Tootfinder

new book about medicine history, "droplets" theory etc
"Science writer Carl Zimmer’s latest book is a brilliant history of medicine that takes us from Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of the 19th century to present day. Along the way, it offers an anthropological study of medical culture — a culture capable of ignoring science when it wants to. ...
"If COVID-19 spread in droplets, then it was worthwhile to keep people two metres apart, to put up plexiglas barriers around checkout stands, and make supermarket aisles one-way. Sanitizing countertops could break the chain of infection.
"But if COVID-19 was airborne, all those measures were pointless."
Bit of an exaggeration in that part of the article. The 2m distance does put you outside the densest clouds of exhaled breath, and sanitising countertops helps against other diseases. But yeah. A lot of effort wrongly expended due to the prevailing myth.
#CovidIsAirborne #books #history

Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined
Hamidou Tembine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13990 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13990

Machine Mirages: Defining the Undefined
As multimodal machine intelligence systems started achieving average animal-level and average human-level fluency in many measurable tasks in processing images, language, and sound, they began to exhibit a new class of cognitive aberrations: machine mirages. These include delusion, illusion, confabulation, hallucination, misattribution error, semantic drift, semantic compression, exaggeration, causal inference failure, uncanny valley of perception, bluffing-patter-bullshitting, cognitive stereo…

In addition to poking fun at media showing video and images from the same few street corners of LA where there is unrest, and hinting that the whole city is on fire and rioting is everywhere, thus providing a cause for Trump's heavy-handed responses, we should also poke fun at the leftist loonies who call it a "revolution". That is exactly the same exaggeration as what the right-wing loonies do.
This does not mean that I would be on Trump's side, obviously.

We can say this at least:
Musk is one of the most malignant people ever to hold a position of influence in American politics.
His actions, without exaggeration, have devastated the health and security of American society
and directly caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people all over the world, with millions more to follow given the course that he has set.
Musk’s DOGE, which is more or less a conspiracy to destroy constitutional government in this country, has …

Go, Elon, and Never Darken Our Doors Again
The worst ultra-billionaire on Earth says he’s leaving government. Let’s hope he actually does it.