Links that interest me and maybe you
Went out to Calgary for our annual trip to Becky’s company Christmas party, which her company thoughtfully pays for, and found that a winter storm followed by minus 15 Celsius had turned the city into Narnia.
Every inch of every branch on the leafless deciduous trees was outlined in frost, and all of the snow that had fallen was frozen in place. It was quite beautiful. Made me miss the place, even though it was frigid.
Continue reading “A trip to Narnia… er, Calgary”
From The Atlantic: “3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless. My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire).”
From the BBC: “On 10 September 1945 Lloyd Olsen and his wife Clara were killing chickens, on their farm in Fruita, Colorado. Olsen would decapitate the birds, his wife would clean them up. But one of the 40 or 50 animals that went under Olsen’s hatchet that day didn’t behave like the rest. “They got down to the end and had one who was still alive, up and walking around,” says the couple’s great-grandson, Troy Waters, himself a farmer in Fruita. The chicken kicked and ran, and didn’t stop. It was placed in an old apple box on the farm’s screened porch for the night, and when Lloyd Olsen woke the following morning, he stepped outside to see what had happened. Word spread around Fruita about the miraculous headless bird. The local paper dispatched a reporter to interview Olsen, and two weeks later a sideshow promoter called Hope Wade travelled nearly 300 miles from Salt Lake City, Utah. He had a simple proposition: take the chicken on to the sideshow circuit – they could make some money.”
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Continue reading “A firsthand account of what it’s like to be homeless in America”
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at The Torment Nexus about whether Bluesky could become the new Twitter, and whether that would be a good thing or not. Since then, the network has just continued to ramp up its growth — it now has more than 23 million members, up from 15 million when I wrote that first piece — and so I wanted to go a little bit deeper and look under the hood at how Bluesky actually works, and how that compares not just to something like Twitter or Threads but also to other social networks such as Mastodon that are often referred to as “federated” or “decentralized.” Before I do, I should note that I am not a programmer or social networking expert, and so it’s entirely possible that I may describe some of this inaccurately or just plain get things wrong and for that I apologize in advance. But I think the differences in how they are perceived versus how they actually work are important.
A network like Twitter or Threads is relatively easy to understand. There’s a company that owns everything (including the actual user accounts, as Elon Musk is arguing in a brief related to The Onion’s acquisition of InfoWars) and it controls who gets to post, what they get to say, where the messages go, and so on. If Meta or Musk want to make the network either unusable or actively hostile, or nuke your account and everything you’ve ever said and all the contacts you’ve made, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. This fits the definition of centralized pretty well. Yes, you can export your tweets etc., but it is difficult (but not impossible) to import them into some other network, and even if you do you lose any related content and connections.
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This structure makes it a relative no-brainer to use and understand, and I think that helps explain why Threads has more than 275 million accounts (according to Threads honcho Adam Mosseri, in November alone the network added the same number of accounts as Bluesky had in total). But having an account is one thing, and actually using it is another — you’ll notice that I said Threads has 275 million accounts rather than users, and that’s because, despite its size, the activity level on Threads seems to be significantly lower than on Bluesky. According to estimates from Similarweb, daily use on Bluesky hit 3.5 million recently, while on Threads it was just over 4 million, despite the fact that Threads has an order of magnitude more users than Bluesky does.
Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Is Bluesky really decentralized? It’s complicated”
From Vulture: “Airing as the final sketch of the Christopher Walken-hosted April 8, 2000, episode, “More Cowbell” has leaped from Studio 8H’s gold-plated diapers into cultural ubiquity. The phrase has even merited an entry into the dictionary. (Idiom, informal: “An extra quality that will make something or someone better.”) Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, Blue Öyster Cult’s co-founder and front man who wrote “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” for their 1976 album, Agents of Fortune, has managed to maintain a healthy relationship with the sketch, but he admits the fate could’ve been a lot different if he didn’t find the premise genuinely humorous. “It’s been a 25-year journey with the cowbell and riding that horse,” Buck Dharma explains. “I can’t complain about any of the history and what’s happened. It’s all good.”
