From Sherrilyn Ifill:

Our spirits will be assaulted in the coming months – by coarse and crude language, by open displays of violence, of privilege, and of unchecked power. We may feel as if we are occupied by a hostile force. This feeling will combine with our grief to weaken and exhaust us. We must hold onto the things that refresh our spirits – time with family, music, art, nature, hobbies, food. We must protect our core.

Now we sit and wait. Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.

Oi. I feel like a moron. I tried to add a font-awesome icon to my blog title. It did not work as expected and now I’m stuck.

You might notice a bunch of older posts on my timeline - I’ve decided to move my blog from a self-hosted Hugo instance to micro.blog. I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner. Thanks, Manton, et al!

Let's see if this Stoot thing works...

[Source not online
at time of site build.]

Is it weird that the Advent of Code problems keep me up at night? I don’t mean I’m staying up late working on them, I mean I’m lying in bed trying to figure out how to find a single point in a 4,000,000x4,000,000 grid populated by scanners with varying positions and ranges. ZZzzzzzzzzzz

Time for Windows Weekly. Listen live at live.twit.tv

I’m turning off my automated news feed on my micro.blog (https://leo.social). If you still want links to stories we’re planning to cover on TWiT follow:

twit.social/@twitnews

Thanks!

So I guess this means I have three Fediverse accounts: leo.social, @leo@twit.social, and @leolaporte@pixelfed.social.

Not to mention my long abandoned mastodon.social account.

And I always thought I was anti-social.

Hello. I’m reconnecting my micro.blog to leo.social. I’m also @leo@twit.social.

Roger Angell passed away yesterday at the age of 101. 

A long-time editor at The New Yorker, he was also the best damn baseball writer ever. His essay This Old Man from 2014 is a lovely paen to old age and features these words of wisdom from another old coot, Walter Cronkite.

Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.

Truer words were never spoke.

I created this site in the midst of a pandemic. Now two years later, it’s over. Right?

Today mask mandates are lifted in our county and, despite cowardly quibbling from the CDC, most of the US. It seems the pandemic ends with a whimper, not a bang. Sunday’s mostly-maskless Superbowl was the party we’ve all been waiting for. And, yet, I’m not exactly ready to celebrate. Personally, I’m planning to tiptoe back, mask at the ready. I’d love to make a pyre in the backyard to burn them all, but what if there’s a new virulent variant? We still have Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ and Ω if we need them.

But, for now, I’m willing to say Mission Accomplished. Good job everyone. Let’s say a prayer for the nearly one million dead in the US, nearly six million worldwide (a chilling number) and get back to living. Save the remaining ivermectin for the horses, shall we?

Oh, and get your goldurn vaccine, will ya? For me? For all of us!

Yesterday my son showed up at the studio. I took the opportunity to interview him!

Henry (or Hank as he’s known now) has become a big-time Tik Tok chef with 1.8 million followers and nearly 30 million likes. Check out his videos and, as soon as he gets more, you can also buy his salt at salthank.com.

We tried to reproduce a photo from 27-years-ago at KSFO.

Father and Sons 27-years apart

Thanks to RailEuropeGroups from Club TWiT for the Photoshop! And here’s the clip from Sunday’s show.

I guess I’m kind of a proud father!

Yesterday I got the first shot of the Covid-19 vaccine!

When I arrived at Kaiser they threw me a curve. “Would you like Moderna or Johnson & Johnson?” I chose Moderna for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I think the mRNA technology is very cool. The process was quick and nearly painless. Afterwards I hod to wait 15 minutes, just in case I had a bad reaction. I didn’t. My arm hurts a bit today, but that’s the extent of the side effects. I expect worse after the second shot, April 14.

Now we just have to get the rest of my friends and family vaccinated and life can kind of get back to normal!

Just because someone believes in conspiracy theories, doesn’t mean they’re dumb.

From an article in The New Republic:

The University of Minnesota’s Joanne Miller and Christina Farhart and Colorado State University’s Kyle Saunders conducted a survey examining support for conspiracy theories, including birtherism and 9/11 trutherism. In a result unsurprising to those who follow this research, they found that higher levels of political knowledge actually deepened the likelihood that conservatives with low trust in people and major institutions would endorse right-wing conspiracy theories. In a section reviewing previous research on the subject, the authors explained that political sophisticates “have the ability to make connections between abstract principles and more concrete attitudes and are therefore more fully able to notice the implications of specific attitudes for their worldviews.” “Because politically knowledgeable people care more about politics and hold stronger political attitudes,” they added, “they are especially likely to want to protect those attitudes.”

The researchers conclude that “people will believe what they want to believe in spite of available data and evidence.”

A new study from CU Boulder (my son’s alma mater) and Harvard’s TF Chan School of Public Health points to a way forward in the pandemic.

The study says

“These rapid tests are contagiousness tests,” said senior co-author Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “They are extremely effective in detecting COVID-19 when people are contagious.”

They are also affordable, he added. The rapid tests can cost as little as $1 each and return results in 15 minutes.

Best of all, “testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid-turnaround COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks.”

This is something we could do today to end the pandemic by Christmas. The FDA has already approved the tests.

For more information and some easy ways to get Congress off its butt visit rapidtests.org.

(NOTE FROM 2024: Yet another example of how the pandemic was mishandled. Due to foot dragging from the FDA, the tests weren’t in widespread use until 2022.)

I resemble that cartoon.

(UPDATE from 2024:) and here I am, moving my blog yet again!