Any common face mask provides significant protection against the virus that causes COVID-19, but N95 masks are most effective at slashing the amount emitted by infected people, according to a University of Maryland-led study released Wednesday.
So-called “duckbill” N95 masks scored highest in the study, which measured the exhaled breath of participants who were tested both masked and unmasked to measure comparative outputs of SARS-CoV-2. The inexpensive masks, which have two head straps and a horizontal seam, captured 98% of exhaled virus, according to the study published in
eBioMedicine.
The researchers also found that—in what might come as a surprise to many—cloth masks outperformed the specific brand of KN95 mask that was tested. Surgical masks brought up the rear in performance out of the four types, but even they blocked 70% of the virus, the tests showed. (To reflect the general public’s use of masks, study volunteers were not fit-tested for their masks or trained how to properly wear them.)
“The research shows that any mask is much better than no mask, and an N95 is significantly better than the other options. That’s the No. 1 message,” says the study’s senior author, Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health and a global expert on how viruses spread through the air.
“our data suggest that a mildly symptomatic person with COVID-19, not wearing a mask or respirator, would exhale on average 2800 RNA copies per hour in their total exhaled aerosol or a little more than two infectious doses, quanta, per hour. However, wearing a N95 respirator would reduce the aerosol shedding rate to less than one tenth of a quantum per hour. “
Optical anti-counterfeiting technology, as a preventive measure, has deeply permeated our daily lives. Visually readable codes designed based on optical materials are widely used due to their ease of verification, reasonable cost, and difficulty in replication. The rapid development of modern technology and the increasingly rampant activities of counterfeiting pose greater challenges to optical anti-counterfeiting technology. Consequently, optical anti-counterfeiting material systems based on multimodal integrated applications have garnered widespread attention.
In a new paper published in
Light: Science & Applications, a team of scientists, led by Professor Jing Wang from Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Bioinorganic and Synthetic Chemistry, State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Chemistry, Sun Yat-sen University, China, and co-workers have developed a non-stoichiometric persistent luminescence (PersL) inorganic material, CaGaxO4:Bi (
x < 2), which is capable of responding to various ultraviolet light stimuli.
Best part of non-American twitter is that sometimes Trending In [Country] will just be a set of loose words that people from your country happen to be using a lot today.
One of the most consequential series of investigative journalism of this decade was the
Propublica series that Jesse Eisinger helmed, in which Eisinger and colleagues analyzed a trove of leaked IRS tax returns for the richest people in America:
The Secret IRS Files revealed the fact that many of America’s oligarchs pay no tax at all. Some of them even get subsidies intended for poor families, like Jeff Bezos, whose tax affairs are so scammy that he was able to claim to be among the working poor and receive a federal Child Tax Credit, a $4,000 gift from the American public to one of the richest men who ever lived:
As important as the numbers revealed by the Secret IRS Files were, I found the
explanations even more interesting. The 99.9999% of us who never make contact with the secretive elite wealth management and tax cheating industry know, in the abstract, that there’s
something scammy going on in those esoteric cults of wealth accumulation, but we’re pretty vague on the details. When I pondered the “tax loopholes” that the rich were exploiting, I pictured, you know, long lists of equations salted with Greek symbols, completely beyond my ken.
But when Propublica’s series laid these secret tactics out, I learned that they were incredibly
stupid ruses, tricks so thin that the only way they could
possibly fool the IRS is if the IRS just didn’t give a shit (and they truly didn’t – after decades of cuts and attacks, the IRS was far more likely to audit a family earning less than $30k/year than a billionaire).
This has become a somewhat familiar experience. If you read the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers, Luxleaks, Swissleaks, or any of the other spectacular leaks from the oligarch-industrial complex, you’ll have seen the same thing: the rich employ the most tissue-thin ruses, and the tax authorities gobble them up. It’s like the tax collectors don’t
want to fight with these ultrawealthy monsters whose net worth is larger than most nations, and merely require
some excuse to allow them to cheat, anything they can scribble in the box explaining why they are worth billions and paying little, or nothing, or even entitled to free public money from programs intended to lift hungry children out of poverty.
It was this experience that fueled my interest in forensic accounting, which led to my bestselling techno-crime-thriller series starring the two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant Martin Hench, who made his debut in 2022’s
Red Team Blues:
The double outrage of finding out how badly the powerful are ripping off the rest of us, and how stupid and transparent their accounting tricks are, is at the center of
Chokepoint Capitalism, the book about how tech and entertainment companies steal from creative workers (and how to stop them) that Rebecca Giblin and I co-authored, which also came out in 2022:
Now that I’ve written four novels and a nonfiction book about finance scams, I think I can safely call myself a oligarch ripoff hobbyist. I find this stuff endlessly fascinating, enraging, and, most importantly, energizing. So naturally, when PJ Vogt devoted two episodes of his excellent Search Engine podcast to the subject last week, I gobbled them up:
I love the way Vogt unpacks complex subjects. Maybe you’ve had the experience of following a commentator and admiring their knowledge of subjects you’re unfamiliar with, only have them cover something
you’re an expert in and find them making a bunch of errors (this is basically the experience of using an LLM, which can give you authoritative seeming answers when the subject is one you’re unfamiliar with, but which reveals itself to be a Bullshit Machine as soon as you ask it about something whose lore you know backwards and forwards).
Well, Vogt has covered many subjects that I am an expert in, and I had the
opposite experience, finding that even when he covers my own specialist topics, I still learn something. I don’t always agree with him, but always find those disagreements productive in that they make me clarify my own interests. (Full disclosure: I was one of Vogt’s experts on his previous podcast, Reply All, talking about the inkjet printerization of everything:)
Vogt’s series on taxing billionaires was no exception. His interview subjects (including Eisinger) were very good, and he got into a lot of great detail on the leaker himself, Charles Littlejohn, who plead guilty and was sentenced to five years:
Vogt also delved into the history of the federal income tax, how it was sold to the American public, and a rather hilarious story of Republican Congressional gamesmanship that backfired spectacularly. I’d never encountered this stuff before and
boy was it interesting.
