Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.

Biosecurity

US COVID and flu website + hotline for getting prescribed paxlovid, for free, for anyone with a positive COVID test risk factors.

Register now to access free virtual care and treatment for COVID-19 and Flu, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Sign up anytime, whether you are sick or not.

https://www.test2treat.org/

I unfortunately had cause to use this recently, and I was struck by how easy it was – as well as the fact that I did not have to talk to anyone via phone or video call.

(It was an option, and they indicated at a couple points that a medical professional might call me if they had questions, so you should be prepared, but in my case they didn’t.) The whole thing including getting the prescription was handled over text digitally. This is fantastic.

First fatal case of alaskapox, a novel orthopox virus, in an immunocompromised patient. Orthopox is the virus group that includes smallpox, monkeypox, and cowpox. Orthopox was discovered in 2015 and seems to be spread by rodents. There have been seven total human cases so far.

The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) has opened a Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) Contingency Planning Project – a group of experts that are planning for the possibility of CWD spilling over into people.

I think this is a deeply important kind of project to be doing. You see this in some places in some fashion – for instance, there’s a lot of effort and money spent understanding and tracking and controlling avian influenza (a strain which has a high mortality in humans but isn’t infectious between humans, just birds – for now.) But often, this kind of proactive pandemic prevention work isn’t done, even when the evidence is there.

(I wrote about the possibility of chronic wasting disease spilling into humans a few months ago. I ended up supposing that it was possible, but looking at the infection risk posed by another spilled-over prion disease from a more common animal, BSE, it seems like the absolute risk from prion diseases that can infect humans is extremely low. I don’t think people on this project would necessarily disagree with that, but there are a lot of unknowns and plenty of reasons to take even a low risk of a highly lethal disease spillover very cautiously. Still, I’ll have to read up on it, there may well be a higher risk than I assumed.)

Related, first noticed cases of Alzheimer’s disease transmitted between people (in patients injected with human-derived human growth hormone, decades later). In a past prion post, I wrote: “Meanwhile, Alzheimer’s disease might be slightly infectious- if you take brain extracts from people who died of Alzheimer’s, and inject them into monkey’s brains, the monkeys develop spongy brain tissue that suggests that the prions are replicating. This technically suggests that the Alzheimer’s amyloids are infectious, even if that would never happen in nature.” Well, it didn’t happen naturally, but I guess it did happen. (h/t Scott at Astral Codex Ten.)

The design history of the biohazard symbol.

Other biology

“Obelisks” are potentially a completely new kind of tiny microorganism, identified from metagenomic RNA sequencing.

One of the best stories in a scientific paper is “Ants trapped for years in an old bunker; survival by cannibalism and eventual escape” by Rutkowski et al, 2016.

First of all: the discovery of ants falling into a pipe that lead to a sealed bunker in Poland. Once inside, the ants couldn’t climb back out. There were no plants or other life in the bunker, so the ants survived on other organisms that that fell into the bunker, including eating their own dead (which they wouldn’t normally do, but if you’re in a tight spot, like an unused former nuclear weapons bunker, calories is calories.)

Second: after studying how they lived, the scientists tried transporting a small group of Bunker Ants to the surface to make sure they wouldn’t immediately behave in some kind of abnormal destructive way toward surface ants.

Then, when they didn’t, the scientists – in what I see as a breathtaking act of compassion – installed a plank into the pipe, so that the Bunker Ants could climb out of the bunker and be on the surface again.

NEW DEEP SEA ANIMALS LOCATED. Listen. I’ve written about this before – I know so much about the weird little women of the deep ocean and still every time I learn some more there are NEW STRANGER WOMEN DOWN THERE. This is also true of all of humanity learning about the deep ocean I guess. You simply cannot have a beat on this place.

Other bad things

A Hong Kong finance worker joined a multi-person video call where all his colleagues’ videos and their voices were deepfakes. It was a scam and the worker was tricked into transferring them millions of dollars. So that’s a thing that can happen now!

Bellingcat’s investigation into a tugboat spilling oil off the coast of Tobago. (The first piece is linked, there have been more updates since.) I love Bellingcat; I’ve talked about this before. My reaction to keeping up with this series is equal parts “those wizards have done it again” and “there be some specific-ass websites in this world.”