From Associated Press: “Using drones and Google Earth imagery, archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old network of earthen canals in what’s now Belize. The findings were published Friday in Science Advances. “The aerial imagery was crucial to identify this really distinctive pattern of zigzag linear canals” running for several miles through wetlands, said study co-author Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire. The team then conducted digs in Belize’s Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The ancient fish canals, paired with holding ponds, were used to channel and catch freshwater species such as catfish. Barbed spearpoints found nearby may have been tied to sticks and used to spear fish, said co-author Marieka Brouwer Burg.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Blue Oyster Cult talks about that infamous SNL sketch”
From Sunday Long Read: “One, two, three deliveries of McDonald’s and Dunkin’ and Hardee’s and whatever else the app tells him to deliver and Ryan Nickerson is driving home having pocketed a whole $2.25 an order for his labor. Gas is $4.30 a gallon. He’s 37 and between jobs. Since he moved from Georgia to Florida, after it happened, work’s been hard to come by. Work’s been hard to keep, too, after it happened. Five years ago next week. He dreads the anniversary. The girl hit the front left bumper. And then she rolled beneath the back left tire. There’s still a scratch where she hit. He looks at it every day. For a long time he couldn’t bear to drive the thing, but what else could he do? He was behind on payments. He couldn’t afford to get rid of it. It has 150,000 miles on it now. It’s paid off. He can sell it but doesn’t want to. It’s as if she is still alive, still with him. Was she afraid? She was 10.”
From Carcinisation: “The current scientific consensus is that the placebo effect is a real healing effect operating through belief and suggestion. The evidence does not support this. In clinical trials of treatments, outcomes in placebo and no-treatment arms are similar, distinguishable only in tiny differences on self-report measures. Placebo-focused researchers using paradigms designed to exploit demand characteristics (politeness, roleplaying, etc.) produce implausibly large effects. There is no evidence that placebos have effects on objective outcomes like wound healing. Three sources purport to show that the placebo effect is a real, objective phenomenon, but the brain imaging studies do not demonstrate an objective effect, but are rather another way of measuring “response bias,” as subjects are capable of changing these measures voluntarily.
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “What do you do after you accidentally kill a child?”
Here’s an estate in Shropshire in the UK — only 10 million pounds or about $12 million US. Ludstone Hall was built in 1607 and sits on about 175 acres of land, has a moat — which was apparently intended more as an attractive addition rather than an actual fortification — and a gatehouse with two bedrooms. The main house is about 8,000 square feet and has a ballroom where the floor retracts to reveal a small swimming pool.
From Daily KOS: “On Feb. 20, 1939, German-born Fritz Julius Kuhn. the leader of the pro-Nazi German American Bund and would-be Führer, was the final speaker at what was billed as a “Pro-American Rally” at Madison Square Garden. At one point, an unemployed Jewish plumber from Brooklyn, Isadore Greenbaum, rushed the stage, shouting “Down with Hitler!” He was tackled and beaten by Kuhn’s brown-shirted security detail and fined $25 for disturbing the peace. When he returned home, Greenbaum unexpectedly received a congratulatory telegram from a local judge, Nathan D. Perlman, and a lavish gift basket signed by Meyer Lansky, the nation’s most prominent Jewish mobster. The odd couple of the Jewish judge and organized crime boss who secretly teamed up to blunt the rise of fascism in the U.S. by organizing Jewish gangsters and boxers to intimidate and fight the German American Bund and another fascist group, the Silver Shirts.”
From Aeon: “Critics argued that Alexander Graham Bell – the founding father of what is still one of the major LSL programmes in the US – was not so much a benevolent supporter of deaf children, but a eugenicist and ‘oralist’ with grotesque views about deafness on a self-appointed mission to eradicate sign languages. There were traumatised adults distancing themselves from their parents entirely for forcing them, despite great difficulty, to listen, speak and lip-read. The wet-eyed social media phenomenon of babies with hearing aids and CIs being filmed hearing sound for the first time was disparagingly called ‘inspiration porn’ or ‘switch-on porn’ – the vulgar showboating of an arrogant hearing class determined to convert their perfectly deaf children into hearing ones.”
Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.
Continue reading “Meyer Lansky organized Jewish mobsters to fight the Nazis”