But then Vogt got into the nature of taxation, and its relationship to the federal debt, another subject I’ve written about extensively, and that’s where one of those productive disagreements emerged. Yesterday, I set out to write him a brief note unpacking this objection and ended up writing a giant essay (sorry, PJ!), and this morning I found myself still thinking about it. So I thought, why not clean up the email a little and publish it here?
As much as I enjoyed these episodes, I took serious exception to one – fairly important! – aspect of your analysis: the relationship of taxes to the national debt.
There’s two ways of approaching this question, which I think of as akin to classical vs quantum physics. In the orthodox, classical telling, the government taxes us to pay for programs. This is crudely true at 10,000 feet and as a rule of thumb, it’s fine in many cases. But on the ground – at the quantum level, in this analogy – the
opposite is actually going on.
There is only one source of US dollars: the US Treasury (you can try and make your own dollars, but they’ll put you in prison for a long-ass time if they catch you.).
If dollars can
only originate with the US government, then it follows that:
a) The US government doesn’t need our taxes to get US dollars (for the same reason Apple doesn’t need us to redeem our iTunes cards to get more iTunes gift codes);
b) All the dollars in circulation
start with spending by the US government (taxes can’t be paid until dollars are first spent by their issuer, the US government); and
c) That spending
must happen
before anyone has been taxed, because the way dollars enter circulation is through spending.
You’ve probably heard people say, “Government spending isn’t like household spending.” That is obviously true: households are currency
users while governments are currency
issuers.
But the implications of this are very interesting.
First, the total dollars in circulation are:
a) All the dollars the government has ever spent into existence funding programs, transferring to the states, and paying its own employees,
minus
b) All the dollars that the government has taxed away from us, and subsequently annihilated.
(Because governments spend money into existence and tax money out of existence.)
The net of dollars the government spends in a given year minus the dollars the government taxes out of existence that year is called “the national deficit.” The total of all those national deficits is called “the national debt.” All the dollars in circulation today are the result of this national debt. If the US government didn’t have a debt, there would be no dollars in circulation.
The only way to eliminate the national debt is to tax
every dollar in circulation out of existence. Because the national debt is “all the dollars the government has ever spent,” minus “all the dollars the government has ever taxed.” In accounting terms, “The US deficit is the public’s credit.”
Some names are neither enigmatic nor absurd themselves but become so in combination with others.
In 1907, the butterfly researcher William Dunham Kearfott described a whole series of new species within the genus
Eucosma. The genus belongs to the moth family
Tortricidaeor leafroller moths, which include codling moths and other fruit pests.
Eucosma bobanais one of Kearfott’s names, but only once it’s placed in concert with the other names, which run through nearly all the consonants in the alphabet, does the appeal of his creations manifest itself:
bobana, cocana, dodana, fofana, hohana, kokana, lolana, momana, popana, rorana, sosana, totana, vovana, fandana, gandana, handana, kandana, mandana, nandana, randana, sandana, tandana, vandana, wandana, xandana, yandana, zandana, nomana, sonomana, vomonana, womonana, boxeana, canariana, foridana, idahoana,and
miscana.
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
Half a byte of data is a nibble.
Particle physicists went out of their way to call a particle a WIMP (weakly interacting matter particle) just because its weak so now you have physicists saying stuff like “one of the candidates for dark matter are wimps”
None of you know how to have any fun
Isn’t it a joy that people who devote their lives to something so crucial find happiness in it too?
There’s also MACHOS in astrophysics but I forgot what it stands for
Dr. Mae Jemison was the first African American woman to travel in space. Born on October 17, 1956, in Decatur, Alabama, and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Jemison’s journey into the stars is a testament to the power of dreams and determination. 🚀
anyway blackout poetry not just as an art form, but as an act of violence against other works of art
taking a piece of text that someone probably put their heart and soul into creating and using it as your raw material, cutting out everything that you deem irrelevant to the point you want to make
i mean imagine cutting up a painting and using it to make a collage, or taking a marble sculpture and carving pieces out of it to make a different sculpture
just to be clear: i love blackout poetry, im not criticizing it here. i am just waxing poetic about it. i dont really know where im going with this i just have Thoughts about art being destructive
Brüggen Glacier in southern Chile is the longest glacier in the Southern Hemisphere, outside of Antarctica, at roughly 41 miles (66 km) long. Also known as Pío XI Glacier, it is part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, a massive 6,360-square-mile (16,480-sq-km) mass of ice along the Chile-Argentina border. The highest ice towers on Brüggen Glacier range from 230-260 feet (70-80 meters) above sea level.
yeah I guess I was starting to feel like it’d been a while since the last round of personal identity discourse
sadly the teleporter
doeskill you because it ends your persistent existence, the clone with all of your memories is merely a copy. But as it turns out, sneezing really hard also results in the destruction of your personal identity and the generation of a clone of you in your place, for entirely epiphenomenal reasons
the idea of protists is really funny. Ah yes, the kingdoms of life: Animals, Plants, Fungi, and Don’t worry about it:)
i just started taking my first botany course and politely op what the fuck is this supposed to mean
Well
Um
…
All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.
Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By “friends” I mean “permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells.” This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.
One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.
A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.
A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.
But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn’t become multicellular is a protist.
The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).
If each of those multicellular clades counts as a “kingdom,” how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.
Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there’s a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it’s not supposed to be, or there’s something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there’s at least two fistfights and one brawl.
Protists: Just don’t worry about it.
Also I lied and there are plenty of eukaryotes that are multicellular and not animals, plants, or fungi, such as giant kelp
However those get called protists half the time too because with kelp, it’s easier than trying to explain what the fuck it is if it isn’t a plant, and with everything else, talking about it just starts an argument about what counts as a “cell” and what counts as “multi” for that matter and nothing good comes of it.
Meet the seven new frog species we just named after iconic Star Trek captains!
