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Here's my 1st piece of overt political propaganda--the first of a series about the systems that undergird our daily lives, which are always one generation of inattention away from catastrophe. Message: they're important! Paywall is lifted, please pass on. bit.ly/4gBYpuC
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
I got a mailer supposedly from the LA County GOP telling me that Nithya is a socialist and Reagan was against socialism on the same day that the U.S. govt suffered big paper losses from its ownership share of Intel, brought on by our socialist/Peronist/GOP prez's stake in said company. The socialist calls are coming from inside the White House.
Kevin Roberts apparently wants you to vote against the party that is seizing private companies and centralizing control over the economy.
It's a surprising take, for sure, but for once I find myself agreeing with him
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Really enjoyed this characteristically excellent @dwarkesh_sp interview with Robert Caro. And I was amused that Caro, like me when Dwarkesh interviewed me, was vocally startled by how sharp and interesting his questions were.
The master biographer reflects at 91. The Robert Caro interview.
0:00:00 – How Caro gets people to talk
0:05:03 – Does America need a little more Moses today?
0:12:42 – Moses the young idealist
0:17:57 – Watching Moses lose power
0:24:01 – Did Moses realize he was changing?
ng the Great Depression
0:32:51 – The threats and promises of Lyndon Johnson
0:36:08 – Could Kennedy have passed Johnson’s laws?
0:41:00 – Getting a book down to one sentence
0:46:21 – All the material that never made it into the books
0:52:59 – Loneliness
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Fine piece about how wildly different the mores of Victorian elites were from our elites today. (Side note: As a journo myself, I was tickled by the artful way the writer finessed the inevitable, impossible question, "Was this system a good or bad thing?")
worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seve…
worksinprogress.co/issue/the-seve…
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
This is exactly the kind of perspective that will keep us from unlocking the potential of AI to improve scientific publication. Using AI to improve the review process, doesn't mean eliminating the human element.
AI is now better than than human peer reviewers on nearly every metric. If editors and journals are paying attention, this should change academic publishing for the better. gking.harvard.edu/files/peerless…
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
Housework used to take 58 hours a week.
Today it's less than 9.
Some economists argue the washing machine was the most liberating technology ever invented.
🎧 @vpostrel and @CharlesCMann explain on this NEW episode of Everyday Abundance.
Today it's less than 9.
Some economists argue the washing machine was the most liberating technology ever invented.
🎧 @vpostrel and @CharlesCMann explain on this NEW episode of Everyday Abundance.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
Wow! Did not know they still existed at this scale in the Fraser River. (Catch and release)
A St Louis woman has caught a recording breaking fish in British Columbia.
It's an 11 ft. 4 in. white sturgeon.
It's officially the largest freshwater fish ever caught by a female angler at 1,200 pounds.
The fish was tagged and released.
Hear Katharine Eckert tell The Chris & Amy d experience!
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I had real trouble believing that Google was actually doing this, but I just duplicated the result myself. The two queries were about a minute apart and identical except for a single digit.
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Talking with a pal, it occurred to me that Iranian Lego videos are, by themselves, proof that RFK Jr. is wrong about the shortage of creativity in the Islamic world.
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Nice new feature on Firefox: a menu item that lets you easily strip tracking tags from URLs. Removing trackers from links while sharing is a pain and I sometimes forget, so this should be a small, helpful advance in the daily struggle against the panopticon.
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All of this is correct, IMHO. The one thing I would add is that the Brazilian-Japanese food I've had, esp in Sao Paulo, is extraordinary and like nowhere else.
Brazil really does have some of the best food in the world, and I always encourage people to visit. I've never had a bad time in that country, and I go for a few weeks every year. The beaches are incredible and extremely affordable to visit/stay at. The food is highly underrated, Bay Area (where I live).
@tylercowen is correct when has says: "Of the very finest steak meals I have had, two of the top three were in southern Brazil."
