March 2024
Wednesday, 27 March 2024
Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores
Ziyad Al-Aly, The Conversation: “… a three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support.”
Dealing with Global Warming Over the Next Fifty Years
Brad DeLong: “And given the pace of Schumpeterian creative-destruction we have experienced since 1870, we have only managed to hold things together when […] we have had a large positive technological dividend to distribute.”
“No way to prevent this” say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso: “At press time, users of the only programming language in the world where these vulnerabilities regularly happen once or twice per quarter for the last eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as "helpless.”“
Saturday, 23 March 2024
Facing reality, whether it’s about Apple or the EU, is a core requirement for good management
Baldur Bjarnason: "Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU’s side to accommodate business interests.”
Monday, 18 March 2024
“No way to prevent this” say users of only language where this regularly happens
Xe Iaso: “‘This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,’ said programmer Lady Lurline Schuster, echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world’s memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.”
Wednesday, 13 March 2024
Boeing fails large portion of FAA audit as investigators probe New Zealand 787 incident
Kris Van Cleave, Emily Mae Czachor, CBS News: “New Zealand’s Transport Accident Investigation Commission announced on Tuesday that it would seize the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder from the aircraft in hopes of learning more about what happened, but early reports suggest that the 787 plane’s flight control system may have temporarily malfunctioned. ‘The best way to describe it is, it dropped out of the air instantly,’ said Brian Jokat, a passenger on the LATAM flight. ‘Then it started to tail down, like, nose down.’”
Friday, 8 March 2024
Macron has started something with his brilliant little blunder
Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth, The Hill: “He doubled down on his message in Prague on March 5, stating that ‘Europe has been cut in two by cowardice, by the desire of one part of Europe not to see the difficulties of the other, to abandon its destiny to totalitarianism.’”
Tracking-ads industry faces another body blow in the EU
Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch: “The Belgian DPA’s decision was — and still is — a big deal for web users in Europe where consent spam has proliferated since the GDPR came into force in May 2018 — littering websites with never-ending pop-ups soliciting consent for ‘sharing’ user data with long lists of ad ‘partners’.”
Tuesday, 5 March 2024
Cars will need fewer screens and more buttons to earn 5-star safety rating in Europe
Jess Weatherbed, The Verge: “The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem”
The Supreme Court’s “Unanimous” Trump Ballot Ruling Is Actually a 5–4 Disaster
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate: “The majority had no reason to nullify the insurrection clause other than an obvious desire to ensure that no other federal candidates are nixed from the ballot because of their participation in Jan. 6.”