Writing in the NY Times, David Wallace-Wells compares mortality rates in the U.S. to that in our peer nations, and (no surprise) we don’t  match up well. Most of the data comes from a paper entitled Missing Americans: Early death in the United States—1933–2021 by Bor, Stokes, Raifman et al.

I particularly liked the concluding paragraph from Matt Yglesias’ Slow Boring substack post re. the new Ivy+ Admissions Paper:

“Fundamentally, though, you come back to the themes of my Strange Death ofEducation Reform series about improving public education. This proved to be a substantively difficult and politically unrewarding task. But it’s actually very important! The victims of the inequities identified in this paper — kids with good grades, 1500+ SAT scores, generally from families in the 70th-80th percentile of the income distribution — do perfectly well in the United States of America. The much larger problem is poor kids for whom K-12 school quality makes a huge difference but who often don’t have access to the best teachers or the best curriculum. This doesn’t key into the personal identity issues of New York Times subscribers in the same way that arguing about Ivy League admissions does, but it’s much more important.”

Randall Monroe and XKCD serendipitously meet up with JAMA…

Wallace J, Goldsmith-Pinkham P, Schwartz JL. Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA Intern Med. Published online July 24, 2023. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1154

“Findings  In this cohort study evaluating 538 159 deaths in individuals aged 25 years and older in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021, excess mortality was significantly higher for Republican voters than Democratic voters after COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults, but not before. These differences were concentrated in counties with lower vaccination rates, and primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.”

Apparently, (see this science article in the NYT by Raymond Zhong) polar ice cap melting from increased global temperatures is not the only way we affect the wobble in the earth’s rotation axis; there are also effects due to our pumping of ground water!  I was completely unaware of the vast volume that must be being pumped in order to have a demonstrable  planetary influence.

I guess Jamelle Bouie agrees – from his NY Times Republicans Have Made Their Choice piece:

“Most things in life, and especially a basic respect for democracy and the rule of law, have to be cultivated. What is striking about the Republican Party is the extent to which it has, for decades now, cultivated the opposite — a highly instrumental view of our political system, in which rules and laws are legitimate only insofar as they allow for the acquisition and concentration of power in Republican hands.”

And don’t miss his June 24 column, Republicans Serve Up Red Meat for a Reason; it’s devastatingly accurate.

Setting aside the all-too-commonly voiced support for the candidate who is so obviously unfit for office, what I find most disgraceful among many republican political office holders is the divisiveness they continue to stoke with their pro forma statements of support for the orange one, statements that most of them know are untrue.  What they keep spouting with their “deep state,”weaponized,” “politicized,” (and worse) rhetoric is bad for a country already suffering from excessive division.  But apparently their concern is not for the country – it’s for staying in power, despite the obvious cost.

Another obvious example of politicking without regard to consequence – their push to cut funding for the IRS, which could result in an INCREASE in the deficit, since it will likely cut tax revenue by over $200 billion.

Maybe this is the first example of, well, AI offsetting some of the emissions costs of generative AI.  From venturebeat.com:

“Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepMind has achieved a remarkable feat in computer science through its latest AI system, AlphaDev. This specialized version of AlphaZero has made a significant breakthrough by uncovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms, which are essential processes utilized trillions of times daily by developers worldwide for data sorting, storage and retrieval…In a paper published in the science journal Nature, DeepMind asserts that AlphaDev’s newly discovered algorithm achieves a 70% increase in efficiency for sorting short sequences of elements and approximately 1.7% for sequences surpassing 250,000 elements, as compared to the algorithms in the C++ library. Consequently, when a user submits a search query, AlphaDev’s algorithm facilitates faster sorting of results, leading to significant time and energy savings when employed on a large scale.”

Wait, I can’t forget DeepMind’s leap in solving protein structures…

I honestly can’t remember nodding along with a Marc Thiessen opinion piece, but I did agree with most of this one in the Washington Post, where Thiessen writes “This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine.”

Jamelle Bouie, writing in the Times, once again discusses the significant problems with the Supreme Court, both at present and for the foreseeable future:

“The problem of the Supreme Court isn’t that its members are mired in ethics scandals (although they are). It isn’t that it’s been captured by a network of conservative apparatchiks and right-wing billionaires (although it has). No, the problem of the Supreme Court is that it is a powerful and unaccountable branch of government whose traditional role has been to protect the rights of property and the prerogatives of the privileged above all other concerns.”

I’m afraid he’s right.

Madison Hilly writes in the NY Times about how the risks and health consequences of fission reactors (especially modern designs) are overblown, important since reactors may be necessary in order to reduce emissions as much as we need to in the next 2 decades.