Artwork by A. Petzold, CC BY-ND 4.0
At the right time of year along rushing streams in the humid rainforests that stretch the length of Madagascar’s eastern and northern mountain ridges, otherworldly trills of piercing whistles can be heard.
Vences et al. 2024 CC BY-SA 4.0
Are they birds? Insects? Communicator beeps? Tricorder noises?
No, they’re little treefrogs!
ALT
Boophis janewayae. Photo by M. Vences, CC BY-SA 4.0
Until recently, we thought all of the populations of these little brown frogs across the island were one widespread species,
Boophis marojezensis, described in 1994. But genetics in the early 2000s and 2010s showed that there were several species here, not just one.
Now my colleagues and I have shown that they are in fact
eight separate species, each with unique calls!
Boophis siskoiVences et al. 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0Boophis pikeiVences et al. 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0
These whistling sounds reminded us so much of Star Trek sound effects that we decided to name the seven new species after Star Trek captains:
Boophis kirki,
B. picardi,
B. janewayae,
B. siskoi,
B. pikei,
B. archeri, and
B. burnhamae.
ALTALT
ALTALT
ALT
ALTALT
Photos of all new species described by Vences et al. 2024. CC BY-SA 4.0
I subtly and not-so-subtly built some Star Trek references into the paper, but probably the best one is this one:
’
Finding these frogs sometimes requires considerable trekking; pursuing strange new calls, to seek out new frogs in new forests; boldly going where no herpetologist has gone before.’
— Vences et al. 2024
There’s a real sense of scientific discovery and exploration here, which we think is in the spirit of Star Trek.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that there are at least two Trekkies amongst the authors (including yours truly). As fans of Star Trek, we are also just pleased to dedicate these new species to the characters who have inspired and entertained us over the decades.
On a personal note, this marks a milestone for me, as it means I have now described over 100 frog species! I am very pleased that the 100th is Captain Janeway’s Bright-eyed Frog,
Boophis janewayae (if you count them in order of appearance in the paper)—she is probably my favourite captain, and I really love Star Trek: Voyager.
You can read more about the discovery of these new species on my website! You can also read the Open Access paper published in Vertebrate Zoology here.
The media coverage on this has been absolutely bonkers. It might be our most successful piece ever in the media, although the Altmetrics don’t reflect it.
There’s a very good chance the frogs appear in a newspaper near you! If you find them in the wild, please send me a photo and/or physical copy of the paper!! I would be extremely grateful!
Also if you hear about it on the radio, please let me know when and where (which channel)!
A while back, there was news about three tiny frog species, called mini ature, mini mum, and mini scule (delight all around). Being no expert in frogs at all but generally interested in cute, unusual animals I went to look up what madlads (g/n) came up with the names. Among them, I noticed, was one called Mark Scherz. Which made me Question Things™, since Scherz is a German word for jest or joke. Didn’t have time to look into it further though (and it’s not that far out a name anyway).
Then, just the other day, another set of frogs was introduced to the world, this time with names of Starfleet captains, named thusly because their calls supposedly resemble sound FX from Star Trek. This being even more up my alley because it’s cute, unusual animals AND Star Trek, I tried to find recordings and happened upon the names of the madlads (g/n) responsible this time - and again, Mark Scherz is among them.
This almost convinced that there is no such person and it’s an in-joke by herpetologists, a fake persona they attach to scientific work that is a bit tongue in cheek (to MARK it as a SCHERZ, if you will). After all, there’s a number of names used similarly in academia so there’s precedence for this type of shenanigans. We have an entire member of parliament in the German Bundestag who isn’t real.
And then, my feed here, on this webbed site tumblr dot com, of all places, saw fit to show me a post about the Starfleet froggies by none other than @markscherz and I don’t know which reality I am in anymore.
Hares are rabbits, toads are frogs, butterflies are moths, tortoises are turtles, humans are apes, apes are monkeys, moose are deer, bees are wasps, ants are also wasps, termites are roaches, birds are dinosaurs, insects are crustaceans, and everything with bones is a fish.
polychaete taxonomy is terrible because there are ten thousand species, and the way you tell them apart is mostly by checking if the gonopore is present on the thirteenth instead of the seventeenth segment (which narrows it down to only six thousand and a half species!), while acoel taxonomy is terrible because all of the relevant papers were published in 1850-1950, before any kind of genetic analysis, and amount to “yeah it’s a brown teardrop shaped worm, five millimeters long, either a new species or a synonym of six others, good luck out there :)”
No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren’t really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.
I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, “What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?”
It’s frustrating, but my general answer is, “Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something
systemic.”
There’s very little you can do as a consumer. You’re not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar
and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can’t agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave
for and so end up stuck there.
I’ve been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:
Molly’s talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:
But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…
Are the platforms
really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is
so hard, the switching costs are
so high – maybe the fact that “there’s a lot more of us than there are of them” is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.
And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly’s excellent work
is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for
everyone to be less enshittified.
This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.
It’s RSS.
RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, “Really Simple Syndication”) is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public “feeds.” For example, rather than reloading the
Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this
very hard to do!), you can just sign up for
Wired’s RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they’re published.
Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes
Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow
Wired’s feed without any cookies, and
Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read.
Wired doesn’t even get to know that you’re monitoring its feed.
You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you’re awaiting, too.
Your local politician’s website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There’s an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).
“I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says James Spann, an Alabama meteorologist. He says how he’s been “inundated” with eerie messages telling him to “stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”
They out here threatening the weathermen.
I used to work for the US government doing weather stuff and this is nothing new. Back at the end of the 2000s there was a lot of people who were reacting to the end of the bush administration (where “global warming” and “climate change” were banned terms) by deciding to go all Truther on WEATHER. Anything we were doing was suspect. We had 20,000 weather stations across the country but they could all be ignored because of pictures of one of them being badly installed in Arizona (it was in a parking lot: a heat island!).
