Air. Can’t go more than a minute or two without it, and there’s enough to share!

How the fuck is this still a tight race? I just for the life of me cannot understand (I mean, I can, but... I just can't).

THE COMMON COLD

(well... just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)

I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

Shocked that Florida made it to double digits.

(sent, with love, from Florida)

When did we get away from saying “X - formerly known as Twitter” ? I liked seeing that gentle nudge in every headline.

The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.

Every time I read a story about some billionaire getting angry about their private jets being tracked I recall a part of the Kim Stanley Robinson novel Ministry for the Future, a (very) near-future tale about how a few global climate catastrophes wreak such havoc that regular people start taking extreme measures -- for example randomly shooting down passenger aircraft for months, causing the collapse of the air travel industry. I have to imagine that the 1%ers are thinking about that too now.

"Texas needs to be less dependent on the federal government, not more. These politicians want to mismanage our electric grid just like they mismanage our border," the statement said.

I don't think it's objectively possible to be more mismanaged than the current Texan electrical grid.

I know this isn't the most popular opinion, but I love self-checkout systems when they're available and used correctly. My local supermarket closed 2 10-item-or-less lanes and put 6 self-checkouts in the same space. I probably make 2 trips/week to the store for fewer than 10 items, and being able to check myself out has been a huge time saver. There are still another 8 lanes with cashiers for larger shopping trips. If the supermarket can avoid the race to the bottom thinking of "well, we replaced 2 lanes, maybe we can also replace the other 8), it'll be a nice compromise.

Now contrast that with my local Home Depot, which typically has 1-2 cashiers MAX at any given time. They have turned the checkout process into a tedious pain in the ass, and I've more or less stopped shopping there as a result.

Having a hard time determining whether this is sarcasm or not. Then I see the phrase "JavaScript Engineer" and become doubly confused.

Because of course Bootgate is the thing that will bring the DeSantis campaign down -- not all of that fascism or corruption stuff.