Wes Cook

I'm not part of the alternative tech cool set, so I don't know what the XOXO conference is, and I barely know who Cabel Sasser is, either. 

But this video of a talk he gave at XOXO is fun and worth the 19:25 it takes. (Though you won't miss anything if you skip to 2:45 and omit what he's been up to for the past 20 years.)

I don't want to say much more because I had no idea what Sasser was going to talk about when I watched it, and it's better that way.

But I should add, I was in Centralia, Washington, in 2012 and I could have seen what he saw... but I guess I didn't go to McDonald's.

One Cancer Cure

This was mentioned in my September Twitter round-up: a Scottish study, which followed women born between 1988 and 1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV at ages 12 and 13, found not a single case of cervical cancer among them. 

That was 40,000 women, and the findings held even if they received only one or two doses rather than the recommended three. For women who were older (14–22) and received three doses, the HPV rate was still cut by more than half.

I saw this news (again) today in the BlueSky feed of writer Ada Palmer, and one of her respondents added this bit of awesomeness:

My dad's sister-in-law developed the vaccine, she considers it her life's work. Every new article I see with a new longitudinal study I send along, just so she can have one more to brag about!

You never know what you'll see in the comments on BlueSky. It's an entirely different experience from Twitter.

And Something About People Who Are Not Refugees

From Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: 

On Indigenous Peoples Day, we honor and celebrate the 11 sovereign Tribal Nations and robust urban Native communities that enrich and strengthen our state’s cultural landscape, economy, and heritage:

A Few Thoughts on Refugees

Last Friday, the Star Tribune ran a helpful article (gift link) by reporter Maya Rao that defined the terms refugee, asylum seeker, and humanitarian parole and gave examples of people who have come to Minnesota in each circumstance.

Minnesota has long prided itself as the recipient of refugees, most numerously Hmong and Somali people, but more recently the Karen people from Myanmar.

I knew that Donald Trump had derailed refugee resettlement during his administration, and that it had taken a while for it to get back on track after Biden took office, due to staff capacity cutbacks. Here's what those numbers looked like over recent years, from a chart in the Strib article:

It's important to note that even the highest annual numbers on that chart are not very high for a country the size of the U.S. There are much smaller countries in the world that take in much larger numbers of refugees. At our best, we are doing the minimum. 

Some people have pointed out that Trump's claims that other countries are sending people from asylums to cross into the U.S. is because he misunderstands (or is trying to mislead about) what political asylum is. I've also recently heard it said that, similarly, his decree that people who are here under humanitarian parole are criminals comes from the same lack of understanding of this use of the term parole, confusing it with parole from prison, as if they were released and sent across the border.

It's notable that the years with the lowest number of refugees were the years when crime in the U.S. surged — during the peak years of the pandemic. Correlation, or causation? Or is Trump too addled to understand the question?

Thoughts Inspired by Eating Worms

I've read a lot of books that used to be called "juvenile" novels, and these days are called middle grade novels. But I never read How to Eat Fried Worms.

I think that omission is because the book came out in 1973, just as I was starting high school. That may have been a low point in the time when I was reading juveniles. Or maybe the title put me off, not being a big fan of worms. 

I know I saw it in the library because I remember the cover, with its illustration by Emily McCully, and the big fat Cooper Black type (though I didn't know that name at the time). 

Yesterday I learned that its author, Thomas Rockwell, was the son of illustrator Norman Rockwell. He co-wrote his father's autobiography. Thomas died in late September this year at age 91.

I also just learned that Fried Worms is one of the most frequently challenged books, which feels pretty quaint these days as far as challenged book topics goes. I guess it belongs in the Captain Underpants set of challenged books, rather than the Bluest Eye set. 

Cover illustrator Emily McCully has had quite a career, much of which I was unaware of. She's been working since the 1960s and is best known for winning the Caldecott Medal in 1993 for the memorable Mirette on the Hire Wire, which she also wrote.

I wonder if McCully knew Ellen Raskin, since the two of them were frequent children's book illustrators at the same time, working in the New York City market, who also wrote books.

Berol Giant

A friend who's a Realtor® posted a photo of some mounted pencil sharpeners she saw inside houses she recently viewed. This was one of them:

I had an instantaneous reaction. I'm not sure which school rooms we had these in — maybe all of the ones in my home district, or maybe it was college. But I saw them a lot at some point in my life. 

Ah. Pencil sharpeners.

