July 2023
Sunday, 30 July 2023
The “Promise” of “Easier” Programming
Chris Hanson: “Maintaining any sort of environment-oriented system over time is much more difficult simply because making comparisons between variants can become incredibly complex, and often isn’t possible except when working within the system itself.”
‘Era of global boiling has arrived,’ says UN chief as July set to be hottest month on record
Ajit Niranjan, The Guardian: “In a roadmap to net zero emissions drawn up by the International Energy Agency, there should have been no new oil and gasfields approved for development from 2021. Instead, governments including the US, UK and Australia have granted licences to drill for more.”
Monday, 24 July 2023
‘We can’t escape’: climate crisis is driving up cost of living in the US west
Maanvi Singh, The Guardian: “A survey by researchers at Columbia University found that nearly 30% of households in California kept their homes at a temperature that was unhealthy or unsafe to save on energy costs.”
Hollywood is on strike because CEOs fell for Silicon Valley’s magical thinking
Brian Merchant, Los Angeles Times: “do studio execs really think consumers want to watch a parade of digital replicas of their favorite actors parroting lines from an AI-generated script? Or are they simply aware that the mere threat of such a future gives them leverage and power over the workers of today?”
Spartans Were Losers
Bret Devereaux, Foreign Policy: “The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tacticss.”
Saturday, 22 July 2023
The immunology of long COVID
Nature Reviews Immunology: “The oncoming burden of long COVID faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable, which is possibly why minimal high-level planning is currently allocated to it.”
Thursday, 20 July 2023
How to pull carbon dioxide out of seawater
David L. Chandler, MIT News: “‘With desalination plants, you’re already pumping all the water, so why not co-locate there?’ Varanasi says. ‘A bunch of capital costs associated with the way you move the water, and the permitting, all that could already be taken care of.’”
Wednesday, 19 July 2023
Good Evening, We Are from Ukraine: The Subversive Radicalism of a Viral Wartime Slogan
Maria Sonevytsky, Los Angeles Review of Books: “ Like Rosie the Riveter’s steely-armed invitation to American women, the we here is an opening.”
Saturday, 15 July 2023
2023 NATO Public Forum | Day 1 [11 July 2023]
Gary Kasparov: “People who want to leave from Putin’s ‘North Korea’ and move to our virtual ‘South Korea’ have to say three things in five seconds without stuttering: the war is criminal, the regime is illegitimate, Crimea is Ukraine.”
…
“The whole idea that you can negotiate peace is impossible. Not every war ends at the negotiating table. War on values can not end at the negotiating table. … There’s no negotiated outcome if you have two very opposite set of values. Putin wants to bring the world back to ‘might is right.’ Ukrainians fighting … the only war NATO was built for, which is defending for Europe.‘”
Friday, 14 July 2023
There’s no such thing as a disaster-resistant place anymore
Rachel DuRose, Vox: “In recent years, reinsurers have dealt with mounting losses globally, and therefore are raising their prices. ’[The reinsurer] is going to pass those costs on to primary insurance and then the primary insurers are going to pass those costs onto their policyholders,‘ Thistlethwaite said. 'There is some truth that a tranche of your premium is going to be reflective of the international risk environment generally.’”
Tuesday, 4 July 2023
The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”
Ben Taub, The New Yorker: “The primary task of a submersible is to not implode.”