Social distancing is getting hard in our house. And we’re normally people who have a limitless capacity for solitude and not going out.
500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”
Scotland is the home of a 500-year-old medieval manuscript containing the oldest extant written F-bomb.
“The profanity appears in a poem recorded by a bored student in Edinburgh while under lockdown as the plague ravaged Europe…. The poem is getting renewed attention thanks to its inclusion in a forthcoming BBC Scotland documentary exploring the country’s long, proud tradition of swearing, ‘Scotland—Contains Strong Language.'”
That is darn interesting.
[Jennifer Ouellette/Ars Technica]
Life Without Toilet Paper Is Better
Frank Bures at Vice:
If you were walking barefoot through your yard, and felt the unpleasant squish of fresh dog do through your toes, what would be your reaction? Would you think, “Geez, I need to get some dry, easily torn paper to smear this off my foot”?
No. You would quickly get yourself to a hose, or a sink. You would find some soap. And you would scrub your foot off using your hands.”
Don’t thank me for sharing this.
Really. Don’t. I don’t ever want to discuss it.
Shkreli’s plea from prison: Free me and I’ll cure COVID-19 [Beth Mole/Ars Technica]: Disgraced pharma exec, best known for raising the price of a lifesaving medicine from $13.50 a pill to $750, goes full supervillain.
This is what happens when a narcissist runs a crisis
Jennifer Senior at the New York Times:
Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats….
Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity….
Trump is genuinely afraid to lead. He can’t bring himself to make robust use of the Defense Production Act, because the buck would stop with him. (To this day, he insists states should be acquiring their own ventilators.) When asked about delays in testing, he said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” During Friday’s news conference, he added the tests “we inherited were “broken, were obsolete,” when this form of coronavirus didn’t even exist under his predecessor.
This sounds an awful lot like one of the three sentences that Homer Simpson swears will get you through life: “It was like that when I got here.”
White House creates ‘Team Telecom’ to probe whether foreign telcos should be allowed near US networks [Tom Claburn/The Register]
New Jersey seeks COBOL programmers to fix unemployment system: “… many of the state’s systems use older mainframes, and those systems are now seeing record demand for services as the coronavirus outbreak disrupts the economy.” [Kif Leswing/CNBC]
Cato Networks raises $77 million for cloud security platform that protects remote workforces
Cato Networks, which provides SD-WAN and other Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) connectivity, raises $77M additional funding, on top of $55M last year for a total of more than $200M. [Chris O’Brien/VentureBeat]
Cato securely connects remote workers and branch offices, which is of course kind of a big deal right now.
I’ve been doing a little work for Cato this year.
Cambridge Analytica and other abusers killed the open, collaborative, API-driven Web 2.0. “It’s amazing, in hindsight, just how naively open everything was back then.”
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A delightful video that takes a surprisingly philosophical and optimistic turn.
Photos of a computer shop that’s been locked since 2001, when the store owner, who also owned the strip mall it sits in, went bankrupt. [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]
Gateway 2000 PCs, LCD displays, and big beige CPUs with big fans!