Favorites December 5th 2021

Eric Topol @EricTopol

Looking good, Japan👍 Almost ~80% of population fully vaccinated. This is what containment looks like (vs 100% Delta) ~100 cases/day, 1-2 deaths/d, among 126 million people It can be done. @OurWorldInData

How did they get 80% fully vaccinated??? Oh right... vaccines haven’t become politically polarized in other countries.

kottke.org @kottke

A list of 52 things that @TomWhitwell learned in 2021, including "clean rooms used to make semiconductors have to be 1,000x cleaner than a surgical operating theatre, because a single transistor is now much smaller than a virus."

kottke.org“52 Things I Learned in 2021”Tom Whitwell’s list of 52 things he learned during the past year is always worth a read. Here are some of my favorites from the li

He picks out 5 of the 52 items, another is "10% of US electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads". But all 5 are gold.

Richard Hall @_RichardHall

As Angela Merkel leaves office, I get to share my favourite photograph again. In November 1990, a 36-year-old Merkel campaigns on the Baltic coast in Germany's first election after reunification. She reportedly drank five schnapps with them. npr.org/2021/09/24/104…

At first, 5 seemed like a lot because of the sugar. But I looked it up real quick, and apparently German schnapps doesn't have added sugar and is ~80 proof. So now that's just a lot of alcohol.

Alex Tabarrok @ATabarrok

Correct. So why are we still vaccinating kids on the old schedule that everyone now knows isn’t the biological optimum?

Michael Mina @michaelmina_lab

3-4 week spacing was never a biologically relevant window of time for maximum benefit. It was always used simply to speed up the trials, Else we would have had to wait months longer to start vaccinating ppl. We can’t keep confusing authorizations with biological optimum https://t.co/IaM54C2mrG

To make things worse, schools aren't reducing the home quarantine requirements until the kid is 'fully vaccinated', so each week you delay the second dose is another week they may need to be kept at home if a classmate tests positive.

Latest in space @latestinspace

NEWS 🚨: Mysterious cube-shaped anomaly discovered on the moon's far side by Chinese rover The rover will spend the next 2-3 months verifying it

Cool! From the article: "It's likely a large boulder excavated by an ancient lunar impact."

Pulp Librarian @PulpLibrarian

Working from home vs working in the office.

I've been doing it all wrong, standing on the same side of the desk. Gotta start practicing pointing at a monitor I can't see before we get back to the office.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

Please look at a map before accepting this characterization of where Equatorial Guinea is.

Michael M. Phillips @MPhillipsWSJ

EXCLUSIVE: China wants to put its first Atlantic Ocean military base in Equatorial Guinea, U.S. intelligence shows. Chinese warships rearming and refitting opposite the U.S. East Coast is a five-alarm scenario for the Pentagon and White House. https://t.co/WArA5yJIh1 via @WSJ

😂 It's in Africa? I'll admit, my guess was an Island in the North Atlantic when I read the headline.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

The craziest WW2 coincidence: Japan's random balloon bombing campaign hit the Manhattan Project plutonium production site in Washington state, knocking out the cooling system. If it wasn’t for conservative engineering, the reactor might have melted down before the Trinity test!

Wow, I always understood that the balloon bombing never accomplished anything, but I didn't realize how close they got.

Next, I technically found this screenshot thread on Twitter, but it appears to have originated on Tumblr, and it’s hard to read via the Twitter embed, so I’ve pasted it in it’s full glory here:

Good to see innovation in the archeological culinary space.

June 2021, Downtown Mountain View