October 24, 2019
One more to go.
WHO just declared another polio virus strain eradicated. For polio to be fully eradicated, all three wild polio strains — types 1, 2, and 3 — need to stop circulating. The three strains all cause the same horrible symptoms, including paralysis and death, but are virologically distinct.
Type 2 was eradicated back in 2015; the last case of type 3 polio surfaced in northern Nigeria in 2012 and the virus hasn’t been seen since. A poliovirus can be considered eradicated if it hasn’t been detected for three years.
“[The eradication of type 3 polio] is a significant achievement that should reinvigorate the eradication process and provides motivation for the final step — the eradication of wild poliovirus type 1,” said David Salisbury, chair of the independent Global Commission for the Certification of Poliomyelitis Eradication, in a statement Thursday.
Today, only type 1 remains at large — in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If it’s eradicated, polio will join smallpox as the only two human scourges wiped off the face of the planet. (A third disease that’s been eradicated, rinderpest, is spread mainly in cattle.) And today’s news is a step in that right direction.
CPU of a computer does not contain: Special Register Group
The Honeywell 800, an obscure 1959 computer, has infected the definition of CPU for 60 years with the irrelevant phrase “Special Register Group.” Ken Shirriff (Previously restoring a Xerox Alto) investigates.
Native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads
Eat your heart out: native water rats have worked out how to safely eat cane toads
Australia’s water rats, or Rakali, are one of Australia’s beautiful but lesser-known native rodents. And these intelligent, semi-aquatic rats have revealed another talent: they are one of the only Australian mammals to safely eat toxic cane toads... The rats, which can grow to over 1kg, are the only mammal found to specifically target large toads, neatly dissecting the toads to eat their hearts and livers while avoiding the poisonous skin and glands.[more inside]
Christians (actually) hiding secret messages on vinyl records!
"35 years ago a Christian rock band encoded a Commodore 64 program on a vinyl album, and this YouTuber managed to retrieve and run it." Robin Harbron runs the 8 Bit Show and Tell YouTube channel and has a lot of Commodore 64 (and 128) videos. This one is his latest.
PrEP+
A New, Ever-Complicated Era of Frank Ocean Is Upon Us [Vulture] “Is Frank Ocean circling album mode again? In the last five days, the Blonded team rolled out a new party, a new radio mix, a new single, a bounce remix of Blonde’s “Nights,” [Soundcloud] and more. Co-produced by German house DJ Boys Noize, Ocean’s new “DHL” [YouTube] is a psychedelic floss track rooted in the cryptic swag rap of 2016’s Endless. The lyrics range from devilishly conceited (“Niggas think it’s new, it ain’t new, boy / Old files just turned two, yeah / Still sound like it’s coming soon, yeah”; “Independent juug, sellin’ records out the trunk / I’m already rich as fuck, so the product’s in the front”) to mysterious (“This ain’t no fuckin’ hopes and dreams prophecy / How’d he sleep? Faith is in the coffee bean”) to just plain horny (“Boy toy suck me like a Hoover / Boy toy ride me like an Uber”).” [more inside]
Your Favorite Bit May be Missing
The 20 defining comedy sketches of the past 20 years by Elahe Izadi in the Washington Post. [Content Warning: sketch comedy, exclusively from US TV, doesn't always age well, mostly SNL]
80×25
“Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I have been able to push this, but let’s get started. MeFi's own mhoye dives 2500 words deep into the history of terminal aspect ratios.
'We need it more snarly'
Scabby the Rat is a familiar feature on the sidewalks of New York (though its origins are in Chicago). But in recent months, the National Labor Relations Board is filing court briefs arguing that the rat constitutes "illegal picketing," reversing a long tradition under which the rat was recognized as protected free speech. Word on the street is: it's personal. What does Scabby think? Follow them on Twitter to keep up to date. [more inside]
Lýdia Machová on giving a TED talk and learning languages
Lýdia Machová talks about her experience doing a TED talk. And here's the TED talk in question, on learning languages.
What will go away next?
Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying
More than one exhibition professional contacted for this article speculated that Disney’s overall goal is to claim as many screens at a theater as possible for its newer titles, even if some of them are packing the house but others are selling just a handful of tickets per show. A former theater manager for a major chain, who asked not to be identified in this piece, says, “It seems short-sighted, you know? But they do it, I think, just to keep a Sony title out, to keep a Universal title out.” The Fox freeze out, he speculates, may be an extension of that tactic: Disney considers any screen that’s taken up by an older movie, even one that’s owned by Disney, to be a screen that could be showing the new Marvel or Star Wars title instead. Or showing Orangutans 4 to an audience of three.
