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silveradeptLet's begin with the twin forces at work in every reader's life - the desire to re-read things that were good (or are remembered as good - beware the Suck Fairy!) and the anxiety that someone might have about their unread books pile and the desire to make that pile smaller.
Doctor-nurse romance novels as social commentary about idealized medical professionals and the National Health System, suggesting yet again that despite their continued stereotype of being material that is trashy and disposable, the romance genre is often doing a lot more behind the scenes than their stereotype would ever admit it.
A reminder that people with ADHD who have trouble with time are already very well aware of that, and are already very good at being self-critical, and they're still bound by the constraints of space-time, so if your and their abilities and priorities diverge, the best thing you can do for them is not judge. Which might take some effort on your part to sound like you're not judging, because those people are also often very good at understanding covert judgment and phrases that are judgey even if they're not intended to be that way.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan of United States troops and personnel is not as orderly as they would like, and also not as expansive as it should be, to get those who assisted the United States in its twenty year war out and safe from the incoming Taliban rule. Which should include persons, especially women, who are likely to suffer under the new regime as well as those who worked explicitly with the United States military.
Germany's Olympic gymnasts chose full-body coverings for their routines, sparking commentary from Japanese women about enforced femininity in their dress codes. This comes along with the Norwegian handball team that intended to play in shorts rather than bikini bottoms.
Equally importantly here, a very decorated Paralympian will not be coming to Tokyo because the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee insisted that one Personal Care Assistant was sufficient for thirty-four athletes, claiming that they needed to keep the number of people down because of coronavirus restrictions. The irony is not lost that a disabled person who can compete at a high level, and was slated to do so, still has to deal with institutional ableism from the body that wants her to compete.
After twenty-five seasons on the air, the PBS show Arthur, based on the series of books by Marc Brown, will be coming to an end.
The Netflix series City of Ghosts is about Los Angeles, but it's more like what happens if StoryCorps comes to Los Angeles, which is already an intriguing idea to watch. The backgrounds are real, the people talking are also real, along with animation over top and a frame story about kids who encounter ghosts.
A lament for the mass market paperback, which has not died but no longer occupies quite as much shelf space as it did before. I feel the person lamenting does not fully understand the purpose of the mass market paperback, which is to get a work cheaply into someone's hands, at the cost of having to deal with tiny print and cheap construction. There's something in there that could be teased out about books as a fetish object, a status symbol, and a thing that one displays to others as a sign of pedigree, wealth, or status, but the writer's lament is that mass market paperbacks used to be a way for authors to get their books on shelves and that's not happening any more. Which, well, publishing is an industry that prides itself on picking winnders and losers. It's just that we know a lot more now that it's not a matter of publishing scooping up the gems from the pile of authors through their skills and hard work, but instead that publishers decide who's going to be big and who isn't, and among those who don't get into the traditional publishing pipeline, increasingly it's either algorithms or influencers who decide how big any author is going to be. Mass markets were always going to be replaced by something more accessible and affordable, and electronic forms, despite all their headaches about permanently owning a thing, are exactly that, especially on an e-ink reader that can last for days without needing to be recharged. Plus, no more people looking at the cover of your book and judging you, either negatively for your genre choices or negatively because they think your reading choices mean their pick-up technique will work on you.
Sometimes the hardest thing for a person to discover is that there's someone there like them, and that there's been someone like them before. While it's very difficult to apply modern conceptions of queerness to the past, there are definitely people in the historical record who perform queer-coded actions. Like cross-dressing officers in the navy. Trying to find queer behaviors outside of metropolitan areas and criminal conviction archives is difficult, and often requires the use of terms now considered offensive, which is a conversation every archive and library has to have about whether they're going to leave those terms alone, make them SEE references, or keep them in addition to more modern terms. (Here, too, you can see where the idea of "neutrality" is still very much an idea charged with politics and active decision-making.)
And sometimes you get lucky and discover a recognizably 210th c. attitude toward gay men and the suffering they have encountered in an 1810 diary entry.
