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Entries for March 2021
Cryptocurrency Explained
I run across this immaculate one-line explanation of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency every few months and today I finally decided to save it here for posterity:
imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
*applause*
Evidence from Israel that their aggressive vaccination efforts are working. Look at that steep, steady drop in hospitalizations in the 60+ age group.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays Impromptu Cello Concert at Covid-19 Vaccination Clinic After Getting Second Dose
After getting his second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine at a clinic at Berkshire Community College, Yo-Yo Ma got out his cello and performed a 15-minute impromptu concert for the others folks at the clinic.
When Ma had first visited the clinic for his first shot, he did so quietly, taking in the surroundings, staff said. But brought his cello when he returned for the second shot.
Staff described how a hush fell across the clinic as Ma began to play. “It was so weird how peaceful the whole building became, just having a little bit of music in the background,” said Leslie Drager, the lead clinical manager for the vaccination site, according to the Washington Post.
Why is it weird? Music is amazing. I know you could never get such a “frivolous” spending measure through an American deliberative body these days, but how awesome would it be for the government to commission out-of-work musicians to play at vaccination clinics? Ok maybe you couldn’t have anyone sing and the brass & woodwinds would probably have to sit this one out, but you could have strings, guitars, percussion, pianos, DJs, etc. there to play some relaxing, uplifting, or energetic music, according to local custom & culture. Bring back the WPA!
It’s Been 23 Years
On March 14, 1998, I started writing here and, aside from a month or two here and there, never stopped. Things just kinda got out of hand, I guess. *shrug* I keep thinking that at some point, someone is going to inform me that vaudeville is over and yank me off stage with a hook, but until then you’re stuck with me. Thanks everyone for reading — I know from past emails that some of you have been following along since the beginning.
While I have you, two things:
1) After several months of inactivity, the Noticing newsletter has relaunched as a weekly recap of this here website — it’s got a new design too. You can subscribe here or read the latest issue with the new look.
2) The newsletter and kottke.org are completely free for everyone to read, thanks to financial support from readers like you. If you’d like to support this small corner of an increasingly paywalled web, please consider investing in a kottke.org membership. Thanks!
How to Operate an Airport in Antarctica
This video and blog post look at the challenges of building and maintaining a 3000-meter ice runway in Antarctica. It bears some resemblance to grooming ski slopes and maintaining ice rinks.
Once the snow is removed, the runway is inspected for cracks, pits, or any other deficiencies that would prevent a safe landing. These are repaired by crews with a mixture of cold water, ice chips, and snow that is poured on, allowed to harden, and then smoothed over.
Finally, two snow groomers with tillers grind a small layer of ice to create a top layer of crushed snow and ice that gives the runway the necessary friction for aircraft to operate. Lidström points out that equipment at Troll isn’t necessarily purpose built, ‘These are the same machines that you see on ski slopes, but with a tiller grinder attached.’
There’s even a small terminal with bathrooms and wifi, amenities which aren’t available at all Antarctic airfields.
How Were the Covid-19 Vaccines Developed So Quickly?
According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, among those people who said they probably or definitely won’t get a Covid-19 vaccine, the top two reasons given were “concern about side effects” and “the vaccines were developed and tested too quickly”. For our purposes here, I’m going to ignore the first concern — the data is pretty conclusive that, on average, the vaccine side effects are minimal when compared to the effects of actually contracting Covid-19 — and focus on the quick development timeline. If you’re among those who are apprehensive about the unprecedented speed at which the world’s governments and scientific community mobilized to create several effective Covid-19 vaccines, I hope the following will help you make a good decision.
In reading a bunch of different resources (linked below throughout), I identified six main reasons why the Covid-19 vaccines were developed so quickly compared to past efforts.
1. The need was urgent. Covid-19 changed the entire world in a very short span of time and it was evident in the absence of an effective vaccine, tens of millions more people would unnecessarily die and/or suffer and the rest of us would be living in fear of disease and death. This urgency drove several of the other factors here: the availability of funding, resources, and collaboration.
2. Funding & focus. Companies and governments threw billions and billions of dollars at this. Companies, research centers, and scientists dropped other stuff they were working on to study SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19. Governments prioritized regulatory approval for trials, etc. From a thread by Dr. Kat Arney:
Relatively few in the scientific, pharma & policy worlds care about vaccines compared w/ drugs. Most vaccine programmes are underfunded as they’re perceived as not profitable, only relevant to LMICs, & have few research groups/companies working on them. Getting funding & research capacity for vax usually takes months/years. COVID-19 vaccine was a massive global research effort w/ $millions for multiple groups/projects in weeks. Years of funding cycles & lab research happened in months, huge amount of time saved.
