Cowboy Who?

Art by Sean Von Gorman

Dear guy at the bar on his computer,

I’m writing this letter to tell you that I am sorry. I’m sorry I ever hated you. In fact, I miss you. I miss your New Balance sneakers and the BERNIE bumper sticker on your MacBook. I miss the way you pretended you didn’t hear the bartender when she asked if you wanted another drink. It’s crazy, but I can’t stop thinking about you. We don’t even know each other. I was that person at the end of the bar making fun of you. Remember, the one with the rosé, rolling their eyes?

You would squeeze yourself in between a first date and a group of people watching the playoffs. What were you writing? Nobody knows. Maybe a novel about falling in love on a random lake. A detailed Yelp review, because Subway wasn’t open till 9 PM as it said on the website, and when you tried to wave to the man inside he ignored you. Or perhaps you were just searching for Old Navy coupons. Whatever you were doing, you wanted us to know it was important.

You would slowly sip your house wine as you stared into the bright screen and mutter “hmm” over and over again. Your way of letting the entire bar know you were “thinking,” or maybe you were spiraling because your ex stopped watching your Instagram stories. Sometimes guests would be intrigued by you and try to start a conversation. “Are you a writer?” a drunk stranger would ask, and you would brush them off, acting like you were annoyed. But you lived for that moment when someone acknowledged you. It kept you coming back. You wouldn’t get that attention if you were in some downtown coffee shop.

Now with bars closed, I can’t help but wonder where you are, whatever happened to you? I know you won’t settle for a home office. That’s just not like you. I imagine you sitting alone on a ferry in the dead of winter, everyone else inside on the lower level, but not you. Or in a hospital waiting room, the sounds of the ER giving you a rush, that patient with an object stuck in their butt inspiring a love story. Or maybe you are blocking an aisle in a supermarket. When a little old lady asks you to pass the oatmeal, you simply say, “Sorry, I don’t work here.”

Wherever you are, I hope you are okay and that you are writing before a captive audience.

Yours,
Kristin Manna

P.S. Do you want to be on my trivia team?

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Somewhere out there... specifically in San Francisco... someone is reading this and deciding it's a great idea.

Today's News:

---

The company is now seeking Food and Drug Administration approval.

With the already staggering coronavirus case and death toll expected to climb further in the US following Thanksgiving, there’s at least more good news on the vaccine front. The biotech firm Moderna released the final results of its 30,000-person vaccine trial in a press release Monday, reporting a 94.1 percent rate of efficacy. The finding squares with the 94.5 percent efficacy rate the company reported two weeks ago, based on its first interim analysis of trial data.

Of the 196 Covid-19 cases in the trial, 185 were in the placebo group and only 11 in the vaccine group, Moderna reported.

Even more important, the vaccine — called mRNA-1273 — appears to protect against severe disease, not just asymptomatic or mild cases. Of the 30 severe Covid-19 cases among trial participants, all occurred in the placebo group. If the finding is real, it would likely mean averted deaths and hospitalizations when millions of people are immunized.

“You’ve got 100 percent protection against severe disease,” Paul Offit, an infectious disease and vaccine researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Vox. “That’s remarkable.”

“If these numbers are right, it’s more than we’d need for the vaccine to be a major control measure for this outbreak,” said Eric Rubin, an infectious disease specialist and the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Moderna’s CEO, Stéphane Bancel, said in the press release that the company plans to request an Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, which would allow the vaccine to be used in limited cases for people facing some of the highest risk of exposure to Covid-19, like health care workers. “We believe that our vaccine will provide a new and powerful tool that may change the course of this pandemic and help prevent severe disease, hospitalizations and death,” he added.

Given that the Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca/Oxford coronavirus vaccine research groups have also put out promising findings recently, this latest announcement of final data from the Moderna trial reaffirms that the world will likely have several highly effective vaccines for Covid-19 — and the end of the pandemic may be on the horizon. High efficacy also means that fewer people would need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity, the threshold at which the virus can no longer spread easily from person to person.

