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I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out for coffee.

TV show idea: “Zeno, Warrior Princess,” about a transgender Classical Greek philosopher who defeats evildoers using logical paradoxes.

An old friend just shared a Dropbox folder of hundreds of photos he took when we were teenagers together.

This is me looking much cooler than I have ever been in my life.

That hair tho. I do miss having hair. 📷 📓

The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead [Donald G. McNeil Jr./The New York Times]

An excellent overview of the best science on what to expect – not just for the next year, but for years.

Short version: Expect gradual, cautious “opening the economy” and going out in public, in phases. The process could take literally years. People proven immune will get passports that let them move freely anywhere. At-risk people will live more limited lives.

The civil liberties implications here are ENORMOUS; freedom of movement and assembly are two essential characteristics distinguishing police states from free societies. But we are going to have to give those things up to minimize harm from the pandemic.

Not said in this article: Or we could be stupid and lots of people could rush out right away to bars and movie theaters and sporting events, and we’ll see hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The Year 2038 Problem [Reset]: If you enjoyed the Year 2000 crisis, we get to do it again in 2038.

Also: Making the case that Y2K was not rubbish; rather, a lot of people got together to make sure that nothing would go wrong, and very little did. Because of their efforts, we did see some problems in 2000, but they were no big deal.

And, interestingly, some of the effects were felt this year, in January – one of the Y2K workarounds was to essentially kick the problem down the road 20 years.

Who’s Organizing the Lockdown Protests [The Daily]

“An informal coalition of influential conservative leaders and groups has been quietly encouraging demonstrations against stay-at-home orders across the country.”

Usual suspects of Tea Party backers, gun rights groups, and Trump advocates.

Generally I’m happy to see Trump supporters burn their own houses down, but I am genuinely grieved and appalled to see photos of these protest groups. They’re playing Russian roulette with their own lives, their children and their families, friends, co-workers and neighbors.

It’s like watching a group of people protest traffic laws by walking blindfolded across a major superhighway during rush hour.

The problem with read-later bookmarking services like Pocket and Instapaper is your queue is filled with articles you decided not to read.

My women friends are showing their coronavirus hairdos on Instagram. Here’s mine.

Why do people think 5G causes coronavirus?

The 5G coronavirus conspiracy theory[Reset]

A vague throwaway line in a European newspaper in January ignited multiple conspiracy theories about a nonexistent link between 5G and coronavirus

People subscribe to theories like this because there are things really going on in the world that would have been unthinkable a short time ago

The best way to combat the spread of a conspiracy theory: Start by listening.

What to expect in the next year or two of the pandemic

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times science and health reporter, who has successfully anticipated the pandemic thus far, polishes his crystal ball and looks at what to expect for the next year or two.

  • Immunity passports, as people get certified immune and fit to go out in public;
  • Start-stop lockdowns, as societies open up, infection rates increase, and then societies shut down again;
  • and strategic self-infection – people intentionally infecting themselves in hopes of acquiring immunity.

Afterward, possibly a flourishing of prosperity and progressive policy, as happened after World Wars I and I.

The Next Year (or Two) of the Pandemic [The Daily/The New York Times]

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

++ Calls by the music industry to put copyright filters on the entire Internet are a terrible idea. Existing filters are utter failures at finding copyrighted material and “they also flag and block entire libraries' worth of legit materials.” Copyright filters will do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they intend: They will encourage copyright abuse, stifle legitimate free expression and creativity and – because they cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year to implement – they will block startups from competing with the big incumbent internet companies.

++ Apartment buildings didn’t cause the pandemic.

++ “Reopen” websites are backed by the Koch brothers and other grifters behind the Tea Party, GOP and conmen who stir up fears that guns are going to confiscated.

++ Charter gives its field techs $25 gift cards to restaurants – which aren’t open – instead of hazard pay or PPE, and it requires back-office staff to come to work in the office. Now at last 230 Charter employees have Covid-19 and the company is under investigation by the NY Attorney General.

++ Disney heiress Abigail Disney says the company’s top executives ought to forego bonuses rather than furlough 100,000 front-line workers.

Trump is going down hard in November

Everyone is in denial about November [Daniel W. Drezner/The Washington Post]

We’re only in the second inning of the pandemic. Getting a little breather now, things are looking like they’re getting better, but most of the crisis is still ahead of us.