And from a presentation given by Dr. Anthony Fauci:
We proceeded at risk. So people say, what do you mean by “at risk”? Are you risking safety? Are you risking scientific integrity? No, it’s a financial risk. In other words, you invest in things that cost a lot of money before you even have an answer to whether the prior step worked.
And a classic example is the production of large scale amounts of clinical lots, which have been produced and are being produced before you even know that your vaccine works, so that you have hundreds of millions of doses ready to go. If the vaccine works, you’ve saved many months. If the vaccine doesn’t, you lost a lot of money, to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. But it was felt it was worth that investment and that risk financially in order to save time.
More on that here. As Dr. Faheem Younus put it, “We didn’t cut corners; we cut the crap!”
3. Availability of volunteers & high incidence of disease. In order to statistically show the vaccine works, you need people to test it on and you need enough people in the studies to get sick. Kat Arney again:
To show vax effectiveness, you need a high number of people with the disease in the population — big problem with the Ebola vax is that it took so long to develop the outbreak was over & the couldn’t get enough numbers to conclusively show it worked
We’re in a global pandemic — the vaccine is being tested in places with very high community prevalence, so trials can hit pre-determined statistical milestones very quickly. Huge amount of time saved.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world volunteered to test these vaccines — without them, we’d be months and years away from a safe, tested vaccine.
4. International & corporate collaboration. Countries and companies shared research, data, and resources because the primary goal was to develop effective vaccines and save lives, not make a profit. For instance, Chinese researchers posted the genome for SARS-CoV-2 on January 11, 2020, allowing the effort to develop a vaccine to begin.
5. We knew a lot about coronaviruses from previous work. This wasn’t an effort that started from scratch. From Bloomberg:
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines may seem brand new, but they are the culmination of more than a decade of work that started during the SARS and MERS outbreaks. Vaccines were even developed against MERS but were never needed. Nevertheless, scientists learned a huge amount from working with that virus, which is from the same family as the one that causes Covid-19.
From Dr. Habibul Ahsan:
Really, most of the vaccine platform development work is already done. You just have to do the remaining part, which is adding the right viral antigens to the already-proven platform and making sure it’s safe and effective in humans. Even in just the last five to 10 years, we’ve made big leaps in developing new kinds of vaccine platforms like those being tested for SARS-CoV-2.
6. Scientific and technological capability. Ok, we know a lot about coronaviruses but humanity’s general scientific and technological abilities have never been stronger or more powerful. Again from Bloomberg:
Remember also that technology has evolved rapidly — for example, we’re now about able to sequence the genomes of every mutant version of the virus in less than a day. That helps in speeding up vaccine development.
Dr. Mark Toshner sums up the effort:
However we have collectively now shown that with money no object, some clever and highly motivated people, an unlimited pool of altruistic volunteers, and sensible regulators that we can do amazing things.
Further reading: The lightning-fast quest for COVID vaccines — and what it means for other diseases (Nature), How were researchers able to develop COVID-19 vaccines so quickly? (Univ. of Chicago), The race for the COVID-19 vaccine: A story of innovation and collaboration (Carnall Farrar), COVID-19 vaccines: development, evaluation, approval and monitoring (European Medicines Agency).
The Age of Data – Embracing Algorithms in Art & Design. “An anthology of genre-redefining data-based art. Featuring 40 artists, designers and studios.”
Novovax announced that their Covid-19 vaccine is “96% effective in preventing cases caused by the original version of the coronavirus” (phase 3 results). Right up there w/ Pfizer and Moderna. Also 86% effective against B.1.1.7.
Masks of the World
This is an excerpt from a short film called Beyond Noh that cycles through 3,475 different masks from around the world — ceremonial masks, costume masks, gas masks, N95 masks, catcher’s masks, etc. The film is by Patrick Smith (I featured his video Gun Shop a few years back), who told Colossal:
To me, masks are an interesting way to view humanity. It seems to me that every culture in the history of the world has participated in some form of mask making, whether it’s for performance, ritual, protest, or utility.