Being adjacent to a famous person does not mean that your own accomplishments should be overshadowed, but it does often mean it takes time to be recognized in your own right, especially if you have cultural narratives going against you. Which means that it sometimes takes retrospective or specifically-focused projects to uncover what should have already been known - women as alchemists, women composing music, even in situations where the men around them believed it wouldn't be any good because it was composed by a woman, and women using specific instruments of law to try and secure better positions for themselves against abusive husbands.
The use of ancient DNA analysis suggests that a person thought to be a woman buried with both men's and women's artifacts might have been a person with an XXY karyotpe. Based on the artifacts, the researchers wonder whether that person lived outside the gender binary in some way in addition to having the XXY genetic karyotype.
Once given an opportunity to engage in thoughtful reflection about their lives and careers, some people make a shift from what they were doing to something they enjoy doing more or find fulfilling. The framing of the article is supposed to be encouraging people to chase a different career in their midlle-to-later life if it's something they want to do or think would be better, but almost all of the examples are people ho had a major disruption in their lives that gave them time to think (like a pandemic) and make a proper assessment about whether they could pursue the avenue they thought had been lost because of other needs they had at the time. Plus, it's a different assessment of what's possible when you've accumulated a few years of salary and assets than when you're just starting out.
A proposed tunnel through the Stonehenge area was ruled unlawful, for a couple of different reasons, one of which was the likelihood that the tunnel would have endangered Stonehenge's status as a World Heritage site. Also, adding verisimilitude to an exhibit about London docks by using the smells of the era along with sights and sounds, and uncovering a segment of Hadrian's Wall while doing utility replacement.
Wally the Walrus has departed for the north, with the hope that he is finally headed home. Which might bring the end to the saga, but at the same time, we do want a walrus to go home to their proper environment. (Wally was spotted around Ireland next, so he seems to be moving northward, at least.) Wildcats are coming back to forests and plants thought lost are coming back as conservation and rewilding efforts continue and succeed, studying more about how giraffes who can no longer give birth still play an important role in their society, a hoax call about many snakes being loosed in a public park, a herd of wandering elephants getting close to home again, renovations that keep in mind and want to keep the bats that have already been there, trying to preserve and spread the peaches of the Navajo nation, Inuit observations about polar bears and walruses leafing to better understanding of how polar bears perceive and use tools in three dimensions, and research examining baby bat babble.
A cogent 30 minute explanation about a leaked CDC presentation about proper communication around δ which includes information about how well it transmits, and the possibility that people who are vaccinated might also transmit the disease. The good news is that vaccination is still good at preventing severe cases and death. The bad news is that δ may not care about who it spreads through, vaccinated or unvaccinated. So, where possible, continuing to wear masks and practice distancing, even if your locality wants to pretend that everything is fine, is a good decision. The CDC and the US government is having difficulty getting accurate information out fast enough to prevent the people who want to spread lies and grift. Which, y'know, the truth still has to put its pants on first. And the truth is that moving people from the unvaccinated column to the vaccinated column is much much better at getting to the point where SARS-CoV-2 is controlled. (And this is something that should happen all across the world, rather than solely in rich countries.)
The gay community of Provincetown, Mass. helped give the CDC granular and nearly real-time data about an outbreak in their area. Which, given what we know about how well the gay community has been treated in the past with regard to fighting off an infectious and damaging virus (*stare*), makes a whole lot of sense.
A thing to keep in mind is that rare events will become commonplace if there are more than enough opportunities for the rare event to happen, and those rare events are likely to get more coverage so that they seem common. The advice changes to suit, but it looks like the same practices that helped before can do the same now. Possibly with an equipment upgrade. And, again, we need to have more people getting vaccinated all around the world. We don't want it to be the kind of thing where it takes tragedy to get someone vaccinated. There's been more than enough of that already.