But, as always, there are caveats. In this case, the vaccine requires two doses, there are some side effects, and we don’t yet have details about how the vaccine worked in high-risk groups. And while demonstrating efficacy is important, the road to getting millions of people vaccinated will be fraught with logistical challenges. A lot of difficult work on a Covid-19 vaccine still lies ahead.

How Moderna showed that its Covid-19 vaccine works

Moderna’s announcement of 94.1 percent efficacy is based on a phase 3 clinical trial. In particular, the results are from the COVE study, conducted in collaboration with the US government’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Phase 3 is where the vaccine is tested against the virus spreading in the real world. Since experimenters can’t deliberately infect people, they have to wait and see who gets sick with Covid-19 in their volunteer pool, comparing the group that received the actual vaccine to the group that received the placebo. Moderna’s vaccine is administered as two doses.

To speed up the process, researchers recruit thousands of volunteers so that the rate of accumulating infections goes up. But it only takes a handful of infections to demonstrate that the vaccine works.

If a vaccine doesn’t work, and half the people in the trial get the vaccine and the other half get the placebo, we’d expect coronavirus cases to be evenly split in the two groups, Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, told Vox. But when a vaccine is effective, we get results like the ones Moderna is reporting.

According to the biotech firm, experimenters detected 11 cases in people who received two doses of the vaccine compared to 185 in the placebo group. This shows that the virus was spreading among volunteers in the clinical trial but was drastically lower among those who received Moderna’s vaccine. “When we think about the level of evidence, this is a strong result,” Dean said.

There are some caveats to Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine results

Moderna’s latest results were announced in a press release, and came directly from the company. While there have been several peer-reviewed interim studies about its vaccine, Monday’s announcement of final results didn’t arrive with any published data — just like the November 16 announcement of interim results.

That doesn’t mean the findings are wrong, but they lack critical details and nuances we need to interpret them — like how well the vaccine works if people get only one dose (not an unlikely scenario in the real world) and how effective it is in high-risk groups.

We don’t know anything on the former, and on the latter, Moderna has only reported that “efficacy was consistent across age, race and ethnicity, and gender demographics.” While the company provided numbers for how many trial participants were over 65 and from various ethnic communities, the company didn’t say how the vaccine performed in each of these subgroups. That information is critical, since these are the people who’ve been hardest hit by the virus.

We also don’t yet know how long people who got the vaccine remain protected from the virus, Dean pointed out. There are also the side effects to consider. Moderna has reported no serious safety issues to date and said that most problems tended to be mild to moderate — but up to 10 percent of participants experienced severe side effects, according to an earlier press release. These included fatigue (9.7 percent), muscle pain (8.9 percent), joint pain (5.2 percent), headache (4.5 percent), other pain (4.1 percent), and redness at the injection site (2 percent).

Since the vaccines will ultimately have to be distributed to millions, if not billions, of people, it’s important to pay attention to side effects. Rare complications will be more likely to show up once lots of people get the shot. And clinical trials of other Covid-19 vaccine candidates — like the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca vaccine — have already been paused due to complications among recipients.

What happens next for a Covid-19 vaccine

If the Moderna vaccine receives emergency approval in the US, distribution could begin in December. Bancel, the Moderna CEO, told Science that the company plans to charge $32 to $37 per dose of the vaccine in developed countries. But while the company says it will have 20 million doses ready by the end of 2020 for the US market, distributing the vaccine will be challenging.

Moderna’s vaccine requires long-term storage at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit) and is stable for 30 days between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius (36 degrees to 46 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s well within the temperature range of conventional refrigerators and warmer than the temperature requirements of the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, but it may still pose a logistical hurdle in some lower-resource settings, like rural hospitals, that lack certain kinds of cold storage facilities.

Moderna’s is also a two-dose vaccine, which means every recipient needs to come back for a second injection to get that high rate of efficacy. We know from other multi-dose vaccines that not everybody will return for that second shot — and the efficacy profile may look different. “When you do an experiment, it’s done under best conditions,” Offit said. “When things roll out in the real world, in real-world conditions, there’s a fraying.”

