Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
The Pfizer vaccine is being distributed in vials that each contain 5 doses’ worth. Or rather, at *least* 5 doses, to account for spills. Official guidance is now to go ahead and use the 6th (or even 7th!) dose in a vial if there’s enough left.
I’m reminded of the feeling when I got a 25th or 26th photo on a roll of film.
Incredible image of Orion seen between sequoia trees
A movie critic looks at the titles of 26 new holiday TV movies and makes up silly plot summaries to fit.
End of an era.
The 57-year-old Arecibo radio telescope, damaged by storms and snapped cables, and already set to be decommissioned, has collapsed before it could be dismantled.
Fortunately, no one seems to have been injured.
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico collapses as engineers feared
The telescope’s 900-ton platform came crashing down overnight
This is cool: recycling discarded PPE into plastic bricks for construction.
“First, the PPE material from body coverings, masks and head caps is isolated for three days. Then Desai’s team of 20 employees sanitizes the fabric and uses a machine to shred it before sanitizing it again. Next it is mixed with 47 percent paper sludge and a binding agent and pressed by hand into various molds. Each brick weighs around 3 pounds and costs about 4 cents.”
The pandemic is generating tons of discarded PPE. This entrepreneur is turning them into bricks.
Interesting read on how the original cookie specs anticipated and tried to block tracking abuses, and how ad companies worked around it to create the privacy mess we have today.
The Original Cookie specification from 1997 was GDPR compliant
From the same era as radium watches 😱
When X-Rays Were All the Rage, a Trip to the Shoe Store Was Dangerously Illuminating – IEEE Spectrum
I love how I’ve seen opinion pieces titled both
“The election has actually been the most normal thing about 2020”
and
“Stop pretending anything about this election is normal”
Covid measures metaphor: Think of each measure (masks, distance, limiting crowds, ventilation, etc.) as a slice of Swiss cheese. Sure, there are holes in each slice, but you stack them together and they cover each other’s gaps.
A Swiss cheese approach to pandemic safety
Also, a nice visual display of how coronavirus spreads in indoor scenarios and how different actions reduce the risk.
A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air
A Metro train in Rotterdam overshot the end of its track, but caught on a giant whale tail sculpture instead of falling 30 feet to the ground. No passengers were onboard, and the driver escaped unharmed. Now they have to figure out how to get the train down safely.
The sculpture, incidentally, is called “Saved by the Whale’s Tale.”
Saved by the whale: Runaway train caught by fateful sculpture
Wow, they’re apparently spamming their drivers, too.
I’m guessing no one thought they’d be writing this headline with the word “another” in it: “LAX reports another sighting of person wearing jet pack”
Not as close to the airport this time, but seriously, WTF, 2020?
Apparently Uber has been spamming its users’ phone app notifications to promote the ballot proposition they co-sponsored to overrule the law that requires them to actually provide benefits to their drivers instead of hiding behind “Oh, they’re independent contractors, not employees, we don’t have to provide anything.”
Gee, that’s encouraging…
T2 security chip on Macs can be hacked to plant malware; cannot be patched
Speculation that the T2 security chip on modern Macs can be hacked has been confirmed by the team behind the research. A combination of two different exploits would give a hacker the ability to modify the behavior of the chip, and even plant malware like a keylogger inside it. All Macs sold since 2018…
Facebook suspends 200 indigenous and environmental activists’ accounts just before their online anti-pipeline protest, claims it was an automated mistake. Suuuuure…
Gee, nothing creepy about that:
“Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house”
😬
Wow. Comparing these numbers for an *entire continent* to the numbers in the US alone is amazing: “Slightly more than 34,000 deaths have been confirmed on the continent of 1.3 billion people….Africa is doing a lot of things right the rest of the world isn’t”
Wow. That’s a way to make a point.
Funny, it turns out that it’s possible to make *contextual* advertising work as well or even better than microtargeting.
In other words, tracking everyone all over the net *isn’t* actually required for the ad industry, or the sites that depend on it.
Wired: Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?
A Dutch public broadcaster got rid of targeted digital ads—and its revenues went way up.