Wallace-Wells Interviews Walensky
• David Wallace-Wells does a very good interview with outgoing CDC Director Rachel Walensky in the NYT.
Humans shift the word’s axis
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.
Navalny on What Should Happen in Russia
• Definitely worth a read: Alexei Navalny’s essay in the Washington Post, communicated via his legal team.
Worthwhile substacks with a medical bent
• Once again advocating for these excellent science-based, rational, primarily medically-oriented Substack newsletters:
Kristen Panthagani’s You Can Know Things
and
Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist
Jamelle Bouie Agrees
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.
What makes some Republicans so bad…
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.
The Orange Man is Bad
• Matt Yglesias has it right in his The Orange Man is Bad Slow Boring Substack entry. Excerpted:
“Trump simply stands head and shoulders above the average American politician in his willingness to take things to the edge, to flout the law, and to act with reckless disdain for the consequences his actions will have for anyone. The law is important, and the fact that this particular act of scumbaggery is apparently illegal gives it a special significance. But for my money, the most morally shocking thing about Trump’s post-presidency is still the extent to which he sullenly refused to be a constructive player in promoting Covid vaccination in 2021.
A very large number of people — Trump voters — got sicker than they might have because of this, and a bunch of them died. And I think that’s a crucial fact about Trump that tends to be overlooked despite the volume of coverage he attracts. His efforts to supposedly owns the libs mostly involve deceiving and betraying his own supporters.
Trump markets himself as a down-and-dirty fighter who champions the right’s causes through his refusal to play the game with kid gloves. In truth, he’s a sub-par politician who’s not good at winning elections or advancing a legislative agenda or convincing people of conservative ideas.
He’s a con man, and conservatives are the marks.”
AlphaZero Improves Sorting/Hashing
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…
Why All the Subtitles?
• Devin Gordon writes on the rising use of subtitles in his article in The Atlantic – “Why Is Everyone Watching TV With The Subtitles On?” It’s not just the hearing impaired; the group using subtitles the most on Roku are millennials. There are multiple reasons for doing it, some technical artifacts of streaming compression. A quick, fun read.
Some Good News – Really
• Sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there has definitely been significant human progress in many parts of the world – dramatic drops in infant mortality, neonatal and obstetric deaths, cancer mortality, and poverty. Nicholas Kristof writes about this in his “This May Be the Most Important Thing Happening in the World Today” opinion piece in the NY Times. Some excerpts:
“We happen to live in a transformational era in which 96 percent of the world’s children now survive until adulthood…
…But one reason the world doesn’t do more to help poor countries is exhaustion, a sense that nothing works. I fear that misperception is driven partly by journalists like me, and by aid workers, advocates and other bleeding hearts.
We pounce upon crises, so what the public hears about in Africa is carnage in Sudan, hunger in Somalia and massacres in Ethiopia. Those are real problems that deserve more attention, not less — but we don’t do enough to illuminate the backdrop of gains in health, education and well-being.
Many people believe that global poverty is hopeless — 87 percent said in a 2016 survey that poverty had stayed the same or gotten worse over the previous two decades — while in fact the share of the world’s people living in extreme poverty has plunged from 38 percent in 1990 to about 8 percent now.”