And Trump can be counted on to make things worse. That is his biggest liability as a President. Not his numerous character flaws – jerk, crook, racist, narcissist, serial and compulsive liar. No, Trump’s biggest liability as a President is that he’s an incompetent moron. He’s an idiot. Even worse, he THINKS he’s a super-competent genius. And that’s going to be even more obvious in November than it is today.

"World on Fire"

Last night we watched about 15 minutes of the second episode “World on Fire,” a British miniseries about the Nazi conquest of Europe, told from the vantage point of ordinary people.

Then we turned off the TV.

I loved the first episode of the program and was extremely impressed by it, but somehow we’re not feeling like watching “World on Fire” when the world seems like it’s on the verge of burning.

A view into an alternate universe

A big part of my job is – or was – attending conferences. When I learn – or learned – about an interesting-looking conference, I put it in my calendar.

And now that calendar is a view into an alternate universe, one where I continued to work at my previous job, and coronavirus did not happen.

Today in that alternate universe, I am returning from the Open Networking Edge Summit in Los Angeles.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic

  • Beware of fake “Someone you came in contact with tested positive for COVID-19” warnings. They’re scams.

  • Investors that own doctors' groups blew millions on ads to promote “surprise billing” even as they were denying access to PPE, cutting wages and firing doctors.

  • Every Covid commercial is exactly the same.

  • The Texas AG threatens to imprison people for warning about the risk of getting Covid while voting.

  • Covid didn’t escape from a Chinese lab.

  • Whole Foods is making heatmaps to detect union activity – cheaper than paying people a good wage.

  • Amazon workers are planning a strike.

How far back does your resume go?

Question for my over-50 associates: How far back does your resume go? I’ve seen tips that experienced job-seekers should only have resumes going back 15 years. Mine goes back to 2003 and I’ll probably keep it that way because I was at that particular company until 2009 – 11 years ago, within the 15-year window.

How about you? How far back does your resume and LinkedIn profile go?

When updating my resume and LinkedIn in February I was a little sad to hit the delete key on the first 15 years of my career, which encompassed local weekly and daily newspapers, time at UNIX Today and Open Systems Today, my first gigs at InformationWeek and Computerworld, and my first 10-month stint freelancing – gone gone gone.

Vintage Season: C.L. Moore and the “Golden Age” of Science Fiction [Eric Rosenfield/Literate Machine]

C.L. Moore was a talented science fiction and fantasy writer whose career spanned the Golden Age of pulp magazines, from the 1930s, and briefly into television. She wrote both under her own byline and in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. She retired from writing in 1963, and died a quarter-century later. The ferocious demands of making a living writing at cheap pulp rates had burned out her talent and used her up.

Her most famous story is probably “Vintage Season.” Set in the present day, it’s about a man who rents out a house to a group of strange but congenial people who, the man learns, are from the future. The mystery of the story is what these people are doing there, at that time: the man thinks there is absolutely nothing remarkable about himself, his house, his city or that moment. He soon learns differently.

Moore’s husband, Kuttner, died of a stroke in his sleep at age 44 in 1958. A month earlier, a talented writer named Cyril Kornbluth died of a heart attack at age 34 “and there was a palpable feeling among their fellows in the trenches that these men had died from the constant need to produce in the pay-per-word mills, especially through the long crunch of the mid-to-late 50s.

Rosenfield writes:

“I was only twenty-three, then,” writer Robert Silverberg would say later, “but I somehow realized right away that these two men had literally died from writing science fiction and I was afraid that I was going to die too. I had some bad months.”

More writers would fall away over the next few years; Mark Clifton dead of a heart attack in 1963 at 57, H. Beam Piper a suicide in 1960 at 60. Still others quit prose fiction altogether. Isaac Asimov, for example, turned to cranking out nonfiction books at his customary breakneck pace and wouldn’t come back to fiction until the ’70s. Leigh Brackett took up a noted film career, including scripts for Rio Bravo (1958), The Long Goodbye (1973), and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), among many others.

Moore for her part completed the transition to television, writing for Maverick, Sugarfoot, 77 Sunset Strip, and other shows under the name Catherine Kuttner. But in 1963 she remarried a physician and quit writing altogether.

It’d be easy to speculate that her new husband didn’t want his wife writing, but she herself said in a later interview, “Since I don’t have to write for a living anymore, I just don’t have the motivation to resume writing, although I wish I did.” There’s a sense in this sentence that the pressures of commercial fiction had sucked out whatever passion Moore had once had for writing–all that giddy glee in which she’d typed out that first story for fun back in 1933–transforming it into just another job. And when the need for that job evaporated so did the desire to do it.