Compilations like this will always remind me of this clip art movie from 2006 and, of course, Noah Kalina’s Everyday. The full film is available to Smith’s paying members on YouTube. (via colossal)
What’s this, a fresh new design for the Noticing newsletter? You can check it out right here.
Old-school NYC diner Eisenberg’s Sandwich Shop has shuttered. Very sad – I used to work nearby and got takeout lunch there at least once a week.
Modern Trailers for Classic Films
In order to promote the classic films available on the streaming service, HBO Max has created a selection of modern-style movie trailers for them. The re-trailered flicks include Dog Day Afternoon, Boogie Nights, Alien, Casablanca, and The Exorcist.
BTW, because of its Turner Classic Movies section, HBO Max seems like the best big streaming service for watching good, classic movies. It’s become nearly impossible to find anything on Netflix made before 2000, but on HBO Max right now you can watch Rocky, A Clockwork Orange, The 400 Blows, Seven Samurai, THX 1138, Malcolm X, 8 1/2, Solaris, Citizen Kane, Grey Gardens, North By Northwest, Rashomon, Tokyo Story, and dozens of others. (via open culture)
One Year Ago Today
For reasons I do not quite understand, I just spent the better part of an hour reading two oral histories of March 11, 2020, aka the day the United States finally took the Covid-19 pandemic seriously — this one from Wired published back in April 2020 and this one published today by Buzzfeed News. You may not want to relive that day and everything it’s come to signify, but apparently I did. (See also a Twitter search for “year ago today” and Covid One Year Ago.)
Several things happened on 3/11 that made Americans and their government finally realize that our lives were about to significantly change: the stock market plunged, the NBA suspended its season after a player tested positive, the WHO called it a “pandemic” for the first time, Trump addressed the nation and announced a ban on travel from Europe, and Tom Hanks & Rita Wilson announced that they had tested positive for the virus.
Claudia Sahm: Frankly, the night before, the 10th, I was in a bit of a panic because I was worried that I was overreacting. It was like gaslighting the way Trump and Republicans and Fox News would talk about the coronavirus. Like, “We’ve got this one, it’s not a big deal. It’s like the common flu.” Listening to that, I was saying, “We need to get going.” Congress needs to do real things. That morning, I stood in front of the House Democrats at the minority whip breakfast and told them what they needed to do with a relief package. I told the House Democrats that the $8.3 billion package that they had passed the week before was an insult.
DANIEL MERTZLUFFT, director of Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, who was then in a Broadway theater audience: In the three hours I was seeing Company, the world had changed. I went to drinks after work with friends, one of whom is a business owner that works in theater marketing, and I remember him arriving at the bar and sort of realizing for the first time what it must have been like on the day the Great Depression started. What he said was, “This is not a month; this is going to be months. My business no longer exists. I have to fire my entire team.”
The Trump, Hanks, and NBA news all hit within a period of 30 minutes — I vividly remember being on Twitter and texting w/ friends as the news rolled in that evening. I’d stocked up on food & such during the last week in February and had been fully convinced the day before by this video on the exponential growth of epidemics that this was going to be a world-changing event, but the pace of events that evening was unprecedentedly dizzying. (via the morning news)
Sobering visualization of the 2.3 million Americans currently jailed or imprisoned. “The United States holds more people in jails and prisons than any other country by far, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of population.”
One year ago today, the reality of Covid-19 finally & dramatically hit the United States. On 3/11/2020, the Dow plummeted, the WHO officially called it a “pandemic”, the NBA suspended its season, and Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis.
Tina
Tina is an upcoming documentary film about music legend Tina Turner, featuring interviews with Angela Bassett, Oprah, Kurt Loder (who co-wrote the 1986 autobiography on which the movie is based), and Turner herself.
With a wealth of never-before-seen footage, audio tapes, personal photos, and new interviews, including with the singer herself, TINA presents an unvarnished and dynamic account of the life and career of music icon Tina Turner.
Everything changed when Tina began telling her story, a story of trauma and survival, that gave way to a rebirth as the record-breaking queen of rock ‘n’ roll. But behind closed doors, the singer struggled with the survivor narrative that meant her past was never fully behind her.
Tina will begin airing on HBO on March 27. A companion playlist of Turner’s music is available at Spotify.
