The Games Machine (May 1988)
The Games Machine was a multiformat computer gaming magazine published in the U.K. in the 1980s. It covered both 8-bit and 16-bit computers. Contents of the May 1988 issue include:
Features
Prove You're The Best! - Final chance to enter for the first National Computer Games Championships.
Battle Between Progs - TGM's American correspondent, Marshal M Rosenthal, reveals Nolan Bushnell's latest exciting hi-tech robot-toys from Axion.
Double-O's Back In Town - John Gilbert reports on how computers have puffed fresh life into the steam train-set.
Nailing Bulls To The Doors - Robin Hogg goes behind the scenes at Bulletin 1000, the people who help sell computer games via tellies.
The Games Machine Questionnaire - Your opportunity to tell us about TGM - use it, PLEASE!
Grow Your Own Radio - A broadcasting revolution is imminent thanks to a new generation of computer-clever radios and a relaxation of broadcasting strictures. Mel Croucher explains...
It's A Crime! - The TGM crew take on KJC's Play By Mail game in a bid to explain how the system works.
Regulars
Readerpage - How you feel about what, and why.
News - TGM Bulletins (not quite 1000)
Infodesk - More answers on technical queries.
Previews - Richard Eddy reveals Software Studio's latest plans for Karnov and Afterburner, and many more early glimpses.
Reviews - 27 pages of the latest 8- and 16-bit releases, plus MSX II.
Getting Adventurous - Rob Steel investigates crime, space piracy and comedy.
Going Overboard - Where No Vultures Fly - grisly board fun, plus boardgame news.
Fantasy Games - John Woods plays a Nordic RPG bid and indulges in gruesome reading from Harn.
Mercy Dash - Robin Evan's anti-heroine gets two pages to crucify Newsfield's recent Computer Arena software conference.
Music Matters - Two astonishing utilities for the Atari ST may herald the music performer's equipment of the future, says Jon Bates.
Endpiece - Mel's Trivia Quiz.
Win!
An Amiga & Monitor - Third of our computer giveaways. Don't miss out!
Omnibots Are Go! - Tomy robots and copies of GO!'s Bionic Commando are the prizes!
It's The Flintstones! - Unique boxer shorts, videos and games mark the launch of GrandSlam's great Flintstones game.
Sierra Adventures - Win the entire 16-bit Sierra On-Line adventure range!
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that we found after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
The first photo was processed in May 1962 and appears to have been taken inside a cathedral. The others feature a building with a U.S. (and others) flag, a soldier, and somebody enjoying a swimming pool. There are no dates are labels but these were all likely taken in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
Processed May 1962
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.
80-U.S. Journal (May/June 1979 )
80-US was one of the earlier computer magazines. It covered, as you might guess from the name, the TRS-80 computer. This issue from May/June 1979 includes:
Features
Troubleshooting Hardware
String Packing Techniques Exposed!
Which Brain?
Chinese, Android and other Nims
Mind Reader
System/Command
The Monitor You Already Have
The Barber & Beauty Shop Cash Accounting & Payroll, Part II
This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.
Here’s how we got to this point.
In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.
Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.
Here’s why.
AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.
Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”
Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.
Uber employs approximately 140,000 drivers in California and Lyft employs roughly 80,000. These 220,000 working Californians will now lose their source of income in the middle of a pandemic and recession, all thanks to the naive intervention of Sacramento regulators who thought they could plan the market. Moreover, the millions of Californians who benefit from and rely on cheap, accessible ride-sharing services will be out of luck.
Yet this isn’t some one-off example where regulators just got it wrong. Rampant unintended consequences inevitably plague any attempt to intervene and “fix” the economy by central planners convened in the state capital.
Lawmakers should be keenly aware that every human action has both intended and unintended consequences. Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended. So while there is a place for legislation, that place should be one defined by both great caution and tremendous humility. Sadly, these are character traits not often found in those who become legislators.
There was nothing humble or cautious about the approach California took to regulating the ride-sharing industry. Legislators took a cursory look at a business model they clearly didn’t understand, wished it was different, and thought they could rewrite it entirely on their own. This hubris has not improved conditions for workers, but brought the industry to the brink of destruction.
