Late last year I mentioned several podcasts I would be trying out. The first one — Who Killed JFK — did not work for me. The production values were too high for the slight content it presented, and I like my podcasts on the raw side. Fortunately, a friend recommended the seven-part span of The Rest is History that covers much more than just the assassination, and I can absolutely recommend it. Even better: those were episodes 392–398, so I am now looking forward to hundreds of hours of two historians spitballing about various people and events, from Anthony and Cleopatra to the Hundred Years' War.

• Demystifying Medicine — Hepatitis D and E: New Challenges and Progress by Drs Theo Heller and Marc Ghany (NIDDK), Tuesday February 13 at 4pm EST
• How Memory Meets Perception During Naturalistic Scene Understanding by Dr Caroline Robertson (Dartmouth College), Wednesday February 14 at 1pm EST
• Demystifying Medicine — Sickle Cell Anemia: a Global Perspective by Drs Ambroise Wonkam (JHU) and Courtney Fitzhugh (NHLBI), Tuesday February 20 at 4pm EST
• WALS Lecture: Tale of Two Cities: Disease Based Research or Geroscience? by Laura Niedernhofer (University of Minnesota), Wednesday February 21 at 2pm EST
• Demystifying Medicine — Global Warming and Human Adaptation by Drs Gabriel Vecchi (Princeton) and Michael Sawka (Georgia Tech), Tuesday February 27 at 4pm EST
• Diversity in Clinical Trials: The Barriers and the Opportunities by Dr Youssef Roman (FDA), Wednesday February 28 at 12pm EST
• Influenza Pathogenesis and Therapeutics in Vulnerable Populations by Dr Stacey Schultz-Cherry (St Jude), Wednesday February 28 at 2pm EST

I wish King Charles the best in light of his cancer diagnosis. Reading some of the old coverage of his health issues I noticed that both of his parents had “old age” listed as the cause of death. Any certifying MD that tried to pull that over here would have had the paperwork returned in an instant.

🍿 Charade (1963) is what you get when the director of Singing' in the Rain want to make his version of North by Northwest: an absolute delight. Come for Audrey Hepburn’s fragile beauty, stay for all the shots of 1960s Paris set to Henry Mancini’s score.

MKBHD’s review of Apple Vision Pro matches my experience perfectly, from preferring the dual loop band to thinking about it as an expensive but oh so very fun toy. Like him, I mostly plan to use mine for travel — though if Sony ever releases the AVP version of PS Remote Play I may use it at home for some PS5 time without occupying anyone else’s screen.

As for people wearing the headsets while driving, walking down the street or sitting at a caffe with their similarly headset-equipped buddies, well, there are idiots everywhere. Someone using their electric toothbrush while riding the subway doesn’t mean electric toothbrushes are inherently bad.

Or should I say “our new toy” — as I’m writing this, the tween is poking and swiping her way through visionOS like she’s been doing it her whole life, while I am on the laptop. Not that I mind, since the only way to post to micro.blog on day 1 of Apple Vision Pro is through the online interface. It looks like none of my preferred writing tools — IA Writer, Ulysses, or even the micro.blog app itself — have even checked the box to allow unmodified porting of their iPad app, let alone made a native one.

The lists of essential-to-me software that’s Apple Vision Pro doesn’t yet have is long: OmniFocus and Asana for task management, NetNewWire and Reeder for RSS feeds, WhatsApp for keeping in touch with family in Europe. I am not a watches-videos-on-the-tablet-by-himself type of person, so missing Netflix and YouTube apps was not a big deal even though people seem to have made much of it. Having the almost-complete Microsoft Office 365 suite natively was a pleasant surprise, even though Word kept crashing and Teams kept defaulting to the useless Activity tab.

Note that I am taking the hardware tradeoffs and the “spatial computing” working environment for granted. This alone is a huge accomplishment: yes, yes, I can get from a grainy image of my apartment to the top of Haleakalā with a twist of a knob, now let me do stuff. And the doing of the stuff will be essential in dingy hotel rooms during business trips — of which there will be many this year — so I may as well start figuring out how to make the best of it. But until then, it is a toy.

So with that in mind, here is a list of first impressions:

• The dual loop band felt more comfortable on my head than the cooler-looking solo band, mostly because it stopped the entirety of the headset from resting on my nose.
• Setting up the screens was much less finicky than I thought it would be, and slipping them off an on quickly to, let’s say, use Face ID on the phone was seamless.
• No eye strain that I’ve noticed, but I haven’t used the toy for longer than 30–45 minutes at a time. I also don’t wear glasses and knock-on-wood never had problems with eyesight.
• The pass-through video is a marvel in that it didn’t cause any motion sickness, but it is so grainy and the motion blur from any head movement so obvious that I never felt like I was looking through glass, even thick glass of fogged up ski goggles.
• To walk back what I wrote above: pass-through video shines when it is the backdrop for the crisp app windows that can feel the walls around them and position themselves accordingly. In those moments, when your surroundings are in the peripheral vision, it does feel like those windows are actually floating in your actual room.
• But that doesn’t matter when the most common use case will be, I suspect, completely obliterating your real environment and doing work in a near-photo realistic 3D rendering of a national park. Or watching equally breathtaking immersive 3D scenes from Apple TV’s latest documentary.
• “Immersive 3D” is distinct from 3D movies, more like actually being there than looking at a diorama through a rectangular screen. I suspect it will change filmmaking forever, but then people have said that Segway would change the world so what do I know?
• Personas are as uncanny as you can imagine. If you ever wondered what you would look like as an NPC in GTA or a player in NBA2K, well, for less than four thousand dollars you can find out yourself.
• People who know that I had AVP when I called on FaceTime acted grossed out, those who didn’t ranged from slightly confused (a new haircut? a filter?) to unfazed (oh, you’re using an avatar… whatever for?)
• At the bottom of the uncanny valley the only way to go is up. Which is scary and deserves a post or two of its own.
• It’s the way of the future, for better or worse.

🍿 Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the best live-action movie I have seen in years, and it wasn’t even close. In the topsy-turvy Monsterverse version Godzilla is a misunderstood hero. In Minus One things are as they should be: the reptile is a force of nature, the humans want to stop it, but the real battle is with the government inertia.

Caveats: it was the black and white version in a “4DX” theater which I thought meant a bigger screen but in fact involved motorized seats, strobe lights and gusts of wind blowing in my face. It was an unusual combination: the colorless, grainy images á la Kurosawa made into a theme park attraction. What would Scorcese have said?

I don’t care! The very first movie was also a thrill ride.

A sentence to ponder:

Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body.

Can you guess if it comes from a dystopian science fiction novel or a peer-reviewed research article?