I had a coworker that had to spend a few weeks rewriting his code because when he’d first done it, it was
too accurate. The precious calculations had been done in the 80s with FORTRAN, so when he converted the algorithm to Java, it took use of our new CPUs and now the averages were slightly different because the previous code had been very limited in how it did math. Naturally, as soon as we published new and improved calculations, endless fools claimed it was lies because the better rounding meant that it was now reported as 70.2 degrees in Newport in August 1987, not 70.1 degrees.
So he had to spend WEEKS rewriting all the calculations to use FORTRAN-equivalent math. Truncate everything, never round up or down, don’t store more than 2 decimal points ever.
We had armed guards on the building, and not just because the IRS was there too. They had their own separate set of armed guards.
Weather has always been stupidly, stupidly political.
Fucking hell why are we making people in hospitals who are responsible for the health and wellbeing of everyone work 12 hour shifts with no breaks I feel like I’m going insane does no one else see the problem here??
Every time I make a post about exploitation in jobs with poor wages and no breaks half of the comments are full of teachers and hospital workers going “haha same” and like…. WHAT?? HELLO???
so. i used to work 9-1-1. we were on 8s but with the caveat that we could be mandated for doubles (16s) up to 4 of our 5 days per week (also we weren’t on rotating schedules, we had to work a normal 5/2 instead of a modified Pittman - 2/2/3/3). the union got us the rule that you could only be mandated twice in a row, but my trainer said if you work 2nds you’re almost guaranteed to be be working at least two doubles a week, and he’d been mandated the dreaded double-double-regular-double-double before. i was on 3rds, and got mandated for what they called the Dirty Double bc it was 3rds into 1st meaning i worked 10p on one day to 2p the next afternoon.
we got either four 15 minute breaks or two 30s, but we couldn’t leave the premises and nobody ever did two 30s. bc once you’ve been taking 9-1-1 calls for 2+ hours, if you don’t walk outside or get some water or go piss for five seconds you start to get hazy. when i trained on 2nds, i took 100 calls in an 8 hr period, so any excuse to get up and not be working was welcome. i never ate at work bc shoving something down your gullet in 15 min made me feel sick and i used that time to take a piss and stand up.
my first double i legit left with full body muscle twitching and thought my vision was graying out periodically. i hadn’t eaten in over 20 hrs. my shift manager was like “buck up! you got two hours :D” and i almost stood up and left. thank christ i didn’t have any hot calls those last two hours but i was defo fantasizing about dying lmfao. plus my commute was 30+ min each way so i got ~4.5 hrs of sleep before having to come back in.
when i worked for a huge hospital system in the EDs, 12s were the norm, and most nurses were making $25/hr and techs $16. EMTs make $14 and medics $23. even people that weren’t burnt out assholes were completely fried by hr 8. believe it or not, it used to be worse! i don’t remember the girl’s name, but NY passed a law in the 00s because residents/interns were working 24s and it caused a mistake that killed a girl, so they banned 24s which i think every state has adopted some version of now.
i’ve been trying to tell people that schedule reform is almost more necessary than wages because the only reason more people haven’t died is luck or lack of advocacy for victims. like. the fact that it’s at all legal to work 12 hrs is bonkers. let alone 16s and 24s. let alone in the medical and responder fields. (and not that it excuses malicious bullshit obv. but let’s not kid ourselves that all mistakes are malicious. we have the data on what these shifts do to human decision making and response time.)
His name is Mehdat Mamdouh, he’s a 22-year-old hip hop and dubstep recorder player from Cairo. He’s been teaching himself this style since he was 14. This article links to his social media sites. He’s on Facebook and YouTube and Soundcloud.
[ID: Photograph of a large piece of machinery, zoomed in on a warning label that reads: “It is possible / to survive this / but not unaltered.” /end ID]
From what I can read online without a paywall block, US medical schools are moving in the direction of requiring or offering courses on climate change. I’m copying this directly from my Duck Duck Go search results:
The number of medical schools in the United States that include climate change in their curriculum has been increasing, with 65% of MD-granting schools requiring or offering courses on the topic in 2022. A survey by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) found that the percentage of medical schools with climate change in their curriculum increased from 27% in 2019–2020 to 55% in 2021–2022, and then to 65% in 2022.
Excerpt from this
EcoWatch story:
A network of universities across Europe has launched an initiative to train medical students on climate change-related illnesses as well as provide education on more sustainable healthcare.
The initiative includes 25 universities that have formed the European Network on Climate & Health Education (ENCHE), which will incorporate climate change education into the existing curriculum. The goal is to better prepare students to treat humans facing health disparities linked to climate change as well as to improve the sustainability of the healthcare system.
“From the spread of infectious diseases to increasingly deadly heatwaves, the health impacts of climate change are becoming ever more dangerous,” Iain McInnes, co-chair of ENCHE and vice principal and Head of College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences at the University of Glasgow, said in a statement. “As educators, it is our responsibility to ensure that the next generation of doctors, health professionals and medical leaders have the skills they need to face these challenges and can provide patients with the best care possible.”
The network will be led by the University of Glasgow and supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), and universities from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Spain, Switzerland and the UK will be involved in ENCHE.
Other health organizations, part of the Sustainable Markets Initiative Health Systems Task Force, will provide additional support to ENCHE. The network will serve as a regional hub for the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education (GCCHE) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, with GCCHE providing collaboration and expert support for the initiative.
ENCHE has a goal to train 10,000 or more medical students on treating climate change health impacts in the first three years of the program. According to the University of Glasgow, there is not a consistent curriculum in medical schools that teaches on the links between climate change and health impacts.
This training could help save many more lives, as human health becomes increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. According to the WHO, about 99% of humans globally are exposed to air quality below WHO standards, while more than 7 million people die from air pollution-related health impacts. Rising heat is another concern, with heat-related deaths expected to triple by 2050 in a business-as-usual scenario.
I hope that collectivity, Tumblr users are enormously proud that prolonged exposure to this site has turned Matt Mullenweg in to an unhinged shit poster. Incredible scenes happening.