That said, because the rare events are happening in commonplace situations, people are debating the ethics of whether it's a good idea to try and get a third shot or to get someone who is not of age a vaccination. When not already trying to find a way of getting an unauthorized third shot for themselves or trying to get an underage child a shot. We'd rather everyone that can get their shots so that the breeding ground for new variations is sharply reduced, but also, in the situation where a caregiver wants a child to do something harmful to themselves, and it might be harmful for the child to say they've defied that expectation, the child should lie and not feel guilty about it at all.
Now that vaccines are available and they're starting to get full FDA approval, health plans and businesses are starting to insist that unvaccinated people should pay for their own costs of fighting a COVID infection or pay additional money to stay on health plans if they are unvaccinated. Because it's the US health care system, of course, there's almost no likelihood that this will have nuance and distinction between people who won't get vaccinated and people who can't. And also, giving insurance companies more excuses to deny coverage and costs is good for their profits, but bad for anyone who has to get care. If this idea succeeds a lot, there will be even more things that insurance companies might start denying care for, based on the idea that someone didn't jump through sufficiently arcane hoops to "protect" themselves against a situation that then requires care.
Getting a flu vaccination may help, but is not a substitute for getting the tailored vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.
With the previous variants, risks were a little easier to calculate, especially when everyone was unvaccinated. Now, with δ and some parts of the population fully vaccinated, others partially so, some that can't, and some places engaging in active hostility, risk calculation has become a much more difficult thing to do accurately and consistently. Even tools like the microCOVID Project have to do some amount of refiguring and reworking to account for the increased transmission and risks involved.
In technology, Apple has announced that they will be running scans of images in the possession of their users (although it's not specifically noted whether this will be scanning their devices or their iCloud accounts or something similar) against hashes of known images of child pornography. The problem with that is part of the value of hashing is that many different inputs can create the same output, and there's going to be some amount of fuzziness built into the matching algorithm. Which, in turn, will lead to false accusations based on the fact that something you have is close enough to a forbidden thing, and the accusation, especially for something that will be as destructive to life and career as child pornography, will be enough, even if after all the investigation, they didn't actually find anything that was child pornography. As the linked article person notes, even after repeatedly filing notices of "this person has the same name I do, but we are not the same people, please stop claiming I need to be sanctioned and cut off from the financial system", it still happens, because the algorithms are making decisions without human intervention. We're probably going to find several different articles in the future that will say something like "don't take any pictures of any children with an iPhone, or you'll have to deal with Apple's overzealous child porn scanners" or "I take pictures of my cat for Insta and the feds raided me for child porn" while Apple claims to be tuning and tweaking the algorithms so that those "regrettable" false positives will happen less often. As Marissa Lingen says in the title, This Will Not Happen To You.
Researchers and the publisher Elsevier have noticed a cache of likely plagarized papers in a computer science journal, where the submitters appear to have tried to disguise their counterfeit by changing known and accepted terms in the community to tortured synonyms, producing examples like "counterfeit consciousness" when the term would have been "artificial intelligence". The papers seem to have been combined with a flaw in the approval process where editors would have been able to examine the papers before they were approved onward.
A Rube Goldberg-type machine that uses a robotic arm (with a googly eye attached) and a Raspberry Pi to manually advance the minute hand of a clock every minute. Because sometimes the point of doing such a project is to say it's possible.
Last for tonight, a person that is drowning does not look like they are drowning, and in fact, they're fighting so hard to try and stay alive that they don't really have energy or awareness to do anything else.
A thread on trying to avoid the freeze response when presented with the climate disaster and trying to fix it, which is mostly getting an understanding of "It always seems impossible until it is done" and using that as the motivation to keep trying to fix things, both individually and societally. I forget where the thing was, but a post that I read on the Internet somewhere said that large amounts of social change seem to go nowhere for forever, and then they seem to rush down in a very short amount of time. The people in the middle of it wonder why it's crashing down so swiftly, but the people who can take the long view can see that it was slowly building momentum and convincing people until it finally tipped over the resistance line, and at that point, the snowball builds / the tsunami comes crashing down.
