Open Thread For January

“2021” looks and sounds completely fictitious if taken as a year AD. I think it’s actually a model number for an old analog synthesiser.

Author: Martin R

Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, boardgamer, geocacher and father of two.

329 thoughts on “Open Thread For January”

  7. David Wong has written SF/horror novels like “John Dies At the End” & “This Book Is Full Of Spiders- Seriously Dude, Don’t Open It”.
    His latest is “Zoey Punches The Future In The Dick”.
    .
    A random sentence: ‘Will said hostage situations were like bad marriages, one party trying to subtly force the other to surrender, inches at a time”.

    The book is a parody of a future libertarian society, rather like Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

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  8. Governor Cuomo of New York has been cooking the books about nursing home deaths in his state.

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  9. The hunter-gatherer Chumash indians in California were using highly worked shell beads as currency 2000 years ago.

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  11. Science fiction: George Clooney will be executive producer for a reboot of Buck Rogers.
    The things Clooney do are usually interesting, so unlike 99% of reboots this could be worth watching.

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  12. I just learned something:*All* the American cannibals were white, from Jeffrey Dahmer to the Donner party.

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  13. British artist Sophie Xenon has died, at 34.
    She was climbing up on a roof to get a good view of the full moon when she slipped and fell.
    This is a tragedy, but also a very stylish way to go.
    .
    2021- I am told that when viewed fifty years on, 1971 may have produced more classic hits and live-action albums than any other year (although 1968 probably has a strong claim, too).

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  15. I recommend “Anti-vaxxers: What went wrong?” at Youtube.
    Naturally, Pharmaceutical lobbyists and Reagan play a role, but also the paternalistic culture among doctors up until the recent past.

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  18. No great discoveries today. To quote Death “people were born , people died, the trees grew a bit taller”.

    BoJo travels through Scotland, being patronising and generally making SNPs voter support skyrocket.

    Marine LePen, totally not a fascist at all, is also polling high.

    I shambled over to my workplace on crutches and managed to feed the pigeons. I am glad to see they have survived the coldest part of the winter.
    No really interesting phenomena in the night sky, but the ordinary stars should be plenty.

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      1. Only a small fracture three weeks ago, now I can walk unsupported shorter distances. Thank Zod I have the cats as company.
        .
        Gwendolin Christie will play Lucifer in Netflix’ upcoming version of Sandman. I always thought Lucifer was the coolest character.

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  19. If you think the intro from “Crying at the Discoteqe” by Alcazar seems familiar, it is borrowed from “Spacer” by Sheila B. Devotion (1979).
    .
    One of the most weird film endings ever:”Big Man Japan “

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  20. Northeast USA endured a snowstorm, resulting in cute coverage of a panda gliding down a snowy slope inside the zoo. Also, for the second time in a month, Washington is overcome by a storm of whiteness.
    Stephen Colbert:”New York got 2 feet of snow!”
    Lapland:”Hold my beer”.

    Trump just proved there are some things lawyers will not do for money 😁
    Q Anon: the inauguration of president Biden on TV is a deepfake.
    Anderson Cooper at TV news is a robot.

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    1. Washington DC is notorious for its inability to deal with snow. Even the prediction of 1 cm of snow will shut the city down. Keep in mind that (1) Washington is further south than Madrid and (2) people who work there come from all over the US, including many places that rarely if ever see snow. Overreliance on automobile transport is also a major factor; rail systems, especially underground metro systems, are much more robust.

      Where I live, it takes significantly more snow to shut things down. We are forecast to get 15 to 30 cm out of this system, which is enough to shut down most nonessential services, but if it’s only 10 cm, expect business as usual.

      Then there are places like the mountain passes of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada. The latter is particularly known for copious snowfalls (the name is Spanish for “snowy mountain range). They also do not use salt to prevent the formation of ice on roadways, because that winter snowpack becomes the summer drinking water supply.

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      1. The main problem for Swedish commuter railroads is fallen wet leaves in the autumns. If you brake the train on rails covered with those leaves, then the whole train just slides along and each wheel gets a small flat abrasion surface, making them go bumpety bumptey bumpety in an unsynched manner when you roll again.

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      2. There’s also the infamous “first day of snow/freezing” (winterized trains wear faster, especially in non-freezing conditions, so a small buffer of winterized trains are kept in the depot and when the weather seem like it’s heading that way, a massive winterization effort is made, but sometimes (well, frequently) that prediction fails, leaving a short stock for the about-first-day.

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  21. “American Gods ” revisited.
    Marilyn Manson has been fired from the cast after a woman he had a relationship with has accused him of abuse.
    .
    Ohio State University: A deep-learning computer model has identified ten compounds that potentially may work against COVID 19 . This includes the approved drugs cyclosporine and anidulafungin.
    A similar strategy at Shenzen Institute has identified
    pralatrecate as a possible medicine.

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  24. For Swedish readers: Bokus has a substantial discount of these titles:

    First Farmers. The Origins of Agricultural Societies
    Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu
    Gold Dust Woman: The Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis
    The Xenophobe’s Guide to the Swedes by Peter Berlin

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  25. OK, not archaeology but still pretty cool.
    Another test flight of the “Starship” space vehicle, Starship #9 today, it reached 10 km altitude and flipped over to horizontal at 4 minutes 35 seconds to present maximum surface and maximise drag as it descends.
    At 6 min 26 seconds it hit the ground, something going wrong the last second. This was half-expected as the main objective was to test the controlled aerodynamic descent, the previous test flight also ending with “non-discursive disassembly” aka blowing up.
    The whole flight is at Youtube and reminded me of the televised launches of my childhood (but with much better image quality).

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