Inside the Little Plastic Castle

MyGuy and I both showed negative on our COVID antigen tests at lunch. Forty-four hours and counting!

( so far a mild case, boring details inside )

ETA: I may be negative but my brain is still mushy and correcting for future self -- this all started on Monday, not Saturday

My public library has re-opened. Not all the way: no community rooms (good for book groups or vidding workshops or tutoring); hold pickup area is split into two rooms to ensure physical distance; more thoughtful precautions explained on their site.

They’ve been accumulating books and magazines the whole time. The shelves are jammed full — no room for the themed spinners, or featuring a book face out. Since people couldn’t browse for a more than a year, the plastic covers are shiny.

And I could browse and wow it’s so wonderful to let my eyes feast and flitter from this title to that author to this typeface.

Half-smoked cigarette butts have been replaced by discarded single-use masks.

Because I’m going to continue wearing a KN95 mask for the foreseeable future — my asthma and allergies have been much better this year — I witness many awkward negotiations on the sidewalk, taking me back to the earliest days of the pandemic, before masking was ubiquitous.

What changes do you notice?

Vox Media posted this excellent explainer on ‌Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines, in particular why the one-dose J&J vaccine’s "66% efficacy" is a statistic, not a problem.

tl;dr: efficacy rates are only comparable when studies occur on the same population at the same time. The studies for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines finished before the virus spiked. The people in the placebo arm of the J&J vaccine study were much more likely to come in contact with COVID because there was more COVID in the world. All vaccines do an excellent job of minimizing hospitalization and death.

direct link

( YouTube with captions and lots of pretty, undescribed diagrams )

Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, noticed how quickly Zoom fatigue arose as video conferencing became commonplace during the pandemic. His open-access article explores why: Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue from Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030

Bailenson notes four aspects of the Zoom interface that create "nonverbal overload"

• Excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze
• Cognitive load
• Increased self-evaluation from staring at video of oneself
• Constraints on physical mobility

While based on tested theory, Bailenson admits no Zoom-specific research has yet tested these barriers; he wants the article "to point out these design flaws to isolate research areas for social scientists and to suggest design improvements for technologists." He uses Zoom as a generic, focusing on its particular affordances since its 30-fold growth between December 2019 and May 2020.

18-minute BBC podcast with author Jeremy Bailenson
https://pod.link/261786876/episode/0c576ae6b94be62a85abd2a6bbeff520

My first MetaFilter post after a decade on site.

Thanks to sara, I watched some excellent Baroque chamber music. The performers, as is customary in the U.S., wore formal clothing: a black suit with white shirt and black tie; a black floor-length dress. All performers wore matte black face masks. Which raises a vital question -- how should we coordinate our mask colors with the rest of our outfits?

( two questions )

Another fascinating essay from nursingclio_feed explores how anti-Asian racism builds on stigma, as per Goffman.

But targeting wet markets as the source of future pandemics obscures the complexity of changing human-wildlife relationships in the 21st century and their role in disease emergence. Anthropogenic changes to the environment including industrial and residential development, habitat disruption and destruction, and agricultural practices introduce new opportunities for pathogens to jump from one species into another. Wet markets that feature many different wildlife in the same space provide one opportunity for such species jumps to occur, but so do logging, mining, road construction, and rapid urban growth. Zoonotic diseases may emerge from interactions between fruit bats and pig farms in Malaysia, as in the case of the Nipah virus, or alongside residential development in the formerly forested suburbs of Connecticut, like Lyme disease. Exclusively focusing on wet markets and coronavirus ignores the history and reality of disease ecology.

https://nursingclio.org/2020/06/02/absolutely-disgusting-wet-markets-stigma-theory-and-xenophobia

It began 51 years ago with a riot. I first attended in 1974, without a police presence. I vividly remember hearing Holly Near and Jeff Langley performing from the back of a truck.

It’s continued in various forms—officially sponsored and not; city-sanctioned and not; police dressed in blazers and national guard in riot gear. Today the police said, "nope." Their notice was wry and very ahistorical:

This Saturday was to be the spring gathering largely known as the Mifflin Street Block Party.

“While MPD has historically taken a fairly tolerant view of the Mifflin Street Block Party, this year is different,” said Chief Vic Wahl, adding, “Any parties or gatherings occurring are in violation of the Governor's ‘Safer at Home’ order. Please do what's best for public health and stay home.”

Is there a standing unofficial event in your part of the world?

Given my earlier link to the Open Library’s announcement they were lifting limits on how many people can borrow from their extensive scanned book collection "for the duration", I was surprised and enlightened to read about opposition from authors.

( 500 words of links & summaries )

ETA 31 Mar 2020

Ah! I found meaningful discussion and links about this on Metafilter:
https://www.metafilter.com/186248/The-Internet-Archives-National-Emergency-Library

Two informative Twitter threads for those who dare to enter the doomscroll

From rahaeli (aka denise)

This is a specific test case being put to the public in order to challenge the doctrine of first sale as applied to ebooks, and it's in direct response to the exorbitant prices and significant restrictions publishers place on libraries.

thread start https://mobile.twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1244257620548038656?s=20

From AlexandraErin

...okay, and I'm getting that a lot of people don't like the idea of copyrights period. Information Wants To Be Free and all that. But your revolution needs an order of operations. If you kill the copyright first, while we're all still toiling under capitalism, you hurt workers.

Thread start https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1244309400690491393?s=20

Kitty O’Meara Captures the Possibility in the Time of Pandemic

( 130 words in total )

That’s from sonia’s recent links post full of non-terrifying COVID-related thoughts and photos: https://sonia.dreamwidth.org/247063.html

Robin Sloan on Making Art Amidst Chaos

I often read the monthly email newsletter from Robin Sloan, a West Coast creative of a type made familiar to me by the Whole Earth Catalog/Co-Evolution Quarterly.

This week, I found his exhortation to keep safe and make art reassuring:

( 267 words )

Payal Arora explores what internet access will mean for the folks who don’t have it now. Relevant because internet access may very well prevent revolutions from happening during this unstable time.

The biggest myths about the next billion internet users

( 234 words )