For the record though, I fully support him and everything he’s done so far. Fuck WPengine and their egregious profiteering from open source ecosystem and the commons.
In fact, the first time I met Stallman in 2011(ish) we had a long argument over dinner about how he and the GPL failed to foresee SASS and the kinds of value extraction that’s completely possible under it’s license.
“There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.”
The Richat Structure, also known as “The Eye of the Sahara”.
Located in Mauritania, the structure is about 50 km in diameter. It was initially thought to be the result of an impact event because large meteors typically produce circular features on Earth’s surface. But geologic studies have revealed that it is actually an uplifted geologic dome, also known as a domed anticline.
Not in perfect condition, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed by Johan Polman in Amsterdam from whom I bought my R2R SP8…
One channel was not working, the Vu-meter module was not shielded properly and the cover was broken. But now it’s ready to go in the iels for our next recording!
that is exactly my point of view. if all people were given universal basic income, we could have tens of thousands of boring, tedious, dangerous, and long term harmful jobs done by robots, while humans are free to explore their passions without fear of poverty and homelessness.
in a good society, automation means a boom in the arts. language, painting, music, dance, writing, philosophy, architecture, etc. these are the sectors that advance tremendously during periods of human health and flourishing
Back in the 1960s, we were told that automation and rising productivity would mean shorter work weeks with higher pay. Instead we have multibillionaires, growing poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. The money is all there, it’s just being hoarded.
Each rock is a wave equation – a complex model of bifurcation and wave formation. The involutions of unstable gestures have made an avatar of mathematical conjecture, and like holograms of time feeling space to predict a future state, each curve in stone foresaw a future boundary state to return its figured sum. But perception, distracted by the rock’s baroque designs, may forget the secret forces that framed its final form – the tiny interferences, the micro-instabilities, and the Laplacian quests of flow regimes. Endless habits carved to stone as the tireless sculptor of the manifold weaves its liquid signals into space. Shells may store the sounds of waves, but Taihu stones compile the liquid physics into an alphabet of epsilons and upsilons – the sinusoidal cells of tidal swells and the shapes that sign the lunar paths.
Paul Prudence, Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary
If you fold the legs over one another and sew the holes shut, you get Alexander’s Horned Sphere, which is topologically a sphere and which looks like a cursed artifact:
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Showing this to my bottom surgeon at the consult
Alexander’s Horned Sphere is topologically a sphere, but its outside is
not topologically the outside of a sphere! If you put a loop through between its handles, you cannot contract it to a point without touching the sphere (or coming arbitrarily close to it).
If you dive, then you dive. And if you really dive, then you have been in the room when someone got grumpy about Carl from Up and his frivolous helium usage.
why is this getting notes? why is this getting any traction at all? I refuse to believe there are this many technical divers on Tumblr of all places. is it just the absurdity of a beef with a Disney character over an increasingly scarce non-renewable resource with niche technical applications used primarily for balloons? There is a guy experimenting with fucking hydrogen as a diluent gas now. we could put hydrogen in balloons and the inert noble gas in our lungs but NOOO. the children are just too flammable. do you even know what the state of hyperbaric medicine is? no, yeah of course you didn’t, nobody does. and that includes professionals who have spent their entire lives researching the field because you can’t exactly do a biopsy underwater. you can make an educated guess based on who makes it back to the surface alive. fun fact the N=1 guy who is currently the only human being to have trialed hydrogen as a diluent, on himself, because he couldn’t ethically ask anyone else to do it, Dr. Richard Harris, is also the guy who did the anesthesia on the kids in the Thai cave rescue, because as you might imagine the upper echelons of tech cave diving is a very small community and the overlap with anesthesiologists consists of one dude and it is him. but the point is, when he had to figure out how to knock out an entire soccer team worth of scared stressed dehydrated underfed children because dragging an unconscious body through two miles of flooded tunnels was the only way to get them out, he scoured the entire planet for a second opinion on the effects of anesthesia at high-pressure underwater environs and there wasn’t one.
the modus operandi of technical scuba is to throw every ounce of chemical and physical knowledge you have at the problem, plan for the very worst, come to terms with the fact that you can’t know what you don’t know, and hope for the best. is it any surprise that the guy who invented scuba diving died scuba diving?
NO, REALLY.
the issue with building and then tinkering with your own life support system is that when you get it wrong you die, which is why most advancements in the field are accompanied by an apology like this one. hey guys, thanks for helping me out, so sorry I made you party to this incredibly dicey proposition, thank god I’m around to apologize for it. gee if only we weren’t draining the planet’s helium reserves for birthday parties. fuck you carl.
The internet, far from being a mere conduit for information, constitutes a complex, dynamic system that fundamentally restructures our perception of temporality. It is not simply a tool for communication, but a medium through which we actively negotiate our existence within time. This digital expanse dissolves the traditional boundaries between past, present, and future, engendering a novel temporal regime.
I am an Environmental, Health & Safety manager who has worked (and currently works) with PSM/RMP covered chemicals, including some that can create toxic vapor clouds similar to the one in Conyers, GA. I would like to explain why this post, and many similar posts in the comments alleging that “they” (who are “they”?) are trying to get people injured by exposure to chlorine or chlorine-containing gases in the air, is incorrect. These posts come from ignorance, which can be corrected by understanding.
This is a long post, so please see the rest after the break. It’s a lot faster to make misinformation than to correct it.
In meteorology, an inversion (or temperature inversion) is a phenomenon in which a layer of warmer air overlies cooler air. Normally, air temperature gradually decreases as altitude increases, but this relationship is reversed in an inversion.
An inversion traps air pollution, such as smog, near the ground.An inversion can also suppress convection by acting as a “cap”. If this cap is broken for any of several reasons, convection of any humidity can then erupt into violent thunderstorms. Temperature inversion can cause freezing rain in cold climates. […]
An inversion is also produced whenever radiation from the surface of the earth exceeds the amount of radiation received from the sun, which commonly occurs at night, or during the winter when the sun is very low in the sky. This effect is virtually confined to land regions as the ocean retains heat far longer.
