Another COVID-19 Shoe Drops

Posted on 2021-10-25 by jcs

Another shoe has dropped in the on-going drama of the origins of COVID-19. For the last 18 months, Anthony Fauci has loudly and emphatically denied that the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He went so far as to describe those saying it did as liars. He even called out Senator Rand Paul for lying about the matter.

Except, oops, it all turned out to be true. In response to insistent, repeated demands from Congress, the NIH sent a letter admitting that the NIH had, in fact, given a grant to EcoHealth Alliance to fund research at Wuhan for gain-of-function research. The NIH was quick to point out that Fauci had been completely honest with Congress because, gee, he didn’t know what the researchers were doing. Sadly for Fauci, the principals are saying that, actually, they sent a full report about what was going on two years ago. The NIH also says that this research is unrelated to COVID-19 and that they know this because the genomes of the viruses involved were completely different. Independent experts agree.

So the origin of COVID-19 is still unknown but what is no longer in doubt is that almost everyone involved has been lying and is involved in a wide ranging cover-up. According to Vanity Fair, Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist with the independent group DRASTIC that is investigating the origins of COVID-19, put it this way, “I cannot be sure that [COVID-19 originated from] a research-related accident or infection from a sampling trip. But I am 100% sure there was a massive cover-up.”

I’ve said before and it’s still true that I don’t have enough domain knowledge to make an informed judgment on the scientific evidence for the lab accident versus the zoonotic explanation for COVID-19. I do, however, have a modicum of common sense so I can recognize special pleading masquerading as science.

If the case for zoonotic origins is as strong as the partisans are insisting, why are they resisting investigating the matter? Why are they are loudly exclaiming that any alternative explanation is a conspiracy theory? Or—the sure sign that they have something to hide—why are they claiming that investigating the cause of COVID-19 is racist? Anyone with a modicum of scientific training, skepticism, or common sense knows instinctively that someone is trying to pull a fast one.

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The Scimax Channel

Posted on 2021-10-24 by jcs

As I noted previously, John Kitchin has been busy making and posting videos about Scimax, his Emacs starter kit targeted at scientists and engineers involved in programming and publishing. There are so many videos that I can’t hope to comment on each one. Nonetheless, they’re all worth watching so I’m publishing a link to the Scimax channel so that you can subscribe or add it to your RSS feed.

Currently, Kitchin is concentrating on videos about Org-ref 3, the latest version of his excellent bibliographic and cross-reference tool for Org-mode. There’s still one or two videos to come in the series but after he’s done I’ll probably write a post on the whole series.

Until then, take a look at the channel’s video listings and pick any that look interesting to you. It will, believe me, be hard to go wrong,

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Florida Digital License Coming in November

Posted on 2021-10-23 by jcs

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my quest to ditch my keys and wallet and be able to leave the house with nothing but my iPhone. All the blocking is due to automobiles. I still don’t have a car that lets me unlock it and start it with my phone and I still don’t have a digital driver’s license.

Happily, that last problem is about the change. Sort of. Florida’s version of the DMV (FLHSMV) is saying that they expect to make digital licenses available to the public in mid-November. That’s great news and moves me closer to my goal of a walletless future. I say “sort of” because, at least for now, you still have to carry your physical license. That’s because Florida law requires it but I expect that sooner or later the Florida legislature will bestir itself and agree that the digital version will suffice. After all, if it’s good enough for the TSA, it ought to be good enough for a traffic stop.

As I was writing this post, another issue came up. If look at the report from the Florida TV station at the above link, you’ll notice that they let their readers record their reaction to the story. An astounding 57% said that the idea of a digital license made them mad. What!?! Are these people crazy? Sure, some people won’t want a digital license for any of a number of reasons and that’s fine but the digital license is completely optional: if you don’t want one, you simply don’t download the app. Why on earth would these people be mad that those who want a digital license can get one?

Just add it to the ever-growing list of things I don’t understand. In the mean time, the future is coming to Florida driver’s licenses.

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Red Meat Friday: Emacs Appearance

Posted on 2021-10-22 by jcs

WebDev Tory makes a point that many long time Emacs users can relate to:

Many of us curmudgeonly misanthropes have little patience for the continual bleating about Emacs’ lack of bling. We subscribe to Vivek Haldar’s philosophy of why should you ever care how your editor looks, unless you’re trying to win a screenshot competition? We don’t care about menus, we don’t care about mice, we don’t care about buttons, we don’t care about bling; we care about power.

