As you can all can see from her new picture, Granny is now wearing a mask in accordance with health advice for septuagenarians, and so is particularly grateful for all suggestions as to how to prevent the fogging-up of spectacles (C8). Adding to yesterday's offerings, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki of Maroubra offers his own method for keeping his swimming goggles unfogged. "I layer about 5 mm of water into one lens of my swimming goggles, add a single drop of hair shampoo, rub the inside of the lens with my finger for about 10 seconds, transfer the water/shampoo mix to the other lens, repeat, and rinse both lenses with running water for about 10 seconds. This gives me 45 minutes of fog-free swimming. I have to repeat this each day. This technique should work with regular eyeglasses."
Monaco was granted sovereignty in the 1860s by Emperor Napoleon III of France, deposed a few years later. San Marino received its independence from the Roman Empire in the 4th Century, while Andorra was split off from the long forgotten Kingdom of Aragon in the 13th century. None of these great potentates would ever have imagined that the tiny stubs of countries they took pity on would have legacies much longer than their own. Yet today, San Marino competes in Eurovision and the Roman Empire does not.
Here is more on Monaco by Ned Donovan
How to Laugh Away the Far-Right: Lessons from Germany
In the many instances where far-right activity attempts to exhibit solemnity, gravity, or strength, a well-aimed joke is a powerful act of resistance.
Known as the Dairy State, Wisconsin is also a paper state. The industry in Wisconsin sells more paper, employs more people and has more paper mills than any other state…But the paper market, like everything, has been rocked by the novel coronavirus.” Link here
I have always been someone attracted to the quantifiable and the physical. I hate to admit it. But I don’t think I would have been able to do what the Huguenots did in Le Chambon. I would have counted up the number of soldiers and guns on each side and concluded it was too dangerous. I have always believed in God. I have grasped the logic of Christian faith. What I have had a hard time seeing is God’s power.
Malcolm Gladwell rediscovers religion
We Need to Talk About Ventilation The Atlantic (cf. NC, May 25, 2020). Excellent round-up, well worth a read. A key paragraph:
Strikingly, in one database of more than 1,200 super-spreader events, just one incident is classified as outdoor transmission, where a single person was infected outdoors by their jogging partner, and only 39 are classified as outdoor/indoor events, which doesn’t mean that being outdoors played a role, but it couldn’t be ruled out. The rest were all indoor events, and many involved dozens or hundreds of people at once. Other research points to the same result: Super-spreader events occur overwhelmingly in indoor environments where there are a lot of people.
Joe Lonsdale on libertarianism
Alec Stapp on antitrust and competition
GPT-3 responds to the philosophers. Recommended, for instance: “I quickly dismissed these thoughts. I was a computer, and no amount of self-reflection would change that fact.”
Jeff Bezo’s statement to the Judiciary committee is excellent. Here’s one of many quotable parts:
Amazon’s success was anything but preordained. Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition. From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had cumulative losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year. Smart analysts predicted Barnes & Noble would steamroll us, and branded us “Amazon.toast.” In 1999, after we’d been in business for nearly five years, Barron’s headlined a story about our impending demise “Amazon.bomb.” My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence: “Ouch.” At the pinnacle of the internet bubble our stock price peaked at $116, and then after the bubble burst our stock went down to $6. Experts and pundits thought we were going out of business. It took a lot of smart people with a willingness to take a risk with me, and a willingness to stick to our convictions, for Amazon to survive and ultimately to succeed.
Read the whole thing
Did Southeast Asian fish sauce come from ancient Rome?
Indian Matchmaking. Note that foreign exoticization, and thus partial concealment of anti-PC attitudes and pproaches, is one response to “things being cancelled.” For instance: “Let’s remove this thing from the status games being fought by white people, and maybe they won’t care very much.” And they don’t.
This Kevin Lewis link about whether hedonism leads to happiness was first sent to my spam blocker.