August 22, 2020: Bright Spots

The flagship Powell's Bookstore, the big one downtown, has reopened two rooms. I haven't gone myself, because I appear to have lost the courage to venture inside anything but the grocery store (and the liquor store, once, and okay, okay, the entrance of the sushi place, to get a take-out bag, and ... yes, I see your point, apparently I am not averse to dashing into an establishment that might provide food and drink, and this should be a surprise to no one), but (getting back to Powell's) I've ordered a couple of books just to celebrate. Remember at the beginning of this, when there was a collective freak-out that Powell's might not make it? Then there was a rally to order from them online, and now, two rooms are open, Blue and Green. Phew.

Also, another bright spot, one of the organizers of the Saturday letter-writing party for VoteForward said that so far, collectively, Oregonians have written 350,000 letters to reluctant voters in swing states. That's just Oregonians! (And just this one Get Out the Vote group.) I did the math, and if there's a 2.3% uptake (and they do keep track of such things, though I don't know how), it should come to around 8,000 votes. 

And also, in my sporadic quest to be vaguely useful, I checked out a site called Zooniverse, which is a compendium of "citizen science" projects.  They feature new projects every week, and this week includes an effort to count meteors, another to identify iguanas in the Galapagos from aerial photographs, and (my favorite), one to classify the babbling of babies around the world (because, sadly, most babbling research has been on babies from English-speaking countries, wouldn't you know it). On my Zooniverse effort, I worked on a project where I had to outline mitochondria on slides. It was ... restful. I tried to work on one transcribing the handwritten Anti-Slavery Manuscripts in the Boston Public Library, but I was terrible at deciphering that spidery old handwriting. Anyway, the bright spot here is that the ASM (Anti-Slavery Manuscript) project is complete. More than 14,000 people worked on this one. Pretty cool.