onfocus

"A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential."

AI lacks nerve is a fantastic way to put it. [via om]

I'm trying out umami for visitor stats on my site and so far it's easy to install (yay, Docker all the things!) and looks great.

For all your salacious guitar photography needs.

"Even after decades of research, the SETI community has yet to find evidence of aliens, probably for the same reason that extraterrestrial beings, should they exist, would be unlikely to visit our planet—the space between stars, let alone galaxies, is unfathomably vast…[Wright] sees no problem with the desire to better understand our airspace and investigate unexplained phenomena, “but why drag astronomers into it?”"

Spoilsports.

"Bipartisan legislation to establish an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has failed in the Senate, as Republicans staged their first filibuster since President Biden took office to block the plan."

We have a party complicit with a crime. This is like asking defendants to help organize their trial. Of course they derail it at the first opportunity. Democrats need to get past the idea that there are two parties operating in good faith and work to fix this environment on their own.

"I’m seeing probably the worst combination of conditions in my lifetime,” said Derrick DeGroot, a county commissioner in southern Oregon’s Klamath County. “We have an enormous fuel load in the forests, and we are looking at a drought unlike we’ve seen probably in the last 115 years.” Asked how worried he is about the 2021 fire season, DeGroot said: “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m a 12. Nothing looks good."

Yikes.

"Think strategically about how you want to allocate your attention. Many of the worst people on the Internet wake up every morning to hijack your attention. They want to use your outrage to build their brand and amass political power. Denying them the engagement they so desperately crave is how we fight back against the politics of 'owning the libs.'"

Trolling works. I appreciate the appeal here but I believe this approach takes the pressure off of platforms. Twitter and Facebook et al should be improving and enforcing their policies to stop disinformation. Sure, we can always do better as individuals, but the people who run large social media platforms have been mostly absent.

"That’s why we have to disentangle severe disease from symptomatic disease from asymptomatic acquisition and PCR positivity. And those are very, very different pieces. Unfortunately, again, we’ve had no nuance in our overall discussion at the national level, and it has really conflated all of those. We’re using the same word for all of those different things, and and that’s a really bad idea because it leads to fear and concern and confusion."

This interview with an epidemiologist explains the confusing Yankees post-vaccine positive tests.

"Google has been pushing sites to use AMP for years and continues to recommend it as “the majority of the AMP pages achieve great page experiences”. But for websites that are optimized for speed, their AMP pages are often slower than the regular pages."

Very happy to see this.

"Now that we have safe, effective vaccines, we can give people immunity without causing dangerous disease. That puts us into a global race against the virus. The more people who see the vaccine before they see SARS-CoV-2, the fewer severe cases, long-term health problems, and deaths. Faster worldwide rollout will save lives. It really is that simple."

A great explanation of why it's the novelty of the coronavirus that makes it deadly and explains some of its seemingly unique properties.

"Many of the 12, he said, have been spreading scientifically disproven medical claims and conspiracies for years. Which provokes the question: Why have social media platforms only recently begun cracking down on their falsehoods?"

It’s much easier to poison the information well than we realize because social media platforms don’t have an incentive to fix it. Poisoned water might even bring people to the well more often.

"Only when we are 0 percent busy can we step back and look at the bigger picture of what we’re doing. Slack allows us to think ahead. To consider whether we’re on the right trajectory. To contemplate unseen problems. To mull over information. To decide if we’re making the right trade-offs."

How inefficiency can be good, actually.

"The way I’ve framed the thought experiment in recent conversations is this: Imagine, tomorrow, an alien craft crashed down in Oregon. There are no life-forms in it. It’s effectively a drone. But it’s undeniably extraterrestrial in origin. So we are faced with the knowledge that we’re not alone, that we are perhaps being watched, and we have no way to make contact. How does that change human culture and society?"

This scenario is a little too specific. I'm in Oregon and now I'm worried. What does Ezra Klein know?

"The company paid the hefty ransom in untraceable cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, underscoring the immense pressure faced by the Georgia-based operator to get gasoline and jet fuel flowing again to major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, those people said. A third person familiar with the situation said U.S. government officials are aware that Colonial made the payment."

Facepalm. This should really help stem the tide of infrastructure attacks. We get a gas panic and the criminals get #!?*coin. At least the perpetrators can't buy Teslas with it.

"In the meantime, those who are already vaccinated can help speed up the process by encouraging their friends, family, and peers to get the shot. Surveys consistently show that around 1 in 3 unvaccinated people are waiting for others around them to get vaccinated first before they do so. Sharing vaccination stories, then, could give people the push they need."

I just want to share that I got the vaccine (twice!) and it was worth the minor inconvenience to help get everyone out of this pandemic. The inconvenience is nothing compared to over a year of lockdown life. We’re very lucky to have easy access to vaccines here in the US—we can do this!

"The investment bank calculated that a $1bn investment in bitcoin would produce the same carbon emissions as the annual output of 1.2m cars due to energy usage associated with bitcoin."

It's the opposite of buying carbon offsets.

In addition to Covid-19 transmission that takes place directly in schools, researchers also attributed the increase to “spillover” factors like parents being able to do more outside of the house if their kids are in school, and school reopenings sending an “incorrect signal” that “normal activities are safe again” to the broader community.

Seems obvious, but good to see a study that confirms this because there's so much denial about schools playing a role in spreading covid.

We're talking about a guy who received one complaint from a student who came to his office to talk to him, and then he himself voluntarily canceled the course. He took his ball and went home. And yet we're supposed to be like, “All of these kids today, they're so over-sensitive”.

Fantastic conversation that connects 90s political correctness discourse with cancel culture discourse. They show how flimsy moral panic stories were fabricated, used as evidence of liberal overreach, and repeated ad nauseam.

As a 28-year-old, he didn't feel in any particular danger, but he finally decided he should start looking for a Covid-19 vaccination clinic this week. Then he heard the magic words.

‘Free beer’, he said.

Heart these incentive stories. More free beer everywhere, please!

"The press needs to start taking this even more seriously than it does now. Every elected Republican who has played footsie with the Big Lie should have to defend that record before they can speak on any other topic. They can’t be allowed to dodge."

Dan Rather on The Big Lie reminding us that we’re still in a dangerous moment in the country.

"The mRNA platform used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can be readily tweaked, enabling the companies to produce newer versions within weeks. Moderna began modifying its vaccine to combat the variant identified in South Africa, after reports emerged that the existing vaccines are slightly less effective against that variant."

I am happy to sign up for these Moderna service packs.

"After all the build-up, the actual vaccination was a bit of an anticlimax. It was over in seconds."

Fun story from Australia about spontaneously deciding to get vaccinated. I’d like to see hundreds of variations on this here in the US. I mean, why are people waking up and deciding to get vaccinated that day?! Please figure that out, media. What is motivating them? Are they happy with their snap decision? What unexpected niche groups have done this? What are some unusual clinic locations and the interesting things people get to see there?

It’s the only vaccine decision story I want to read.

"The Lomax Digital Archive provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948)."

Fascinating folk music archive to wander through.

"The station has stuck to its pledge in its day-to-day coverage ever since, by simply and without fanfare including boilerplate language about how lawmakers conducted themselves during the attempts to overturn the election whenever they are mentioned in the course of regular news coverage."

Daily journalism with a memory is rare.