The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth

Sara Seager is a tenured professor of physics and planetary science who won a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2013. Her area of expertise is exoplanets – planets that orbit stars other than our son – specifically the search for a planet that might contain life.

Chris Jones profiles Seagar for the New York Times. She emerges as the very picture of the obsessed scientist: She speaks in an unmodulated breathless tone, never learned to manage money, doesn’t celebrate birthdays, Christmas or holidays, never learned to cook.

It would be easy to pigeonhole someone like Seagar as a soulless human computer. But this profile is only half-focused on her work; the other half deals with her immense grief over becoming a young widow, struggling to raise children alone, and eventually finding friends and connection with people.

vintagegeekculture:

Star Trek art designer Matt Jeffries, with one of his most famous creations: the Klingon battlecruiser.

Bonus: his original, and in my view, far better, design for the shuttlecraft.

via

The temperature will probably get up past 90 by Saturday. I am looking forward to complaining about the heat as a break from complaining about the cold.

Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic.net:

  • Denmark is denying bailouts to companies headquartered in tax havens: If you don’t pay taxes, you don’t get to enjoy tax benefits.

  • Zoom claims it uses AI to stop sexytimes. Zoom won’t let you zoom anybody on Zoom. Or so it says – AI has been terrible at detecting nudity, there’s no reason to think it’s gotten better. And why does Zoom believe it has the right to be sex police?

  • Cars, not public transit, are correlated with contagion in NYC. I need to look into this further; it doesn’t make sense. I am 100% pro-public-transit, and it absolutely can be made to work even here in suburbanized Southern California. But public transit, like sporting events, religious services, Comic-Con, and other wonderful things, seems like contagion vectors.

  • 94.5% of “small business” money went to giant corporations. Because Trump’s only skill is grifting.

  • Also, while every President since Reagan has had a terrible record on anti-trust, Trump is the worst. He’s not even trying.

Tales of romance and relationships during the pandemic

Covering Covid [Embedded]

A woman tries dating by Facetime and Zoom, and has stories.

A newlywed couple, married just one year, is quarantined together in a one-bedroom apartment; they’re struggling as he’s an average male slob and she had a terrible fear of death that she was seeking counseling for even BEFORE the pandemic.

A man tells his wife he wants a divorce and then they get locked in together in quarantine, which is awkward.

I loved this episode and am looking forward to the inevitable Richard Curtis movie adaptation.

But it occurs to me that all the stories are about privileged people. Where are the so-called “essential workers” – the Amazon warehouse and Instacart workers? Where are the doctors and nurses? Where are the people who are sick or dying?

P.S. Dating stories from my over-30 single women friends are a guilty pleasure of mine. They’re suffering for my entertainment!

The poop emoji was born in Japan in 1997 and launched a generation of cute poop. This is the cute poop decade.

The poop fad connects with unicorns, unboxing videos, toys, marketing, Apple, the changing role of girls, slime, ice cream, emoji, glitter, Google, and middle-age people’s difficulties having bowel movements.

Unicorn poop: How did excrement get cute? [Decoder Ring]

Cast of Pulp Fiction and Quentin Tarantino, 1994 via

I remember I didn’t want to see this for years because I thought it would be artsy and tedious. Boy was I wrong.

“Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?” 1970’s campaign via

“Kids are murder!” - Sanatogen Tonic Wine ad with a mail-in coupon to receive a sample [1960s] via

Del Cerro hills, from a few minutes’ walk from home. The air is amazingly clear. 📷

Don’t care what the answer is. I’m keeping mine.

Coronavirus will also cause a loneliness epidemic

COVID-9 exacerbates another long-standing and serious pandemic: Loneliness.

Loneliness can literally cause physical illness. People most at risk from COVID-19 are the elderly and disabled, and they’re more likely to be lonely too.

[Ezra Klein/Vox]

Procrastination is Not Laziness

David Cain at Raptitude:

… procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.”

So much here is true for me. Sometimes, when I’m particularly hard on myself, I think I could have accomplished so much more.

And by “sometimes” I mean “often.” Maybe every day.

Why Walking Matters—Now More Than Ever

Shane O’Mara at The Wall Street Journal:

Walking is essential to our nature. Walking upright is one thing that sets humans apart; no other animal does it, but we can’t do without it.

