Links: Good to know!

[sonia]

Weird Things You Learn About Food When You Garden at Last Word On Nothing by Laura Helmuth. Great gardening tips, and a satisfying turn at the end.

Ratfactor's Illustrated Guide to Folding Fitted Sheets by Dave Gauer. What it says on the tin, with charming illustrations.

What do we know about the Covid-19 virus five years on? by Rachel Hall. A brief summary of basic facts, reassuringly honest.

It’s been five years since the start of the Covid pandemic. Although most of the government mandates, from social distancing to face masks, have been consigned to the past, the virus is still prevalent – and capable of causing real harm.

Although it was initially forecast to become a seasonal illness, the virus is on the rise in the US – making it far from the common-cold-style winter illness that was expected.

Machine Learning—good and bad arguments against by Sandra. From a gut-level hatred of machine learning to an analysis of the arguments against it.

Wingfield Pines in Allegheny County, PA, is a restored wetlands. Good to hear about an environmental success!

It was formerly a site plagued by Abandoned Mine Drainage (AMD); we were able to hire environmental engineer Bob Hedin to implement an aesthetically pleasing passive treatment system that visitors can walk through to watch the water transition from murky orange to natural, clean clear water flowing into Chartiers Creek.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

Thanks for the links! The folded sheet illustrations are indeed charming. And I also enjoyed the way Laura Helmuth used a post about gardening to send that particular message.

[sonia]

Glad you enjoyed them!

[adrian_turtle]

The Covid article is reassuringly honest, but different paragraphs seem to have been written at different times (or otherwise in different contexts.) That link to the article saying that people under 65 will be denied covid vaccines is just kind of sitting next to the conversation about "low uptake of the free vaccine," and how "vaccine hesitancy" means people in school and the workplace aren't getting vaccinated.

[sonia]

I figured it was sending a pointed message with that, but you could be right about its being accidental.

[silveradept]

Good things to know, indeed. I'll see if I can figure out how to make the folding fitted sheets thing work, they're usually non-Euclidian surfaces to me.

One hopes that the recommendations about vaccination are taken up by those who have the power to make them happen and make them freely available, but that's not looking great.

The gardening piece is on point, especially at the end. The machine learning piece seems to be mostly focusing on Large Language Models as the form of ML being talked about, but it's entirely possible that other ML models have the same consequences and arguments against. (Or maybe it's because LLMs are everywhere in the news and in programs and services these days.)

[sonia]

Good luck with folding the fitted sheets! Many years ago someone said, "... are you calling that folded?" about my attempt to fold a fitted sheet, and I decided to learn how. As a massage therapist, there is much, much folding of sheets.