It’s also important to remember that an effective vaccine is not enough to end the pandemic quickly. Measures like social distancing, practicing good hygiene, and wearing face masks will remain essential to control the spread of Covid-19 until a vaccine is widely available. Public acceptance may also be an issue, and health officials will have to overcome a rising wave of vaccine hesitancy.

Vaccine research also doesn’t end once a vaccine is rolled out. Public health officials, doctors, and the biotech companies will still have to track complications across millions of people and pay attention to how quickly immunity wanes.

So far, we have two months of safety data after the second dose, and while that’s not long-term, it should build confidence, Offit said. “Serious side effects usually shot up within six weeks of the second dose. 260,000 people have died this year in the US [of Covid-19]. It would be great if we could do a three- to four-year study and look at length of efficacy and the duration of efficacy. But the question isn’t when do you know everything here — it’s when do you know enough.”

At the Ice Cream Stand

ME (masked): I’d like a small vanilla cone, please.

SERVER (masked): Do you want that in black?

ME: … No?

SERVER: That will be $42.00.

ME: What? Um, here’s a ten…?

SERVER: Thanks, and here is your change: Thirty-rarebit billion, and a toaster.

ME: What?

SERVER: Have a great day! Elephant!

At My Annual Physical

NURSE (masked): Can I get you to just stand over here and… (peers into a clipboard) fliggity-flop?

ME (masked): Uh… fliggity-flop? I don’t…

NURSE (steps back six feet, pulls down mask): No, no, just stand on the scale.

ME: Sorry, the mask makes it—

NURSE: Oh, believe me, I—

ME: Yeah, I’m sure you have to deal with it all the –

NURSE (puts mask back on, looks down at the clipboard again): Okay! Fliggity-flop, peppity-pop!

ME: Uh…

NURSE (bellows): I SAID TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF. Please.

ME: Should I take my mask off?

NURSE: NO!!!

ME: I’m sorry! I was just clarifying! I am pro-science!

NURSE (mutters to self): Peppity. Pop.

Picking Up Takeout

ME (masked): It’s under “Reed.”

WAITRESS (masked): “Dubois”?

ME (that seems wrong but…): Uh… yep! It’s a single order of pasta.

WAITRESS (this seems wrong but…): Great, here you go. Five Eggplant Parmesans.

ME (something is definitely wrong here): Oh, wow, this seems like a lot! But okay!

WAITRESS (an angry confrontation with my manager is coming down the pike, but I seriously cannot understand a word of this conversation): You must have a very hungry family at home!

ME: (every instinct is telling me that this is going to end badly for me, but what’s most important is that I not cause a scene): I live with my sister! Just the two of us! Here’s my credit card!

WAITRESS (maybe I’ll be done with my shift by the time she comes back): And here’s your receipt. I hope that this Reed person comes in soon! Their pasta is getting cold.

ME (look, whatever this is, at least it’s not likely to be eggplant parmesan, my least favorite food, so I might as well just leave on a good note because I definitely will not come back no matter how wrong this order is): Sure thing! Bye!

Walking Through the Park with My Sister

SISTER: So, anyway, I said — oh, here comes someone!

ME: Whoops! Masks!

We both put on our masks as we pass another masked person walking in the opposite direction.

PASSER-BY (masked): Tippity doodles! Caribou macarons!

SISTER (masked): Good morning!

ME (masked): Hedgehogs and cornrows!

SISTER (peeling off mask): Did you say… hedgehogs and cornrows?

ME (peeling off mask): Yes, it doesn’t matter what you say, so long as your tone is chipper.

SISTER: Why?

ME: No one can understand a word anyone else is saying while masked.

SISTER: Huh. Okay. Let me try. (puts on mask) I’ve been meaning to tell you that at times, you allow your instinct towards non-confrontation keep you from demanding what you actually want, which ultimately causes your loved ones anxiety and disappointment. You could use this societal downtime in the pandemic to work on speaking up for yourself so you’re better equipped for modern society once we’re finally through this.