Walking helps the body heal, helps the brain function. Walking, rather than seeing, is how we build metal maps of our environment. And walking protects us against depression.

I walk 3+ miles daily.

Remdisivir, a drug that shows promising signs as a potential treatment for COVID-19, was developed using public funds. But Gilead, a pharma company, stands to profit big.

Republicans were right to warn about welfare kings and queens “driving Cadillacs and getting fat on government pork.” These moochers are the wealthy, big-business donors to both Republicans and Democrats.

Gilead, the remdesivir welfare queens [Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic]

I’m trying to remember when I last had a day off work, and I can’t recall. Weekend before lockdown when I went out to brunch with Julie, maybe? That was more than a month ago.

I’m not working ALL the time. I take a few hours off every day. Indeed, I am actually not currently working very hard at all, though that needs to end very soon and I need to get back to working hard again. Because money.

Still, I do work every day, some more and some less. Every day. And my schedule is unhinged. Like Billy Pilgrim or Doctor Who, I have become unstuck in time. Last night after 10 pm I caught up on email and worked on organizing my to-do list. Not something I would normally do on a Saturday night.

Yesterday was Saturday, right? And that means today is Sunday? [Checking phone] Yes, that’s right.

What does a day off look like anyway, when you work from a home office, most of your work and play both involves staring at screens, and – this is the key part – YOU CAN’T GO ANYWHERE.

I asked Julie and she said: Clean house. We usually have a service come in and do that but of course they’re not coming now and the house is getting pretty colorful.

So I guess that’s what I’m doing. As a self-employed person I can schedule my “weekend” whenever it makes the most sense. So I guess sometime in the next few days I’m taking the day off and helping clean house. Um, yay?

Is the Virus on My Clothes? My Shoes? My Hair? My Newspaper? - Tara Parker-Pope on The New York Times

Staying safe when you come in from the big world.

tl;dr: If you’re not leaving the house much, and not coming in contact with infected people, then social distancing, mask wearing and handwashing should be fine. And even mask-wearing is unnecessary if you stay outdoors and can keep your distance.

Julie and I do not wear masks on our daily walks. We live in a quiet suburb, and it’s easy to keep 20 or more feet away from anyone we encounter.

I’ve done something counterintuitive to ease news anxiety: Turned on news notifications on my phone.

Yes, on.

If the news notifications look like the usual baloney, then I know there’s no crisis requiring my immediate attention.

I used the same principle immediately post-9/11 with the technology available at that time. I had my clock radio tuned to wake me up with news radio. If the first words I heard were “Michael Jackson,” I knew there was no reason for me to rush to look at headlines.

Caleb, a young man whose life is going nowhere, finds escape and purpose on YouTube. First of a new podcast series by The New York Times.

One: Wonderland - Rabbit Hole

The podcast producers are nonspecific about where Caleb’s story ends, but it seems to be far-right extremism. Shocking because he seems like a pleasant young man. And Caleb even supported Obama. Not in a deep or informed way, but Caleb thought Obama seemed like a good guy, and that it spoke well for the US to have an African-American President.

I see my past self in Caleb.

“Rabbit Hole,” a narrative audio series with tech columnist Kevin Roose, explores what happens when our lives move online.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez interviews from quarantine with the New York Times Daily podcast and discusses why she voted against the pandemic bailout bill – because it devotes hundreds of billions of dollars to propping up share prices for megacorporations who don’t need it, and not enough to struggling people, who do.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Progressivism and the Pandemic

She uses the phrase “rugged capitalism for the poor and unfettered socialism for the rich,” which she attributes, possibly incorrectly, to Martin Luther King.

AOC’s primary subject is the future of progressivism and the Democratic Party after Sanders dropped out of the Presidential race. She sees support for Biden as minimizing harm rather than necessarily doing good, but is prepared for a better outcome (same for me).

She also discusses the difficult task progressives face – Democrats need affluent middle-class suburban white votes to win elections, but those voters are often put off by the progressive agenda.

Nearly a half century after the OPEC oil embargo almost brought the US to its knees, we’re now the worlds largest oil producer rather than consumer, and Trump is trying to jack up oil prices.

That’s normally Presidential suicide, but Trump is trying to protect the US oil industry.

Oil be back - Donald Trump’s big bet - Checks and Balances

A wise economic strategy for the US would have to carefully balance protecting the oil industry while encouraging clean energy production, such as solar. But Trump doesn’t do subtle – his only move is smashing things with a hammer and grabbing gold and power for himself and his cronies.