…But when there’s not detailed public-facing information about something, you can make your own, as shown by volunteers tracking ICE deportations by setting up CCTV facing Boeing Field in Seattle and showing up weekly to watch the feed and count how many chained detainees are boarded onto planes. This is laudable dedication.

Do you have an off-brand video doorbell? Get rid of it! They’re incredibly insecure. They aren’t even encrypted. If you have an on-brand video doorbell, maybe still get rid of it, or at least switch it to using local storage. At least, Ring has been ending the thing where they make it easy for police to get footage without warrants, but there are other brands that might have different systems and if you ask me it’s pretty bad that they had that in the first place. (H/t Schneier on Security)

You know who is giving police sensitive customer personal information without warrants? Pharmacies! Yikes! (Again, h/t Schneier on Security)

Other interesting things

Mohists as early effective altruists? Ozy at Thing of Things writes about the Mohist philosophy of ancient China. I knew a little bit about this, but learning more it’s even cooler than I thought, and the parallels to modern rationality are surprising.

MyHouse.WAD is a fan-created map for the video game “Doom” that turns promises to be a map of a childhood home and turns into an evocative horror experience. I don’t know anything about Doom, so I’ve only experienced it in the form of youtube videos about the (real! playable!) map. You also don’t need to know anything about Doom to appreciate it. Power Pak’s video “MyHouse.WAD – Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod” is the most popular video and for good reason.

If you liked that, you may also enjoy Spazmatic Banana’s “doom nerd blindly experiences myhouse.wad (and loses his mind)” (exactly what it sounds like) as well as DavidXNewton’s “The Machniations of myhouse.wad (How it works)” series (which, as it sounds like, explains how the map works. Again, well explained if you do not know a thing about Doom modding.)

The earliest ARG began in the 1980s at the very beginning of the internet age and is based around a supposed research project that made a dimensional rift in the (real) ghost town of Ong’s Hat, New Jersey.

The world’s largest terrestrial vehicle is the Bagger 293, an otherworldly-looking machine that scrapes up topsoil for digging mines.

A cool piece on the woman who won the “Red Lantern” award for coming in last in the 2022 Iditarod. (H/t Briar.)

Hilariously, she wrote on Twitter:

Defeating the "bioligical advantage of trans women" narrative by being literally the slowest musher to finish the Iditarod this year 😂😂😂

— Apayauq 🏳️‍⚧️ 🏴🇵🇸 (@Apayauq1) March 21, 2022

A short story: The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library. (H/t Ozy.)

Kelsey Piper’s piece on regulations and why it’s good that the FAA lets parents on airplanes carry babies in their lap, even though this is known to be less safe in the event of plane accidents than requiring babies to have their own seats.

Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.

Also, semi-intentionally, none of the links in this harvest are COVID-19-related. If you want some interesting distractions, you might like this post.

---

First, an eternal recommendation for the SCP Foundation’s Antimemetics Division series. (“Antimemes” are information that resists sharing.) It’s smart, creepy, mind-bending fiction in which a variety of clever protagonists try to save the world from an enemy who they can’t remember exists. The final story in the series is being posted very soon, and you’ll have a lot to work through before then.

“Negative ion” products on Amazon: not only do they not work, many of them are literally impregnated with thorium powder. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. h/t Lorelei.

“Dreamy labyrinthine architecture that is somehow both crushingly oppressive and unimaginably vast” alert: These man-made caverns in New York State.

Relatedly, you should be following BLDGBLOG, a blog about buildings and so much more.

If you can’t find dreamy labyrinthine architecture in real life, you can make your own. Artbreeder.com is a wonder and free to use. If you’ve tried it before, check again, because in addition to the table-deer-mop hybrids of your dreams, it now allows you to make landscapes and disturbingly realistic human portraits to your desired specifications. Wondering where I got the cover image for this post? I’ve picked up oil painting during self-isolation, I call this one “Lost Carcosa” – just kidding, an AI and I made it in five minutes.

John J Audubon recorded a species of giant eagle he’d occasionally seen in the American midwest. To date, nobody else has found that bird.

