The News Is Still Bad\Good
And sometimes granular and always fascinating
Links are at the end, in the links corral.
So long, that Covid
George Monbiot has a grievance in The Guardian:1
The importance of ventilation and filtration is not lost on our lords and masters. Parliament now has a sophisticated air filter system, incorporating electrostatic precipitators. According to the contractor that fitted them, they ensure airborne viruses and bacteria are “kept to an absolute minimum within the space”. The same goes for the government departments where ministers work. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this month, there were filtration systems in every room, in some cases protecting politicians who have denied them to their own people. It’s almost as if they believe their lives are more important than ours.
The clean air standards rich and powerful people demand for themselves should be universal, rolled out to all schools and other public buildings. Instead, while private schools have been able to invest in ventilation and filtration, state schools, many of which are close to bankruptcy, rely on government disbursements that are strictly rationed by a series of nonsensical conditions. It’s another classic false economy.
The false economy Monbiot refers to is the burgeoning economic cost of long Covid, which can be debilitating enough to snatch people out of their jobs while at the same time consuming medical resources on top of those required to treat the initial infections. By way of example, yr. unemployed editor spent 12 weeks in physical therapy after treatments including a very expensive infusion of monoclonal antibodies.
To this point, governments and private players think the cost of protecting everybody outweighs the cost of not, and of course the public resistance to some basic and only marginally invasive preventive measures is enough to scare off politicians from acting on what is becoming a profound social issue.
The New York Times has a story about a study examining the impact of long Covid in New York.2
The study, published Tuesday by New York’s largest workers’ compensation insurer, found that during the first two years of the pandemic, about 71 percent of people the fund classified as experiencing long Covid either required continuing medical treatment or were unable to work for six months or more. More than a year after contracting the coronavirus, 18 percent of long Covid patients had still not returned to work, more than three-fourths of them younger than 60, the analysis found.
“Long Covid has harmed the work force,” said the report, by the New York State Insurance Fund, a state agency financed by employer-paid premiums. The findings, it added, “highlight long Covid as an underappreciated yet important reason for the many unfilled jobs and declining labor participation rate in the economy, and they presage a possible reduction in productivity as employers feel the strains of an increasingly sick work force.”
Cases of long Covid will inevitably increase so long as protecting people against Covid is relegated to the private sphere—which, again is in part a class issue and in part a political one. The federal government could fund ventilation and filtration systems in public schools, as some private schools do. They could fund the same in workplaces which can’t afford the cost, and mandate it for companies which can.
But that won’t happen so long as the burden of preventing infections falls on the individual, and that situation is likely to hold forever or until it’s simply unaffordable to avoid taking action, whichever comes first. Not identical to our climate change mitigation approach, but quite similar.
Facial recognition in a non-dystopian cause
Facial recognition is a deeply flawed technology, especially in the hands of police, who not uncommonly arrest the wrong person — usually people of color — based on bad AI identifications.3456
Yr. editor was buoyed, then, by a story in which dedicated sleuths solved a 500-year-old case of mistaken identity using AI facial recognition. Much to the joy of the owners, a painting that had gone variously without attribution or with misattribution was identified as a Raphael because the models for a Madonna and child were the same, according to the program, as in an authenticated Raphael.
Based on the close similarities of the face of the Madonna in the previously unattributed de Brécy Tondo and Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, a research team from the University of Nottingham and University of Bradford, both in the U.K., has determined that there is a 97 percent chance that the mysterious round painting, studied by scholars and art historians for decades, is the work of the famed Old Master, reports the BBC.
. . .
The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister at the Dresden State Art Museums, which owns the Sistine Madonna—actually best known for its two putti, or baby angels, at the bottom of the canvas—had previously determined that the lookalike de Brécy Tondo was a much later copy of the original work, perhaps from the Victorian era.
The longtime owner of the piece, who insisted all along it was a Raphael, is unfortunately deceased and presumably unable to enjoy his vindication.
Check out the Artnet site if you’re unable to get a good look at the angel toddlers in the painting above; they are indeed the most fascinating element of it.7
Music that soothed the somewhat less than savage breast
Polyawkward, “Polyawkward (EP),”8 Low Hummer, “Modern Tricks for Living,”9 The Bug Club, "Pure Particles."10
That’s it, Comrades (except not quite)
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Take care, be well.
The politicization of science has awful repercussions. Shades of the Scopes "monkey trial".
It's difficult to get public money for Covid protection measures or health measures generally when a significant portion of the population and political powers reject the legitimacy and effectiveness of such measures.