a benefit to everyone. (via @CharlesCMann)
A list of the 10 greatest works of journalism of the past 10 years. Writers on the list include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, and Michelle Alexander. The NY Times’ 1619 Project is there too.
A Free Hyperlegible Typeface from the Braille Institute
Atkinson Hyperlegible is a free typeface developed by the Braille Institute and Applied Design Works that makes text more readable for people with low vision.
“People may be surprised that the vast majority of the students who come to Braille Institute have some degree of vision,” says Sandy Shin, the institute’s vice president for marketing and communications. “They’re not 100% blind.”
Thus, most of the Braille Institute’s 37,000 clients across Southern California don’t depend on the dot-based Braille language. Instead, they rely on spoken-word tools and accessibility standards that encourage text publishers to think more carefully about the legibility of words on pages.
As you can see in the graphic above (taken from their summary PDF), Atkinson Hyperlegible’s letterforms are constructed so that each letter is as distinctive as possible so that it’s recognizable even when blurry or distorted by low vision. You can download Atkinson Hyperlegible on the Braille Institute site. (via print)
We Need to Reckon with the Aerosol Spread of Covid-19
A spin studio (aka an indoor gym with stationary bikes) in Hamilton, Ontario is dealing with an outbreak of Covid-19 stemming from one asymptomatic patron that has resulted in 69 positive cases so far, even though the studio “followed the rules”. From the CNN report:
SPINCO, in Hamilton, Ontario, just reopened in July and had all of the right protocols in place, including screening of staff and attendees, tracking all those in attendance at each class, masking before and after classes, laundering towels and cleaning the rooms within 30 minutes of a complete class, said Dr. Elizabeth Richardson, Hamilton’s medical officer of health, in a statement.
As the Washington Post reports, patrons were allowed to take their masks off while exercising:
Although Hamilton requires masks to be worn in most public settings, the law includes an exemption for anyone “actively engaged in an athletic or fitness activity.” In keeping with that policy, the studio, SPINCO, allowed riders to remove their masks once clipped into their bikes, and told them to cover up again before dismounting.
The problem here is that while the studio may have followed the rules, they were not the right rules. This outbreak appears to be another clear-cut instance of Covid-19 spread by aerosols. A group of people indoors, without masks, breathing heavily, over long periods of time in what I’m guessing is not a properly ventilated room — this is exactly the sort of thing that has been shown over and over again to be problematic.1 The science is there, but governments and public health agencies have not caught up with this yet. If you take the transmission by aerosols into account, the rules for gyms (and bars and restaurants) being open is that they should probably not be open at all — or if they are, they should be well-ventilated and the wearing of masks should be mandatory at all times.2 (via @DrEricDing)
To return once again to aerosol expert Jose-Luis Jimenez’s excellent smoke analogy, attending a spin class with an asymptomatic patron who is breathing heavily is like being in a room with someone who is furiously chain-smoking for an hour. Unless that room is extremely well-ventilated, everyone is going to be breathing in so much smoke.↩
And to compensate these businesses for their public service in remaining closed, they should be financially supported by the government. We cannot let these businesses, especially small businesses, and their owners go under, for people to lose their savings or go bankrupt, etc. as they help keep the rest of us safe. If we want to have bars and restaurants and gyms and movie theaters and concert venues on the other side of this pandemic, they have to be compensated for their sacrifice on our behalf.↩
Nature (the science journal) supports Joe Biden for US president. “We cannot stand by and let science be undermined. Joe Biden’s trust in truth, evidence, science and democracy make him the only choice in the US election.”
How Artisanal French Butter Is Made
In Brittany, France, Le Beurre Bordier still makes butter by hand using wooden machines. In this video, we travel to their small factory and meet artisan butter maker (and goofy chap) Jean-Yves Bordier to see how they make what some people call the best butter in the world.
To Jean-Yves, the malaxage is a more romantic way to make butter. At his workshop, everything is churned, kneaded, and shaped by hand.
Bordier is such a character, and it’s genuinely delightful to see how he thinks like an artist about his work. (via colossal)
Welcome to Fall, the Two Days Between Summer and Winter. “O.K., is that sleet? It’s sleeting now. And it says that tomorrow it’s supposed to be in the eighties. Then it’s going to snow. How is that possible?”
The Winners of the 2020 Wildlife Photographer of the Year
The winning photographs in the 2020 Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest have been announced by the Natural History Museum in London. Photos above by Shanyuan Li, Weiwei Zeng, and Greg du Toit. (via in focus)
LeBron James continues to expand our concept of excellence. “What Americans insist on seeing as a deficit, you remind us is part and parcel of our cheat code. You are Black abundance.”
