My overall cardio fitness, as measured by the Apple Watch, has been low for a long long time. No more tho!

Researchers have been working on a way to prevent RSV since the 1960s, without success. But on August 3, 2023, the CDC approved a drug called nirsevimab (trade name Beyfortus): a long-acting monoclonal antibody that is 80 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations and 90 percent effective at preventing intensive care unit admissions. Nirsevimab is administered as a single, intramuscular injection and can be given at the same time as other vaccines.

A Breakthrough Product for Babies

Paul Krugman:

The bottom line is that even though many people would like someone to blame for high grocery prices, it’s really hard to find domestic villains. Despite what the American right claims, Joe Biden didn’t do this. Despite what some on the left would like to believe, neither, at least for the most part, did greedy corporations.

Why Are Groceries So Expensive?

You can blame Putin and weather, he does say.

Oliver Sacks on saving humanity:

I think we have to preserve the human scale — in life, in building, in architecture, in technology. The human scale doesn’t mean we can’t have grand visions of the universe, it doesn’t preclude the development of physics and cosmology, but it does mean one shouldn’t be an anonymous person — an anonymous non-person, one of a thousand non-people — in a skyscraper.

Henry Miller, concluding Tropic of Cancer:

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.

The Human Scale: Oliver Sacks on How to Save Humanity from Itself

Rayaki in Cherry Hill, NJ

My first blush with iPadOS’s mouse support left me underwhelmed. Using a Magic Mouse, I was able to click and otherwise emulate a finger, but one absent feature in particular–support for scrolling in apps like Safari–left me uninterested in using a mouse with my iPad.

A little reading, however, led me to discover that mice with scroll wheels–notably Logitech mice–scroll as you might expect. I tried a leftover USB mouse from my son’s computer, and low and behold! Scrolling!

I picked up a Logitech Anywhere MX 2 today and set up the mouse. I must report that in addition to scrolling working, the ability to program each button to complete a number of useful features makes the mouse even more intriguing.

I set up the mouse to support click/tap with button one; button two activates the menu; other buttons will snap a screen shot, open the app switcher, and even summon the dock. This list action blew me away; I had hovered over the bottom of the screen a number of times looking for the Dock to pop up, but this is possibly even more interesting than standard macOS behavior.

One small detail bothered me, however: leaving Assitive Touch turned on when not using the mouse leaves the small menu button, semi-transparent as it is, on the screen at all times. I don’t like that one bit.

But Shortcuts to the rescue! I quickly made two shortcuts: Mouse On and Mouse Off. One turns Assstive Touch on, the other off. I keep these sorted near the top of my shortcuts, and keep Shortcuts pinned to my home screen.

I have started to collect some usage notes on iPadOS for a later post, but I will say that I like having the Files widget pinned to my Today view on the home screen. I used to make smart folders in the Finder with the intention of reviewing them each morning to see where I left off the day before. Files pinned to Today puts it front and center.