So, yeah, no, this isn’t some government plot to keep people in their homes at night but force them to come to work amongst the poisonous fumes during the day, it’s the EMA’s response to the fact that there are specific kinds of weather that will trap (and concentrate!) air hazards close to the ground and some of those kinds of weather just literally have to do with whether the sun is in the sky or not.
First discovered near Kume Island in Japan by local divers, pictures of the animal attracted media attention in 2017. But they weren’t given their formal taxonomic description until 2024
There are few phrases in the modern lexicon more accursed than “software-based car,” and yet, this is how the failed EV maker Fisker billed its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed, shut down its servers, and degraded all those “software-based cars”:
Fisker billed itself as a “capital light” manufacturer, meaning that it didn’t particularly make anything – rather, it “designed” cars that other companies built, allowing Fisker to focus on “experience,” which is where the “software-based car” comes in. Virtually every subsystem in a Fisker car needs (or rather, needed) to periodically connect with its servers, either for regular operations or diagnostics and repair, creating frequent problems with brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, locking and unlocking the doors:
Since Fisker’s bankruptcy, people with even minor problems with their Fisker EVs have found themselves owning expensive, inert lumps of conflict minerals and auto-loan debt; as one Fisker owner described it, “It’s literally a lawn ornament right now”:
This is, in many ways, typical Internet-of-Shit nonsense, but it’s compounded by Fisker’s capital light, all-outsource model, which led to extremely unreliable vehicles that have been plagued by recalls. The bankrupt company has proposed that vehicle owners should have to pay cash for these recalls, in order to reserve the company’s capital for its creditors – a plan that is clearly illegal:
This isn’t even the first time Fisker has done this! Ten years ago, founder Henrik Fisker started another EV company called Fisker Automotive, which went bankrupt in 2014, leaving the company’s “Karma” (no, really) long-range EVs (which were unreliable and prone to bursting into flames) in limbo:
Which raises the question: why did investors reward Fisker’s initial incompetence by piling in for a second attempt? I think the answer lies in the very factor that has made Fisker’s failure so hard on its customers: the “software-based car.” Investors
love the sound of a “software-based car” because they understand that a gadget that is connected to the cloud is ripe for rent-extraction, because with software comes a bundle of “IP rights” that let the company control its customers, critics and competitors:
A “software-based car” gets to mobilize the state to enforce its “IP,” which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics (who can, in turn, be price-gouged for licensing and diagnostic tools). “IP” can be used to shut down manufacturers of third party parts. “IP” allows manufacturers to revoke features that came with your car and charge you a monthly subscription fee for them. All sorts of features can be sold as downloadable content, and clawed back when title to the car changes hands, so that the new owners have to buy them again. “Software based cars” are easier to repo, making them perfect for the subprime auto-lending industry. And of course, “software-based cars” can gather
much more surveillance data on drivers, which can be sold to sleazy, unregulated data-brokers:
Unsurprisingly, there’s a large number of Fisker cars that never sold, which the bankruptcy estate is seeking a buyer for. For a minute there, it looked like they’d found one: American Lease, which was looking to acquire the deadstock Fiskers for use as leased fleet cars. But now that deal seems dead, because no one can figure out how to restart Fisker’s servers, and these vehicles are bricks without server access:
It’s hard to say why the company’s servers are so intransigent, but there’s a clue in the chaotic way that the company wound down its affairs. The company’s final days sound like a scene from the last days of the German Democratic Republic, with apparats from the failing state charging about in chaos, without any plans for keeping things running:
Great (enraging) enshittification case study: “software-based cars”.
Then go read the short stories linked at the end, not least for this awesome paragraph in Spill.
I don’t pretend to understand finance, but a friend of mine who does taught me a little trick: whenever you hear a finance word that you don’t understand, just replace it with “fraud” and you’ll be right the majority of the time. As in “the forward-option frauds were protected by a securitized default fraud that ensured that senior bondholders would get the first fraud from every fraud that frauded.”
Hodaka Yoshida From My Collection- Row Houses, P (Paris)
(Watashi no korekushon yori, Ienami - P.)
zinc etching and woodblock print on paper; titled and signed in penciled Japanese in the lower left margin, Watashi no korekushon yori, Ienami - P, and in penciled English, Paris (in black area at lower right corner), and in the margin below, A.P. Hodaka Yoshida ‘79, 1979
I always thought these pictures were photoshopped but apparently a man in guangzhou china did indeed make a huge ass garden to cover up the fact he illegally added three more stories to his apartment
The resounding question of “does this even matter?” likely echoes on a loop, every time you toss an item in the recycling bin, or call your elected officials for the umpteenth time.
Their paper, titled “Going Viral: Public Attention and Environmental Action in the Amazon,” will soon be published in the
Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.It focuses on the “unprecedented” public scrutiny following forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon in August of 2019.
These fires occurred soon after Jair Bolsonaro became Brazil’s president, after a staunchly anti-environmental campaign.
But after analyzing both media coverage and international pressure towards Brazil’s federal government, the researchers found that the increased public attention resulted in a 22% decrease in fires in the country’s Amazon Rainforest.
This, in turn, translated into the avoidance of an estimated 24.8 million tons of CO2 emissions.
“Our research underscores the significant role that public attention and media coverage can play in influencing local environmental policies and actions,” the study’s coauthor Teevrat Garg, said in a statement…
“The 2019 surge in attention led to immediate governmental responses, which contributed to the notable decrease in fires,” he added.
To come to these conclusions, the researchers compared fire activity in Brazil with that in Peru and Bolivia, countries that did not receive the same amount of public pressure, though typically still have the same level of fire activity per square kilometer.”
