» 2020 » December Epicene Cyborg

Why Americans are numb to the staggering coronavirus death toll.

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%.

People who grew up with the internet of the 1990s probably remember forums — those clunky, lo-fi spaces where people came together to argue about cars, cycling, video games, cooking, or a million other topics. They had their problems, but in retrospect the internet of those days felt like a magical land of possibility, not a place for organizing pogroms.

We are in a race against time – we must change our vaccine policy now. Vaccine strategy should be changed – to get a single shot to as many people as possible to slow the spread of coronavirus. Blair is right. Absolutely this is what should be happening everywhere.

As Covid death toll soars ever higher, Sweden wonders who to blame. Sweden failed, but it could’ve worked with a few tweaks (contact tracing, universal indoor masking).

Zoned Out: How Zoning Law Undermines Family Law’s Functional Turn.

The solace of Joni Mitchell’s “River,” a holiday song that defies merry and bright expectations.

The Biden Administration Should Restore the Endangered Species Act to Full Strength.

‘Like sending bees to war’: the deadly truth behind your almond milk obsession. Almond milk also tastes like licking a moldy garbage can, so there’s that.

2020: The year in pictures.

Meet the Monkey Slug Caterpillar.

Alex Sangha and Velvet Steele: It’s time to break the chains that bind sex workers. Just as true in the US too, but lib prudes will never, ever let this happen.

Her Wrist Was Swollen and Excruciatingly Painful. Steroids Didn’t Help Much.

Why It Pays to Play Around.

Explicit Sex Scenes and the Work of Stories.

The more you earn the less unfair the world seems to you.

End The Austerity Loop. Democrats are failing to heed the cautionary tale about how their obsession with deficit reduction hurts the economy and harms their political prospects. Democrats will do whatever suppresses wages and employment.

How Effective Is the Mask You’re Wearing? You May Know Soon. A C.D.C. division is working with an industry standards group to develop filtration standards — and products that meet them will be able to carry labels saying so.

Our results do not support the premise that masculinity is a cue for immunological quality in men.

95 Percent of Representatives Have a Degree. Look Where That’s Got Us. All these credentials haven’t led to better results.

What All the Secession Talk Really Means.

Is left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) closer to a myth or a reality?

Assessment by Audiences Shows Little Effect of Science Communication Training.

The strange politics of the coronavirus have created a taboo, at least in certain progressive circles, in talking too much about the emotional suffering wrought by nine months of purgatorial isolation.

All the Beautiful Losers.

Safe. Now that is a good essay.

More than half of Hudson River tidal marshes were created accidentally by humans.

Plants can be larks or night owls just like us.

Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri. Strange radio transmissions appear to be coming from our nearest star system; now scientists are trying to work out what is sending them.

One reason why government feels inefficient is that, well, it is – mostly by the nature of what it is. See, we don’t have the luxury of saying ‘it’s not worth our time to send a check for $0.47 to some one out in East Jesus’.

The Job-Preservation Effects of Paycheck Protection Program Loans.

Unrecognizable. William Gaddis’s American pessimism.

‘Most incompetent government’: Londoners’ fury at Covid tier 4 rules. Good. This stuff needs to be resisted, and hard.

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine. The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves.

Overdispersion of COVID-19. Why a Small Percentage of People May Be Responsible for a Large Share of the Disease’s Spread.

In Praise of Calling Out Our Absurd and Immoral Economic System.

Battery prices have fallen 88 percent over the last decade.

How Selfish Are Plants? Let’s Do Some Root Analysis. A new model further untangles the complex strategy games playing out under our feet.

The 15 Objects That Defined 2020.

Can we restore nature? In seeking a means to heal our wounded planet, we should look to the painstaking, cautious craft of art conservation.

Here’s why some McDonald’s restaurants are putting cameras in their dumpsters.

MRSA emerges through natural transformation.

Moderna Vaccine Is Highly Protective Against Covid-19, the F.D.A. Finds.

Double the Inoculated Population with One Dose. Strongly agreed. Maximize leverage at the crucial time.

Car crashes killed 36,096 people in the US in 2019. Urban pedestrian and cyclist deaths have risen over the last decade.

Who Holds the $1.65 Trillion of Apartment Building Debt amid Eviction Bans and Plunging Occupancy Rates at High Rises? You guessed it: For over half of it, taxpayers are on the hook. Time to take a look.

An under-appreciated fact about the the modern economic world is that it actually is in economic terms a radically different place than all the other societies that existed in the thousands of years of recorded history before it.