Power. That’s what Emacs gives us and really it’s all that matters. If you want bling—to channel DMR—you know where to find it. Head on over to VS Studio or whatever the latest hotness is. But if you want power, Emacs is the place to be.

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The First Remote Worker

Posted on 2021-10-21 by jcs

In response to my post A Broken Way of Working, Perry Metzger left a comment pointing me at a podcast about the first remote developer. That would be Paul Lutus, who, among other things, wrote Apple Writer for the Apple II. That doesn’t sound too exciting until you hear the whole story.

For various reasons, which are described in the podcast, Lutus was living in a cabin in the Oregon woods. Before he got the Apple II in 1976, he didn’t even have electricity—he had to run what amounted to a 1,200 foot extension cord to a construction box that he talked the utility company into installing.

Every once in a while he would travel to Apple. Later, after he made some money from Apple Writer, he had an airplane and would fly to California for the meetings but he still rode his bicycle to and from the airport at both ends. Still, he did all his work in his cabin.

Among the vignettes that Lutus recounts, his backup system was to bury floppy disks of his work in an ammo can at his cabin. He started doing that after a lightning strike reset his computer while he was working. There’s a bunch of other amusing stories as well.

You can either listen to the podcast or read the transcript. The podcast is 41 minutes, 41 seconds so plan accordingly if you plan to listen.

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How To Avoid Search Warrants

Posted on 2021-10-20 by jcs

Last week, DuckDuckGo tweeted that they have had zero search warrants since their founding in 2008. That’s because they don’t log their users’ searches so there’s no useful information for law enforcement to demand access to. Contrast that to Google who last year had 11,554 geofence warrants. To channel the meme, if you collect it, they will come. What DDG has shown is that if you don’t collect it, they will leave you and your users alone.

I was disappointed with the tweet’s comments. They mostly fell into the “Yeah but the XYZ search engine is better” or the “Yeah but the guvment will issue secret warrants forcing them record queries and not reveal it” categories.

I’m not sure that the second complaint is reasonable in the U.S. There have been such warrants targeted at specific individuals but a general warrant targeting everyone would doubtless run into fourth amendment issues.

As far as which search engine is best, that’s a war I don’t want to enlist in. Irreal commenters I trust have recommended Brave and I do use it but my go to search engine is still DDG and I find it adequate for most uses. Brave, I find, does have slightly more comprehensive results so I fall back to it if I need to bear down. Truth to tell, I suspect that the search engine with the best results—once you filter out all the nonsense—is Google but then your search data is being logged and you could be caught up—perfectly innocently—in some law enforcement dragnet having nothing to do with you.

I think we should all take a moment and celebrate DDG—and yes, the others—for keeping our data so safe that law enforcement doesn’t bother trying to get it out of them.

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RSS for the Researcher

Posted on 2021-10-19 by jcs

At the beginning of his Elfeed video, John Kitchen mentioned a paper by James Fraser on RSS for the researcher. This is notable for two reasons. First, there’s the paper itself, of course, but there’s also the very nice way Kitchin has of representing URLs. He lists the URL in text but also provides a QR Code for it. My first reaction was that it was sort of gimmicky but the URL to Fraser’s paper was long and was split over two lines so I paused the video and scanned the QR code with ScanLife on my iPhone. That captured the URL and when I shared it with my laptop, the paper was automatically opened in my browser. That’s really easy and convenient. I wish others would consider doing that, at least for complicated or long URLs.

Although it was written in 2013, the paper is still interesting and useful today. A significant part of a researcher’s job is keeping up with the literature. There are all sorts of aggregators specialized for a particular discipline but RSS is a general solution that can aggregate almost any periodic content provider such as journals and blogs.

The paper goes over the advantages of RSS, which most Irreal readers are familiar with but Fraser also details his workflow and how he keeps up with the literature virtually for free by reading his RSS feed in short downtimes or even when he is walking. If you’re a researcher trying to keep up, RSS is something you should take a look at. You should also read the paper if you’re an RSS n00b.

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Emacs as a Tool for Scientists

Posted on 2021-10-18 by jcs

Recently, John Kitchin tweeted a pointer to the draft of a paper by
Timonthy Johnson that makes the case for Emacs as the tool for scientists to organize and report their research. The paper, Emacs as a Tool for Modern Science, contrasts the “normal” way or organizing and conducting research to using Emacs for the same job.