In this prophetic science fiction story from 2015, a cooking blogger keeps up a cheerful attitude and makes do while self-quarantining with her family during a global pandemic. Excellent story and a fast read: “So Much Cooking,", by Naomi Kritzer on Clarkesworld.

And from a few days ago, Kritzer follows up: “Didn’t I Write This Story Already? When Your Fictional Pandemic Becomes Reality. Some interesting discussion by Kritzer about the themes she explores in the story, how fans and friends are reacting today, what the author got right and wrong about the pandemic, and how the fictional characters' quarantine struggles maps to reality.

Inspired by “So Much Cooking,” on my next grocery run, I’m going to go out and buy a couple of vacuum-sealed cans of Maxwell House or Chock Full o' Nuts coffee. Just in case the good stuff gets hard to find.

I’m also going to think about what more I can be doing to help neighbors and the community. Confession: So far, not much.

Thanks, Cory.

Carnival kept sending out cruise ships while knowing it was risky. And the chairman of Carnival is on Trump’s back-to-work council. Rearranging dreck chairs - David Pell on Nextdraft

Armed far-right groups are behind anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and elsewhere. They love Trump and Trump is cheering them on. Martyrdom and dumber - David Pell at Nextdraft.

ME: I have 300+ podcast episodes in my queue. I will never listen to them all!

ALSO ME: This looks like an interesting podcast. I’ll subscribe now!

John Horton Conway, a ‘Magical Genius’ in Math, Dies at 82.

Siobhan Roberts writes The New York Times’s obit for mathematician and “Magical Genius” John Conway, most famous for inventing the computer Game of Life. Cause of death: COVID-19

Martin Gardner, the longtime mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, said that when the game went viral on the internet, “with addicts programming it at home and at work — one quarter of the world’s computers were playing it.”

Conway’s colleague, Princeton mathematician Simon Kochen, said there are two kinds of geniuses in mathematics and physics, ordinary geniuses. Ordinary geniuses just seem to be people who work hard.

“But then there are the magical geniuses,” he added. “Richard Feynman was a magical genius. And the same always struck me about John — he was a magical mathematician. He was a magical genius rather than an ordinary genius.”

Also:

Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”

People like Conway seem to be to be the truly blessed people in the world. They work hard at what they do, they excel at it, and the work is pure joy to them. We’re all advised to do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life – it will all be play to you – but very few people can achieve that.

I became fascinated by Conway’s game around 1983-84 or so, and wrote a program in the computer language Basic to play it on an early IBM PC. Each turn took a half-hour!

China Police Censor Tales of Post-Coronavirus Renewal.

New York Times journalist Paul Mozur finds signs of a nation opening up on the streets of the big Chinese city of Hefei, population 8 million.

He also finds xenophobia, and police censorship that’s both laughably clumsy, and effective.

Mozur was expelled from China, along with other Western journalists, shortly after.

Some people say we need to open the economy soon and if a few thousand people – or hundred thousand people – die because of it, well, that’s a small price to pay.

People who espouse this view should be asked whether they themselves are taking greater risk to help others. Are they volunteering at a food bank, blood bank, or working front lines in essential retail service?

If not, they should be invited to shut the fuck up.

In any war, there are always chickenhawks – people who, from a place of safety, advocate ruthless sacrifice BY OTHER PEOPLE. I’ve noticed over the decades that these people are never themselves combat veterans. Somehow when it was their turn to stand in front of unfriendly strangers with guns, these brave warriors had other things to do.

Donald Trump, aka “Captain Bonespurs,” is of course the chickenhawk-in-chief.

Dr. Tony Fauci: From One Pandemic to Another - Epidemic.

AIDS activists in the 1980s were surprised to find a champion in a civil service doctor, Anthony Fauci.

And for people who lived through that crisis, the coronavirus pandemic gives them a terrible sense of déjà vu.

Kicked Out of China - The New York Times Daily podcast.

As the pandemic spread, China expelled Western journalists, including New York Times reporter Paul Mozur, as well as reporters for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Mozur talks about the experience, and heightening tensions between China and the West.

Foreigners in China are facing increase xenophobia as the Communist Party spreads rumors that foreigners brought coronavirus in China. Some rumors say it was a deliberate act of biowar by the US Army.

This is an old trick for the Chinese Communist Party. Whenever they fear the legitimacy of their rule threatened, they stir up hostility toward foreigners, particularly the West, particularly the US. And of course Republicans in the US are now borrowing the same playbook.