Update: Cassie Da Costa reviewed Tina for Vanity Fair:
Her new interview in the film allows her to speak authoritatively on her own celebrity and personal life without having to revisit the sordid details of the abuse she experienced at the hands of Ike. And though it doesn’t shy away from the darkness held within her biography, Tina turns decidedly toward the light. The result is a film that shines, both in its passion for Turner’s talent and the depth and complexity of her character.
Research suggests that increasing the minimum wage could help lower suicide rates. “So many people who died by suicide weren’t just starving for therapeutic attention. They were starving.”
Lego is going to produce a set featuring Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night. It’s based on an idea contributed by Truman Cheng, who will receive a 1% royalty from all sales of the set.
Netflix to Air Documentary About the Last Blockbuster Video Store
Netflix was founded in 1997 as a DVD rental service. At the time, Blockbuster Video was a multi-billion dollar video rental behemoth, growing to over 9000 stores as recently as 2004. In 2000, Netflix offered to sell to Blockbuster for $50 million — Blockbuster declined. By 2011, Blockbuster was bankrupt and down to 2400 stores while Netflix had gone public and their streaming business was exploding. Today, Netflix has a market cap of $223 billion, is a member of the S&P 100, and will soon start showing The Last Blockbuster, a documentary about the very last Blockbuster video rental store in the world. Absolutely savage victory lap.
Make-Your-Own Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth from the 11th century that documents the events of the Norman conquest of England. Teacher @profannieoakley recently turned her art history students loose with an online make-your-own Bayeux Tapestry app and their results, as well as some shared by Twitter commenters, are pretty entertaining.
Vivid Images by Noe Alonzo
Digging this work from Noe Alonzo. The top image is from his Anime World project and the bottom from a collection of Blade Runner-esque images shot at night. His images are obviously heavily processed — he offers tutorials on his YouTube channel — but what photos aren’t? Very little comes out of the camera looking amazing, which was as true in Ansel Adams’ day as it is today. (thx, @thelastminute)
This study gave $500/mo in no-strings-attached cash to low-income folks for two years. After, recipients were happier, healthier, less anxious, and more likely to have a job. “The best way to get people out of poverty is just to get them out of poverty.”
Ballhaus, the Art of Basketball
The @ballhaus Instagram acct is pairing photos of basketball players with art. From top to bottom: Luka Dončić × Correggio, Obi Toppin × Myron, C.J. Miles × René Magritte. (via austin kleon)
The Bookshop: One of John Cleese’s Favorite Comedy Sketches
In 2014, John Cleese listed five of his favorite comedy sketches that he had written over the course of his career. Among them was one I’d never seen before but soon had me in stitches: The Bookshop.
I also watched another of the sketches he mentioned (The Cheese Shop) and it fell totally flat — Monty Python-style humor is very much a hit-or-miss thing for me, so YMMV. (via open culture)
In 1977, the “world’s last lost tourist”, bound for San Francisco from Germany, mistakenly got off the plane in Maine. “The rusted green bridge that links Bangor to neighboring Brewer was clearly not the Golden Gate, but Kreuz carried on regardless.”
The Winners of the 2020 World Nature Photography Awards
The World Nature Photography Awards have announced the winners of their 2020 competition. Thomas Vijayan’s photo of an orangutan (top) won the overall prize and I enjoyed the optical illusion created by Naomi Rose (bottom). You can see the rest of the winners in several different categories here. (via in focus)
How Looney Tunes & Other Classic Cartoons Helped Americans Become Musically Literate. “Who can hear Wagner without wanting to sing at the top of their lungs, ‘Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit, Kill da wabbit!’”
All the Sitcom References from WandaVision Explained
In this extensive video, The Take not only explains the themes and ending of WandaVision (spoilers, obvs) but walks through all of the sitcom tropes, references, and Easter eggs present in the show, from The Dick Van Dyke Show to the beeping Stark toaster commercial to Bewitched to Full House (Olsen sisters!) to The Office. Weirdly, they kinda glide right over perhaps my favorite trope referenced in the show: the recasting of the Pietro character a la Darrin in Bewitched and Aunt Viv in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
The video pairs well with this interview with WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer.
The first thing was the notion of, how do you do this? How do you take sitcoms and combine them with Wanda and Vision who, up to this point in the M.C.U., were such self-serious characters and dramatic characters with so much sadness surrounding them. They weren’t funny. What’s the synthesis? I’m a big fan of “Lost,” and I was very inspired by shows like “Russian Doll,” “Forever” and “Homecoming.” I relished the opportunity of a slow burn. It seemed like an exciting, sneak-attack way to have a bit of a social commentary and a very large story of character and grief.
