The remainder of the month of April 02021
May. 1st, 2021 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptHello again! Let us begin with the idea that neither Sylvia Plath nor Anne Sexton are supposed to be punchlines about angsty teenage girls.
Also, history is vast enough that those people who we have thought about as impossibly ancient were writing poetry about those they thought of as impossibly ancient.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who did not get to walk on the moon, is now among the stars at 90 years of age.
A fire in South Africa spread to a historic university library, causing damage and destruction of materials that may never be recoverable. Worse, if the investigation turns out to conclude the fires were set deliberately, someone may have caused the destruction of scholarship and resources that could have been used for greater scholarship. And despite the seeming availability of everything in digital form these days, the amount of archival material that has been actually digitized is minuscule, and cannot replace an actual visit to an archive for serious research. Not to mention that doing digitization and preservation the right way is extremely resource-intensive, both initially and in the long term, so the more things get digitized, the more resources are needed to maintain those digital archives and make them accessible.
Bones of victims of a state-sanctioned bombing in Philadelphia in the 1980s have been used as part of an Ivy League anthropology course for decades, without permission sought nor acknowledgement of the remains given to those who were affected by the bombing.
The death of Prince Phillip, at 99 years of age, leaves behind a legacy of crude and cruel remarks that go at odds with what the royal family would prefer he be remembered as. Given how the royal family treated Meghan Markle, I think they're going to have a lot more problems than just image burnishing to deal with for a very long time. Then again, when dudes are allowed to lionize and enshrine other dudes who were terrible, it makes it seem like image burnishment is all that would have been needed. I wonder what sort of hagiography will be written about someone alleged to have said he would rather have bodies piled high than choose to go into another lockdown, showcasing that he cares more about the profits of the few than the lives of the many. And, apparently, we're supposed to see that as man talk, the kind of thing that would burnish his reputation with the voters rather than make himself completely repugnant to them.
Managers and companies, unlimited time and ambiguous or conditional statements about your employees using their time work only to keep them from using that time. Be explicit, and explicitly encourage finding time for your employees to take and use their paid time. Also, possibly, workers, consider unionization as a set of guardrails that will also help you set boundaries and use your time off effectively, even though the United States is doing its very best to try and make unionization an impossibility. Collective power and action may still be possible and doable. But there has to be some structure involved in making decisions, or it's very easy for things to get and stay off the rails or devolve into personal elites.
A toxic culture at Scott Rudin Productions that should be a sign of what kind of terror a completely out of control person could wreak but that was instead treated as the normal operating office culture of the place. And while at least one of the people apologizes for what they let happen and knew was happening, the culture underneath needs even more reform if there's to be a hope of stopping the next Scott Rudin.
A citizen child to an immigrant mother successfully won a case against the government of the United Kingdom that prevented his mother from using public funds under a policy that prevents an immigrant from receiving public assistance for ten years after their immigration. The court reviewing declined to say that the policy is racist (despite the disproportionate impact it has on people of color) but did say that such a policy interfered with parenting and endangered children. (Another judgment against that policy said it was against human rights to deny someone assistance that would make or keep them destitute.)
A small monitor lizard encouraged to wave so as to be let out of their enclosure, with a much bigger one climbing the shelves at a convenience store, a pterosaur that had an opposed thumb, a vaccination site being held underneath an iconic blue whale, the meme game that is so good at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission that people are making fanart of the characters referenced,
On matters of the virus, The University of Illinois is looking for information from persons who have had at least one vaccine dose and one menstrual cycle in their past to see what information there is to be had about how vaccines may affect menstrual cycles.
A Tiktok series about how the mRNA vaccinations work, including the extremely memorable phrase "fork hands".
It's possible that vaccination is helping people with persistent COVID symptoms, and that getting their shots might significantly decrease their symptoms and effects, which is leading at least one researcher to suggest how a trial might be performed to determine what might be responsible for the long COVID scenario, and how that might impact other long-term chronic illnesses.
Even a single doze of the mRNA vaccinations produces both antibody and T-cell responses, so one shot is still better than zero. Material from this study might inform some of the "mix and match" studies trying to figure out if the best way to get a good immune response is to have one dose of one vaccination and one dose of another. Additionally, one dose is still better than zero about reducing the chances of getting infected by the virus.
The CDC's update to finally say that SARS-CoV-2 spreads by aerosols primarily and that fomite spread is unlikely is good, but it will take much more than that to excavate the common wisdom that has been so prevalent for so long. Which is to say, what's effective may not be easily visible, and what's visible isn't necessarily effective, but people want to see you doing things, rather than saying "that object over there that exchanges the entire air of the building six times in an hour is the best protection we have, along with your properly-applied face coverings."
