š reading time: 5m 28s.
hi :) happy belated halloween š». i hope youāre keeping well, as always.
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š earworm: listen to biig piig.
š word of the week:
ā
eldritch
ā.
weird and sinister or ghostly.
despite the eldritch horrors of toniās princess cake, her competitorsā renditions were, somehow, even more atrocious.
- the new yorker, june 1, 2018
š§ brain candy:
š³š¬ #endsars is the biggest and longest-running series of national protests in a generation against sars (a notorious āspecialā police unit). read how a youth-led digital movement is driving the protests minute by minute.
šØš³ have you heard of ādark tourismā? meet the tourists booking trips to wuhan, the former epicentre of the covid-19 pandemic, six months after its lockdown ended.
šŗ a study released thursday by the election integrity partnership, a consortium of misinformation researchers, found that just 20 pro-trump twitter accounts (including the presidentās own @realdonaldtrump) were the original source of one-fifth of retweets pushing misleading narratives about voting.
š· if you begrudgingly wear a mask but donāt really think they work, take a look at this animation that shows magnified view of particles filtering through the fibres of a cotton mask. itās amazing how effective it can be.
āļø the decline in air traffic during the coronavirus pandemic has sharply reduced the amount of data routinely collected by commercial airliners which has directly affected the quality of weather forecasting models.
š¦ in numbers that donāt quite make sense to me this week, amazon hired 250,000 permanent full-time and part-time employees between june and september alone. it added a further 100,000 workers in october.
š¤Ŗ mildly humorous:
š” longer reads:
š§» wastewater watchdog.
when britney carson drove into a rural neighborhood in northern kentucky in july, she had to double check her maps to make sure she had the right place. a wastewater pretreatment specialist, carson was looking for a manhole that could give her access to the intricate sewage pipes below, but she couldnāt find it. she got out of her van and walked around until she finally spied the cover, obscured in someoneās yard. āit was half buried,ā she says, and lifting the roughly 60 lb cover up took a pickaxe for leverageāplus a conversation with the yardās owner, who was fine with her work there.
carsonās job that day was to set up one of eight wastewater monitoring sites across campbell, boome, and kenton counties along kentuckyās northern border. today, those sites are monitoring covid-19 activity, searching for viral signals in several hundred thousand peopleās waste.
early in the pandemic, scientists discovered that fecal matter contains bits of the genetic material from sars-cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, up to a week before a person tests positive. sewage couldnāt tell you exactly who is infected, but it could reveal if there were infections afoot in a regionāpotentially, even before people started feeling sick.
so a few months ago, carson and her team in northern kentuckyās sanitation district no. 1 (sd1) teamed up with the local public health department and researchers at the university of louisville to start a wastewater-based epidemiology program. they cranked open manholes, gazed down into the rusty sludge, and snaked down tubing that sucks up about a half cup of flowing waste. an autosamplerāwhich carson says looks a bit like r2d2 from star warsāsits near the manhole, slurping up a sample every half hour for 24 hours and storing the waste on ice until carson or one of her team members picks it up to take it to a lab.
itās too early for the kentucky program to inform public health decisions just yet. there are no standards or procedures here; the methods are younger than the pandemic itself. so far, sd1 has collected two monthsā worth of samples; theyāre watching for the amount of sars-cov-2 genetic material to go up or down, and comparing that data with metrics like active cases and hospitalizations. theyāll make adjustments as they learn, all while the pandemic rages on. āitās a bit like working on the engine while weāre driving the car,ā says ted smith, an environmental medicine researcher at the university of louisville also working on the project.
wastewater monitoring is a bit of a long shotābut given the failure of other strategies to contain the pandemic, itās an intriguing option.
š read more via quartz.
šŗ
treasonous maps
.
ānothing is going to break me, neither prison, nor anything,ā iveri melashvili told a tbilisi court earlier this month. ābe my guest, put me in prison, but iām not going to put up with this accusation.ā
melashvili, 62, is at the center of a strange and convoluted case, in which two georgian cartographers stand accused of trying to give away a spiritually significant piece of their homeland to neighboring azerbaijan.
he and colleague natalia ilychova were arrested on charges of treason on october 7, and now face jail sentences of up to 15 years. both are saying they are shocked and confused by the charges and so is much of the country. critics charge that the georgian government invented the case to manipulate voters and discredit political rivals ahead of a fiercely contested parliamentary vote.
the story began with a concerned citizen, who apparently unearthed maps of the border between georgia and azerbaijan dating back to the 1930s that prove georgiaās ownership of a piece of territory claimed by both countries. their supposed discovery triggered an investigation that snowballed into a scandal, in which history, the present, fact and fiction all collide.
to hear the georgian government tell it, the two cartographers knew about the 1930s maps all along, but intentionally hid them to help neighboring azerbaijan walk off with 14 square miles of land.
at the heart of the matter is a 30-year-old tug of war between georgia and azerbaijan for a sliver of rugged terrain on their mutual border. azerbaijan views the disputed area as a strategic military point, while georgia regards it as a major spiritual and cultural heritage site, including part of the ancient, rock-hewn georgian monastery complex of davit gareji.
to make their cases for the landās ownership, the two countries have been dusting off maps from decades ago, when the boundary between the then soviet republics of georgia and azerbaijan was in a state of flux. melashvili and ilychova long served as cartographers on the georgian commission for border delimitation talks with azerbaijan.
georgian prosecutors claim that the pair ignored a 1930s map that allegedly bolsters georgiaās claims for the land and deliberately relied on versions that supposedly put their own countryās case at a disadvantage.
š read more via coda.
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