Here’s a species of fungus that is found in a little region in Japan, a little region in Texas, and literally nowhere else on earth.

First major use of deepfakes in an election was surprisingly not terrible (“translating” a video of an Indian politician into another language, as though the politician were speaking it himself.)

I’ve harbored a longtime fascination with domestic life, housekeeping, cooking, etcetera – both modern and past. This surprises a lot of people. It was actually a large part of my interest in working on The Funnel of Human Experience – so much of human history was spent by people, mostly women, keeping the home running and the fires hot and the children clothed. In the late 1800s, Ellen Swallow Richards turned the art of home economics into a science – people studying the most time-effective way to make a bed, the best nutrition for a family, sanitation and food safety at home and standardization. There was the 1870’s MIT Women’s Laboratory, and later there were universities with actual living orphan “practice” babies, who the students practiced caretaking on. There are whole books’ worth of history here. (And if you know any good ones about anything on this topic, please let me know.) Anyway, Efficiency is Everything – Industrial engineering applied to life is a re-discovery of the topic for the modern age.

Explorable.es: Some delightful interactive scientific/technical concept-explainers.

We’ve had sci-fi. There’s worldbuilding fiction, of whole planets and cultures and sentient species. Some of my friends are interested in “soc-fi”, fictional plausible societies. There are con-langs and alternate histories and speculative biology. There’s even time-fi. And now, finally, we have food fiction – fun recipes with beautiful results that don’t work! Unfortunately, it’s masquerading as those short viral videos from Blossom, Five Minute Crafts, So Yummy, etc, that you see all over facebook and youtube, and it’s also known as “lying for profit.”

Trees that harvest high amounts of metals from the soil, so much that e.g. nickel trees exude green sap. BLDGBLOG calls this “metallurgical druidry.”

Sandy Island, New Caledonia: an island near Australia that was discovered not to exist in 2012. This is part of a phenomenon known as “phantom islands.”

A wholesome online retail store that sells zoo animal toys.

Why does a tiny spot in rural Maine produce as much light at night as some cities? Identification of unexpected light sources from a global map of light pollution. (Fun game: try to guess each source before you learn what the answer is.)

A very intense online “game”: Look at videos of lifeguard rescues in swimming pools. See if you can find and click on the drowning kid before the lifeguard rescues them. May be good if you spend a lot of time around kids (or adults?) in water.

Do you know about David Goodsell’s biology art? He makes gorgeous drawings of cells, molecular mechanisms, etcetera, that are also considered good representations of how much stuff there actually is in a cell. A lot more than the sort of sterile, structured drawings you saw in intro biology textbooks.

This Dutch company trains eagles to take down drones. A news article notes:

“What I find fascinating is that birds can hit the drone in such a way that they don’t get injured by the rotors,” said LeBaron [of the Audubon society]. “They seem to be whacking the drone right in the centre so they don’t get hit; they have incredible visual acuity and they can probably actually see the rotors.”

Humans, of course, only see rotors as a blur – LeBaron suspects that the eagles can make out the complete movement and thus have no trouble avoiding injury. It doesn’t hurt, either, that attacking a drone the way a bird might attack another bird is usually effective. “Their method of attack is always going to be to hit it in the middle of the back; with the drones they perceive the rotors on the side and so they just go for the rear.”

This is fascinating and also checks out with the observation that smaller animals, notably birds, seem to have a much faster perception than humans.

It seems like smart speakers, bluetooth headsets, and the like can be hacked to produce harmful levels of sound. Great! That’s another entry for the bestiary.

First, a quick note and call for aid. For my final semester in George Mason’s biodefense program, I’m working on a capstone project. I’ll be researching and writing about list-based biosecurity in the US – places where biodefense systems identify risks based on a list of known pathogens.

I see why the systems work this way, and this was probably sufficient in the past – yet as far as I’m aware, it’s all but an unspoken consensus in the field that these won’t protect against engineered organisms – recombinant or genetically altered pathogens that are either totally novel, or “resemble” a harmless organism in most ways while posing significant danger to humans. I want to explore where list-based biosecurity shows up, what the risks are, and possible alternative systems. Ideally, this’ll eventually be published.