Short Film Clip of a Snowball Fight from 1897
This is a short clip from 1897 of a snowball fight filmed by cinema pioneers the Lumière brothers in Lyon, France. This lovely little film has resurfaced recently after a retouched, motion-stabilized, upsampled, and colorized version was posted to Twitter. This doctored version was created using AI-powered software DeOldify. The colorized video does look strikingly modern, but it feels overclocked, overheated. I prefer the original version without all of the guesswork; as I wrote recently, I’ve grow weary of these AI-mediated films.
Wild World: a Hand-Drawn Geographic Map of the Earth
You may remember Anton Thomas from the huge hand-drawn map of North America that took him about 5 years to finish. His next effort, already well underway, is Wild World, a geographic map of the Earth.
Commenced in mid-2020, this is a brand new map of the world. Rather than the endless skylines and cultural features of North America: Portrait of a Continent, I wanted the wild character of Earth to shine.
While you won’t find cities or borders on this map, you will find geographic labels. This is important. From mountain ranges to deserts, rivers to rainforests, the labels here offer a detailed, accurate outline of Earth’s natural geography.
He’s aiming to complete the map by mid-2021.
“Your Civilisation Is Killing Life on Earth”
Nemonte Nenquimo, leader of the Waorani people in Ecuador: This is my message to the western world — your civilisation is killing life on Earth.
My name is Nemonte Nenquimo. I am a Waorani woman, a mother, and a leader of my people. The Amazon rainforest is my home. I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat. Because our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love — our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth — and it’s time that you listened to us.
This is a great letter because it contains the force of truth. Nenquimo is a cofounder of the Ceibo Alliance, an indigenous-led organization working to defend indigenous territory and develop “viable solutions-based alternatives to rainforest destruction”, and was honored as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2020 (Leonardo DiCaprio penned her bio).
How a Road Trip Through America’s Battlegrounds Revealed a Nation Plagued by Misinformation. “Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation…”
Sean Penn & Ann Young Lee used their non-profit organization CORE to build one of the largest coronavirus testing programs in the US. Free tests for 10s of 1000s of daily patients, results back in ~48 hours.
Vaccines May Help End the Pandemic. But Realistically, It’s Not Even Halftime Yet.
We’re all so goddamned tired of this fucking pandemic and so people are looking at the development and distribution of a vaccine as the thing that’s going to get us out of this (and quick). But realistically, that’s not what’s going to happen. Carl Zimmer wrote about some of the challenges with Covid-19 vaccines.
The first vaccines may provide only moderate protection, low enough to make it prudent to keep wearing a mask. By next spring or summer, there may be several of these so-so vaccines, without a clear sense of how to choose from among them. Because of this array of options, makers of a superior vaccine in early stages of development may struggle to finish clinical testing. And some vaccines may be abruptly withdrawn from the market because they turn out not to be safe.
“It has not yet dawned on hardly anybody the amount of complexity and chaos and confusion that will happen in a few short months,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, the director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic.
See also Dr. Fauci’s belief that our best case scenario for returning to something close to normal life in the US is late 2021.
On Twitter, Zimmer also commented on something that I hadn’t really thought about: that all of these vaccines in development in the US are only for adults:
I wrote last month that no trials for kids had started. Update: still no US trials for kids. The goal of having shots ready for them by fall 2021 may be slipping further away.
From Zimmer’s article on the development of a kids’ vaccine:
Only if researchers discovered no serious side effects would they start testing them in children, often beginning with teenagers, then working their way down to younger ages. Vaccine developers are keenly aware that children are not simply miniature adults. Their biology is different in ways that may affect the way vaccines work. Because their airways are smaller, for example, they can be vulnerable to low levels of inflammation that might be harmless to an adult.
These trials allow vaccine developers to adjust the dose to achieve the best immune protection with the lowest risk of side effects. The doses that adults and children need are sometimes different — children get smaller doses of hepatitis B vaccines, for example, but bigger doses for pertussis.
You probably hate reading these kinds of articles; I know I do. But facing up to the reality of our situation, particularly here in the US where our political leadership has utterly failed in protecting us from this virus, is much better than burying our heads in the sand — that’s just not mentally healthy.
Aw, this sucks. Netflix announced that there will be no second season of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. My kids and I really loved this show – I wish more people would have watched it.
Winning Images from the 2020 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition
Nikon has announced the winners of its Small World Photomicrography competition for 2020. From top to bottom above, the development of a clownfish embryo by Daniel Knop, crystals by Justin Zoll, and a bogong moth by Ahmad Fauzan. You can check out the competition winners from past years, all the way back to 1975. (via @dnabeck)
Cristiano Ronaldo has Covid-19. It’s astounding that so many of the world’s best footballers have had it: Neymar, Zlatan, Mbappe, Pogba, Di Maria, Navas, Dybala. Fit or no, some are likely to have long-term health problems because of this.
Jackson Bird’s Transition Timeline
Jackson Bird, who kottke.org readers may know as the host of Kottke Ride Home, recently made a video showing his lifelong transition from the assignment he was given at birth to “the man I am today”.
