Interesting Links for 11-06-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Watch from Inside the Nest as a Pair of Kestrels Raise a Family

(tags:birds video )

2. The COVID Event Horizon (or: How many Covid infections can a person have?)

(tags:pandemic disease doom )

3. There are early signs of Covid infections trending back up the way

(tags:pandemic doom )

4. Jacob Rees-Mogg refuses to debate why he blocked bill that would have spared elephants from torture

(tags:elephants torture conservatives OhForFucksSake )

5. 40% of the UK is heading for fuel poverty

(tags:heating poverty electricity gas )

6. Green light for £21m Scottish plastic-to-hydrogen plant

(tags:plastic hydrogen energy )

7. The best book ever about computers is getting a second edition. I may need to update

(tags:books computers )

8. The Sriracha Shortage Is The Next Harbinger of Climate Change

(tags:globalwarming food )

9. Sex with your distant ancestors: bestiality or not?

(tags:bestiality sex prehistory evolution )

10. The perception of rhythm in language (read it out loud)

(tags:poetry language research awesome )

11. How Tesla tries to avoid its autopilot being on for crashes

(tags:Tesla automation OhForFucksSake cars driving )

Comments

[cmcmck]

2.'Between 7 and 23 m' is not exactly what you'd call accurate stats!

[channelpenguin]

2. Yup. That's describing what's been my cheery little view for the past couple of years. I am still taking it all pretty seriously, am hugely worried about societal long term effects and have been dismayed to see how those in charge have been doing .... not a lot. :-(. One post viral experience in my teens was more than enough. It was mild, but I feel that I *never* regained normal energy levels. I have always been subtly easier to wear out than most. Covid does much worse.

I say yet again what I've said since 2020 - knock 10 years off your expected lifespan. I can't say what to subtract from your "healthspan" .... Now cope emotionally with the fact that this applies to EVERYONE. All your friends and family.

[cmcmck]

Well, since I'm already 65! :op

[mellowtigger]

"But getting a thing that kills your T cells seems not infinitely scalable, right?"

It baffles me that I've had so little luck explaining even this one point (much less, all 5 points) to the world.

[channelpenguin]

Your site is awesome content. It does looks like something from the 90s, though. I don't care, but the world in general probably does. Almost nothing professional and even damned little amateur looks like that nowadays. It should not matter. Sadly, it does. I haven't seen much go viral that doesn't also *look* slick. A CSS makeover might not hurt?

Also, people don't want to hear. That's WAY more important than any styling issues. Like 10,000 times more!

Grrrrr

I love your site.

[mellowtigger]

Funny you should mention the 90s. I learned HTML on Notepad back when HTML2 was becoming the hot new tech, although these days I use xed on Linux Mint. It does helpful color coding on HTML docs. I still write it all "by hand", so I'm sure I understand the tech. (You can View / Source to see badly written notes to myself and interested curiosity seekers.) It took my too many hours to figure out how to get image previews to work in Twitter and Facebook. And lots of playing around to get the layout to work as well (almost) on cell phone display as it does on widescreen computer screen.

I'd rather have a nicer interface to it, but I don't know how many more hours I'd have to pour into it. :D

[channelpenguin]

Best of luck! I'm 51. One grandmother died at my age, one at over 100. I have NO clue how I'll do!

[cmcmck]

In a sense, it's probably best that we CAN'T know!

[channelpenguin]

For me, I would disagree. If I knew, I would know when to stop worrying about money!

[qilora]

"7. The best book ever about computers is getting a second edition. I may need to update"

there is NO SUCH THING as a last edition.

[andrewducker]

Well, until humanity goes extinct.

[qilora]

AH! touché!

[qilora]

"9. Sex with your distant ancestors: bestiality or not?"

this makes "kissing cousins" suddenly pop into my mind... if you trace your genealogy back far enough, you will realize that you are technically related to most (if not all) of the people you have ever had sex with...

i MIGHT have escaped this when i had the lover from Sichuan....

as for the other Jews i have been with, ugh, talk about a small gene pool!

[andrewducker]

I've not dated any other Jews.

Three women from Northern Ireland, somehow, but no Jews.

[channelpenguin]

I did have one partner who practically everyone who didn't know thought was my brother...

When I did the famous genderswap photo app thing, I looked just like him (with a bad haircut).

(We had noticed the resemblance at the start and we thought it was hilarious).

[qilora]

me and my hubby have the same nose and mouth, and even his mother sees a resemblance between both of us...

but take a look at our picture, i DOUBT we are closely related ;D

[andrewducker]

You could be twins!

[cmcmck]

I managed the famous genderswap back in the seventies without the aid of a photo app! :o)

Wonder how I'd look on that app?

[cmcmck]

One Guy from Nigeria and another from Zimbabwe then a fellow English type before I fetched up marrying a Scot, so I suspect I'm probably safe although I DO have Scottish ancestry myself! :o)

[qilora]

let's face it, the mother of ALL of us is Eve from south-east Africa – no escaping it.

[cmcmck]

True that! Or perhaps Lucy, also from Africa. :o)

[qilora]

haha ;)
oooh, i bet you that she is the same person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

[dewline]

2. "It is now no longer in question that our collective disinterest in doing the most bare minimum to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus pandemic is perpetuating mass disablement."

4. Of course he won't debate why he did this.

[channelpenguin]

2. ...and the resulting poverty, since support for the long term sick in UK is shocking (Europe prob not better, US ... well, poverty ++ due to medical debt). 2 PLUS 5 will be a perfect storm.

Irony in that in order to keep making profits by getting the workers back to work, the capitalists will likely have to deal with labour shortages ... long term. Logically, that should drive up wages, but I expect "you're faking it - get back to work you lazy peasants" rhetoric to wind up a few notches instead, and some sort of horrible force exerted to try to *make* sick people work and make the rest accept below-living-wage pay.

[armiphlage]

6. The plastic-to-hydrogen plant is interesting. It's easy to turn plastic into hydrogen (same way Victorian-era gas plants turned coal into town gas, then run your producer gas past hot iron plates and separate it out). Dealing with the petcoke, tars, acids (i.e. HCl from vinyl), and brominated phenols from fire retardants is the hard part. Depending on local regulations, it may be cheaper to landfill the relatively inert plastic than to safely store the hazardous waste products.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, hopefully they have methods for dealing with all of that. Fingers crossed they can make it work cost effectively.

(Personally I'd be fine with it all being buried where it can't do any harm)

[danieldwilliam]

I suspect they might incinerate the waste products at very high temperature to power the plant.