And speaking of those, there's still a high likelihood that people for whom infection would be dangerous and deadly are probably not going to go out and rejoin the people who are celebrating the apparent end of their vulnerability, even after vaccination. Because the risk still isn't worth it for them, because they can't afford to guess wrong about whether or not it's really safe.
rydra_wong has links to science and other things related to the statistically unlikely blood clot event involving vaccinations.
India and South Africa are suffering greatly and asking for the countries that have the patents for the various vaccines to waive those patents so that more vaccine can be made readily available. In addition to seriously considering the need to wave the patent protections on the vaccination, countries that have additional stockpile of vaccine doses and medical equipment should be willing to share them with other countries that are experiencing surges.
Because there continues to be lots of good news about the effectiveness of the vaccine, including some of them holding up pretty good against variations and all of them still doing really well against hospitalization and dying.
Perhaps as both palate cleanser and reality check about what passes for reality in certain parts of the media sphere ("if it can be used to attack liberals, then we're all for it"), Rupert Murdoch's propaganda network is giving airtime, repeatedly, to someone with mostly fringe beliefs about vaccinations, but since she used to be thought of well in Democratic circles, she's a perfect attack vehicle. Nevermind that she's not credible, she used to be liberal!
And something that's supposed to be all in good fun, the formation of various "Team Vaccine"-style shops and places for people to have a laugh (or at least, it had better be for a laugh that people are buying those things).
A Burkina Faso trial for a malaria vaccination has met the WHO threshold for effectiveness, paving the way for potential regulatory approval and distribution, which is also really good news! Malaria also needs to be sent off.
The way in which materials like Our Bodies, Ourselves allowed women to talk about themselves as experts with lived experience and to provide information that was not otherwise being discussed has produced an enduring legacy, one that deliberately tries to adapt itself to the places where it goes, rather than to insist that audiences adapt to them instead. And it spawns even more possibilities over time.
An examination that asks whether some of the less nuanced conversation around men, consent, and structural patriarchy in earlier decades paved the way for some of the men's rights people we have to deal with now, while suggesting there was only a grudging acknowledgment that the kink community had a working framework to handle questions of consent (a framework that stays mostly intact to our current days). There's still more than a few good videos out there to help with effective sex ed and consent talks.
The state of Arizona passed a bill that criminalized another reason why a woman might seek abortion, as the Republicans in charge find yet another way to try to make Roe versus Wade decision apply to less.
The costuming decisions of the Centauri and the Narn of Babylon 5, and what they suggest about the cultures that such costumes come from. [video, Youtube, ~30m] Something that I think could have been added to the video that would strengthen the argument is that, story-wise, I believe the narrative tells us that the Centauri were one of humanity's first alien allies, and that we also got the hyperdrive technology that allows for warping around from them. So there's also a component of "we have a good working relationship with each other" that might also be based on that similarity and us-ness that happens in the costume and other designs, and that makes it harder for us to believe that the Centauri are willing to do what they're going to do. (And possibly the difficulty that the humans have in seeing how the Centauri are being open, where EarthGov is trying to be covert, but it's the same thing. Then again, given how overt the current wave is being, maybe EarthGov didn't need to invest in secrecy.)
An Indigenous language, meant to be spoken, and that is being taught with as much as can be done, has ended up, at least according to copyright law, as the property of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. That said, the A.P.S. is doing their best to make sure that the language itself is treated well and is working with the people to whom the language really belongs and is being taught. But still, there's something in here about how the law refuses to care about some very important considerations.
In technology, despite being the darling of companies (and users) everywhere, dark mode themes may not be any better, and sometimes worse, for legibility and accessibility of content. And after a joke that didn't land at all about their light mode, Discord published what their plans were to make it much easier for their light mode to stay on parity with their dark mode.
The complicated ethics of the haunted house industry and their increasing attempts at both realism and intensity, where specific bodies are excluded from horror because they're expensive to make, specific bodies are commissioned for their appeal, and specific people are likely to engage in the horror industry because they're the least likely to have been exposed to horrors in their real lives.
The markings, calibration targets, and other elements included on the Perseverance rover that are almost all easter eggs of one sort or another, proving that there are a lot of really fannish people who work on building Mars rovers.
a mummy thought to belong to a priest, based on the name on the coffin, turns out to have been a pregnant woman instead, because a scan revealed a foot of an infant.
Last for tonight, the possibility that what we think of as the collapse is the inevitability of change coming for us all, and that we can do better for ourselves by both learning from those who have already faced apocalypse and by trying to make the change as non-damaging as possible.