Instead of photos, I used thirty years worth of home videos to share my story. I called this my Five Years On Testosterone video, but it could more accurately be called Thirty Years In Transition. This is three decades worth of what it looks like to be a transgender person. From childhood tomboy days to confusion and questioning to denial and finally coming out, starting hormones, changing my name, getting top surgery, and all of the moments in between. Not all of our stories are the same, far from it, but this is one story — my story. The story of how I became the man I am today.
What a great video and fantastic storytelling. Undertaking a journey in public like this cannot be easy; thanks for sharing this with us, Jackson. If you’d like to know more about his story, check out his memoir: Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place.
Teens and young adults are having a hard time reasoning with QAnon-obsessed parents who have become radicalized by social media. “I love my dad, but at the same time I kind of hate him for this.”
Darren Aronofsky & His Cast Reunite for the 20th Anniversary of Requiem for a Dream
To mark the 20th anniversary of the debut of Requiem for a Dream, MoMA organized a virtual reunion of director Darren Aronofsky and the four principle cast members (Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans) to talk about “the film and its impact on cinema and culture”. Would have loved to hear from cinematographer Matthew Libatique and Clint Mansell (who did the fantastic music for the film) as well, but even six-person online panels are a little unwieldy. (via open culture)
A Scientific Portrait of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus
This is a great piece from Carl Zimmer about how much scientists have learned about SARS-CoV-2 through imaging, including how the virus works and prospects for treatment and a vaccine.
Thanks to the work of scientists like Dr. Li, the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, is no longer a cipher. They have come to know it in intimate, atomic detail. They’ve discovered how it uses some of its proteins to slip into cells and how its intimately twisted genes commandeer our biochemistry. They’ve observed how some viral proteins throw wrenches into our cellular factories, while others build nurseries for making new viruses. And some researchers are using supercomputers to create complete, virtual viruses that they hope to use to understand how the real viruses have spread with such devastating ease.
I’ve been watching the lectures for MIT’s online Covid-19 class and the thing that has struck me most is just how much scientists have learned about the SARS-CoV-2 virus in such a short amount of time. To be clear, there are many things that they still do not understand about it (and viruses in general), but scientists know this thing upside down and backwards. The depth and breadth of their knowledge is so impressive and I wish more people were aware of it.
Winter Is Coming. Is It Safe to Socialize Indoors?
In an article that The Atlantic classifies as “politics” rather than “science” or “medicine”, Olga Khazan explores why, more than 8 months into the pandemic, Americans still have little idea about the safety of gathering with others indoors.
For months now, Americans have been told that if we want to socialize, the safest way to do it is outdoors, the better to disperse the droplets that spew from our mouths whenever we do anything but silently purchase grapefruit. But in many parts of the country, this is the last month that the weather will allow people to spend more than a few minutes outside comfortably. And next month, America will celebrate a holiday that is marked by being inside together and eating while talking loudly to old people.
In a nutshell, the lack of federal support/guidance/action is the main reason why people are still so confused about what safety measures to take to reduce their Covid risk:
Still, Ranney says, this [Covid risk] app is the kind of thing the federal government really should have developed by now. It’s odd that in a wealthy, industrialized country, a random researcher is the one designing a tool to keep citizens safe from public-health threats, using data she scraped from a newspaper.
One thing that Khazan doesn’t really get into is the whole aerosols thing, which in my mind is something that most people are still not familiar with, many local & state governments are not taking into account w/r/t recommended safety measures, and requires different risk guidance about the safety of the indoors than if we were just dealing with fomites & droplets. Again, from the excellent Time magazine piece by aerosol chemist Jose-Luis Jimenez:
When it comes to COVID-19, the evidence overwhelmingly supports aerosol transmission, and there are no strong arguments against it. For example, contact tracing has found that much COVID-19 transmission occurs in close proximity, but that many people who share the same home with an infected person do not get the disease. To understand why, it is useful to use cigarette or vaping smoke (which is also an aerosol) as an analog. Imagine sharing a home with a smoker: if you stood close to the smoker while talking, you would inhale a great deal of smoke. Replace the smoke with virus-containing aerosols, which behave very similarly, and the impact is similar: the closer you are to someone releasing virus-carrying aerosols, the more likely you are to breathe in larger amounts of virus. We know from detailed, rigorous studies that when individuals talk in close proximity, aerosols dominate transmission and droplets are nearly negligible.
If you are standing on the other side of the room, you would inhale significantly less smoke. But in a poorly ventilated room, the smoke will accumulate, and people in the room may end up inhaling a lot of smoke over time. Talking, and especially singing and shouting increase aerosol exhalation by factors of 10 and 50, respectively. Indeed, we are finding that outbreaks often occur when people gather in crowded, insufficiently ventilated indoor spaces, such as singing at karaoke parties, cheering at clubs, having conversations in bars, and exercising in gyms. Superspreading events, where one person infects many, occur almost exclusively in indoor locations and are driving the pandemic. These observations are easily explained by aerosols, and are very difficult or impossible to explain by droplets or fomites.