Hospital housekeepers among first to get vaccine. Good.

It Took Two Days to Develop Moderna’s Vaccine.

Mass Extinctions Happen Every 27 Million Years.

How to let go of a lifelong dream.

Physicists Create Time-Reversed Waves of Optical Light in Head-Spinning First.

Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition.

How race politics liberated the elites. If society is taken to be inherently oppressive, the notion of a common good disappears.

Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics.

Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19.

FDA authorizes Moderna coronavirus vaccine for emergency use across the US.

The Sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service Is a National Security Matter.

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon. Playing with reality.

“Evil mobile emulator farms” used to steal millions from US and EU banks. Scale of operation is unlike anything researchers had seen before.

How Science Beat the Virus. And what it lost in the process.

Close to Home: How the Power of Facebook and Google Affects Local Communities.

The Vaccines Are Supposed to Be Free. Surprise Bills Could Happen Anyway. This country is an entire piece of shit.

Looking into the genetics of severe COVID-19. Genetics may underlie some of the variability in people’s symptoms. Uh-oh. Don’t tell the woke libs.

Plastic pipes are polluting drinking water systems after wildfires – it’s a risk in urban fires, too. Plastic pipes are a terrible idea, but we build nothing to last.

Congress to Pass $17 Billion Bailout of Airline Shareholders & Bondholders, to Top Off Prior Bailout. Industry Applauds, Airline Stocks Jump.

‘Like nothing seen in nature before’: strange dinosaur has scientists enthralled.

As Biden won the presidency, Republicans cemented their grip on power for the next decade.

Federal Car Crash Testing Needs Major Overhaul, Safety Advocates Say.

The death of the department store and the American middle class. The collapse of America’s middle class crushed department stores. Amazon and the pandemic are the final blows.

Data models point to a potentially diverse metabolic menu at Enceladus.

What Makes You Think 2021 Will Be Better? Most of the issues that made 2020 feel like a horror story will roll along with us into the new year.

The ‘Healthy Building’ Surge Will Outlast the Pandemic. That remains to be seen, but I hope so.

How Should We Understand Capital Income Inequality?

EU unveils landmark law curbing power of tech giants.

A record breaking number of journalists arrested in the U.S. this year.

Facebook to move UK users to California terms, avoiding EU privacy rules.

Pandemic Failure, Vaccine Success Indict American Monopoly Capitalism.

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language. Neuroscientists find that interpreting code activates a general-purpose brain network, but not language-processing centers. Probably why I am a bad programmer.

As with many things, technology is fundamentally changing the nature of persuasion. And society needs to adapt its rules of persuasion or suffer the consequences.

Nature’s ‘Brita Filter’ Is Dying And Nobody Knows Why.

The People Who Actually Had a Pretty Great Year. It’s not just the filthy rich. Much of America’s professional class has quietly, if a bit guiltily, been doing just fine, despite 2020.

What Did the Past Smell Like?

This Plant Evolved to Hide From a Predator. It Might Be Us.

China’s Policy Banks Are Lending Differently, Not Less.

Even Disaster Veterans Are Stunned By What’s Happening In Honduras.

Solid State Batteries.

The human odorant receptor OR10A6 is tuned to the pheromone of the commensal fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One. Armed with a handgun, a fake ID card and disguises, Miriam Rodríguez was a one-woman detective squad, defying a system where criminal impunity often prevails.

How McKinsey, the World’s Most Elite Consulting Firm, Helped Turbocharge America’s Opioid Epidemi.

The incoming administration’s pandemic response is going to rely on science in the same way the Democrats rely on science when it comes to climate change: as a useful bit of branding to set them apart from their opposition, but something to be largely ignored if they feel the solution is too politically unpalatable.

Why more, earlier voting means greater election security—not less.

Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will.

America’s 1% will be pulling out all the stops to get their hands on COVID-19 vaccine.

The Surprising Accuracy of Memory. Our memories are more reliable than experts predicted. Way, way more accurate.

Mission Creep or Creepy Mission: The New York Fed’s Trading Desk Has Ballooned to $6.59 Trillion Today from $576 Billion in 2008.

China’s vaccine gambit.

It’s Time to Scare People About Covid. Our public messaging about the virus should explain the real costs — in graphic terms — of catching the virus.

Psycho secession: Texas’ lost-cause lawsuit was the first shot in a new Civil War.

Copyright law is bricking your game console. Time to fix that.

Archives