The new abnormal

Wednesday. It’s Little Joe Cook‘s birthday today.

Covid or common cold? Here’s how to play.

Remember back in early 2020 when there were only a few identified Covid cases in the country and the president said it was all well under control and “would soon go down to zero?” I’m reminded of that as Massachusetts approaches its one million case milestone, with almost 20,000 deaths.

The tensions between progressive and practical politics are playing out in Philadelphia. Crime and race are driving the divide, and not necessarily in the ways you would expect.

Thanks to the New York Times, Discord is now mainstream. Soon it will be too crowded and no one will go there anymore.

And reports of a data breach at Last Pass are, according to Last Pass, greatly exaggerated.

A square peg

A quiet Sunday. Don’t rush. You can be late today.

Why can’t we just make more chips? Bloomberg explores the brutal economics of chip manufacturing.

In Providence, a NCAA basketball officiator and a friend of the mayor, with no law enforcement experience, has been promoted to the police department command staff as a Major. Seems like an odd choice. The mayor says other cities have done the same thing. Not really. But I see the rationale. If it were a high level civilian position, focused only on community engagement, it could make sense. But putting someone having no experience with policing in charge of the police academy makes absolutely no sense at all.

Here’s what you need to know about the mu variant. It’s more transmissible and it has “a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape,” according to the WHO. In other words, vaccines might not work. Great. Just great.

Floods, fires, terror attacks, pandemics. Add solar superstorms to the list of things that we should be worried about.

And flowers are nice. Nice to send. Nice to get.

United we test

Wednesday. Isaias is gone and sunshine returns.

Halloween is cancelled, at least in Salem, where it’s kind of a big deal.

Because testing for Covid-19 is a hard problem that would benefit from a consolidated approach, a number of governors came up with a crazy, out-of-the-box idea; join together into some kind of federated entity to attack the problem in a consistent and coordinated manner. Brilliant. Maybe this ‘federated state’ thing will catch on.

Smart headlights sound amazing. Arrays of LED’s, they’re super bright, but they dim selectively for oncoming vehicles. Sadly, they’re not available in the US because of headlight regulations written in 1967. Bummer.

If you thought the Kayne West run for president was mostly about vote splitting, it seems you’d be right.

I’m not a big fan of police militarization. But departments need to plan for contingencies and one of those is dealing with an attack from someone with serious firepower. That’s the world we live in, unfortunately. This kerfuffle in Cambridge isn’t surprising but it is wrongheaded.

And Larry Bird has found a long lost twin… in the garden.

Fools rush in

Monday, the 8th of June, 2020. Today is the anniversary of 1984.

How do you read a science paper? With a grain of salt and dash of social media verification.

Calls to defund the police to the point of elimination are a bridge too far for most people (not to mention a potential Republican talking point.) It’s a bad idea. I’ve seen Camden, NJ held up as place where it actually happened, but Camden was more of a city-to-county reorganization. There are more cops in Camden now, not less.

80% of the country thinks things are out of control. Sounds about right. The president wants to address the nation in a televised speech to talk about race and unity. This should be interesting. I can almost hear advisors begging and pleading, “stick to the teleprompter.” But, you know…

Tim Kirk reports on a march in Dublin to honor George Floyd.

There are two more articles today looking at police unions, one from The New Yorker and the other from the Huffington Post.

And the treasure of the Rocky Mountains has been found. Eureka!