Thanks to the effort of millions of people, we were close to a great success story. But because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that 100K’s of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.
Month: June 2020
Simplest Animal
Despite having the simplest bodies of all animals, placozoans carry many of the same genes as humans do, including numerous genes involved in building brains and other complex organs, like those in the digestive system. Placozoans contain far more genetic complexity than scientists ever guessed. “The question is, what are they doing with it?”
Supine Computing
Happily, I was prepared with some very comfortable and ergonomic ways to use the computer while laying down (supine).
80% not susceptible to COVID-19?
His models suggest that the stark difference between outcomes in the UK and Germany is not primarily an effect of different government actions (such as better testing and earlier lockdowns) but is better explained by intrinsic differences between the populations that make the “susceptible population” in Germany — the group that is vulnerable to Covid-19 — much smaller than in the UK.
Even within the UK, the numbers point to the same thing: that the “effective susceptible population” was never 100%, and was at most 50% and probably more like only 20% of the population. He emphasises that the analysis is not yet complete, but “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be 80%.”
Pandemic Oil Decline
Because the fossil fuel economy is so big, its decline could pose a significant threat to global financial stability. Fossil fuel companies have a combined market capitalisation of $18 trillion, 25% of the total value of global equity markets, and they account for $8 trillion of corporate bonds, more than 50% of the non-financial corporate bond market. Unlisted debt may be 4x greater.
Nextdoor Is Courting Cops
privatized security means your nimby asshole neighbors will do a lot of snitching. welcome to our grim meathook future.
Scifi inventions timeline
starting in 1634.
Solving online events
It’s often struck me that networking events are pretty inefficient and random. If you’re going to spend 1 hour or 2 in a room with 50 or 500 people, then you could take that as a purely social occasion and enjoy yourself. But if your purpose is to have professionally useful conversations, then what proportion of the people in the room can you talk to in 1 hour and how likely is it that they’ll be the right ones? Who’s there? I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners, as in the image at the top, so that you could look across the room and see who to talk to. (First Tuesday did something like this in 1999, with different colored badges.)
This might just be that I’m an introvert asking for a machine to manage human connections for me (and I am), but there is also clearly an opportunity to scale the networking that happens around events in ways that don’t rely on random chance and alcohol tolerance. A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes. In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA started online. Next, before lockdown, you would often have planned to schedule a non-urgent meeting with a partner or client or connection ‘when we’re in the same city’. That might be at some specific event, but it might also just be for some ad hoc trip – ‘next time I’m in the Bay Area’ or ‘next time you’re in New York’. In January most people would never actually have thought of making that a video call, but today every meeting is a video call, so all of those meetings can be a video call too, and can happen this week rather than ‘next time I fly to that city’ – or ‘at CES/NAB/MIPCOM’. In the last few months video calls have broken through that habit. I wonder what happens if we accelerate all of those meetings in that way.
On the unbundling of events, and how networking might be done better.
Biosensor scaling
The tests are performing well, but are still being optimized. The biggest hold back at the moment is to scale from mass production (10s of 1000s of chips per month) to extreme mass production (10s of millions and, with time, 100s of millions of chips per month).
2021-10-07: This seems to have happened:
Covid-10 has driven a change in diagnostics technology. Many companies debuted new technologies for at-home test kits under the FDA emergency use authorization last year. “It’s going to go beyond Covid-19 testing. Everything from cancer detection to STD testing and anything that would go through the historical lab chain. We’ve gotten a lot of inquiries for rapid test kits from various companies about new applications. It’s going to be a revolution for the diagnostics market. To go from a test that would take 24-48 hours and cost $150 to get processed, to something you can do in 15 minutes for $20 or $30.”
Roof Koreans
While most are primarily armed with “America’s Rifle,” the AR15, the weapons are as varied as the people, from pump-action shotguns to FN Scars and expensive NFA items (such as machine guns). Similarly, the level of personal equipment sophistication ranges from walkie talkies and flashlights to encrypted radios and night vision.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 