If you have thoughts on any of the above, or you know things that I should know, I’d love to chat. My email, as always, is eukaryotewritesblog (at) gmail.com.

---

Alright, on to the bounty. Internet Harvest is a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs.

I’m interested in feedback on what you think of the section, or the links therein. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.

---

Are you following the Wuhan coronavirus/nCoV outbreak? Yeah, me too. This is the first major world event that I actually know anything about that I’m watching unfold live on Twitter, and the misinformation situation on a lot of the hashtags is so much worse than I thought. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security is publishing regular updates on the outbreak’s progress, and they know what they’re talking about.

Mystery drone swarms above US cities! Welcome to 2020. This is a thing that happens now, I guess.

An update to the colorful visual Euclid textbook in the last internet harvest: A gorgeous web version.

A confusing Youtube project: “meaningwave”, which features glitchy visuals, soft electronic music, and clips from motivational speakers. Notably Jordan Peterson, but also Alan Watts and Mr Rogers. Dozens of videos, all made by the same person. I don’t like Jordan Peterson but I can recognize when the universe drops something bizarre and beautiful into my lap. This one is my favorite, featuring Naval Ravikant on habits and clips from the Moomin TV show.

The website of, and videos from, a practicing professional Voodoo magician.

My views on gendered pronouns as a mainstay of language are well-exemplified by this classic Douglas Hofstadter essay (yes, the Gödel, Escher, Bach guy), Person Paper on Purity in Language. (Content warning: Lots of ironic racism.)

Speaking of racism, a horrific aspect of it in the US that I didn’t know much about: Sundown Towns. The linked research project includes maps and how to identify if a town was one. (Content warning: Discussion of intense racism, mostly anti-black, and antisemitism.)

Escape a frankly soul-sucking social media ecosystem, and make 2020 the renaissance of the personal website. If anyone wants to set up an unironic webring with me, hit me up.

(Indieweb looks like a decent place to start.)

This month’s podcast recommendation is The Dream, on multi-level marketing schemes. It’s compassionate and cutting at the same time, as well as interesting and informative. I don’t come from an environment where these are common, so it’s boggling to see the scope of these – though I expect if you’re already more familiar with MLMs, you’ll still get something out of this.

You know about moon snails, right? Look ye upon moon snails. (If you live on the west coast of the USA, you can go find these guys on sandy beaches at low tide.)

Inspired by some other favorite bloggers, I’m trying a new post type: a selection of the most succulent links on the internet that I’ve recently plucked from its fruitful boughs.

I’m interested in feedback on what you think of the section, or the links therein. Feel free to discuss the links in the comments.

Biology

Best youtube videos of the month: Dubstep video of a sub-antarctic “brinicle” of super-cold saltwater. Zero narration. The drop hits perfectly.

Instead of a video loop of a crackling fire, why not put on BBC Earth’s “Deep Ocean: 10 Hours of Relaxing Oceanscapes” in the background of your winter party? Zero narration, just faint water sounds and lovely footage of spectacular seascapes and bizarre animals. (There are other videos for Open Ocean and other ocean environments.)

Possible method for assessing animal welfare, either in the wild or, in this case, in farms: If you give them antidepressants, do they get better? A Russian factory farm has tried giving antidepressants (lithium) to their pigs.

Culture

A journal specifically for works in the public domain.

Ethnography of an online roleplay based on the Warriors Cat series, which took place entirely on book reviews for the Nook e-reader. Humans will build culture in a handful of dust.

A timeline of when food and specific dishes came into being!

Art

Uncomfortable ASMR

A mid-1700’s series of etchings of cavernous fantasy prisons. I think I’ve had nightmares about this place before.

A colorful, visual version of Euclid’s proofs.

Assorted

“She sells sea shells by the sea shore” is frequently held to refer to Mary Anning, a major figure in palaeontology who found dinosaur and other fossils in Lyme Regis on the southern coast of England. I hold that it would also make sense if it referred to the Seychelles.

Semi-relatedly, the Seychelles are generally a matriarchal society.

I very much enjoyed the Bellingcat Podcast. If you like investigative journalism and careful analysis of fraught political situations, you may as well.

“Privacy-conscious” and open-source alternatives to apps and software you probably use regularly.