«At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book. We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding. Instead, we digitize it the hard way—one page at a time. We use the Scribe, a book scanner…
Month: February 2021
Apple Watch Can Detect Covid-19 a Week Early, Study Finds
In the early days of the pandemic, dozens of researchers launched studies trying to see whether wearables of all sorts could potentially identify covid-19 before symptoms began.
Who Really Created the Marvel Universe?
In the early nineteen-forties, decades before he was Stan the Man, the impresario of the Marvel Universe, Stanley Martin Lieber fetched coffee, took notes, and sat on desks playing the piccolo—or perhaps the ocarina—in the offices of his uncle’s comic-book company.
Bitcoin is Half a Tulip…
I have no real opinion on Bitcoin — I understand the basics of blockchain and mining, but I have nothing in the way of any unique insight or “edge” as to what its potential valuation might be. Hence, why your normally opinionated host usually has so little to say about it.
Blogging as a forgiving medium
Artists speak of unforgiving mediums. I am attracted to pastel as a medium because of the gamble involved in its execution.
No internet, no vaccine: How lack of internet has limited vaccine access for racial minorities
Three researchers who study health disparities are seeing increasing evidence that a lack of internet access is preventing people in racial and ethnic minority groups from getting vaccines.
How Prince won the Super Bowl
On this day in 2007, Prince won Super Bowl XLI with a soaring halftime performance that climaxed with the skies opening up to honor his guitar solo. It is not just the best-regarded halftime show ever, but was to that point the most-viewed musical performance in American history.
NYTimes: The vaccine news continues to be better than many people realize.
As some folks sweat the effectiveness of COVID vaccines on the market, NYTimes points out that studies for all five vaccinnes have shown they essentially eliminate COVID deaths:
By those measures, all five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.
To put that in perspective, it helps to think about what Covid has done so far to a representative group of 75,000 American adults: It has killed roughly 150 of them and sent several hundred more to the hospital. The vaccines reduce those numbers to zero and nearly zero, based on the research trials.
Zero isn’t even the most relevant benchmark. A typical U.S. flu season kills between five and 15 out of every 75,000 adults and hospitalizes more than 100 of them.
A Vintage Paper Airplane Collection
Harry Everett Smith was an artist and a collector. One of the things he collected was paper airplanes — he picked up hundreds of them from the streets and buildings of New York between 1961 and 1983.
It’s Time: The COVID Tracking Project Will Soon Come to an End
After a year of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting COVID-19 data for the United States, we’re ending our data compilation work in early March.