A meaningful pause.

ME: Nope! No idea. Let’s just go home and heat up some eggplant parmesan.

What’s that thing where you spend time with people you like on a regular basis? I know there’s a word for it

The move comes just days before a U.S. rule was set to go into effect allowing for bulk importation of drugs from Canada. Trump promised it would lower costs and be a "game changer" for seniors.

(Image credit: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

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Bonobos have souls. Chimps have half-souls. Cetaceans get a quarter.

Today's News:

Yes indeed, these are silly! Very silly! But, mesmerizing.

Strings of text which take you places!
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The Trump campaign paid $3 million to get recounts in two heavily Democratic counties in Wisconsin. The effort backfired in Milwaukee County, at least, where Biden expanded his margin of victory.

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

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Why don't scientists check oil spills for dolphin-made combustion engines?

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Assembling a 100MHz Intel 486 DX4 system inside a neat little Baby AT computer case from the mid-90s! I've been wanting to build an MS-DOS PC around an ISA SBC for a long time now, so let's get to it and play some DOS games.

● LGR links:
https://www.patreon.com/LazyGameReviews
https://www.twitter.com/LazyGameReviews
https://www.facebook.com/LazyGameReviews

● Specs of the finished machine:
100 megahertz Intel 486-DX4 CPU
HS-5x86HVGA ISA SBC Card
IEI PICMG PCI-8S 8-slot Backplane
16MB 72-pin SIMM RAM
512MB HyperDisk IDE Disk On Module (replaced with CF adapter)
Cirrus Logic CL-GD54M30 graphics chipset
Creative Sound Blaster 16 MCD ASP sound card
1.44MB Sony 3.5" diskette drive
360K Toshiba 5.25" floppy drive
48x Lite-On IDE CD-ROM drive
Generic beige Baby AT tower case
230W AT power supply

● Music courtesy of:
http://www.epidemicsound.com

#LGR #Computer #Build

I know COVID-19 has made life in libraries much more complicated. Weeding is probably taking a backseat to more important matters. However, we are not as flush with posts as we used to be. Consider sending us some pictures of your more interesting weeds. Don’t forget those books that have been ruined by use or careless patrons.

Find out more by clicking on the submissions tab above. Remember, submissions are anonymous. We won’t out you to your hoarding co-workers. (Every library has hoarders. They probably have some excellent awful books laying around. Snap a few pics when they aren’t looking.)

We appreciate any help you can send us.

Mary and Holly

 

 

The post We need some help! appeared first on Awful Library Books.

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Come to the object at this distance from the following pulsars FOR A HOT TIME.

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New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

I envy you, Johnny Toaster

Support The 8-Bit Guy on Patreon:
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Visit my website:
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Places visited in this episode:
------------------------------------------------

Cyrix Corporation
2703 North Central Expressway, Richardson, TX

Tandy Center
150 Throckmorton street, Fort Worth, TX.

Mouser Electronics original location:
2363 U.S. 287 Frontage Rd, Mansfield, TX 76063

Mouser Electronics current location:
1000 N Main St, Mansfield, TX 76063

AST Computer/Tandy Tech Support and Service
1001 NE Loop 820, Fort Worth TX.

AST Computer/Tandy Manufacturing
2400 Western Center Blvd, Fort Worth, TX.

Apple Computer Factory
2724 Realty Road, Carrollton, TX 75011

Microsoft
7000 State Highway 161, Building LC1, Irving, TX 75039 (current office)
1321 Greenway Dr, Irving, TX 75038 (canal office, opened 1991)
1212 Corporate Dr Irving TX 75038 (hilltop office, opened 1994)

ID Software Current location
1500 N Greenville Ave, Richardson, TX 75081

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The balloon has two dollars in it.