Also, history is vast enough that those people who we have thought about as impossibly ancient were writing poetry about those they thought of as impossibly ancient.
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 pilot who did not get to walk on the moon, is now among the stars at 90 years of age.
A fire in South Africa spread to a historic university library, causing damage and destruction of materials that may never be recoverable. Worse, if the investigation turns out to conclude the fires were set deliberately, someone may have caused the destruction of scholarship and resources that could have been used for greater scholarship. And despite the seeming availability of everything in digital form these days, the amount of archival material that has been actually digitized is minuscule, and cannot replace an actual visit to an archive for serious research. Not to mention that doing digitization and preservation the right way is extremely resource-intensive, both initially and in the long term, so the more things get digitized, the more resources are needed to maintain those digital archives and make them accessible.
Bones of victims of a state-sanctioned bombing in Philadelphia in the 1980s have been used as part of an Ivy League anthropology course for decades, without permission sought nor acknowledgement of the remains given to those who were affected by the bombing.
The death of Prince Phillip, at 99 years of age, leaves behind a legacy of crude and cruel remarks that go at odds with what the royal family would prefer he be remembered as. Given how the royal family treated Meghan Markle, I think they're going to have a lot more problems than just image burnishing to deal with for a very long time. Then again, when dudes are allowed to lionize and enshrine other dudes who were terrible, it makes it seem like image burnishment is all that would have been needed. I wonder what sort of hagiography will be written about someone alleged to have said he would rather have bodies piled high than choose to go into another lockdown, showcasing that he cares more about the profits of the few than the lives of the many. And, apparently, we're supposed to see that as man talk, the kind of thing that would burnish his reputation with the voters rather than make himself completely repugnant to them.
Managers and companies, unlimited time and ambiguous or conditional statements about your employees using their time work only to keep them from using that time. Be explicit, and explicitly encourage finding time for your employees to take and use their paid time. Also, possibly, workers, consider unionization as a set of guardrails that will also help you set boundaries and use your time off effectively, even though the United States is doing its very best to try and make unionization an impossibility. Collective power and action may still be possible and doable. But there has to be some structure involved in making decisions, or it's very easy for things to get and stay off the rails or devolve into personal elites.
A toxic culture at Scott Rudin Productions that should be a sign of what kind of terror a completely out of control person could wreak but that was instead treated as the normal operating office culture of the place. And while at least one of the people apologizes for what they let happen and knew was happening, the culture underneath needs even more reform if there's to be a hope of stopping the next Scott Rudin.
A citizen child to an immigrant mother successfully won a case against the government of the United Kingdom that prevented his mother from using public funds under a policy that prevents an immigrant from receiving public assistance for ten years after their immigration. The court reviewing declined to say that the policy is racist (despite the disproportionate impact it has on people of color) but did say that such a policy interfered with parenting and endangered children. (Another judgment against that policy said it was against human rights to deny someone assistance that would make or keep them destitute.)
A small monitor lizard encouraged to wave so as to be let out of their enclosure, with a much bigger one climbing the shelves at a convenience store, a pterosaur that had an opposed thumb, a vaccination site being held underneath an iconic blue whale, the meme game that is so good at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission that people are making fanart of the characters referenced,
On matters of the virus, The University of Illinois is looking for information from persons who have had at least one vaccine dose and one menstrual cycle in their past to see what information there is to be had about how vaccines may affect menstrual cycles.
A Tiktok series about how the mRNA vaccinations work, including the extremely memorable phrase "fork hands".
It's possible that vaccination is helping people with persistent COVID symptoms, and that getting their shots might significantly decrease their symptoms and effects, which is leading at least one researcher to suggest how a trial might be performed to determine what might be responsible for the long COVID scenario, and how that might impact other long-term chronic illnesses.
Even a single doze of the mRNA vaccinations produces both antibody and T-cell responses, so one shot is still better than zero. Material from this study might inform some of the "mix and match" studies trying to figure out if the best way to get a good immune response is to have one dose of one vaccination and one dose of another. Additionally, one dose is still better than zero about reducing the chances of getting infected by the virus.
The CDC's update to finally say that SARS-CoV-2 spreads by aerosols primarily and that fomite spread is unlikely is good, but it will take much more than that to excavate the common wisdom that has been so prevalent for so long. Which is to say, what's effective may not be easily visible, and what's visible isn't necessarily effective, but people want to see you doing things, rather than saying "that object over there that exchanges the entire air of the building six times in an hour is the best protection we have, along with your properly-applied face coverings."
