Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/20: The Great Unmasking. The CDC has lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated people. In one fell swoop, it is suddenly fine for anyone fully vaccinated to go maskless anywhere, without social distancing, at any time, so long as regulations and rules permit it. This retains the madness of ignoring partial vaccination entirely, and the madness of making children as young as two (!) wear masks around groups of fully vaccinated adults, but it is certainly a huge step towards sanity. There was also much confusion and opposition. Very Serious People expressed panic and horror. Others expressed reasonable concern that this was premature. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 12/16: On Your Marks. The main action continues to be at the Omicron Variant post. (more)

(Legal) requirement to wear a filter mask in certain environments, esp during COVID-19 pandemic.

How tech companies should be thinking about apprenticeships. The rise of tech apprenticeships in the U.S...The Biden administration recently launched an initiative to expand the Registered Apprenticeship Program with the Apprenticeship Building America grant program. The grant will make $113 million in funding available to approved programs and is aimed at diversifying and modernizing the U.S.'s apprenticeship programs. (more)

Max Read: Four questions about the "New Right". There's been a spate of recent articles about an emerging (or evolving) alliance between tech billionaires, right-wing politicians, Substackers, podcasters, and New York art kids...variously known as “dissidents,” “neo-reactionaries,” “post-leftists,” or the “heterodox” fringe—though they’re all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America’s New Right. (more)

Recovering from Schizophrenia Without Medication | Mad in America. In February 2012, University of Illinois College of Medicine researcher Martin Harrow published, “Do All Schizophrenia Patients Need Antipsychotic Treatment Continuously Throughout their Lifetime? A 20-Year Longitudinal Study,” funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the United States Public Health Service. (more)

Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill. In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADD), anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not. (more)

Ryan Craig: Is It An Apprenticeship? With millions of unfilled good tech and tech-oriented jobs inaccessible due to both skill and experience gaps, there’s only one tool in the education/training/workforce arsenal with sufficient force to bring labor supply and demand back into balance. It’s not a college degree or bootcamp or training program. And it’s definitely not an unpaid internship. The only model that solves for skills and experience in a single, transfer-less, transition-less bound is apprenticeship. (more)

Creator of FireFly. (more)

CB-Insights has published a metaverse market map. (more)

by Rudy Rucker, The LifeBox, the Sea Shell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/ ISBN:1560257229 (more)

Karl Edward Weick (born October 31, 1936) is an American organizational theorist who introduced the concepts of "loose coupling" (loosely coupled), "mindfulness", and "sensemaking" into organizational studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_E._Weick

Jerry Michalski gave a talk at the Push2005 conference profiling "rogues" who assume that Amateurs can be trusted to do things, and create tools/structures to help them do that: Christopher Alexander, Alice Miller, John Taylor Gatto, Lars Von Trier, George Fox (Quakers), Richard Stallman, David Bohm, Russell Ackoff... (more)

circuits, etc. (more)

a soft model for reality - beware Model Theism (more)

Peter Lindberg on finding/picking a Metaphor for an Extreme Programming application. He talks about the RssAggregator concept, and echoes some Universal Inbox ideas... (more)

John Cutler: TBM 17/52: The Problem With Problems. People often distinguish between problem solving and problem definition. (more)

agriculture/food writer

The original SimCity has been donated to the OLPC project. This was initiated by Don Hopkins, the original coder (correction: he ported the original Maxis code to UNIX). He is integrating it into the Sugar UI system and will make it mod-able by Python. (more)

book on Raising Kids ISBN:0470471948 by Lenore Skenazy http://www.freerangekids.com/ (more)