Benevolent intentions simply aren’t enough. As famed free-market economist Milton Friedman once noted, “concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” Still, not all hope is lost for the future of ride-sharing in California.
In this case, voters will have an opportunity to rectify the unintended consequences of this failed attempt at central planning. Uber and Lyft have successfully secured the addition of a ballot question to the November election that will give Californians the opportunity to vote to create an exception to AB 5 for ride-sharing app drivers, allowing them to once again work as independent contractors. (Although freelance writers and many other professions will still be left in the lurch.)
If this vote succeeds, it might be enough to bring Uber and Lyft back to California. But the struggling Golden State will continue to run into problems like this as long as its legislators continue to abandon humility in favor of a heavy-handed approach.
Videogaming Illustrated is one of many short-lived video games magazines from the early 1980s. Videogaming Illustrated actually went through a few name variations in its short life with it actually being called Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated in this September 1983 issue. That sure is a mouth full. This issue includes:
Nybbles - Introducing Nybbles, a brand new column of industry whispers.
Eye On - New games from Atari, new hardware for Vectrex, an industry shakeup.
Preview - Is Space Dungeon the best videogame ever created?
Focus On: Traditional Education Bytes It! - Computers are playing a major role in education in America; herein VCI provides tips to the bewildered; guidelines that will help parents select educational software, comprehensive lists of some of the best programs available, a quick glimpse at computers, and a wild projection of teachers of the future.
Conquering - Robot Tank is a stunning new combat game from Activision.
Conquering - Sir Dudley Dashley will need help to rescue Lady Penelope in Jungle Hunt.
Behind the Scenes - Your right to play videogames: don't bet on the Constitution for support.
Chip Ahoy - New Coleco games and an arcade laserdisc fantasy game are previewed.
Supergaming - Step by step instructions will explain how to fix your Atari joystick.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that we found after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
The first photo in this set is a family portrait from circa 1973. The husband sure doesn't look happy... The rest of the photos appear to be from the early 1960s based on the date stamped on them. Two feature a statue, fountain and other architecture that someone other than me could probably identify. The other is a nature shot of a small waterfall.
Processed May 1973
Processed May 1962
Processed May 1962
Processed July 1961
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.
Commodore Computing International was one of a rather large number of Commodore computer magazines published in the U.K. This one targeted a more international audience I suppose, with prices on the cover of this particular issue for Belgium, Germany and the U.S. in addition to the U.K. The June 1989 issue includes:
CCI View - Publisher Antony Jacobson comments on the stunning speed of the development of the computer world.
News - The G2 VideoCenter, Image Maker and Photon Video news, plus lots more of the latest happenings from around the world of chips and memory.
DeluxePaint III - A much awaited upgrade with an animator's eye for detail.
Decision Maker - Would you purchase this program? Bob Collyer says you just might need it to decide.
Back to Basics - Peter Gerrard begins an exciting new series on the fine art of Basic programming for the C64.
Hearsay 1000 - Andy Eskelson reports on a fantastic voice recognition system for the C64/128.
Hearsay 1000 Offer - Speak - and your computer will obey! See how...
More more more 64 - 4 Power! Part II - Peter Gerrard describes the ports and plugs which link you and your C64 to the rest of the world.
Virus - Part III - Nancy Picard provides the vital guide to keeping your computer healthy.
DataStar 8000M Offer - The smallest pocket computer in the world can be yours!
A500 Control Centre Offer - Save your Amiga from harm!
'Troubleshooting Your C64...' and 'Metrophage' - Books to keep you eye on the needs of today and the future of science.
Secureword - Andy Eskelson reports on a data encryption package that remains something of a mystery.
Readers Letters - Letter's put you write!
Whether or Not - Peter McDonald reviews a premonition program (you've heard of before?!?).
Technical Letters - Jack Cohen, our resident expert, explains those Commodore quirks.
Heard It On The Grapevine - Zak Mule Skinner reflects signals from the Mirrorsoft dimension.
Crazy Cars II - Rev up your engines for an accelerating sequel.
Horgans Hints - Pokes-a-plenty brought to you by games ace Tony Horgan.
Arcade Action - Horgan hits the arcades in search of Chase HQ and more!
Cover Offer - Supremely stylish Spring softwear fashion.
Run The Gauntlet - Does this game really separate the flora from teh fauna?