I thought how they constructed the entire show was really fantastic — I loved every minute of it.
BirdCast: Real-Time Bird Migration Forecasts
Colorado State University and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have developed a system called BirdCast that uses machine learning & two decades of historical bird movement data to develop daily bird migration forecasts for the United States.
Bird migration forecasts show predicted nocturnal migration 3 hours after local sunset and are updated every 6 hours. These forecasts come from models trained on the last 23 years of bird movements in the atmosphere as detected by the US NEXRAD weather surveillance radar network. In these models we use the Global Forecasting System (GFS) to predict suitable conditions for migration occurring three hours after local sunset.
The map above is the migration forecast for tonight — overall, warmer temperatures and increased bird movement are predicted for the next week or two. They also maintain up-to-the hour records of migration activity detected by the US weather surveillance radar network; this was the activity early this morning at 3:10am ET:
If the current & predicted bird radar maps were a part of the weather report on the local news, I might start watching again.
Plots of 80s movies if their protagonists had been people of color. “Ferris attends school that day, and every other day, until he graduates high school as valedictorian, goes to Yale, and becomes a dermatologist.”
A Drone’s Eye View of a Bowling Alley
The very first sequence of this video is of the camera — presumably perched on a drone — dropping out of the sky, flying through the door of beloved Minneapolis institution Bryant Lake Bowl, and following a bowling ball down the lane…and it just keeps going from there. Great drone piloting, choreography, sound design, and execution of concept. (via @brianmcc)
Update: ILM visual effects artist Todd Vaziri added Star Wars sound effects to the original video. He links to a few other remixes in this thread (like this Naked Gun one).
There Are Days, a poem by Kate Baer. “How they climb and climb and climb and climb.”
A Dutch Timber Skyscraper
Architecture firm Studio Marco Vermeulen has designed a 38-story building to be situated in Eindhoven, Netherlands that’s partially constructed from cross-laminated timber. They’re calling it The Dutch Mountains. From Dezeen:
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) sourced from sustainably managed forests will be used for much of the building, which will be largely prefabricated and assembled on site.
The publicly-accessible interior lounge and winter garden on the lower levels will be wholly constructed using timber, while heavy loaded structural elements, including lift cores and tower floors, will be made from concrete.
“Although not visible in every place, the wood gives a tactile quality to the interior,” Studio Marco Vermeulen said.
Looking at the pictures, it’s a head-trip seeing wood used so overtly & prominently in a building of this scale. We’re used to wooden houses but not wooden skyscrapers. I’m a fan of the vibe here: sustainable, more organic shapes & materials, big spaces that feel like they are, even in some small way, part of nature instead of deliberately apart from it. (via moss & fog)
The pandemic travel pause has given some communities a chance to rethink tourism. “Tourism had become extractive and hurtful, with tourists coming here and taking, taking, taking, taking, without any reciprocation with locals.”
What the End of the Pandemic Looks Like
Stat’s Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell on the short-term, middle-term, and long-term future of the coronavirus in the US. The short-term outlook is dominated by vaccination & variants; some parts of the country will continue to be affected by outbreaks:
Conditions may be ripe for a better summer, however. Vaccine supplies should be flowing more freely, at least in the U.S.; the Biden administration now expects enough vaccine doses in hand for all adults by the end of May. With most vulnerable populations protected, there should be fewer hospitalizations and deaths. And with warmer weather, people can return to outdoor life.
Widespread transmission of the virus could be replaced by more sporadic and localized outbreaks. There’s also growing evidence that vaccines don’t just protect people from getting symptomatic Covid-19, but can reduce transmission.
And in the long-term, well, SARS-CoV-2 will be around for years and even decades to come:
Years from now, SARS-CoV-2 could join the ranks of OC43, 229E, NL63, and HKU1 — the four endemic, seasonal coronaviruses that cause a chunk of common colds every year. Essentially, our immune systems — primed by vaccines, boosters, and previous encounters with the coronavirus — will be ready to knock back SARS-2 when we see it again, potentially blocking an infection or leading to one that causes no symptoms or maybe just the sniffles.
It’s good to read stuff like this — it provides a basis to use when calibrating your optimism or pessimism for future activities and desires.
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