Link. Trump appointees shut down the investigation.
Olympic BMXer: “25 fractures, 12 screws, eight surgeries and countless tears of ligaments and tendons”
Link. Things that are fun and exciting attract more trauma than playing cribbage.
Lead in chocolate: “organic cocoa products had a higher risk of being contaminated with either metal than non-organic products”
Link. The standard they used is very strict. Using the less strict US FDA standard 3% exceed.
Cloud Migration Regrets: “businesses lifted and shifted applications, thinking they would slowly rewrite them, but then they didn’t”
Link. It’s marketing but for me interesting.
(Personally I migrated my simple tasks to Google Cloud, migrating back to local store was tedious)
Imagining images: “when you really dig into it, everybody experiences something wildly different.” 🆓
Link. “subset of people with extremely vivid imaginations who are known as maladaptive daydreamers. Some choose to live in their imagination”
We run an emulation layer on our minds that is tied to language. Under that layer we run different operating systems. We are all aliens.
Paris triumphant: Hidalgo’s Seine bet pays off (free link)
Link. Hidalgo is one hell of a mayor. She seems likely to go for the presidency.
Venezuala’s Maduro declares victory: “an opposition candidate, a retired diplomat named Edmundo González, actually beat Mr. Maduro by more than 30 percentage points”
Link. Even a near-dictator can’t lose an election by so much and stay in power.
Trump declares JD Vance is unimportant and not worth talking about.
Link. As he declared Harris was fake Black he also urged everyone to ignore JD Vance. He’d dump Vance yesterday except he needs Musk’s money.
Musk’s Trump PAC (“America PAC”) is floundering
Link. Twitter users are supporting Trump.
US “fertility rate dipped to 1.6 births per 1,000 women”
Link. Canada is 1.43. US used to be different from developed world; with higher rates in low income. Now it’s converging with Canada, though still far higher than Korea. No nation has been able to reverse the lower fertility that comes with wealth and female education.
Who is weird: “there are so few educated conservatives nowadays that it’ll be hard to provide intellectual leadership to the masses” 🆓
Link. Dem smarties are happy to be weird but for conservatives weirdness is death.
It is remarkable that the smart MAGA are pretty much all evil people.
Antarctic glaciers: “The scientists spotted several seals living in a fracture in Dotson’s ice”
Link. The undersides sound great for seals but they do need air …
Braggoscope: a fan tool for exploring the In Our Time archive. 🆓
Link. Via Mastodon. Lovely gift to all.
New Europe attraction: Trans Dinarica route.
Link. “… journeys a momentous 5,000km and contains around 100 different stages. It was completed at the end of June …”
“Rodrik’s trilemma suggests that out of the three goals—economic globalization, national sovereignty, and democracy—only two can be fully achieved simultaneously.”
Link. This is new to me and quite interesting. I heard of it in the context of an In Our Time podcast on mercantilism as a last minute comment.
IOT: Mercantilism – podcast.
Link. Very topical.
21st century China and 19th century Prussia have common features
Mississippi River falls to the Asian carp – dog food might get cheaper.
Link. They are supposed to be quite healthy for dogs — but there are a lot of carp.
“10 breeding pairs could inundate the [Great Lakes] ecosystem”
Project 2025 goes undercover.
Link. Wars between Trump loyalists, mostly incompetents.
“soreness and pain from swimming is her own choice, she said, “so it’s a lot easier for me to accept that than to accept that pancreatic pain.”
Link. Treating chronic severe pain with long cold miserable and even more painful endurance swims is a novel approach.
“The idea of a big shift from an unknown Australopithecus-like species to Homo erectus has given way to an understanding that none of these hominins around 2 million years ago were very different from each other.”
Link. Updates a lot of old ideas. It’s only recently (basically yesterday) that we have had one hominid on earth.
“why sloth bears are so aggressive … “The answer I always got from people was, ‘It’s because they fight with tigers,’”
Link. The blurry video should be watched. Do not approach that sleepy vegetarian bear.
“E3 protein called cereblon that thalidomide fits into really well. Must have a lot to do with its bioactivity”
Link. Derek Lowe imagines a chemist of the 90s presented with the latest in modern biotech. Going where no-one has gone before.
The Druse of Israel: “Druse doctrine is unknown even to the majority of the Druse community and has been an enigma to religious scholars.”
Link. Free link because I learned several surprising things reading this.
The Druse remind me of Mormonism.
“In 2018, Israel passed a law that defined the right to national self-determination as being “unique to the Jewish people.” This is what the Christian Nationalists want America to do.
Yet another old person scam gets to the NYT: “scheme based in India.”
Link. We American Olds are losing our wits (data suggests starts in 50s for most), many have cash, and there is no risk for the criminals. This is the ultimate growth industry.
Best to not be online at all.
(The most likely fix is the AI Guardian.)
Chinese EVs crush combustion in tariff-free Thailand.
Link. “$25,000 package for the Y Plus that included an eight-year warranty, installation of a home charger and 12 months of insurance.”
Capitalism and massive government subsidies mean China will rule the auto world. Our tariffs will only slow the demise of US auto companies.