In Minas Gerais, a mountainous region in the south of Brazil (a few hours west of Rio de Janeiro), you can find arguably the best BBQ in the world. There are many small restaurants that still use open-fire cooking to smoke sausages (called linguiça), top sirloin (called picanha), filet mignon, and chicken hearts or livers. The meats have a char and softness that I have never found at, say, Fogo de Chao, which in my opinion is not even comparable to actual Brazilian food.
We ordered both the linguiça and picanha, and they were better than anything I've had in Texas, Kansas, or other hotspots. (I used to live in Kansas.) We also ordered a bunch of yuca or cassava appetizers; one is simply fried yuca with salt, and the other is mandioca cozida com manteiga de garrafa, which means cooked yuca topped with clarified butter.
The desserts are also excellent. The brown blob is cocada morena, a caramelized coconut sweet that is soft and commonly eaten with a spoon. The liquid-looking dessert is Ambrosia; it has a flavor sorta like flan, and it's made with just milk, eggs, and sugar. The green loops (that look like Fruit Rollups) are unripened strips of papaya rolled into spirals and then cooked in a sugar syrup.
Go to Brazil! You will have a great time, enjoy wonderful food, and meet many kind and charistmatic people.
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A lawyer pal in Nevada saw the Justice Dept press release on the left and passed it on to me (I was raised in WA, my sibs still live there), along with the screen-cap on the right. "Wanna bet history repeats itself?" he said. "These guys are gluttons for punishment."
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One thing about Washington is that the 2004 gubernatorial election was so close (Gregoire won by 129 votes) that the state and both parties examined the voter database with extreme care, scrubbed it of anomalies, and set up procedures to keep it clean. So WA is a weird target.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
Cartoons are powerful stuff. I didn't realize how critical Nast's cartoons were to taking down political corruption in NYC back in the day.
I also didn't know about the Vanna White case in California that leaves a bit of a black box as to when something counts as parody. If you made the parody, you certainly wouldn't want to be dragged through court to find out if it gets a pass on name, image, and likeness rights.
I also didn't know about the Vanna White case in California that leaves a bit of a black box as to when something counts as parody. If you made the parody, you certainly wouldn't want to be dragged through court to find out if it gets a pass on name, image, and likeness rights.
.@JohnHardin considers whether some of today's proposed AI deepfake laws could have helped one of America's most corrupt politicians silence his critics.
In 1871, political cartoonist Thomas Nast was exposing New York City's infamous Boss Tweed through illustrations of his furious, complaining that while his constituents might not read newspaper articles, they would see "them damned pictures."
He even tried bribing Nast to leave the country and stop drawing.
Tweed couldn't sue Nast simply for using his likeness without permission.
Today, the NO FAKES Act would create broad federal rights over people's likenesses to address AI-generated impersonations.
While the bill includes protections for satire and commentary, history offers a warning about how expansive likeness rights can threaten free expression.
A modern Thomas Nast shouldn't need a legal defense fund or a powerful politician's permission to criticize him.
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Two cheers for global warming? New Science paper argues that the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin I., last remaining bit of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered N America, restarted growing ~2K yrs ago but began shrinking ~1960 due to climate change, maybe ending oncoming ice age.
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Here's the paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… A key sentence: "The demise of the next glaciation, despite the ongoing decline in summer insolation, illustrates the influence of anomalous greenhouse gas forcing on climate."
/v @erleellis
/v @erleellis
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“'The field has gotten very polarized,' said Anna-Christina Eilers, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies little red dots."
Fun Wired story about the furious debate over the "little red dots" seen in the Webb telescope. wired.com/story/inside-t…
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Fun Wired story about the furious debate over the "little red dots" seen in the Webb telescope. wired.com/story/inside-t…
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 retweeted
The transcript for my Madison's Notes interview with @CharlesCMann talking about his @tnajournal essay series, "How the System Works," is now available on substack:
"Progress Is A Choice: on the Systems of Modern Civilization" (mortals.substack.com/p/progress-is-…).
"Progress Is A Choice: on the Systems of Modern Civilization" (mortals.substack.com/p/progress-is-…).
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