The worship of one God has been abandoned in favour of the worship of such local divinities as the nation, the class and even the deified individual. Such is the world in which we find ourselves - a world which, judged by the only acceptable criterion of progress, is manifestly in regression. Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless. Indeed, it is worse than useless. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
i’ve been reading a lot of books about urban naturalism recently, and the one big thing they all talk about is how you HAVE to stop seeing nature as something that happens somewhere else. nature is not just charismatic megafauna and state parks and mountain ranges. nature is that abandoned lot that’s growing native milkweed in it. nature is the murder of crows that lives in your block. nature is the moss growing on your roof and the dandelions growing in the sidewalk cracks and the song birds at your neighbor’s birdfeeder. and you should care about it! you should notice it! that’s YOUR nature!
the two that most directly pertain to this post are Nature Obscura by Kelly Brenner and Crow Planet by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Both are written by naturalists living in Seattle about their practices as urban naturalists, Nature Obscura through the vehicle of multiple creatures found in different seasons, Crow Planet mainly through the behavior of the crows living in West Seattle. though i’m spoiled and also live in seattle i think both of these books are super useful introductions to anyone who’s interested in building a personal practice as a naturalist anywhere. (both also have extensive bibliographies that i have mostly yet to work through.)
more broadly i also read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer which everyone tells you to read for good reason, it rocks. it’s less about how to be a naturalist and more about how to create a relationship with the earth, but i think having read it will make any other book about urban naturalism carry more weight.
i’m also going to shout Underland by Robert Macfarlane out here as well, which is not at all about urban naturalism but did introduce me to the concept of deep time and rocked my entire world.
and i haven’t read this one yet, butSlow Birding by Joan E. Strassmann is on my tbr, it’s about birding as a way to connect with nature in your backyard and sounds excellent.
I can say that Slow Birding is a very interesting read, she highlights a bunch of common birds with really cool facts and gives good tips on birding at home. Also Underland was FASCINATING and I read it twice. Braiding Sweetgrass is a classic at this point. The other 2 I haven’t read and am adding them to my tbr pile
oh good to know slow birding is good, i’m excited to get to it! i think both the authors of the two you haven’t read have other books (i know haupt does) but i haven’t gotten to them yet.
so like I said, I work in the tech industry, and it’s been kind of fascinating watching whole new taboos develop at work around this genAI stuff. All we do is talk about genAI, everything is genAI now, “we have to win the AI race,” blah blah blah, but nobody asks -
you can’t ask -
What’s it for?
What’s it
for?
Why would anyone want this?
I sit in so many meetings and listen to genuinely very intelligent people talk until steam is rising off their skulls about genAI, and wonder how fast I’d get fired if I asked: do real people actually want this product, or are the only people excited about this technology the shareholders who want to see lines go up?
like you realize this is a bubble, right, guys? because nobody actually needs this? because it’s
not actually very good? normal people are excited by the novelty of it, and finance bro capitalists are wetting their shorts about it because they want to get rich quick off of the Next Big Thing In Tech, but the novelty will wear off and the bros will move on to something else and we’ll just be left with billions and billions of dollars invested in technology that nobody wants.
and I don’t say it, because I need my job. And I wonder how many other people sitting at the same table, in the same meeting, are also not saying it, because they need their jobs.
idk man it’s just become a really weird environment.
Like, I remember reading an article and one of the questions the author posed and that’s repeated here stuck with me, namely: what is it for? If this is a trillion dollar investment what’s the trillion dollar problem it is solving?
I finally think I have an answer to that. It’s to eliminate the need to pay another person ever again. The trillion dollar problem it’s solving is Payroll.
Except like… it’s not solving that
either.
A metaphor I’ve been using lately is that being a tech-interested person and watching the AI hype is like if you had followed the development of blenders for years. You watched them go from prototypes that were basically just a spinning open blade all the way to a design that has the potential to be a consumer Vitamix! It’s really cool! Blenders have come such a long way, and they’re ready for prime time!
And then you turn on the news and see otherwise rational, intelligent people saying “gosh, imagine, soon we’ll replace all of our chefs, and our surgeons, and our high school teachers with blenders!” and your friends and family all nod and agree and say things like “wow, blenders can basically do everything now!” And when you ask people “are you HIGH?!” they show you the new blender they bought, and how well it makes a smoothie, and then they act like that’s evidence for a statement like “blenders will replace 90% of the workforce” not being utterly nonsensical and deranged.
“Scientists just have to fix the hallucination problem!” they say. When you ask what the hallucination problem is, they say “I’ll show you” and then they put their unfinished math homework into the blender and hit pulse. “You see, I wanted it to
solve those math problems, but it just shredded the paper. It must have
hallucinated a world where the answer to 2+2 was puree.” When you point out that it did exactly what it was designed to do, because a blender
cannot do math and it will
never do math and expecting it to be able to do math just because it can make both smoothies
and soup is ludicrous and bizarre, they tell you that they’re sure that blenders will be able to do math any day now, just you wait, “I mean, look how far they’ve come! A year ago I would have said that blenders could never be strong enough to blend ice into sorbet, but now they can. So who are you to say they’ll never do math???”
The thing is, there are
plenty of things that LLMs and generative AI are good for. OCR is still a vital need, and AI is
excellent at it. Facial recognition is an area where AI has a lot of potential. It can be used as a screening step for the analysis of all sorts of large datasets. Better autocomplete on your phone is a real thing that real people want. There are a ton of problems that these tools genuinely do solve!
…But none of them are
trillion dollarproblems, and that’s an issue, because no one wanted to pour a trillion dollars into “improved OCR” and “somewhat better autocomplete”.
So, we get snakeoil to make up the weight. It’ll
solve payroll; it’ll
democratize visual art; it’ll make it so that
anyone can do
anything – you name it, blenders will do it, eventually! Once we’ve fixed the problems with using blenders to do everything, including tasks which aren’t blending things, then blenders
willbe worth the trillion dollars that people have already spent developing them! Look at the progress we’ve already made: we’re working on attaching a calculator to the blender, and that could make it so that blenders
can do math! Don’t you dare suggest that calculators already exist and work just fine without being attached to blenders – we
need our blenders to do math, because we
promised that one day they’d be able to do everything! And they will! Blenders are the future and don’t you
dare suggest that maybe that future is just “we can blend things now”; if you so much as breath those words, the bubble will pop.
