Cross-reading #1

Introduction

This series is heavily inspired by my friend Bastian Widmer and his series Angelesen which is absolutely worth a look.

Of course it also helps me to find an article again, which is probably the main reason to start my own series.

The Articles

The Virus Will Win (theatlantic.com)

… because of the failures of Trump and Chauvin, of the CDC and the WHO, of public-health experts and Fox News hosts, we are, instead, likely to give up—and tolerate that hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will die needless deaths.

America is Giving Up on Coronavirus — and the Consequences Will be Devastating (eand.co)

Living in a failed state — like America — has a very real price. Americans don’t seem to get it. A price like being ten times more likely to die of things that aren’t even threats anymore elsewhere. Whether guns — or pandemics.

Spies Can Eavesdrop by Watching a Light Bulb’s Vibrations (wired.com)

… it allows anyone with a laptop and less than a thousand dollars of equipment—just a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor—to listen in on any sounds in a room that’s hundreds of feet away in real-time, simply by observing the minuscule vibrations those sounds create on the glass surface of a light bulb inside.¹

How CERN Made High Quality Electronics In The 1970s (hackday.com)

Daniel Valuch works on the Linear Accelerator 3, which has had an extended downtime after many decades of continuous operation, for major upgrades and overhauls. Part of the upgrade involves the removal of electronic assemblies dating back as far as the 1970s, and he’s shared his fascination with them as he trawls through dusty filing cabinets in the lab basement.

Why Are There So Many Humans? (sapiens.org)

Saving women time and energy is central to increasing the population. And humans have developed numerous technological and social ways of accomplishing this.

Homemade pedalboard (0ut3r.space)

I am an amateur and I put together everything according to my preferences and many hours spent listening and watching. Maybe I made a mistake somewhere or someone may have comments about this configuration, but it works for me and I’m happy.²

How the Nintendo Switch prevents downgrades by irreparably blowing its own fuses (blog.jonlu.ca)

The boot loader verifies a specific fuse, FUSE_RESERVED_ODM7, to prevent downgrading. Each software version expects a different number of fuses to be blown — if more than is expected, it fails to boot, and if less, it’ll blow those fuses and then proceed to boot. Blowing a fuse is irreversible— once it’s been set it can never be undone.

There’s a reason we procrastinate and it’s not laziness (cbc.ca)

Here’s the magic — the next time you face a task that your whole body is screaming, “I don’t want to, I don’t feel like it,” ask yourself: What’s the next action I’d need to take to make some progress? ³