Whereas the normal procedure involves the use of multiple pieces of software, the Emacs method uses only a single program: Emacs. It’s easy to take the attitude of ‘Meh, so what?’ but with Emacs, there is only one set of keystrokes to learn and there are no context switches as you move between different phases of a research project.

Johnson also stresses the importance of persistence. When you use proprietary software, you are at the mercy of the vendor. They may go out of business, discontinue the product, or make non-backward compatible changes. With open source software, the user can always recover—although perhaps not easily—because the source is available. More importantly, with Emacs, everything is in plain text and readable with any editor.

Finally, there is Org-mode. With Org, data and the calculations upon it can be embedded in the manuscript. That’s a huge win for reproducible research and ensures that the results in the paper also reflect the latest version of the data and the calculations on it. It’s also an easy way of generating LaTeX for submission to journals.

All of these benefits are well-known to developers who use Emacs but many scientists are focused on their field of research and don’t consider their tools. Mostly they use whatever tools they learned in grad school regardless of the tools’ shortcomings. If you follow Emacs, you know there are exceptions like Kitchin and Eric Fraga—to name the first two to come to mind—who have embraced the Emacs way in their research. Indeed, Kitchin has a similar paper in ACS Catalysis that makes analogous points.

I’ve written before about the use of Emacs in the humanities. Most of the same points apply. Really, if you’re wrangling text or doing research, you should consider Emacs.

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A Broken Way of Working

Posted on 2021-10-17 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the future of work and my fascination with what used to be called digital nomads. The idea of remote work has become so common that the term “digital nomad” no longer makes sense and there are probably people who wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you used it.

Once the concern of nerds and the publications they read, the idea of remote work has become mainstream. So mainstream that even The New Yorker is writing about it. A recent article considers the proposition that going to the office is a broken way of working. The pandemic has made clear that virtually any knowledge worker can work remotely just as effectively as if they were in the office.

The article is partially a conversation with Chris Herd who started a financial-tech company in northern Scotland. He realized immediately that his location made finding local talent hard or impossible so rather than establish an office, he staffed the company with remote workers. Herd was so impressed with the results of his remote work force that he started a second company, Firstbase, a company that provides remote-work infrastructure.

Herd says that office work and its surrounding culture is a derivative of factory work where people had to come together to work on manufacturing machines and be closely supervised by management. Oddly, Herd does not believe in remote-only work. He feels that face-to-face contact is still important and says that teams should meet in person periodically—perhaps once a month. My first thought was that it would be prohibitively expensive to fly everyone to a central location for these monthly meetings but Herd notes that it would be cheaper than maintaining expensive office space for those employees.

Herd is a crusader for remote work and whether due to him or not, the message is getting out. Amazon just announced that corporate and technical workers can work from home indefinitely, backing off from their previous announcement that workers would have to return to the office at least 3 days a week. Remote work is a powerful idea that, apparently, won’t be denied.

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Scimax Notebook

Posted on 2021-10-16 by jcs

As I’ve said before, John Kitchin is producing so many videos that it’s hard to keep up. One of his recent videos is about Scimax Notebook, his implementation of digital notebooks based on Projectile, Bozhidar Batsov’s project interaction package. In my Zamansky-79: Project.el post, I mentioned that I’ve never felt the need for a package like Projectile but Kitchin reimagined it as an engine for digital notebooks.

The idea is pretty simple: every notebook is a project in the Projectile sense, and every Projectile project can be thought of and acted on like a notebook. The Scimax Notebook library is simply a series of functions that operate and search the project’s file. All of that is, of course, leveraged on Projectile.

The library and Kitchin’s explanation of it is interesting. It’s clear that the library grew organically with functions being added as there was a need for them. Kitchin says that he rarely uses some of them indicating a failed experiment. In other words, the library grew according to his needs and will doubtless continue to evolve.

The source code, as a literate programming file, is available here. The video provides a quick exegesis of many of the functions and provides an idea of what’s going on. The video itself is just over 37 and a half minutes so you’ll definitely have to schedule some time. If, like me, the idea of an Emacs-based notebook infrastructure appeals to you, be sure to spend the time to watch his video. The source code, being a literate file, should be easy to adapt for your own purposes and needs.

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