Doctor-nurse romance novels as social commentary about idealized medical professionals and the National Health System, suggesting yet again that despite their continued stereotype of being material that is trashy and disposable, the romance genre is often doing a lot more behind the scenes than their stereotype would ever admit it.
A reminder that people with ADHD who have trouble with time are already very well aware of that, and are already very good at being self-critical, and they're still bound by the constraints of space-time, so if your and their abilities and priorities diverge, the best thing you can do for them is not judge. Which might take some effort on your part to sound like you're not judging, because those people are also often very good at understanding covert judgment and phrases that are judgey even if they're not intended to be that way.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan of United States troops and personnel is not as orderly as they would like, and also not as expansive as it should be, to get those who assisted the United States in its twenty year war out and safe from the incoming Taliban rule. Which should include persons, especially women, who are likely to suffer under the new regime as well as those who worked explicitly with the United States military.
Germany's Olympic gymnasts chose full-body coverings for their routines, sparking commentary from Japanese women about enforced femininity in their dress codes. This comes along with the Norwegian handball team that intended to play in shorts rather than bikini bottoms.
Equally importantly here, a very decorated Paralympian will not be coming to Tokyo because the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee insisted that one Personal Care Assistant was sufficient for thirty-four athletes, claiming that they needed to keep the number of people down because of coronavirus restrictions. The irony is not lost that a disabled person who can compete at a high level, and was slated to do so, still has to deal with institutional ableism from the body that wants her to compete.
After twenty-five seasons on the air, the PBS show Arthur, based on the series of books by Marc Brown, will be coming to an end.
The Netflix series City of Ghosts is about Los Angeles, but it's more like what happens if StoryCorps comes to Los Angeles, which is already an intriguing idea to watch. The backgrounds are real, the people talking are also real, along with animation over top and a frame story about kids who encounter ghosts.
A lament for the mass market paperback, which has not died but no longer occupies quite as much shelf space as it did before. I feel the person lamenting does not fully understand the purpose of the mass market paperback, which is to get a work cheaply into someone's hands, at the cost of having to deal with tiny print and cheap construction. There's something in there that could be teased out about books as a fetish object, a status symbol, and a thing that one displays to others as a sign of pedigree, wealth, or status, but the writer's lament is that mass market paperbacks used to be a way for authors to get their books on shelves and that's not happening any more. Which, well, publishing is an industry that prides itself on picking winnders and losers. It's just that we know a lot more now that it's not a matter of publishing scooping up the gems from the pile of authors through their skills and hard work, but instead that publishers decide who's going to be big and who isn't, and among those who don't get into the traditional publishing pipeline, increasingly it's either algorithms or influencers who decide how big any author is going to be. Mass markets were always going to be replaced by something more accessible and affordable, and electronic forms, despite all their headaches about permanently owning a thing, are exactly that, especially on an e-ink reader that can last for days without needing to be recharged. Plus, no more people looking at the cover of your book and judging you, either negatively for your genre choices or negatively because they think your reading choices mean their pick-up technique will work on you.
Sometimes the hardest thing for a person to discover is that there's someone there like them, and that there's been someone like them before. While it's very difficult to apply modern conceptions of queerness to the past, there are definitely people in the historical record who perform queer-coded actions. Like cross-dressing officers in the navy. Trying to find queer behaviors outside of metropolitan areas and criminal conviction archives is difficult, and often requires the use of terms now considered offensive, which is a conversation every archive and library has to have about whether they're going to leave those terms alone, make them SEE references, or keep them in addition to more modern terms. (Here, too, you can see where the idea of "neutrality" is still very much an idea charged with politics and active decision-making.)
And sometimes you get lucky and discover a recognizably 210th c. attitude toward gay men and the suffering they have encountered in an 1810 diary entry.