Renegade III - Hit the target with Renegade III
Breech - 'Once more into the Paladin/Breech, my friends, for God and Harry, England and Saint George.
Balance of Power 1990 - Tip the scales in your favor in the latest version of the geopolitical power struggle.
Chart Chattering Events - Two new number ones, while half man/half machine blows crime off the streets.
U.M.S. - Travel back in time to recreate the famous battles of your choice.
Danger Freak - Are you an adrenaline addict? Get your fix here!
Running Man - More marathon, murder and mayhem (his feet are killing him...and other people too!)
Adventure - Andy Moss goes on-line with Sierra - plus maps, letters, reviews and much more!
Competition - Win an Okimate color printer/ a Phillips color monitor plus loads of fantastic Electronic Arts Software!
A500 Covers - Protect your Amiga from the harsh elements!
G.M. Subscription Form - What every RPG fan wants and needs!
Writing Role Playing Games - Spice up your RPG from 'good' to 'great'!
Sentry Preview - A preview of an exciting new programming aid developed exclusively for CCI readers.
Programs - Too many to list - powerful programs for C64/128 and Plus 4 owners alike!
CCI Subscription Form - 'Sold Out!' Why listen to the pitiless cry of the newsagent when CCI could fly in through your letterbox!
The efficacy of face masks has been a subject of debate in the health community during the pandemic. Because health experts disagree on their effectiveness, countries and health agencies around the world, including the World Health Organization and the CDC, have done a reversal on their mask recommendations during the pandemic.
Reasonable and persuasive cases can be made both for and against the use of masks in the general population. Unfortunately, the science of masks and viruses is becoming less clear because of the politicized nature of the debate.
A case in point is the Kansas public health official who made news last week after he was accused of using a deceptive chart to make it appear counties with mask mandates had lower COVID-19 case rates than they actually did.
At a press conference, Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Dr. Lee Norman credited face masks with positive statewide COVID-19 trends showing a general decline in deaths, hospitalizations, and new cases.
Norman pointed to a chart (see below) that depicted two lines tracking cases per 100,000 people between July 12 and August 3. The red line begins higher than the blue line but then falls precipitously as it travels down the X-axis, ending below a blue line.
Norman explains that the red line represented the 15 counties with mask mandates, which account for two thirds of the state’s population. The flat blue line represented the remaining 90 counties, which had no mask mandates in place.
“All of the improvement in case development comes from those counties wearing masks,” Norman said.
The results are clear, Norman claimed. The red line shows reduction. The blue line is flat. Kansas’s real-life experiment showed that masks work.
It didn’t take long for people to realize something wasn’t quite right, however. The blue line and the red line were not on the same axis.
This gave the impression that counties with mask mandates in place had fewer daily cases than counties without mask mandates. This is not the case, however. In reality, counties with masks mandates have far higher daily COVID-19 cases than counties without mask mandates.
If the trends are depicted on the same axis, the blue and red lines look like this.
Many Kansans were not pleased with the trickery.
Kansas Policy Institute expert Michael Austin told local media that the chart clearly gives a false impression.
“It has nothing to do about whether masks are effective or not. [It’s about] making sure Kansans can make sound conclusions from accurate information,” Austin said. “And unfortunately, the chart that was shown prior in the week strongly suggested that counties that had followed Dr. Norman’s mask order outperformed counties that did not, and that was most certainly not true.”
Twitter was less diplomatic.
The chart is deceptive.
Worse, Norman also failed to note that the lines were on different axes until a reporter asked if the blue line “would get below the red line” if those counties passed mask mandates, which prompted Norman to mumble about different metrics and then admit that counties without mask mandates have lower case rates.
“The trend line is what I really want to focus on,” Norman said.
The deception prompted a non-apology from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment: “Yes, the axes are labelled differently … we recognize that it was a complex graph and may not have easily been understood and easily misinterpreted.”
Dr. Norman, meanwhile, vowed to do better next time.
“I’ll learn from that and try to [be] clearer next time,” he said following criticism from lawmakers.
The episode is unfortunate because it further clouds the science and erodes trust in the medical experts individuals rely on to make informed decisions.
