Mitch's Blog

Feds are seizing medical supplies from hospitals without saying what they’re doing with it [Noam N. Levey/LA Times]

“In order to have confidence in the distribution system, to know that it is being done in an equitable manner, you have to have transparency,” says Dr. John Hick, a Minnesota emergency physician.

“Are they stockpiling this stuff? Are they distributing it? We don’t know,” one official said. “And are we going to ever get any of it back if we need supplies? It would be nice to know these things.”

New study investigates California’s possible herd immunity to COVID-19 [Caitlin Conrad/KSBW]

Scientists are investigating the possiblity that California was infected with coronavirus early — in the fall. The mystery is that California gets more visitors from China than other states do, and yet has a relatively low infection rate.

The 10 Most Offensive Movies Ever Made [Keith Langston/Screenrant]

(1) The writer Tad Williams and his wife, Deb, had a cat named “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Kitten.” Or just Henry. Tad told wonderful stories about that cat, and Julie and I got to meet the cat, who was indeed wonderful.

(2) The following would be great names for podcasts: “I Spit On Your Grave,” “The Human Centipede,” and “Cannibal Holocaust.”

Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math

Relativity makes no distinction between past, present and future; they are all fixed. In relativity, “now” does not exist.

In real life, though, we know that time flows from past to future and we live in the now. Quantum mechanics agrees with real life.

How to resolve the contradiction?

Gisin thinks he has, using an obscure, turn-of-the-20th Century branch of mathematics.

Gisin’s theory, if borne out, would explain the nature of time, reconcile classical and quantum mechanics, explain whether numbers are real, describe the nature of “now,” and might require physicists to invent a whole new kind of mathematics. Kind of a big deal!

[Natalie Wolchover/Quanta Magazine]

Privileged person problem: When I go to the supermarket, I keep the shopping list on my iPhone. When I’m wearing a mask, Face ID doesn’t recognize me. I have to open my iPhone by entering the passcode a dozen times or more.

I heard about a feature called “Setup Alternate Appearance” for situations where you have an “appearance that can look vastly different.”

I tried it with my mask on this morning. Nope, didn’t work. It said I had something obscuring my face and I should try again.

Joanna Stern has more on the whys and wherefores at the Wall Street Journal. The iPhone needs to see your eyes, nose and mouth. It’ll work for many sunglasses but not all. It supposedly works when men grow and shave off facial hair, and when women wear or don’t wear makeup.

There’s apparently a workaround to the mask problem: masks printed with images of the lower parts of faces on them!

Doctors who’ve been living with this problem for years offer suggestions: Just use pen and paper, bunch up your interactions with the iPhone in batches all at once, tell someone you trust to unlock the phone for you, ir continue typing in your passcode like a savage.

Stern notes, and I can confirm, that you can punch in your passcode and otherwise use your iPhone while wearing thin nitrile gloves on with trivial additional inconvenience. 🌕

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net

Cleveland Plain Dealer’s new owners massacre staff

The owners of the Cleveland Plain Dealer laid off all but 14 of the newsroom staff, then prohibited the survivors from covering the beats they’ve mastered over decades, giving those roles over to the non-unionized staff at cleveland.com. …

Among those affected: Ginger Christ, the paper’s health reporter, who has been stripped of her beat during a pandemic.

This during the largest public emergency in the last 75 years. Peak parasitic capitalism.

The TSA wanted to inspect a 16-year-old trans girl’s genitals

The scanner operator “she told Jamii she must go to a private room, expose herself, and let her ‘feel up in there.’ That is, a TSA supervisor demanded to molest a child.”

When her mother refused, TSA called in the police and top TSA managers. They were eventually released and drove 600 miles rather than flying.

The TSA previously strip-searched a grandmother on Mother’s Day to get a look at her sanitary napkin, and penetrated another woman’s vulva and “falsely told her that she could not refuse the search and abandon her trip and threatened to physically restrain her if she didn’t submit.”

Also:

• The 400-year-old Bannatyne Manuscript may not be the oldest surviving F-bomb. Roger Fuckebythenavele ftw.
• Excellent public domain Zoom backgrounds. Alas, my MBP is too underpowered to use Zoom backgrounds. I have not been moved to buy a greenscreen but these backgrounds may change my mind!
• Monster-themed COVID PSAs.

I think we’ll be cautious and not rush out to any restaurants or crowded social gatherings.

But I think I’ll absolutely take the dog to the park, Lake Murray, where we used to walk every day. Stop and talk to people. Let Minnie sniff out some other dogs. That sounds lovely. With Julie of course if she wants to come. 🌕

The computer language COBOL debuted in 1960, and it’s still running the world’s governments and banks

It’s tried and true. And also, according to this article, not hard to learn.

I do recall a remark by a programmer a few years ago – once you’ve learned one or two languages, it’s not hard to pick up another.

I took a couple of computer science classes in late 1979 as a college freshman. EVEN THEN we were taught COBOL was obsolete!

[Dave Gershgorn/OneZero]

Rules Rewritten: Managing Data Centers Through the Pandemic: Data center operators are reducing headcount to minimize coronavirus exposure, and these reductions may become permanent. [Scott Fulton III/IT Pro Today]

This looks like a useful new feature on Inoreader: Convert Almost Any Webpage Into RSS Feed With Inoreader’s Web Feeds

Inoreader will let you subscribe to updates for web pages even when those pages don’t offer RSS feeds.

Whenever you see a web page with a series of updates, be it news articles, blog posts, classifieds, product updates, weather alerts, practically any series of HTML links, Inoreader should be able to present it as an RSS feed. This feed will then be continuously updated, and any new links added to the list will pop up as articles inside Inoreader. Just like any regular feed.

I’m guessing it does a little screen-scraping and looks for patterns in text.