Back of the Book

• Covid~19 cases in the whole world - 122,086,638 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the whole world - 2,695,945 on Friday.
• Covid~19 cases in the United States of America - 29,714,219 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America - 540,733 on Friday.
• Covid~19 deaths in the United States of America since our last program - 8,582.
• The January 6, insurrectionists - Over 300 of them have been arrested so far, but some of the most violent insurrectionists have not been identified.
• Pickles of the North - Got her first shot of the Pfizer vaccine.
• Spring - Arrived during this radio program!
• Bit Brother - Facebook is perfecting an Artificial Intelligence that can recognize people and objects from surveillance and other images and videos.

We were able to bribe certain high officials to make sure that the Vernal Equinox would happen during this program! Yeah, you wouldn’t believe the people I had to bribe to get the 2021, Vernal Equinox to happen during our program. It occurred at 5:37 AM, and Spring was here! We managed to time things so that the pre-recorded program aired our celebration just at the time when Spring began.

We talked about the program not airing last week and told folks that they could access the archive of the program here. https://glib.com/botb_20210313.html#program

We talked about R. Paul having gotten his second shot of the vaccine more than two weeks ago and therefore having whatever immunity is conferred by the vaccination. We also talked about Pickles of the North getting her first vaccination against the virus this past week. They're making her wait four weeks to get her second shot.

We talked about the plague of hateful acts, including violence, against persons of east-Asian ethnicity, including this Robert Aaron Long character who murdered eight people, six of them women of east Asian ancestry in the past week. We think some of this can be traced back to Trump referring to the "China Virus," and his tiny, hateful comments.

We talked about Oumuamua, the interstellar object that sailed through the Solar System a couple of years ago. A new theory is that it may have been a block of frozen nitrogen that was sheared off of an ice planet, sort of like Pluto, about 500 million years ago.

We talked about Facebook's a new AI called  SEER that can learn from any random group of unlabeled images on the internet.

We talked about NASA releasing sounds from the Perseverance rover, and we played a little bit of that on the air.

• Vernal Equinox and Spring. -

• Barracuda - Heart
• Here Comes the Sun - The Beatles
• Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty

• I have a Web site.

• I'm on Twitter.

• WBAI LSB Treasurer's Reports are here.

• If you want to do something to protect your privacy while using regular browsers, like Firefox, you can check out NOSCRIPT which gives you more control over what Web sites can learn about you.

• Search engines help us to find things on the World Wide Web. Most search engines exist not to help you find things but to allow the companies that provide the search service to data mine your searches and then sell your search history to clients so they can spam you. An alternative to getting your privacy compromised is to use the DuckDuckGo search engine.

• If you'd like to keep your browsing history private you can get yourself the Tor Browser. Using the DuckDuckGo search engine is automatic with the Tor Browser, and by accessing the DuckDuckGo search engine from the Tor Browser you are pretty much guaranteed that no one can trace searches back to you.

• Gnu Privacy Guard can help you to encrypt your data and preserve your privacy.

• For those who need some help getting started with Gnu Privacy Guard there is Gentle GPG which does a lot of the work for you.

• For the somewhat more advanced user who wants to protect his or her privacy there is the Tails OS. Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a USB flash drive or a DVD. It allows you to use any computer that will allow you to boot up off a USB flash drive or a DVD and it provides a lot of good security for your on-line activities. You can get it here.