January 5, 2022
Should I Just Get Omicron Over With?
If you’re vaccinated, an infection might not make you super sick, but don’t count on it making you super immune, either. “The amount of heterogeneity in people’s immune responses is just incredible,” Taia Wang, an immunologist at Stanford, told me. Some recently infected people might experience only a modest bump in protection—which might not be enough to meaningfully stave off another infection in the not-so-distant future. Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute, in South Africa, told me that he suspects the post-breakthrough luster may dissipate within weeks, as antibody levels naturally fall. There’s also no telling how well Omicron-specific protection—should it show up, and persist—would shield us against the next variant, or the next. The arithmetic of vaccine + vaccine + vaccine + infection just isn’t very satisfying. That last component is always essentially an unknown quantity, with an unknown shelf life, and no equation we’ve come up with—no combo of primary vaccines, booster shots, and variants—adds up to being done with COVID forever.
"Do not, my friends, resist the Toyota Camry."
Seat Safety Switch posts slightly askew short fiction primarily about the joys and trials of owning terrible cars; and has posted something most days for the past six years or so.
“how we arrived at today’s view of our world”
A Century of Science is a website by Science News, where they delve into their vast archive of scientific news articles to present an overview of major developments in science over the last hundred years. Among the subjects covered are plate tectonics, by Carolyn Gramling, epidemics, by Aimee Cunningham, and worlds outside our solar system, by Lisa Grossman. But that is only a sampling of what’s on offer. You can also explore the articles through a timeline and the categories language, new areas of research, and unsung characters.
One does not simply walk brick into mortar
Where Are The Robotic Bricklayers? and more generally, why did agriculture mechanize and not construction? (tl;dr? how about some mechanical harvester videos: grape, citrus, carrot, potato, olive, onion)
Mystenous keming
The perpetrator of a mysterious phishing scam targeting unpublished manuscripts by authors including Margaret Atwood and Ethan Hawke has been arrested by the FBI (NYT): Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old rights coordinator for a major international publisher in London (previously)
The Blue Tit Nest Box Cam of Loughborough, UK.
The blue tits make a family, over ~80 days. (tw: baby birds die a natural death, non-violently.)
From empty nest to first egg in less than 8 minutes.
First egg hatching to chicks in 23 minutes. Here is the same thing in 21 minutes, without the upsetting parts.
Want to see all the details, every day? More inside! [more inside]
From empty nest to first egg in less than 8 minutes.
First egg hatching to chicks in 23 minutes. Here is the same thing in 21 minutes, without the upsetting parts.
Want to see all the details, every day? More inside! [more inside]
Bad “roommates” aren’t the problem.
Olúfémi O. Táíwò writes about the privilege of being-in-the-room for The Philosopher. (Likely related the soon to be published book, Elite Capture.)
The female gaze: 100 overlooked films directed by women
The British Film Institute has compiled a list of 100 overlooked films directed by women: "In this list we aim to write women back into film history by championing 100 female-directed hidden gems that have been forgotten or unfairly overlooked – with contributions from Jane Campion, Greta Gerwig, Claire Denis, Isabelle Huppert, Agnès Varda, Tilda Swinton, our regular contributors listed below and many more special guests."
Look at the quality of this 3D animation
"hey what's going on?" we're covering DMB "oh heck yes"
"These fringe beliefs... are no longer confined to the fringe"
One year later, a more complete picture of the January 6th rioters has been uncovered by detailed research into 700 arrestees. "[O]over half of those who have been arrested are business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.... 52 percent are coming from counties that Biden won in the 2020 election.... The No. 1 feature of the county sending insurrectionists, aside from simply the size of the population overall, is that these are the counties losing the most white population in the United States.... When you ask questions about their belief in “the great replacement,” you see that that is head and shoulders the No. 1 belief that’s driving the difference between being in the 21 million versus being in the rest of the body politic." [SLSlate]
Queer fiction for 2022
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