The Chinese government wants to tell a story to the world that they have gotten the coronavirus under control, through their variety of enlightened autocracy, while democracies are flailing. They are expelling western journalists, who might tell the truth and undermine that story.

Mozur also discusses his grief at leaving China - probably never to return - which has been his home for 13 years.

All praise, no pay - Today, Explained: Essential workers in the food, transportation, and retail industries are being called American heroes. They want to be paid that way.

We had drama. Julie commented at bedtime that she hadn’t seen Vivvie, our slate-gray cat, for about 24 hours. So we spent some time looking around the house for her. I went down in the courtyard, though Vivvie never, ever shows any interest in leaving the house. She’s a timid cat and runs away at any sign of busyness. No sign of Vivvie. I kept my eyes peeled around the yard when I was putting Minnie to bed. No sign of Vivvie. I looked in the spare room and closets. Nothing.

Vivvie did not come to bed with Julie during the night either.

This morning, we looked around some more. Still no sign of Vivvie. Julie was distraught. I was concerned and also puzzled. Sammy is an escape cat. If Sammy was missing that amount of time I’d be sure she’d gotten out. But Vivvie stays put.

Then Julie had an idea: My recliner in the living room. I’d been sitting in it yesterday. What if Vivvie climbed up in there when it was open, then couldn’t get out when I shut it and got up?

And we went to the living room and opened it up and Vivvie SHOT OUT AT TOP SPEED.

We are often in the living room with the dog and Vivvie is wary about the dog so when she got stuck in there she didn’t complain the whole time we were in the room. Or I don’t know maybe she liked it. Cats are weird. 📓

What AOC Gets that Bernie Didn’t - Michael Grunwald at Politico

Progressive pot-stirrer Sean McElwee has some thoughts about what went wrong for Sanders supporters, and how they can get what they want (eventually).

McElwee defies conventional wisdom for progressives by saying progressives need to embrace conventional wisdom — polling, focus groups, and changing the message to suit the district.

He popularized the slogan “Abolish ICE” — even had it as part of his twitter handle — but advises Democratic candidates to be extremely cautious using it themselves, because it’s just not a slogan that will win many elections.

Talking about which policies could work politically in Trump districts is not a fun conversation to have, but we need to have those conversations.

This article comes at a good time for me; I’ve been disgusted by national Democratic Party politics, discouraged and pessimistic about the future of the US. But now I’m reminded politics is incremental. Getting Trump out of office and keeping Congress would be a big win and it seems very achievable. Winning the Senate and a few state houses would be even better. That would only be the beginning — if Democrats fail to deliver real improvements in people’s lives, they’d be out of power by 2024. But victory in 2020 would be a great start.

Why Aren’t We All on the Same Time Zone? - Patrick J Kiger on How Stuff Works

Time zones are confusing to people who routinely communicate or travel across them, and some people are proposing to put the whole world on one time zone - UTC, which is five hours ahead of Eastern time in the US.

This does not mean that New York businesses would open five hours earlier. A business that opens at 9 am today would open at the same time under the new system, it’s just that the clock would say 2 pm. Everybody would get used to it quickly, say proponents of the change.

I think this is a bad idea, simply because I don’t think there are enough people doing business across time zones to make it worthwhile to change the system for everybody.

However, I have thought for years, that there should be a custom of using universal time for those of us who DO have business crossing time zones. I’ve been routinely doing business across time zones for many years, and even now I still occasionally miscalculate, or propose a meeting time to someone without specifying which time zone I mean.

One of my favorite features of the iPhone is the ability to get notifications for replies to individual email messages and threads.

Watch the weird cinematic rabbit hole that is Blade Runner: The Lost Cut - Adi Robertson at The Verge

“Blade Runner: The Lost Cut” is a 20-minute fan film that splices Blade Runner with

… other films that star Blade Runner cast members, plus more films starring those films’ co-stars, resulting in a masterfully edited cinematic rabbit hole where Rick Deckard is hunting down a cast of replicants including Gene Hackman (via The Conversation, one of Harrison Ford’s first films), Steve Martin (via The Jerk, which stars M. Emmet Walsh, who plays Deckard’s boss Bryant), and John Belushi (via The Blues Brothers, which features Ford’s Star Wars co-star Carrie Fisher).

Getting on lunchtime here so I think I’ll be watching this while I eat.