Being adjacent to a famous person does not mean that your own accomplishments should be overshadowed, but it does often mean it takes time to be recognized in your own right, especially if you have cultural narratives going against you. Which means that it sometimes takes retrospective or specifically-focused projects to uncover what should have already been known - women as alchemists, women composing music, even in situations where the men around them believed it wouldn't be any good because it was composed by a woman, and women using specific instruments of law to try and secure better positions for themselves against abusive husbands.
The use of ancient DNA analysis suggests that a person thought to be a woman buried with both men's and women's artifacts might have been a person with an XXY karyotpe. Based on the artifacts, the researchers wonder whether that person lived outside the gender binary in some way in addition to having the XXY genetic karyotype.
Once given an opportunity to engage in thoughtful reflection about their lives and careers, some people make a shift from what they were doing to something they enjoy doing more or find fulfilling. The framing of the article is supposed to be encouraging people to chase a different career in their midlle-to-later life if it's something they want to do or think would be better, but almost all of the examples are people ho had a major disruption in their lives that gave them time to think (like a pandemic) and make a proper assessment about whether they could pursue the avenue they thought had been lost because of other needs they had at the time. Plus, it's a different assessment of what's possible when you've accumulated a few years of salary and assets than when you're just starting out.
A proposed tunnel through the Stonehenge area was ruled unlawful, for a couple of different reasons, one of which was the likelihood that the tunnel would have endangered Stonehenge's status as a World Heritage site. Also, adding verisimilitude to an exhibit about London docks by using the smells of the era along with sights and sounds, and uncovering a segment of Hadrian's Wall while doing utility replacement.
Wally the Walrus has departed for the north, with the hope that he is finally headed home. Which might bring the end to the saga, but at the same time, we do want a walrus to go home to their proper environment. (Wally was spotted around Ireland next, so he seems to be moving northward, at least.) Wildcats are coming back to forests and plants thought lost are coming back as conservation and rewilding efforts continue and succeed, studying more about how giraffes who can no longer give birth still play an important role in their society, a hoax call about many snakes being loosed in a public park, a herd of wandering elephants getting close to home again, renovations that keep in mind and want to keep the bats that have already been there, trying to preserve and spread the peaches of the Navajo nation, Inuit observations about polar bears and walruses leafing to better understanding of how polar bears perceive and use tools in three dimensions, and research examining baby bat babble.
A cogent 30 minute explanation about a leaked CDC presentation about proper communication around δ which includes information about how well it transmits, and the possibility that people who are vaccinated might also transmit the disease. The good news is that vaccination is still good at preventing severe cases and death. The bad news is that δ may not care about who it spreads through, vaccinated or unvaccinated. So, where possible, continuing to wear masks and practice distancing, even if your locality wants to pretend that everything is fine, is a good decision. The CDC and the US government is having difficulty getting accurate information out fast enough to prevent the people who want to spread lies and grift. Which, y'know, the truth still has to put its pants on first. And the truth is that moving people from the unvaccinated column to the vaccinated column is much much better at getting to the point where SARS-CoV-2 is controlled. (And this is something that should happen all across the world, rather than solely in rich countries.)
The gay community of Provincetown, Mass. helped give the CDC granular and nearly real-time data about an outbreak in their area. Which, given what we know about how well the gay community has been treated in the past with regard to fighting off an infectious and damaging virus (*stare*), makes a whole lot of sense.
A thing to keep in mind is that rare events will become commonplace if there are more than enough opportunities for the rare event to happen, and those rare events are likely to get more coverage so that they seem common. The advice changes to suit, but it looks like the same practices that helped before can do the same now. Possibly with an equipment upgrade. And, again, we need to have more people getting vaccinated all around the world. We don't want it to be the kind of thing where it takes tragedy to get someone vaccinated. There's been more than enough of that already.
That said, because the rare events are happening in commonplace situations, people are debating the ethics of whether it's a good idea to try and get a third shot or to get someone who is not of age a vaccination. When not already trying to find a way of getting an unauthorized third shot for themselves or trying to get an underage child a shot. We'd rather everyone that can get their shots so that the breeding ground for new variations is sharply reduced, but also, in the situation where a caregiver wants a child to do something harmful to themselves, and it might be harmful for the child to say they've defied that expectation, the child should lie and not feel guilty about it at all.