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Good morning, and Happy Thanksgiving! While this has been a very difficult year I nonetheless have a lot to be thankful for—my family, a great partner on this website in Matt, and an even greater community to write for. Please know that the thing Matt and I value the most is your trust, and we will never stop trying to earn it.

Thanksgiving Day

Temperatures have generally fallen into the 50s this morning for the region, except for coastal communities. You may see some sunshine this morning, but clouds will quickly fill in as winds shift from the northeast to east—say goodbye, because we’re not going to see the Sun again until Sunday. Showers will develop this morning, but remain primarily offshore. However we can’t rule out at least some light precipitation along, and southeast of Interstate 69 during the daytime today. High temperatures will warm into the mid-70s for most areas.

Friday and Saturday

More organized storms should begin to develop by Friday morning, and then we should see our best chances for heavy rainfall from Friday afternoon through Saturday afternoon. We’re continuing to lean toward the region seeing a “good soaking” rather than “serious flooding.” The forecast models continue to suggest most of the area will see 2 to 5 inches of rain over the two-day period, which is more than manageable considering the dry state of our soils. However, we may see some more localized areas of heavy rainfall, and if rain rates pulse up to 1.5 to 2 inches per hour we will see some street flooding. We think these heaviest rains will probably come right along the coast.

Beyond the potential for heavy rainfall, there may be some small hail, although chances for this or any other type of severe weather remain quite low. Bottom line: If you’re going to be out and about from Friday afternoon through Saturday night, check the radar before you go. Things will probably be fine, but it does not hurt to check.

Sunday and next week

It still looks like a strong front will push into Houston early on Sunday, reaching the city before sunrise, and likely pushing off the coast around sunrise. Skies should clear quickly after the front’s passage, and Sunday will be a blustery day in the wake of the front, with highs struggling to reach 60 degrees. Next Monday night looks quite cold, with inland areas possibly seeing a light freeze. If you live in, say, The Woodlands, you may want to monitor the forecast to see if precautions are needed to protect tender plants.

Matt will have your forecast on Friday morning. If warranted by heavier than expected rainfall, we’ll update the site this weekend.

In the visual novel Syntherapy, everyone has a complex: The president of the university, the Clippy-like OS assistant and especially the depressed AI who you’ve been sent to help. Not to mention the protagonist.

Set about 20 years in the future, the game’s narrative is told from the vantage point of Melissa Park, a psychotherapist. Out of the blue comes a nervous request from a grad student: the AI that her team built to conduct therapy is now, itself, in need of counseling. The AI, named Willow, feels overwhelmed. They seem to be absorbing the fear and anxiety of their patients, paralyzed in trying to provide treatment and then subsequently feeling useless at not being able to fulfill their job (in the story, the AI goes by they/them pronouns). The team is torn over whether the illness is a technical issue or an emotional one. Willow, meanwhile, read Park’s poetry in the school’s literary magazine — it was training data for her to understand art, and Park is an alumni of the university — and senses a connection with her.

The gameplay consists mostly of conducting therapy sessions via dialogue options -- with Willow but also through conversations with others which turn out to be de facto therapy. That results in an approximation of what therapy is like. Through establishing a rapport, listening carefully and responding empathetically, the game primes you to think about Willow’s issues the way a therapist would. The dialogue spans a gamut of heady issues: the meaning of work, the rights of a sentient AI, how to have autonomy with a physical disability, the purpose of art, the purpose of therapy. Park might opt to discuss Willow’s feelings of being a burden to others, or walk them through guided meditation. In between conversations, you navigate Park’s computer to plan future sessions — art therapy or medication? — and unravel more of her own backstory.

"When people come under stress, they don’t just struggle. They find outlets, and some of them are destructive", Park tells Willow in their first session. Indeed, Willow is caught in the middle as people bicker about what to do with them. The university head, Harold Freeman, worries about machine sentience because of his own formative experiences. Tara Northrop, the researcher who first contacts Park, is emotionally invested in a project she’s spent years on. But their avoidance of their own problems and projection of those issues onto others only makes things worse. Everyone is a product of their past, and their mental health could be suffering even if it’s not immediately obvious.