It’s also ironic, because the controversy overshadowed the state’s positive data, which suggests masks may be working in Kansas. The chart may have been deceptive, but the data is correct and shows a 34 percent drop in COVID cases in counties with mandates in place.
It’s quite possible that drop is linked to county orders mandating the use of masks. Then again, the order may have nothing to do with the drop. Correlation, we know, doesn’t equal causation. If it did, the surge in COVID-19 cases in California following its mask order would be “proof” that masks increase transmission rates.
But science doesn’t work that way (at least it shouldn’t), and Dr. Norman knows this.
Maybe masks are an effective way to curb transmission of the coronavirus, or maybe it’s largely ineffective or even harmful, like the Surgeon General stated back in March. The truth is we don’t yet know.
What’s clear, as I noted last week, is that the top physicians and public health experts on the planet can’t decide if face coverings help reduce the spread of COVID-19.
In light of this, it seems both reasonable and prudent that public health officials should focus less on forcing people to “mask-up” and more on developing clear and compelling research which will allow individuals to make informed and free decisions.
This, after all, is the traditional role of public health: inform people and let them choose.
Allowing individuals to choose instead of collective bodies is the proper and more effective approach, because, as the great economist Ludwig von Mises reminded us, individuals are the source of all rational decision-making.
“All rational action is in the first place individual action,” Mises wrote in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. “Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.”
Mask orders aren’t just about public health. They are a microcosm of a larger friction at work in our society: who gets to plan our lives, individuals or the collective?
Despite what many today seem to believe, society is best served by allowing individuals to plan and control their own lives.
But individuals benefit from sound and reliable information. Sadly, that is something public health officials increasingly appear incapable or unwilling to offer.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that we found after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
This set spans the 1960s until at east 1971. The first photo looks like a landscape shot out west somewhere. It was taken in August 1963. The next two photos are more cat pics for the Internet to consume, the first of which was processed in March 1971. The final photo was shot on the beach and was processed in January 1963.
August 1963
Processed March 1971
Processed January 1965
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.
CPU, short for Computer Power User, is a magazine that was a competitor to Maximum PC. While I enjoyed it, I never thought it was quite as good as Maximum PC which probably explains why it isn't around anymore. There's barely enough room in the physical magazine world for one such title. The August 2008 issue includes:
Spotlight
Power Mobile - The Past, Present & Future of Portable Computing
Smartphone IQ Test - Just how Smart Are They?
Small Wonders - Subnotebooks & UMPCs That Are Worth Their Weight
Jacks Of Many Trades - A Right Laptop For Every User
Frontside
What's Happening
Digital Economy
The Saint - Alien Computing
Heavy Gear
Dream Hardware
Sound Card Clash - The Best Of Add-In Audio
Robocop Or Keystone Cop - Are Consumer-Grade UTMs Worth It?
Lite-On DH-401 - Iomega REV 120GB USB
Dell XPS M1730
NZXT Tempest - Antec Mini P180
Lenovo ThinkPad X300 - Trendnet TS-S402
Pinnacle Video Transfer - Sony Walkman NWZ-S718 8GB
TomTom GO 930 - GE E1235
Corsair HX1000W - HIS Radeon HD 3650 IceQ Turbo
Thecus N5200B - Intel DX48BT2
Anand's Corner - Apple Takes On Google
The Shark Tank - Round Two For The Eee PC
Hard Hat Area
PC Modder
Tips & Tutorials
The Soundless Savage - High-Powered Quiet Computing
Mad Reader Mod - Project Phenom
PC Challenge - Best Gaming PC For Less Than $2,000
Advanced Q&A Corner
X-Ray Vision - OLED Optimus Maximus Keyboard
White Paper - IBM's Racetrack Memory
Loading Zone
The Bleeding Edge Of Software - Inside The World Of Betas
Up To Speed - Upgrades That'll Keep You Humming Along
TrustWare BufferZone - Stealthsurfer
Ringtone Media Studio 3 - NovaBackup 10
Dialogue Box - Narrowing Broadband
Open Sauce - Little Things Mean A Lot
Caught In the Web
Booting Up Blockbusters - Film Rentals Now Playing On A PC Near You
The Department Of Stuff - design.txt
Digital Living
Road Warrior - Lenovo IdeaPad, Mobile Fuel Cells, New BlackBerry, Mobile Power From Kingston & More
At Your Leisure - Games, Gear, Movies & Music
Cutting Edge - Online Service Providers
Tips & Tricks
Software Tips & Projects - Get The Color Right
Warm Up To Penguins - The Audacity Of It All
What's Cooking
Shavings From The Rumour Mill - Nano Chips Away At Intel's Atom
Wagging The Dog - Apple Fanboys
Technically Speaking - An Interview With Joshua Levy, Managing Editor Of Change.org
Under Development - A Peek At What's Brewing In The Laboratory
Back Door
Q&A With Mark Bernstein - PARC Director On The Next Big Thing(s)
Infinite Loops - Strange stats and other oddball items from computing's periphery
...and more!