The science is there — it’s the lack of connection between scientists, public health experts & officials, and the government that continues to be a problem.
Facebook is finally updating their hate speech policy “to prohibit any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust”. Tho after years of being a welcoming place for harmful misinformation, this is like using a teaspoon to bail out a cruise ship.
Etsy has banned merchandise related to the death cult QAnon from their platform. A search on the site just now yielded zero results.
Podcast Recommendation: You’re Wrong About
My favorite podcast right now is You’re Wrong About, hosted by journalists Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes. So I was pleased to see Rachel Syme’s profile of the show in the New Yorker this morning.
Marshall and Hobbes are endlessly curious about their own blind spots, which they hunt down like truffle pigs set loose in a damp forest. Each brings a unique view and tone to the show; Marshall is more world-weary and sardonic, with a gravelly voice that sounds not unlike the caustic cartoon character Daria Morgendorffer. Hobbes is excitable and buzzing, often so eager to rattle off information that he speaks in full paragraphs. Together, they make up a kind of millennial Statler and Waldorf, heckling the shoddy journalism of the past. But even their response to the media is one of amusement, or droll resignation-they stay far away from the outrage that has become the pattern of public life. (Indignation would imply certainty, and certainty would cut against the core of their project.) In one episode, the hosts discuss the Y2K-bug scare, in which people feared that the year 2000 would cause computer systems — and society at large — to crash. Hobbes tells Marshall that people often use the subject as a bludgeon. “When we’re talking about climate change, people will bring up, like, Oh, we were worried about Y2K, too, and that turned out to be a hoax,” he says. “And somebody else will respond to that by saying, No, Y2K is an example of us coming together and fixing a problem.” After he’s done, Marshall playfully clears her throat. Then she says, “And, since we have now had two years of doing this show, I am able to extrapolate that perhaps the answer is no one is right.”
If you haven’t listened to the show before and your interest is piqued after reading that, I’ll give you some of my favorite episodes:
- Their still-ongoing series about The OJ Simpson Trial is simply fantastic. My only criticism of the excellent OJ: Made in America documentary was that they didn’t spend enough time on violence against women and You’re Wrong About is very persuasive in arguing that it was a central issue in this case.
- The four-part DC Snipers series is just as good as the OJ series. At the time, this was painted as radical Islamic terrorism but the actual motivations of the killers had much more to do with toxic masculinity than religion.
- Why Didn’t Anyone Go to Prison for the Financial Crisis? This episode is noteworthy in that they don’t actually talk that much about the circumstances of the 2008 financial crisis, but after listening you totally know the answer to the title’s question. I could have listened to an expanded 2-3 part series of this one.
- More recently, the two-part Tuskegee Syphilis Study is worth a listen.
But I’ve only been listening to the show for a little over a year and haven’t gone back into the archive that much. Other episodes that have gotten a lot of love from fans include Tonya Harding, Kitty Genovese, and Terri Schiavo. So much more to explore!
A profile of Dolly Parton in the New Yorker. “In the partisan world of country music, Parton’s persona defies categorization, at once down to earth and soaring high.”
I don’t like the language here that school reopening fears were “overblown”. With high Covid rates country-wide, parents & staff were correct to be concerned. We should be happy we prepared and were wrong. I hope the success continues.
Bicycle Ballet
Watch as artistic cyclist Viola Brand does all sorts of seemingly impossible bike tricks that look like ballet, all while dodging a massive chandelier inside an ornate European castle.
See also bicycle acrobat Lilly Yokoi performing some similar tricks back in 1965.
No, wearing a mask doesn’t make you sicker. So why do some people say that it does?
The Spell Checkers Agenda
The piece above is part of a series called Pluralism by artist Deborah Roberts — it’s a collage of dozens of Black names marked as misspelled by Microsoft Word’s built-in spell checker. I don’t know about you, but this makes me think about the neutrality of technology, how software is built, who builds it, and for whom it is designed.
I found this via Seeing Black Futures by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew, which is adapted from their forthcoming book, Black Futures. You can check out more of Roberts’ work on her website or on Instagram.
Edward Tufte’s New Book: Seeing with Fresh Eyes
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte has published four books on the art and science of displaying information, including the seminal The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983. To that set, he now adds a fifth book: Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth. I couldn’t find a description of the book, but the website lists the table of contents and shows a few of the page layouts.
His previous four books are some of my favorites about design. You can only order Seeing with Fresh Eyes direct from his site, which says the book is shipping in mid-October. (thx, dewayne)
Socials & More