Trigger warning for #eikositriophobia: this is my 23d linkdump (Hail Discordia!), an erratic Saturday purge of the open tabs I haven’t managed to blog this week; here’s the previous 22:
When I was a kid, I idolized Harlan Ellison. I loved his prose styling, his stage presence, the way he blended activism and fiction, and the way he mixed critical nonfiction with fiction. As a 17 year old, I attended a writing workshop that Ann Crispin was giving at a local science fiction convention and she told me that I had the makings of a great writer, just as soon as I stopped trying to be Harlan Ellison.
But Harlan was a complicated figure. I attended the Clarion Workshop in 1992 specifically because he was our instructor, and came away bitterly disillusioned after he targeted one of my fellow students for relentless, cruel bullying, a performance that was so ugly that the board fired the director and permanently barred him from teaching the workshop.
Later on, Harlan became the kind of copyright maximalist who called for arbitrary internet surveillance and censorship in the name of shutting down ebook piracy. During a panel about this at a sf convention, he called one of the other panelists a “motherfucker” and threatened to punch him in the face. He took to badmouthing me in interviews, painting my position – whose nuances he certainly understood – in crude caricature.
But Harlan and I had many friends in common, people I really liked, and they were adamant that Harlan’s flaws were not the whole story: if Harlan liked you, he would do
anything to stand up for you, no matter the cost to himself. Famously, when Harlan taught Octavia Butler’s Clarion, he demanded to know why she wasn’t writing full time, and she replied that there was the inconvenient matter of making rent and groceries. He replied, “If that’s all that’s stopping you, come live in my guest house for as long as it takes, eat my groceries, and write.” Which she did.
Which is great, but also: one of my own Clarion students told me about when his then-teenaged mother met Harlan at a sf convention and told him that she dreamed of becoming a writer, and he propositioned her. She was so turned off that she stopped writing forever (her son, my student, is now an accomplished writer).
So Harlan was a mixed bag. He did very, very good things. He did very, very bad things. When Harlan died, in 2018, I wrote an obit where I grappled with these two facts:
In it, I proposed a way of thinking about people that tried to make sense of both Harlans – and of all the people in our lives. There’s an unfortunate tendency to think of the people that matter to us as having their deeds recorded in a ledger, with good deeds in one column and wicked deeds down the other.
In this formulation, we add up the good deeds and the bad deeds and subtract the bad from the good. If the result is a positive number, we say the good outweighs the bad, and therefore the person is, on balance, good. On the other hand, if the bad outweighs the good, then the person is bad, and the good deeds are irrelevant.
This gets us into no end of trouble. It means that when someone we admire slips up, we give them a pass, because “they’ve earned it.” And when someone who’s hurt us does something selfless and kind and brave, we treat that as though it doesn’t matter, because they’re an asshole.
But the truth is, no amount of good deeds can wipe away the bad. If you hurt someone, the fact that you’ve helped someone else doesn’t make that hurt any easier to bear. And the kindnesses you do for other people make their lives better, no matter what bad things you’ve done to others.
Rather than calculating the balance of our goodness or badness, I think we should just, you know, sit with our sins and virtues. Let all the harm and joy exist in a state of superposition. Don’t cancel out the harm. Don’t wave away the good. They both exist, neither cancels the other, and we should strive to help more, and to do less harm. We should do everything we can to help those we harm. No one owes us a pass because of the good we’ve done.
That’s the lesson Harlan taught me, and he taught it to me by
absolutely failing to live his life this way – a fact that exists alongside all of the good he did, including the great art he made, which I love, and which inspired me.
Not long after Harlan’s death, I got a phone call from J Michael Straczynski, Harlan’s literary executor. As part of his care for Harlan’s literary legacy, Joe was editing a new anthology of short stories,
The Last Dangerous Visions, and did I want to contribute a story?
Of course I did. Harlan edited
Dangerous Visions in 1967: a groundbreaking anthology of uncomfortable science fiction that featured everyone from Philip K Dick to Samuel Delany. The followup, 1972’s
Again, Dangerous Visions, was, if anything, even
more influential, including Le Guin’s
The Word For World IS Forest, as well as work by Joanna Russ, Kurt Vonnegut, David Gerrold, and James Tiptree, Jr.
Though some of the stories in these books haven’t aged well, together, they completely changed my view of what science fiction was and what it could be. But
The Last Dangerous Visions was a different (ahem) story. For complicated reasons (which all cashed out to “Harlan being very difficult to work with, sometimes for damned good reasons, other times for completely petty ones),
TLDV was, at the time of Harlan’s death,
fifty years behind schedule. It was "science fiction’s most famous unpublished book.” Harlan had bought early work from writers who had gone on to have major careers – like Bruce Sterling – and had sat on them for
half a century.
Then Joe called me to tell me that he was starting over with
TLDV and did I want to contribute a story – and of course I did. I wrote a story for him with the title “Jeffty Is Five,” part of my series of stories with the same titles as famous works of sf:
Joe liked the story, but not the title. He thought Harlan wouldn’t have approved of this kind of appropriation, and he wanted to do right by the memory of his old friend. My first reaction was very Harlan-like:
this is supposed to make you mad, it’s my art, and if it offends you, that’s your problem.
But I remembered the most important lesson I learned from Harlan, about good deeds and bad ones, and I thought about Joe, a writer I admired and liked, who was grappling with his grief and his commitment to Harlan’s legacy, and I changed my mind and told him of course I’d change the title. I changed the title because Harlan would
never have done so, and that’s rather the point of the story.The story is (now)) called “The Weight of a Heart, the Weight of a Feather” (a very Harlanish title), and it’s about the legacy of complicated people, whose lives are full of noble selflessness *and careless or deliberate cruelty. It’s about throwing away the ledger and just letting all those facts sit together, about lives that are neither washed of sin by virtue, nor washed of virtue by sin.
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