Interesting stuff that crossed my feed lately:

• We know more about the topography of the Moon and Mars than we do about our own planet, because so much of Earth’s surface is covered by water. Saildrone is deploying uncrewed, autonomous surface ships to map the ocean floor.
• Vaccine rollout is accelerating, but I still don’t know where or when I’ll get mine. No clear plan has been articulated here in California. That’s common across the country. It’s nice to see the state of New Jersey publishing so much data about its activity to date. …

We’re six days from the inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris. The National Guard has assembled in Washington, DC to protect the legislature and to safeguard the top officials in the nation during the inauguration.

Yesterday, the House voted to impeach President Trump for the second time, awarding him half of all impeachments in US history. That was on the back of a takeover of the US Capitol by his followers, aimed at stopping the Constitutional process to certify the legitimate election results for Biden and Harris. …

Interesting stuff that has crossed my feed lately:

• Eli Dourado’s written an encyclopedic survey of reasons for techno-optimism over the next decade: Health, energy, transport, space, just a little bit on IT. You’ve been looking for reasons to be cheerful. Eli’s got you.
• Lots of well-deserved congratulations aimed at Stacey Abrams in Georgia after the November and January elections. But what did she do, and what can we learn?
• For my nerds: Redmonk measures programming language popularity by, more or less, the amount of work programmers do in different languages. TIOBE measures language popularity by counting how many programmers in the world know different languages. Different sources and different methodologies yield, unsurprisingly, different results. …

The turmoil of President Trump’s final days in office are sucking up almost all the front page real estate, Twitter chatter capacity and raw attention that Americans have, right now. It is hard to turn away from a train wreck.

But we need to do that, because in our distraction, we are losing critical time in battling the coronavirus pandemic.

In early December, a mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was discovered for the first time in the UK. Mutation is common in viruses, but no mutant strain before this one caused much alarm among epidemiologists. This time, though, they’re worried. …

Interesting stuff that has crossed my feed lately:

• John Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock won run-off elections for US Senate seats in Georgia. President Trump incited his supporters to storm the Capitol building in Washington, DC, briefly interrupting Congress’ count of the 2020 electoral votes. Barack Obama spoke out, as did Mitch McConnell. On returning to the chamber and resuming the count, Vice President Pence presided over the certification of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’ victory.
• As the COVID vaccines roll out globally, Israel has become an outlier to imitate. While other countries, including the US, struggle with logistics, Israel is vaccinating about 1.4% of its population every day. Our World in Data has continually updated charts for vaccine delivery, so the numbers will change depending on when you click the link — but I hope the rest of the world learns from Israel’s success. …

The avalanch of the final two weeks of the Trump Presidency will cause more damage. Events will no doubt affect my thinking.

But in the immediate aftermath of the President’s call to his supporters, their riot and seizure of the Capitol building, and their interruption of the sacred task of a democracy — counting the vote — I feel compelled to put my thoughts down.

I’m alarmed at the success of conspiracy theories. Those beliefs are the raw fuel on which all of the madness of Trumpism runs. If people are capable of believing in alien overlords, lizard people, satanic cults of pedophiles, it absolutely stands to reason that they could believe Hugo Chavez stole the Presidential election, but didn’t touch any Congressional races, from beyond the grave. …

I’m kind of a map nerd — I love projections and renderings and different wavelengths and physical features and geopolitical boundaries and buildings and roads and oh my goodness! Just for example, after a trans-UK bicycle tour a few years ago, I got obsessed with the total linear measure of dry stone walls in the country, because they were all over the place on the bike ride. Took me a while, but it turns out that the Dry Stone Walling Association thinks that 193,000 kilometers is about right.

Anyway:

The person who tweets at @cartocalypse has posted an amazing set of Earth images, collected from a variety of satellites. He (I am pretty sure it is a “he,” as the web site uses the first name “Hannes”) took daily images from all of 2020, and combined them to create a single picture of the average Earth. …

Interesting stuff that crossed my radar lately:

• Kara Swisher’s Predictions for 2021 are fun.
• “The boat is still alive, which means it fruits — grows mushrooms — each time they take it out for a paddle.” Nebraska college student grows a mushroom canoe.
• Zeynep Tufekci has been good on the pandemic from the beginning. She’s in The Atlantic this week with an explanation of what the new mutation of the coronavirus means. Key insight: change in transmissibility has exponential effect, while change in lethality has linear effect. …