Today is Tuesday, December 1st. And so begins the last month of 2020.
It’s been a couple of years since Massachusetts legalized marijuana and the sky hasn’t fallen. But, as Shira Schoenberg reports, it hasn’t been all blue skies and sunshine either.
Globe reader Jonathan Leamon felt the need to defend brutalist architecture in response to an Alex Beam column slamming the style. Here’s the thing. There are attractive brutalist buildings (Boston City Hall) and ugly ones (The Hoover Building and most of U-Mass, Amherst). And as an aside, although Tom Menino famously hated the design of city hall, I think that was due more to the clunky interior design than the outside appearance. It’s a beautiful building on the outside, but no-one, including, I suspect, Mr. Leamon, would want to work inside of it for very long.
Scientists in Italy are reporting that they found coronavirus in a sample of sewer water from December, 2019, more than a month before the first case appeared. Antibodies were also found in donated blood samples taken in December from California, Oregon and Washington. So it appears that the virus was spreading outside of China earlier than previously thought. A CDC board will vote today on a plan for how to roll out the vaccines, including who goes first. And in other related news, Scott Atlas is history.
You can forget hydroxychloroquine. Just take vitamin D.
And GPT-3 can still be awkwardly inaccurate sometimes while scarily human-like at others. It’s only been around for a short time so I suspect that as it becomes more refined it will soon easily pass the Turing Test without any qualifications. Then, stand back as it takes over the world.