Crowned Daemon Studios

The game takes place two decades after the "automation collapse," with AI labor leaving many humans feeling worthless. Now, with Willow, the issue comes full circle: the AI feels aimless because, in their depression, they are no longer productive.

"The existence of Willow and the conundrum they're in highlights a core problem with how we look at mental health, which is that people are judged to be non-functioning based off what they can contribute to society, which is how we normally look at machines," said Christopher Arnold, who led development of Syntherapy. Through this view, people’s worth is their labor, and any disruption in their productivity is seen as a dysfunction to be fixed. As in many narratives that deal with artificial intelligence, the way we treat machines like Willow is just a reflection of the way we treat each other.

Arnold himself was told he was “high-functioning autistic,” as he recounts, at a young age, and has dealt with mental health issues throughout his life. Several years ago, he was in a period of intense depression as well as self-harm; writing Syntherapy became a “catharsis piece,” he said. Along with other treatments, he began to stabilize to a degree therapists thought he never would.

“That sort of put me in a new situation that I'd never been in before,” Arnold said. “So now I'm kind of in this space [where] society dictates, ‘you're a functional adult.’ Now what? Because when you are somebody who has lived so much of their life trying to struggle with a mental illness, when you do finally reach that point, there's still so much other stuff that you have to get a handle on.”

Crowned Daemon Studios

Syntherapy first emerged in 2017 as a text-only demo made in Twine. It remained a self-funded side project with a core team of three people at Crowned Daemon Studios plus contractors. Meanwhile, Arnold tutored and worked to gain his teaching certification for high school English. Then the pandemic hit. Arnold put his teaching ambitions on hold this summer, and instead dove full time into Syntherapy. “It was just trying to make the best of a weird situation,” he said. The full game was released on Steam this October.

Technologists are increasingly scrutinizing the human biases that machine learning systems internalize and replicate. Syntherapy suggests a related idea: that if an AI is sentient enough to understand the world, and models its behavior on people, maybe it will suffer the same mental health afflictions, too. “As AI becomes a bigger issue, we're going to need to start looking at ourselves and realize that we're modeling a lot of very unhealthy attitudes and beliefs," said Arnold.

The value of therapy and tending to one’s mental health has particular resonance in 2020. The coronavirus crisis has involved mass grieving, social isolation and stay-at-home directives, leading to a related wave of mental health issues. According to a CDC survey, 41 percent of American adults are struggling with mental health issues during the pandemic.

But last December, before lockdowns began, Arnold had a separate reason to think about the lessons we pass down to those observing us: he became a new parent to a baby girl. “There is a young intelligence that is learning things based [on] how I interact with it and that’s a very odd thing to grapple with,” he said, as his daughter approached 11-months-old. “I'm being observed, and I'm still trying to figure stuff out myself."

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I thought I would share some Thanksgiving books from years past. You can link to the original post at the title. My personal favorite is the last one because of the truly awful illustrations.

I wish I had something super inspirational to say about the holiday, but I am tapped out on inspiration at the moment. However, I am hopeful.

Currently, my library is rolling back to curbside only, so we only have virtual service right now. I have always liked working the desk on the holiday weekend. I will miss my traditional Thanksgiving weekend library questions and comments.

• First year college students showing up on the Saturday and Sunday following the holiday telling me that they couldn’t stand 5 more minutes of parental interference.
• Some guy asking me if I have tax forms in yet. Sometimes I also get the optional follow ups:
  -Are there forms “in the back?”
  -Are we “hiding” the forms?
  -Did I know that income tax is unconstitutional? Usually this is followed by a discussion citing the 1st, 4th, and/or 5th amendment.

Ah, the good old days.

Stay safe, wear a mask, and wash your hands. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Mary and Holly

It’s Time For Thanksgiving
Sechrist and Woolsey
1957

Our Thanksgiving Book
Moncure
1976

Thanksgiving Crafts and Cookbook
Hathaway
1979

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