And speaking of those, there's still a high likelihood that people for whom infection would be dangerous and deadly are probably not going to go out and rejoin the people who are celebrating the apparent end of their vulnerability, even after vaccination. Because the risk still isn't worth it for them, because they can't afford to guess wrong about whether or not it's really safe.
rydra_wong has links to science and other things related to the statistically unlikely blood clot event involving vaccinations.India and South Africa are suffering greatly and asking for the countries that have the patents for the various vaccines to waive those patents so that more vaccine can be made readily available. In addition to seriously considering the need to wave the patent protections on the vaccination, countries that have additional stockpile of vaccine doses and medical equipment should be willing to share them with other countries that are experiencing surges.
Because there continues to be lots of good news about the effectiveness of the vaccine, including some of them holding up pretty good against variations and all of them still doing really well against hospitalization and dying.
Perhaps as both palate cleanser and reality check about what passes for reality in certain parts of the media sphere ("if it can be used to attack liberals, then we're all for it"), Rupert Murdoch's propaganda network is giving airtime, repeatedly, to someone with mostly fringe beliefs about vaccinations, but since she used to be thought of well in Democratic circles, she's a perfect attack vehicle. Nevermind that she's not credible, she used to be liberal!
And something that's supposed to be all in good fun, the formation of various "Team Vaccine"-style shops and places for people to have a laugh (or at least, it had better be for a laugh that people are buying those things).
A Burkina Faso trial for a malaria vaccination has met the WHO threshold for effectiveness, paving the way for potential regulatory approval and distribution, which is also really good news! Malaria also needs to be sent off.
The way in which materials like Our Bodies, Ourselves allowed women to talk about themselves as experts with lived experience and to provide information that was not otherwise being discussed has produced an enduring legacy, one that deliberately tries to adapt itself to the places where it goes, rather than to insist that audiences adapt to them instead. And it spawns even more possibilities over time.
An examination that asks whether some of the less nuanced conversation around men, consent, and structural patriarchy in earlier decades paved the way for some of the men's rights people we have to deal with now, while suggesting there was only a grudging acknowledgment that the kink community had a working framework to handle questions of consent (a framework that stays mostly intact to our current days). There's still more than a few good videos out there to help with effective sex ed and consent talks.
The state of Arizona passed a bill that criminalized another reason why a woman might seek abortion, as the Republicans in charge find yet another way to try to make Roe versus Wade decision apply to less.
The costuming decisions of the Centauri and the Narn of Babylon 5, and what they suggest about the cultures that such costumes come from. [video, Youtube, ~30m] Something that I think could have been added to the video that would strengthen the argument is that, story-wise, I believe the narrative tells us that the Centauri were one of humanity's first alien allies, and that we also got the hyperdrive technology that allows for warping around from them. So there's also a component of "we have a good working relationship with each other" that might also be based on that similarity and us-ness that happens in the costume and other designs, and that makes it harder for us to believe that the Centauri are willing to do what they're going to do. (And possibly the difficulty that the humans have in seeing how the Centauri are being open, where EarthGov is trying to be covert, but it's the same thing. Then again, given how overt the current wave is being, maybe EarthGov didn't need to invest in secrecy.)
An Indigenous language, meant to be spoken, and that is being taught with as much as can be done, has ended up, at least according to copyright law, as the property of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. That said, the A.P.S. is doing their best to make sure that the language itself is treated well and is working with the people to whom the language really belongs and is being taught. But still, there's something in here about how the law refuses to care about some very important considerations.
In technology, despite being the darling of companies (and users) everywhere, dark mode themes may not be any better, and sometimes worse, for legibility and accessibility of content. And after a joke that didn't land at all about their light mode, Discord published what their plans were to make it much easier for their light mode to stay on parity with their dark mode.
The complicated ethics of the haunted house industry and their increasing attempts at both realism and intensity, where specific bodies are excluded from horror because they're expensive to make, specific bodies are commissioned for their appeal, and specific people are likely to engage in the horror industry because they're the least likely to have been exposed to horrors in their real lives.
The markings, calibration targets, and other elements included on the Perseverance rover that are almost all easter eggs of one sort or another, proving that there are a lot of really fannish people who work on building Mars rovers.
a mummy thought to belong to a priest, based on the name on the coffin, turns out to have been a pregnant woman instead, because a scan revealed a foot of an infant.
Last for tonight, the possibility that what we think of as the collapse is the inevitability of change coming for us all, and that we can do better for ourselves by both learning from those who have already faced apocalypse and by trying to make the change as non-damaging as possible.
no subject
Date: 2021-05-02 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-02 08:34 pm (UTC)