Anyway, if anyone out there is thinking about developing pollen allergies, I guess my advice is to have a pretty careful think about it before you make the leap. Might not be as fun as you’ve been told.
Basically it seems like if there’s a window open I cough. This creates some difficulties because I like fresh air and dislike running the AC.
Cover of a high school Earth science textbook–ass picture. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110572308644962989
It’s called the Agreeing With Charlie Method and it has the potential to streamline many aspects of our society.
Like you know the friend who’s always complaining about a certain kind of bad social interaction? And sometimes (not always) it becomes clear that they are just bad at that kind of interaction? I feel like 15% of the internet by volume is that.
If someone keeps finding themselves in the kind of circumstance where where they have to say a certain kind of thing – different circumstances and the same thing over and over again – consider that they may possibly be the ones putting themselves in that circumstance because they like saying the thing.
When I say “consider” here I really mean just consider. Don’t assume bad faith. Very much don’t discount people who are stuck in systemic traps. But some people, on some topics, sometimes….
There's so much happening now with next generation Covid vaccines, that I'm planning more frequent updates.
New update today @PLOS:
https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/05/30/progress-on-next-generation-covid-vaccines-update-7/
Includes
* details on the US Project NextGen
* positive early clinical results for Gritstone's "variant-proof" Covid vax
* more preclinical results for pancoronavirus vaxes - including an intranasal one
* more clinical trial data on 2 mucosal vaxes
Plus, Indonesia & Morocco bring the number of countries rolling out mucosal vaccine to 6.
Online reviews of this aftershave: Pleasant, middle-of-the-road, not too strong.
My review of this aftershave: The smoke alarm is going off, the cat is hissing at the ceiling, the windows are permanently etched, the new milk in the fridge curdled, I’m crying out my ears, I’m getting a call from the county bomb squad,
So here’s a thing that’s live: https://abookapart.com/products/you-deserve-a-tech-union
I’ll have more to say about it soon, but for now I’ll say this:
I wrote this little book for you, for me, for all of us. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, and I’m really very proud of it. And I hope it’s helpful to you.
Mostly I think we learn by paying attention, reflecting, making loose connections, and being in the shared world, and in other ways, but not by saying “X is Y!”
I don’t know. Too-good metaphors have their place. Sometimes they launch us with enough force to escape. And we think partly by jumping to conclusions. “Whose hearts have left their bodies here in England / And lie pavilioned in the fields of France.”
I am grateful for popular science writing that can keep some epistemic humility about its work: that can balance astonishing news carrying weird implications against the reminder that sometimes the truth doesn’t make sense even if we do have it.
Things we aren’t – forests or LLMs or planets or abacuses or moths or whatever – aren’t us in domino masks. It is not the case that everything other than the human soul is only present in creation in order to provide metaphors to humans for their souls. I also suspect that Italian is not just English with a really strong Italian accent and bees are not a model for a perfect human society. Different things are actually different.
A wrinkle in the “forests are internets” thing is that (I suspect) a lot of people promulgating it are trying to do forests a favor by putting them in these terms. In practice, this may often be true. But it seems worth watching closely. These things get away from us.
But metaphors are always not good enough or too good. There’s never the one that takes you exactly as far as it’s accurate and leaves you hydrated, sunscreened, and pointed in the right direction.
You know him on the internet. Eucalypt-adjacent; very occasional writer. Consulting and passively looking for work in geospatial, image processing, and related fields.