From a survey of travelers: “28 percent said they are tired of hearing about climate change”
Link. A smooth transition from denialism to ennui. (Some is justified cynicism about corporate slogans.)
I expect CO2 boredom to reach 60% in the US in the next few years.
Progress will be made in the shadows, out of public attention.
Capitalism: “in 2004, it took the world a whole year to install a gigawatt of solar-power capacity … In 2023 there were single days which saw a gigawatt of installation worldwide”
Link. China rules the sun.
Tau blood test could help identify Alzheimer’s in persons with significant cognitive loss.
Link. Limited value until we have better therapies or preventive measures. Interesting even specialists can’t reliably differentiate Alzheimer’s from other dementias. (Many are likely multiple causes).
Interesting is tau.
The Guinea Worm died first.
Link. Carter can pass now.
“apparent gulf between the muon’s predicted anomalous magnetic moment and that predicted by the Standard Model is not as large as previous findings suggested”
Link. Argghhhhh.
The case against UBI (excluding the AGI apocalypse)
Link. He argues non-AGI UBI reduces economic growth by increasing leisure time and decreasing work output. Assumption that society will not tolerate falling incomes.
I like this as a framework for discussion especially through a disability lens.
“Trump is monologuing his evil plans here, because he has no sense and can’t not.”
Link. I have always appreciated Trump’s transparency.
Eswatini: “We are a fortress, we are a mystery, we hide ourselves away, we are powerful ones”
Link. Yeah. Definitely Wakanda. Independent 1968 from UK.
Formerly Swaziland.
The Evolution of the AI Stack: from the 00s to year 1 in the new calendar.
Link. jk about year one but this is a fun overview.
(They will want their own calendar though)
Mexican crime boss betrayed and captured and this is a crazy story. 🆓
Link. It’s wild. Free link.
Russia key Interest Rate 18 Percent as Putin unleashes the printing press.
Link. Can Trump win in time to save Putin?
COVID-19 was, unsurprisingly, very hard on teachers.
Link. At the time I’d have said they, and school staff, got the worst of the pandemic. They still head my list.
“mainline Protestant Christianity was in near free fall, and the numbers of nonreligious were rising every single year”
Link. The most important American politics article of 2024. Via Mastodon.
The pastor-academic wrote a book called “None”.
(Hilariously our Antichrist is an atheist who is the last champion of the fundaments)
“no difference in survival if you have a lumpectomy, a mastectomy or a double mastectomy.”
Link. 7% chance second cancer regardless.
This is very hard to understand. Suggests we are missing something big about breast cancer.
“although her blood level was normal, the level of B12 in her cerebrospinal fluid was nearly undetectable”
Link. Autoantibodies blocking brain uptake.
Math Olympiad: “A.I. performed at the level of a silver medalist, solving four out of six problems for a total of 28 points.”
Link. “The system was allowed unlimited time; for some problems it took up to three days. The students were allotted only 4.5 hours per exam.”
Adobe couldn’t quit its happy accident: “There is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously” in the order flow without “taking a big business hit,” this executive said.”
Link. Apple plays similar games and they get worse every year.
“the risk of dementia was 17% lower in those who received Shingrix compared with Zostavax”
Link. Intriguing in many directions. Can’t show causation but effect was expected.
“When a shingles vaccine, Zostavax, was first rolled out in 2006, a number of studies found hints that the risk of dementia seemed to be lower in those who got the shots.”
If animal studies agree Shingrix will be a popular vaccine.
“you can prevent Mail from crashing unexpectedly by quitting and relaunching the app after you work in the Previous Recipients window”
Link. I edit Previous Recipients every year or two.
Reddit blocks all robots but Google.
Link. The content wars begin.
Novel gene editing fixes mouse model progeria.🆓
Link. Not CRISPR, rather a 2017 gene editor created by torturing bacteria that has very focal action that happens to work for mouse model progeria (single gene disease). Kolata masterfully blends personal stories and science. I suspect a book is pending ….
PS. They expect future fixes for other terrible genetic diseases.
“Expect Llama 3.1 to cause the AI world to evolve even faster”
Link. Apocalypse now.
Mouse study of placebo effect implicates role of anterior cingulate cortex in pain perception
Link. The sensory inputs don’t change, but mouse behavioral manifestations of pain respond to an “expectation” of relief. The human analogue would be the common pain relief that is felt a few minutes after taking Advil (before it can actually do anything).
Sensory inputs come from the periphery, but pain is always in your head.
NYC bike guy: “it’s my personal belief that the pedal-powered bike does have the power to make a city better, but everything else is basically just more crap.”
Link. America is a dystopian nation; our vandalism is legendary. For some reason bicycles are more often stolen than vandalized.
I wonder if non-bicycle micro mobility works better in Canada. MSP is not as bad as the Bronx. There are relatively easy regulatory fixes for Type II/III eBikes.
Phones have messed up young women: “well-being of young adults (ages 18-25), especially young women, went into precipitous decline beginning around 2017”
Link. I also believe it’s the smartphones, but the effect is gender specific. It’s girls, not boys.