Now that vaccines are available and they're starting to get full FDA approval, health plans and businesses are starting to insist that unvaccinated people should pay for their own costs of fighting a COVID infection or pay additional money to stay on health plans if they are unvaccinated. Because it's the US health care system, of course, there's almost no likelihood that this will have nuance and distinction between people who won't get vaccinated and people who can't. And also, giving insurance companies more excuses to deny coverage and costs is good for their profits, but bad for anyone who has to get care. If this idea succeeds a lot, there will be even more things that insurance companies might start denying care for, based on the idea that someone didn't jump through sufficiently arcane hoops to "protect" themselves against a situation that then requires care.
Getting a flu vaccination may help, but is not a substitute for getting the tailored vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.
With the previous variants, risks were a little easier to calculate, especially when everyone was unvaccinated. Now, with δ and some parts of the population fully vaccinated, others partially so, some that can't, and some places engaging in active hostility, risk calculation has become a much more difficult thing to do accurately and consistently. Even tools like the microCOVID Project have to do some amount of refiguring and reworking to account for the increased transmission and risks involved.
In technology, Apple has announced that they will be running scans of images in the possession of their users (although it's not specifically noted whether this will be scanning their devices or their iCloud accounts or something similar) against hashes of known images of child pornography. The problem with that is part of the value of hashing is that many different inputs can create the same output, and there's going to be some amount of fuzziness built into the matching algorithm. Which, in turn, will lead to false accusations based on the fact that something you have is close enough to a forbidden thing, and the accusation, especially for something that will be as destructive to life and career as child pornography, will be enough, even if after all the investigation, they didn't actually find anything that was child pornography. As the linked article person notes, even after repeatedly filing notices of "this person has the same name I do, but we are not the same people, please stop claiming I need to be sanctioned and cut off from the financial system", it still happens, because the algorithms are making decisions without human intervention. We're probably going to find several different articles in the future that will say something like "don't take any pictures of any children with an iPhone, or you'll have to deal with Apple's overzealous child porn scanners" or "I take pictures of my cat for Insta and the feds raided me for child porn" while Apple claims to be tuning and tweaking the algorithms so that those "regrettable" false positives will happen less often. As Marissa Lingen says in the title, This Will Not Happen To You.
Researchers and the publisher Elsevier have noticed a cache of likely plagarized papers in a computer science journal, where the submitters appear to have tried to disguise their counterfeit by changing known and accepted terms in the community to tortured synonyms, producing examples like "counterfeit consciousness" when the term would have been "artificial intelligence". The papers seem to have been combined with a flaw in the approval process where editors would have been able to examine the papers before they were approved onward.
A Rube Goldberg-type machine that uses a robotic arm (with a googly eye attached) and a Raspberry Pi to manually advance the minute hand of a clock every minute. Because sometimes the point of doing such a project is to say it's possible.
Last for tonight, a person that is drowning does not look like they are drowning, and in fact, they're fighting so hard to try and stay alive that they don't really have energy or awareness to do anything else.
A thread on trying to avoid the freeze response when presented with the climate disaster and trying to fix it, which is mostly getting an understanding of "It always seems impossible until it is done" and using that as the motivation to keep trying to fix things, both individually and societally. I forget where the thing was, but a post that I read on the Internet somewhere said that large amounts of social change seem to go nowhere for forever, and then they seem to rush down in a very short amount of time. The people in the middle of it wonder why it's crashing down so swiftly, but the people who can take the long view can see that it was slowly building momentum and convincing people until it finally tipped over the resistance line, and at that point, the snowball builds / the tsunami comes crashing down.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-02 11:22 pm (UTC)Well, that Tor.com link definitely made a thought jump into sharp relief for me about why I have problems with my massive TBR. o_o
no subject
Date: 2021-09-02 11:34 pm (UTC)