I had the opportunity to pick up a huge batch of slides a while back. These are pictures span from as early as the late 1940s to as late as the early 1990s. These came to me second hand but the original source was a combination of estate sales and Goodwill. There are several thousand...maybe as many as 10,000. I will be scanning some from time to time and posting them here for posterity.
Getting your pictures processed as slides used to be a fairly common thing but it was a phenomenon I missed out on. However, my Grandfather had a few dozen slides (circa late 1950s) that we found after he died. That along with having some negatives I wanted to scan is what prompted me to buy a somewhat decent flatbed scanner that could handle slides and negatives, an Epson V600. It can scan up to four slides at a time with various post-processing options and does a decent enough job.
This set continues a rather large batch of slides that originally came from an estate sale and appear to have belonged to a locally well known photographer (or perhaps a close family member) from the Spokane Washington area and later Northern Idaho named Leo Oestreicher. He was known for his portrait and landscape photography and especially for post cards. His career started in the 1930s and he died in 1990. These slides contain a lot of landscape and portrait photos but also a lot of photos from day to day life and various vacations around the world. Here's an article on him from 1997 which is the only info I have found on him: http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jan/04/photos-of-a-lifetime-museum-acquisition-of-leo/
Many of these slides had the date they were processed (presumably) stamped or printed on them. I've found that in cases where I could verify the date, either because a more specific date was hand written or there was something to specifically date the photo in the photo itself, that this date has typically been the same month the photos were taken. In other words, I expect that in MOST cases these photos were taken relatively near the processing date.
The first photo in this set was taken in the woods, probably in the early 1960s somewhere in Oregon. The next two photos were taken at a lake or other large body of water and were processed in September 1964. The final photo once again proves that cat pics didn't start with the internet. Here is a cat, apparently named George XIII according the the handwritten label, carefully studying a photograph.
Processed September 1964
Processed September 1964
George XIII
The entire collection that has been scanned and uploaded so far can be found here.
On Thursday, a Florida health official told a local news station that a young man who was listed as a COVID-19 victim had no underlying conditions.
The answer surprised reporters, who probed for additional information.
“He died in a motorcycle accident,” Dr. Raul Pino clarified. “You could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash. I don’t know the conclusion of that one.”
The anecdote is a ridiculous example of a real controversy that has inspired some colorful memes: what should define a COVID-19 death?
While the question is important, such incidents may be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding the unreliability of COVID-19 data.
In May, a public radio station in Miami broke what soon became a national story. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been conflating antibody and viral testing, obscuring key metrics lawmakers use to determine if they should reopen their respective economies.
The story was soon picked up by NPR, who spoke to an epidemiologist who condemned the practice.
"Reporting both serology and viral tests under the same category is not appropriate, as these two types of tests are very different and tell us different things," Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told NPR.
The Atlantic soon followed with an article that explained the agency was painting an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic. The practice, the writers said, was making it difficult to tell if more people were actually sick or had merely acquired antibodies from fighting off the virus.
“How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess,” said Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
In some ways the “mess” was no surprise. Two weeks earlier, Dr. Deborah Leah Birx, the White House's coronavirus task force response coordinator, reportedly ripped the agency in a meeting, saying "there is nothing from the CDC that I can trust."
Birx’s concerns about the CDC’s data did not alleviate concerns of data manipulation. The New York Timesspeculated that perhaps the agency had sought to “bolster the testing numbers for political purposes.” The Texas Observerwondered if the state was “inflating its COVID testing numbers by including antibody tests.”
