The end of the metaverse. The font wars. And science shoots down medical marijuana claims.
The End of the Metaverse
We have blogged extensively about the “metaverse,” the virtual reality realm in which we could go to work, send the kids to school, socialize, and basically live our lives. We could pick our own avatar so we could “present” as anything we wanted and interact with other people’s avatars in a computer-animated world, like living inside a video game.
Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the metaverse would someday be our “primary” reality. He was so excited about the possibilities that he renamed his whole company Meta.
Well, despite all the hype and prognostications about how the metaverse was the future, the idea didn’t quite catch on. It seems that human beings for the most part prefer actual reality to virtual reality.
Now Zuckerberg is pretty much scrapping his metaverse business. Reports Victor Tangermann at Futurism:
All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in.
Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now.
Now Zuckerberg is pivoting to a new obsession: Artificial Intelligence. “The company has committed to spending an astronomical $72 billion on AI this year,” says Tangermann, “roughly as much as the company’s lost on the metaverse, coincidentally.”
Please, God, may the company lose that money also. May AI be another overhyped failure! Amen.
The Font Wars
Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a decree that all state department documents must use the New Times Roman font instead of the Biden-era Calibri.
He said that the font switch in word processing programs would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” New Times Roman, he said, evokes “tradition, formality and ceremony” better than the more modern, unadorned Calibri.
The main difference is that New Times Roman is a “serif” style. That refers to the tiny lines, dots, and flourishes added to the strokes on a letter. Calibri is “sans-serif,” meaning without serifs.
See the difference?
Elle Purnell at the Federalist sees serif styles like New Times Roman as being more like cursive handwriting, while sans serif is more like the dumbed-down printing used in public schools that have thrown out cursive. She relates this shift to the rise of the “Corporate Memphis” style of computer illustration–“flat, geometric, figurative, and usually made up of solid colours”–and to the bland ugliness of so much contemporary architecture. She throws in a discussion of Cracker Barrel’s attempt to change its logo. She concludes,
The dumbing-down of visual aesthetics — from font to logos to illustrations — is not without consequence. It would be foolish to assume the aesthetics we surround ourselves with have no effect on how we perceive the world. Official correspondence should be professional, not infantilizing. Sans serif is the medium of corporate jargon and DEI trainings. Fonts like Calibri are literally stripped of their character, reduced to their simplest and most utilitarian form. So are graphics and illustrations that erase shading, detail, and even faces in favor of blob art.
I would say that the main difference of New Times Roman and other serif fonts is that they make the text look like the printing in a book, nearly all of which have always used serif type.
While it is true that the Cranach blog appears in a sans serif font–something that is outside of my control–that does not mean that we have sold out to liberalism. When I write these posts, from within the blog’s dashboard, they are in properly conservative serif.
Science Shoots Down Medical Marijuana Claims
Forty states have legalized medical marijuana, which has been hyped as a cure-all for all kinds of afflictions. States took this action in the absence of scientific testing. Finally, a large-scale study of the medical benefits of cannabis has been completed. The findings: with certain exceptions, medical cannabis has few medical benefits.
From the New York Times:
To treat their pain, anxiety and sleep problems, millions of Americans turn to cannabis, which is now legal in 40 states for medical use. But a new review of 15 years of research concludes that the evidence of its benefits is often weak or inconclusive . . .
“The evidence does not support the use of cannabis or cannabinoids at this point for most of the indications that folks are using it for,” said Dr. Michael Hsu, an addiction psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the review, which was published last month in the medical journal JAMA.
Researchers found no conclusive evidence that marijuana helps with acute pain, anxiety, or sleeplessness.
There is, however, some evidence that certain formulations of THC (the component of cannabis that gets you high) and CBD (the component that doesn’t) can help with chronic pain. Some prescription medications available in pharmacies that contain cannabis are indeed effective in stemming nausea from chemo-therapy, improving appetites, and easing pediatric seizures.
Also, CBD gummies can indeed help with anxiety. (In my day, marijuana was thought to make you paranoid, but that must have been the THC.)
One big concern raised by the report is that almost 30% of patients who use medical cannabis have cannabis use disorder.
My takeaway from this study is that cannabis needs more study but that it can be used to make effective medicines for certain conditions. But, like other medicines, they need to be thoroughly tested and, if found effective, sold only in pharmacies with a doctor’s prescription. As opposed to how it’s done in my native Oklahoma: claiming a condition, getting a medical cannabis card on demand, and buying your “medicine” at a “dispensary” that looks like a head shop.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In