More than one exhibition professional contacted for this article speculated that Disney’s overall goal is to claim as many screens at a theater as possible for its newer titles, even if some of them are packing the house but others are selling just a handful of tickets per show. A former theater manager for a major chain, who asked not to be identified in this piece, says, “It seems short-sighted, you know? But they do it, I think, just to keep a Sony title out, to keep a Universal title out.” The Fox freeze out, he speculates, may be an extension of that tactic: Disney considers any screen that’s taken up by an older movie, even one that’s owned by Disney, to be a screen that could be showing the new Marvel or Star Wars title instead. Or showing Orangutans 4 to an audience of three.
"Perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary"
"Given how long we’ve relied on the work of critics on film, music, food, and much else besides, as well as the ever-increasing relevance of cities in our lives, it’s time we recognised city criticism as its own distinct category of writing. But what is city criticism — or rather, what isn’t it?" 'A way of learning from everything': the rise of the city critic. [more inside]
How To Defeat Democracy
“Von Spakovsky, a member of the Trump-Kobach “election fraud” commission, urged GOP lawmakers to use citizenship data to redistrict state legislatures rather than count the total populations of districts, the latter being the constitutional standard for U.S. House districts and the longtime norm for states, as well. Most state legislatures, however, could redistrict state legislative lines based on citizen population, in most cases simply by passing a statute. (Recent revelations from the files of late GOP redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller demonstrated that Republicans attempted to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census to gather citizenship data for this purpose.) “All of you need to seriously consider switching to using citizen population to do redistricting,” he said, asserting that the concept of “one person, one vote” was just something that liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court “created … out of whole cloth.” How to Get Away With Gerrymandering (Slate) Rigging the Vote : The Intercept’s 3 part investigation into the network of lobbyists, lawmakers, and financiers that push partisan gerrymandering. Supreme Court tosses challenge to Republican-drawn Michigan electoral maps. (Reuters) ( previously )
"The brain does not accept that death is related to us."
Warning: this story is about death. You might want to click away now. That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise. A study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categorising death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people. (Ian Sample, The Guardian)
Financing freedom from fossil fuels
The next US administration has the chance to strike the greatest climate bargain of all time. For less than $3/ton of CO2 abated, the next US government could economically retire the nation’s coal plants and buy back the planet’s future – all while saving US consumers billions. (Jules Kortenhorst, RMI)
Eighteen cards, except just one
Button Shy Games is a small board game publisher, in many senses of the word "small" -- most of its games are "wallet games", consisting of just 18 cards (some require tokens and dice, which the buyer is expected to furnish). That wasn't minimalist enough for Button Shy publisher Jason Tagmire, who has started a monthly 18 Card Challenge, each of which puts an additional restriction on the 18-card rule. The first month's restriction: Create an 18 Card Game Where Every Card Is Identical. Tagmire and friends winnowed 228 entries down to 20 finalists (27-minute YouTube video), which show amazing ingenuity in how much information you can pack onto one standard-sized card -- or how little you need to. [more inside]
Ohio court offers human trafficking victims recovery, not punishment
Ten years ago, Judge Paul Herbert [...] noticed a trend. He was seeing lots of women who were abused and forced into sex work, but they were being treated like criminals. "The sheriff brings the next defendant out on the wall chained up," Herbert says, "and it's a woman and she's all beat up, she's looking exactly like one of these victims of domestic violence except she's in handcuffs and a jail suit. I look down at the file and it says prostitute." Herbert realized the law didn't recognize these women as victims of human trafficking. So he pitched the idea of a courtroom dedicated to recovery, not punishment. It's called CATCH Court, which stands for Changing Actions To Change Habits. A Pioneering Ohio Courtroom Helps Trafficking Victims Find Hope (NPR) [more inside]
The Probation Trap
Counting jail, prison, probation, and parole, Pennsylvania now has the nation’s second-highest rate of people under correctional control. We found a system that routinely punishes poverty, mental illness, and addiction. We met a woman who was jailed two months for failing to report to probation because she wasn’t permitted to bring her newborn child and couldn’t afford a babysitter. We met a man who was locked up because he didn’t have $227 to pay for a court-ordered drug evaluation.
As a result, some people remain under court control for years after being convicted of low-level crimes, resentenced two, three, four, or five times over for infractions including missing appointments, falling behind on payments, or testing positive for marijuana.
WeLose, IWin
The saga of WeWork in the past few months has been a strange and infuriating one, even for financial markets. Starting from a crazy August IPO filing which contained ten pages detailing how then CEO Adam Neumann was a risk to the company, to the collapse of the company's value and cancelation of the IPO, leading to Neumann's ouster as CEO. But Neumann has had the last laugh, as his position with "superowner" stock options giving him oversized control of WeWork has allowed him to force investor SoftBank to buy him out with a golden parachute worth $1.7B, at a time when WeWork doesn't even have the funds to perform necessary layoffs. [more inside]
An Interactive Documentary About Big Tech, AI, and You
Meet the new A.I. that knows you better than you know yourself: https://stealingurfeelin.gs [more inside]
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