Considering President Trump’s sometimes comically inaccurate boasts about America’s testing prowess, perhaps such questions were not unjustified. The many people who spoke to the Times said the answer was simpler, attributing the flawed system to “confusion and fatigue in overworked state and local health departments.”
If data manipulation had been the motive, the architects of the ploy were in for a rude awakening. Testing numbers did soar, but so did case numbers; the surge in late June and throughout July spawned new fears of a second wave and more lockdowns and more charges that America was botching the pandemic. (The surge was the result of both increased testing, including antibody testing, as well as a resurgence of the virus.)
Tensions between the White House and its own agency boiled over last week when the Trump Administration stripped the CDC of its role in collecting data on COVID-19 hospitalizations.
A Data Fiasco of Historical Proportions?
It’s hard to read the drama, incompetence, and confusion without thinking about Dr. John Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University.
In a March 17 STAT article, Ioannidis warned the world was looking at what could turn out to be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.” He worried central planners were making sweeping and reflexive changes without sufficient data.
Locking people up without knowing the fatality risk of COVID-19 could have severe social and financial consequences that could be totally irrational, Ioannidis warned.
“It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies,” said Ioannidis, one of the most-cited scientists in the world.
In one sense, Ioannidis has already been proven right. The models on which lockdowns were initiated have already proven astronomically wrong. But that was hardly the only example.
Every day it seems there’s another story about reporting flaws or mixups.
Tuesday it was a lab in Connecticut where researchers said they discovered a flaw in a testing system for the virus. The flaw resulted in 90 people receiving false positives. That may not sound like many, but researchers said the test is used by labs across America.
A few days earlier, it was announced that Texas had removed 3,484 cases from its positive Covid-19 case count because the San Antonio Health Department was reporting “probable” cases. None of the people had actually tested positive for COVID-19.
We don’t know how many new cases are probable cases and not positive cases, but we know it’s a lot. That’s because in April, the CDC changed its reporting to include people who had not tested positive for the virus but might have it. (The CDC’s criteria for what qualifies as a probable case are more than a little confusing.)
As the Associated Press noted, the change was made with the understanding that “deaths could soon jump because federal health officials will now count illnesses that are not confirmed by lab testing.”
The One Thing Everyone Agrees On
COVID-19 has been far from the deadliest virus in modern history, but it has been the most divisive. The public, politicians, policy experts, and public health officials have disagreed on how deadly it is and how best to contain it.
But the one thing everyone seems to agree on is the numbers we have—fatalities and cases—are way wrong. A new CDC report estimates COVID-19 rates about 10 times higher than reported. Ioannidis put the figure even higher, estimating weeks ago that as many 300 million people had already been infected globally.
Deaths are more complicated.
The New York Times says COVID-19 deaths have been massively undercounted. Dr. Ashish Jha, speaking to Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, agreed, saying most experts agreed there is a “substantial undercount.”
Others, including nearly one-third of Americans according to a recent survey, believe that the COVID-19 death toll is inflated. This includes physicians who say medical professionals are being pressured by hospital administrators to add coronavirus to death sheets.
Writing at the American Mind, Angelo Codevilla recently argued if the CDC had used the same criterion for the SARS virus as COVID-19—primarily “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome”—total COVID fatalities in the US would have been 16,000 through June.
Nobody knows the true count, of course. But the one thing left and right seem to agree on is the data we have are junk. And yet the lesson we keep hearing is “trust the experts.”
"Follow the science. Listen to the experts. Do what they tell you," Joe Biden said in April.
But thinkers as diverse as Matthew Yglesias at Vox to author Matt Ridley have pointed out the dangers of blindly following “the experts,” especially when they’ve shown themselves to be spectacularly wrong from the very beginning on the COVID-19 pandemic.
"It's dangerous to rely too much on models (which lead politicians to) lock down society and destroy people's livelihood,” Ridley recently told John Stossel. “Danger lies both ways."
Ridley has a point. The experts can’t agree on their own numbers or even clearly answer if a man who died in a motorcycle accident while infected should be labeled as a COVID-19 death.
In light of this, perhaps it’s time for the experts to exercise some humility and begin offering guidance to individuals instead of advocating collective blunt force.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.
Bylines: The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
