December 31
December 30
December 25
Reminder: after 20 years of work, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into orbit today. Liftoff is at about 7:20 AM ET; watch live here.
December 23
The tragedy of Johnson & Johnson's Covid vaccine. "The company was bested by one of the central facts of drug development: Biology is unfair, and, besides, you can't be smart enough to beat bad luck."
December 22
Today's Omicron update from @dr_kkjetelina. Some interesting info and guesses as to why cases in South Africa peaked so quickly. And: "Not nearly enough people have their boosters in the United States."
Been listening to Can You Feel It by The Jacksons recently. Even among a family of talented singers, this 1981 song really highlights just how amazing Michael Jackson's voice was; you'll need 0 guesses as to when he starts singing.
An unusual holiday-surge Covid indicator: a sharp increase in reviews of Yankee Candles complaining that they have no smell. This happened in 2020 too.
Walter Reed researchers say they're working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine that will protect against all Covid and SARS variants. Only at Phase 1 trials and very little detail here, but something to watch.
December 21
Blueprints of the James Webb Space Telescope. Not the full plans but cool nonetheless.
A demo of recreated scenes from the original Matrix movie rendered in real-time by Epic's Unreal Engine 5. It's stunning how good this looks – the actor closeups are almost unbelievably believable.
The Life of a Cherry Drying Pilot. TIL that cherry growers use helicopters to dry their cherries (to protect them from rot & splitting).
Patrick Radden Keefe: The Metropolitan Museum of Art will remove the Sackler name from seven of their exhibition spaces. A group of artists (Nan Goldin, Kara Walker, Ai Weiwei, etc.) finally forced their hand.
Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trial failed for kids aged 2-5 (but not for 6mo to under-2). Here's why and what happens now.
December 20
Video I thoroughly enjoyed watching the other day: Lionel Messi At Absolute Peak Of His Powers. He is the GOAT.
Finally! A millipede with 1000 actual legs has been discovered. "Eumillipes persephone, discovered deep underground in Australia, is the first millipede ever identified with more than 1,000 legs. The count actually comes to a whopping 1,306."
A CPU built entirely in Minecraft that's capable of running games like Tetris & Breakout and performing graph & fractal calculations. I love the aesthetics of the computer and its display.
My Parents Collect Cans for a Living. "It represents my family's strong values and their dreams for me of getting the opportunity to go to college and lead a stable life."
Why the US Is a Failed Democratic State by @lessig. "The self-governing republic works only if it expresses the will of the majority. But one party is now committed to minoritarian rule by any means."
December 17
Ezra Klein: We Will Look Back on This Age of Cruelty to Animals in Horror. "How we treat farm animals today will be seen, I believe, as a defining moral failing of our age."
"Fully vaccinated" = 3 shots. Get that third shot if you haven't and you're eligible. It's your best protection against Omicron.
This morning's Omicron update. 1 million US cases/day by 1st week of Jan (exceeding testing capacity). "If we continue this rate of spread...there is no modern day virus that has spread this fast and this far ever before."
December 16
88MPH: The Story of the DeLorean Time Machine, a feature-length documentary about the Back to the Future and the DeLorean used in the movie. The full documentary is available for free on YouTube.
An interesting list from Vogue of the 78 best documentaries of all time. Heavy focus on celebrity and culture but all solid picks.
A report from the 2021 National Funeral Directors Association International Convention & Expo. "Funeral directors, we're not the most popular kids at the party."
bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69. "I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love."
This is quite an obituary. "She also told us she came up with the name for Sunoco, and I choose to believe this, too. Yes, Renay lied a lot. But on the plus side, Renay didn't cook, she didn't clean, and she was lousy with money."
December 15
Burger Joint, a burger place with a dive bar vibe hidden behind a curtain in a fancy NYC hotel, has reopened. It had been closed due to the pandemic and the new owners of the hotel decided to keep it just the way it was.
A literary clock: each minute of the day is represented by a quote from a book. "...after that it was always ten minutes to five in the castle." Like a text version of Christian Marclay's The Clock.
Hockey sticks have curves. The visual signature of the Omicron variant is more like a bookend – straight up.
December 14
Continued great news about Pfizer's Covid pill (Paxlovid): "[it] retained its 89% efficacy at preventing hospitalization and death in the full results of a study of 2,246 high-risk patients". Pfizer is also confident about its effectiveness vs Omicron.
Omicron variant update from @erictopol, who has been an essential source of information for me throughout the pandemic. The third shot is looking essential & and the doubling rate seems quite high.
December 13
Fun holiday children's book: Hookers and Blow Save Christmas. "It's up to Hookers the tow truck and Blow the snowblower to make their way through the snow to save the day..."
Over 800,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the US. More than 450,000 of those deaths have occurred in 2021.
I am reading epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina's Omicron roundup every morning. She's sharing & contextualizing the latest scientific findings related to this significant variant.
Mayfield, Kentucky is reeling from the aftermath of an incredibly destructive tornado. Jim Finch drove 1.5 hours w/ his grill & a bunch of food to feed hungry folks. "Just figured I'd do what I could do."
We're Sorry, You Can't Join Our Street Gang Because You Don't Know Ballet. "If you can't do a toe touch, you're putting us all at risk."
Ok you've done your Spotify Wrapped for 2021 but do you have the guts to do @puddingviz's How Bad Is Your Streaming Music? "Our sophisticated A.I. judges your awful taste in music."
December 10
December 9
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December 3
I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict. @espiers on Justice Amy Coney Barrett's too-casual assertion that adoption is "an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant".
David R Chan has eaten at more than 8000 Chinese restaurants across the US. "My interest in the history of Chinese in the US led me to eat Chinese food and see what it was like to be Chinese in different parts of the country."
The escalating costs of being single in America. "We don't seem to like or respect single people and their choices."
Just sent out the latest issue of the @kottke newsletter. There's been so much interesting stuff on the site lately that it was hard to keep this short. A good way to catch up on things if you've been busy.
This is hilarious but can we just marvel for a moment at the camera work here. There's panning and zooming and the reindeer stayed bang in the middle of the frame the entire time. Respect.
December 2
Square has changed its name to Block. In a few years, they can go up another dimension with Tesseract.
How Gollum's performance was created for the LOTR movies. "That the end result is so believable, so deeply felt and human, is miraculous given the complicated, piecemeal nature of its construction."
The US finally has a plan for providing cheap, at-home rapid tests for Covid (yay!) and it involves people finding & buying their own tests and then getting reimbursed via their health insurance (whaaat a fucking joke).
An analysis of the most frequently used emoji in 2021. "Tears of Joy accounts for over 5% of all emoji use."
December 1
A man shoplifting ~$200-950 in goods from Walgreens got much more media coverage than Walgreens stealing $12 million in wages from their employees. Shoplifting is mostly a moral panic but corporate wage theft is an actual problem.
In the Western US, forests are being replaced by brush and dense grasses. Wildfires are burning the trees down and warming temperatures driven by climate change are preventing new trees from growing.
The majority-conservative Supreme Court is open to overturning Roe v. Wade (either in part or as a whole). "Should Roe be overturned, at least 20 states will immediately or in short order make almost all abortions unlawful." Fuck. This.
Ibram X. Kendi: One of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology is that anti-racist = anti-white. "White supremacists are mobilizing against an anti-white army that isn't mobilizing, that isn't coming, that isn't there."