Pick Me, I'm White

Every time Donald Trump says Kamala Harris is dumb, stupid, or some other version of that, it's obvious racism and sexism. Anyone who can't tell that is open to his racism and sexism, because it takes no effort to find multiple examples that demonstrate it's not true, and if anything, the opposite is true: that he is in cognitive decline, at a minimum.

Tonight, after Obama's speech in Pittsburgh and Trump's in Detroit, All In With Chris Hayes had political journalist Alexi McCammond on. She said,

His pitch is literally at this point, Pick the white guy over the Black girl. And he's asking people who are the most racist of this country to support him and to actually come out and vote. Because that's who he knows he needs to get out to vote in order to win this election.

It's a fairly succinct version of this year's election reality. I'm glad it has been a short campaign so there is less of it to see, and less time for the message and its reach to get consolidated. Imagine if she had been the candidate for 18 months.

It's an utter head-shaker, because as Trump is fond of saying in many other cases, Harris is "right of central casting" for the role of modern-day president. Sure, she could be a bit taller, but other than that, she hits every note of what a U.S. president (who's a woman) would look like in a movie.

And the idea that she's stupid is just...so clearly not true. He has mentally blocked out the debate, of course.

Everything Trump says is his insecurity speaking, when the opposite is true. Usually he makes accusations of actions and therefore is confessing to acts (they're stealing the election!), but in this case it's an admission of his own intellectual inferiority.

Billion Dollar Disasters

I learned two important facts last night about climate-change-induced weather damage on All In with Chris Hayes.

One was that Hurricane Helene damaged pipes that had been buried 24 feet deep in anticipation of future severe weather. So "future-proofing" didn't work against Helene.

The other was how much inflation-adjusted billion-dollar weather events have increased since 1980:

Those unlabeled lines closer to the bottom are generally the years before 2017, if they had billion-dollar events. Even 2005, the year of Katrina, doesn't rate compared with the disasters of recent years, as the climate has warmed further. 2011 is the only year from those before 2017.

And 2023 is clearly an outlier, with 28 events. It will be notable to see how 2024 rates compared to 2023. 

Hurricanes

As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida, I'm remembering reading in the newspaper about Katrina several days before it was to arrive in New Orleans. The story said it could (likely would) leave southern Louisiana and the city uninhabitable, that the levees would be overwhelmed. 

And I'm wondering what happened in the Yucatan already this morning as Milton passed at an even more powerful level, and what's happening right now as it passes the western end of Cuba. No word on either of those places in our media, as far as I've heard.

And North Carolina (and Georgia, and other places in the Southeast) are still in the midst of search and rescue and major recovery from Hurricane Helene, while Republicans thwart those efforts with lies. 

It was bad enough during the Katrina debacle to have the usual incompetence, racism, and financial greed making things worse: now we have overt manipulation of vulnerable people, carried out in an attempt to seize national political power.

It's another one of those moments where I can't believe what these supposed leaders have sunk to.

Tell NHTSA Yes

You and I have until November 18, 2024, to send comments to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (here's the link) on its proposed new vehicle safety standards. They would require passenger vehicles under 10,000 pounds — finally — to be less dangerous to people outside the vehicle.

That means pedestrians, and likely people on bikes, too. 

The standards would set up test procedures and performance requirements related to hood heights, which have been getting higher and higher in recent years. Increased hood heights are documented as particularly dangerous in two important ways: they decrease drivers' ability to see in front of them, and when a person does get hit, they make the injury worse because the pedestrian's head is hit instead of their torso. (The hood designs are also often blunt, rather than curved, which is another danger.)

David Zipper, Senior Fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, wrote about the rules in Fast Company in late September. 

It's time to say yes to what Europe has been doing for quite a while, and bring the SUV/truck bloat and and blunt under control.

 

Waste Not, Want Not: Fences

Today I learned from Alice Loxton, who writes on Twitter as History Alice, that there are metal street fence rails in London that were once stretchers used during the World War II Blitz:

The original fences had been removed to harvest the metal for the war effort:

During the Blitz, utilitarian stretchers were created that were made up of a metal frame overlaid with a wire grid...

...which made them easy to clean.

After the war, in rebuilding London, someone had the idea to use the stretchers, unmodified, as fence panels in at least some parts of the city.

They're still there today.

__

(The images are all screen grabs from the 1-minute, 20-second video Alice posted.)

A Day Off

I've been laid low by the covid and flu vaccines I got yesterday, so I don't feel up to writing tonight. Low-grade fever most of the day, and still kind of an oogy feeling now that the fever is gone. 

I'm hoping for a normal morning tomorrow!