Links

Stuff I find around the web that interests or amuses me.

Fast-forward on the Future

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Really interesting list from Politico of 17 pandemic innovations that are here to stay:

Amid all the death and heartbreak, Covid-19 also hit fast-forward on the future.

For the past year, POLITICO has been chronicling these changes, from cities to states to the federal government, as part of our Recovery Lab project. One thing we’ve noticed is that many of these pandemic innovations, while birthed in crisis and adopted temporarily, increasingly look like they are here to stay.

Most of these, I think, are pretty good, and any downsides I think can be adapted or worked around as we move forward. The big trick will be holding onto the most beneficial aspects, especially those that benefit marginalized communities but may not be as immediately noticeably beneficial for the majority.

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Vinegar:

YouTube5 was a Safari extension back when Flash was still a thing and hated by everyone. It replaced the YouTube player (written in Flash) with an HTML <video> tag.

And now the YouTube player situation has gotten bad enough that we need another extension to fix it. That’s where Vinegar comes in. Vinegar also replaces the YouTube player (written in who-knows-what) with a minimal HTML <video> tag.

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With No Time To Die, or even wash his hands, James Bond’s travel hygiene fails:

From his questionable sexual behavior to his unsafe eating habits to his risk-taking with regard to insect- and animal-borne diseases, it’s remarkable that the famous fictional secret agent has repeatedly lived another day.

In a new paper, published in the journal Travel Medicine and Infectious Diseases, researchers report numerous examples of 007’s shaky approach to travel health and safety throughout 25 films produced by Eon Films from 1962 to 2021.

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Breakthrough infection odds: 1 in 5,000 or better.

In Seattle on an average recent day, about one out of every one million vaccinated residents have been admitted to a hospital with Covid symptoms. That risk is so close to zero that the human mind can’t easily process it.