Six years before the coronavirus, Neïl Beloufa imagined a global outbreak of disease and digital bewilderment. “Screen Talk,” his new project, erases the line between fiction and real life.
From a homemade guitar made out of tin and fishing line, to writing songs for country music icon Slim...
What Art Will Come Out Of These Difficult Times?
What then can we expect of the contemporary artistic community by way of helping us digest this experience of physical confinement and anxiety? Some have already shared their creations during confinement through social media. – The Art Newspaper
Irene Triplett died last week at the age of 90. She was the last person in America to collect a pension from the Civil War, $73.13 each month from the Department of Veterans Affairs right up until she passed away. Her father Mose Triplett was both a Confederate and US soldier (a North Carolinian, he defected from the Confederacy halfway through the war) and Irene was eligible to receive his pension after he died because of disability.
After Mary died in the 1920s, Mose married Elida Hall. He was 78. She was 27. Their 1924 marriage, according to the Journal, was rough. They lost three babies. Then Irene was born on Jan. 9, 1930, but had mental disabilities, according to the newspaper. She was 8 when her father died on July 18, 1938, at the age of 92. His headstone reads: “He was a Civil War soldier.”
This is a great example of the Great Span, the link across large periods of history by individual humans. But it’s also a reminder that, as William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Until this week, US taxpayers were literally and directly paying for the Civil War, a conflict whose origins stretch back to the earliest days of the American colonies and continues today on the streets of our cities and towns. (thx, m)
FRANK WHITE WROTE A BOOK ABOUT THIS IN THE EIGHTIES: The Psychological Effect of Seeing Earth From Space Changes You, Astronauts Say.
RESEARCH: A cohort study to evaluate the effect of combination Vitamin D, Magnesium and Vitamin B12 (DMB) on progression to severe outcome in older COVID-19 patients. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough of these anyway. And this is a small study, but interesting.
Related: Paging Dr. Hamblin: Does Vitamin D Help Fight COVID-19? Evidence is slowly mounting. Some researchers think that’s enough to recommend it. Of course, you should be making sure to get enough Vitamin D anyway. . .
TechCrunch: “Facebook’s photo transfer tool is now available globally half a year on from an initial rollout in Europe, the company saidtoday. The data portability feature enables users of the social network to directly port a copy of their photos to Google’s eponymous photo storage service via encrypted transfer, rather than needing to download and manually upload photos themselves — thereby reducing the hassle involved with switching to a rival service. Facebook users can find the option to “Transfer a copy of your photos and videos” under the Your Facebook Information settings menu. This is the same menu where the company has long enabled users to download a copy of a range of information related to their use of its service (including photos). However there’s little that can be done with that data dump. Whereas the direct photo transfer mechanism shrinks the friction involved in account switching. Facebook debuted the feature in Ireland at the back end of last year, going on to open it up to more international markets earlier this year and grant access to users in the US and Canada come April. Now all Facebook users can tap in — though the choice of where you can port your photos remains limited to Google Photos.
SOUNDS LIKE THE VOTERS OF BALTIMORE KNOW WHAT THEY WANT, AND DESERVE TO GET IT GOOD AND HARD: Ex-Baltimore mayor, once convicted of embezzlement, now favorite to fill seat of mayor convicted of fraud.
How Apple learned automation can’t match human skill Apple Insider. Whaddaya know, turns out labor power is worth paying for.
‘Biggest payroll surprise in history’ – stocks and yields rise after jobs number Seeking Alpha. Resilc: “Fake numbers.” He’s right. From the very end of the Department of Labor’s press release:
If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to “other reasons” (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally adjusted basis). However, according to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reclassify survey responses.
Admittedly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had a similar note last month. As always, focus on U-6, which shows unemployment over 20%.