• Thread of the week: Pandemic doomsaying
• Article of the week: Controversy, what controversy?
• Meme of the week: Research(yes, sure, there is also this)
• Video of the week: Trams
• RIP Mira Furlan

What a week…

There are pieces of several good movies in these two hours and 30 minutes but none of them last for very long and what’s in between isn’t very good. The novel it is based on has almost a thousand pages in paperback and not having read it I would still wager it would’ve been better served as a TV series than this overwrought film that is narratively, visually, and emotionally all over the place.

The longest stretch of coherence — our young semi-orphan Theo’s coming-of-age in a Nevadan subdevelopment with his new friend Boris — should have comprised the first two acts of a 90-minute three-act movie that would still have had enough different storylines to satisfy the early 2020s fad of too much plot (see also: Soul). This structure would both have prevented Nicole Kidman’s family of emotionally stunted ciphers from contaminating the movie, and given Finn Wolfhard’s adorable pretend-Russian accent more screen time.

Directed by John Crowley, 2019.

There is a place in everyone’s life for mindless entertainment: things with which to amuse and delight your brain when it can’t handle anything more mentally taxing. But whereas mindfulness is always the same: complex, developing characters, plot twists, emotional range (yawn), there are many different ways to achieve mindlessness. Most shows take the easy route: if there is no “there” there, there is nothing to worry your mind about — just react to what’s in front of your eyes without worrying what came before or what will come after, football in the groin-style.

As you could have guessed from the thumbs up emoji in the title, The Mandalorian does it the hard way. It counts on the viewers’ familiarity with Star Wars and western movie tropes to do the mental work in the background without taxing the frontal cortex. There is a before and an after, but you’ve seen the before and can guess the after so you can focus on the here and the now of blasters firing away and villains monologuing themselves into a stalemate. Familiar but fresh, just what the brain needs after dealing with the stale strangeness of the last year.

• Article of the week: Schrödinger’s cat bias
• Thread of the week: Omega events
• Blog post of the week (remember those?): L’éducation idéologique
• Letter of the week (remember those?): Biden’s to Eric Lander
• Video of the week: Warren Buffett’s house (bonus: wokeness overload)

• The Americans
• The Mandalorian
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels
• Peter Thiel’s Zero to One
• Sam Harris’s Waking Up app
• Steven Wolfram’s Mathematica
• The following Mac “productivity” apps: Omnifocus, Omnigraffle, DevonThink Pro, Tinderbox
• Zettelkasten
• Apple hardware
• Electric bicycles
• Birdwatching

Obviously, I recommend all of the above.

See also: Things I used to like but now wonder what in the world I was thinking.

• Social media
• Gmail
• Richard Dawkins and his “New Atheism”
• Ayn Rand’s two books

There must be more, but I am good at suppressing.

See also: Things I heard were good but was holding out for reasons unknown then wondered why I haven’t tried them sooner.

• A few hours before I developed symptoms I had a negative screening nasal swab. By the time I got a positive test three days later the symptoms were well on their way to resolving. Good thing I didn’t believe that first result.
• What helped my not believing was that I had textbook Covid-19 which was moderate bordering on severe: fever 39.5°C (~103°F), chills, body aches, nasal congestion, rhinorhea, and a dry cough that was mild enough for me not to worry. But thankfully no anosmia.
• Read the preceding paragraph again. The nasal swab done just before I developed all those symptoms (and arguably while having chills - though I didn’t know they were chills at the time) was negative. Covid-19 testing is no better or worse than any other clinical test we have, which is to say caveat medicus.
• Considering our family’s practices I was surprised that it managed to get in and suspected it was one of the new strains. Lo and behold not 7 days later the UK strain was found in Maryland. I won’t know the sequence of the one that got me for a few more months, but I’d say it’s likely.
• Said practices did contribute to containment, as there seemed to be no spread outside of the household (there is a small asterisk there which I will leave for another time).
• The new strains being so much easier to get makes any delays in administering the vaccine that more deadly. This is hard to overstate: shots in arms now, doesn’t matter how and to whom.
• Speaking of shots, I did get my first dose a few days before the likely exposure, and plan on getting the second one as scheduled if available.
• Masks aren’t 100% effective, particularly in areas of high prevalence which is right now most of the world. The new strains shift the equilibrium even more. Holier-that-though memes about things being OK again if only people did what’s good for them (i.e. wore a mask) are misguided at best and quite likely counterproductive.
• Another misguided effort: a DC health professional telling the sole member of a large family without a fever to use a separate bathroom, wear a mask at all times and open all the (quite tall) windows of their 1200 sq ft 7th floor apartment. Hard to tell if this was more comical or dangerous.
• DC health professional’s misguided advice #2: to get everyone in the household tested. If mine was positive and four more people also have fevers do we really think they have something else? Why risk the tester’s exposure and waste reagents: count these people as positive and move on.
• But as things stand right now, if these household members don’t get tested they don’t count as positive. How prevalent is this situation, I wonder? Even with test availability not being a bottleneck I’d multiply the current counts by at least 2, probably 3 to get the real number (and I’m sure there are epidemiologists who have a more scientific explanation for why we should be doing that anyway).
• Symptoms in children seem to be no different than any other febrile viremia of childhood (and in fact may be slightly better as they didn’t seem to sap any of their energy, for better or worse). Does this make in-person school more or less safe? I can see both sides of the argument but if you thought children as asymptomatic carriers would be a big risk that risk is probably overblown as they do in fact get symptoms — they just won’t telegraph them.
• And if you are worried about long-term effects of Covid-19 in children, well, sure, but how is that different from long-term effects of any febrile viremia of childhood? I’m sure our parenting style will ruin their prospects enough that Covid-19 will be just a drop in the bucket.
• I have been getting lists of home remedies from people who should know better. This includes aspirin (as an anti-platelet agent, not an antipyretic), azithromycin (still!) zinc, turmeric, propolis. What I took: a little bit of APAP and a lot of H2O.
• I have a new appreciation for the gig workers, who are the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Tip your Dasher.
• 2021 is certainly off to an interesting start.

The disaster continues. After making a mindless theme park out of liberal democracy, our daring trio of materialists sets their eyes on slavery, race relations, and American fascism. Did I say “set their eyes”? My mistake — I meant “completely ignore while protecting their Civil War ancestors’ honor and looting Native American treasure”.

A pox on everyone who was in this movie, Helen Miren inclusive.

• Nature Methods method of the year (and deservedly so): spatially resolved transcriptomics
• Transgenic myeloid cells (not the worst idea) from Siddhartha Mukherjee (uhmmmmm…)
• Thread of the week: Adam Cifu doodles
• Pile-on of the week: David Chapman on airmchair philosophy (and a bonus pile-on from last weeek)
• Basketball is easy (when you’re Jokić)

In a museum exhibit dedicated to the fall of liberal democracy, National Treasure deserves to be played at the entrance, on loop; because the treasure in question isn’t freedom, nor equality, and no it’s not brotherhood either. It’s actual treasure, stolen from civilizations past, to be turned by our daring protagonists at the end of the movie into mansions and fast cars. That The Aristocats have a trigger warning on Disney+ and this consumerist anti-civilization piece of dreck doesn’t tells you all you need to know about the situational awareness of modern institutions.

Directed by Jon Turteltaub, 2004.