Jerry Stratton's Blog, page 34

Power Play 2020

Frederik Pohl shows why science fiction authors aren’t any better at being futurists than anyone else. Hubris is a powerful drug.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal linked on Editorials

“For the first, time ever, they refused to run his column. So he ran it unedited on his own blog.

“I wasn’t advising them—they tend not to ask me for my opinion—but I would have advised against such a blackout. There’s a longstanding Internet term called ‘the Streisand effect,’ going back to when Barbara Streisand demanded that people stop sharing pictures of her beach house. Unsurprisingly, the result was a massive increase in the number of people posting pictures of her beach house. The Big Tech Blackout produced the same result…

“CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted: ’Congrats to Twitter on its Streisand Effect award!!!’ Big Tech shot itself in the foot, and it didn’t stop the signal.”

COVID Lessons: How can we respond to a disease before it spreads?

How can we make ourselves less vulnerable to sudden epidemics, before they become epidemics, and without causing epidemic levels of deaths?

Cream of Jack-o-Lantern soup

Use the body parts of your hallowe’en pumpkin to make a tasty, if disconcerting, pumpkin soup.

COVID Lessons: Journalistic Delusions and the Madness of Politicians

COVID-19 was real. The crisis surrounding it was entirely manufactured. Everything we did took a manageable disease and turned it into a killer. And the very worst was believing a media we knew was lying.

The Post Office is not designed for universal mail-in ballots

Universal mail-in ballots introduce serious problems that the United States Postal Service is not designed to handle. To be sure that all votes are counted, we should continue accepting ballots for 100 years.

Safari 14 disables Automator Quick Actions in text fields

As of the September 17 release of Safari 14 for macOS Catalina, Automator can no longer replace text in text fields, such as in forums and blog comments. Here are some workarounds.

COVID Lessons: Don’t trust socialists

Our response made the virus worse. We trusted self-styled experts, failed models, socialists, and the media over what we could see with our own eyes.

Check42 for verifying Astounding Scripts

If you’ve been wanting to type scripts in from the book but were worried about typos, this script will help you find errors in any scripts you’ve typed in from 42 Astounding Scripts.

Catalina vs. Mojave for Scripters

More detail about the issues I ran into updating the scripts from 42 Astounding Scripts for Catalina.