Tuesday 14th May 2024

  • After Al Jazeera, Will Israel Target Its Own Media? - Foreign Policy (No paywall)

    Rights groups worry the closing of the Qatari network is just the beginning.

    Continued here

  • Eric Schmidt: Why America needs an Apollo program for the age of AI - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)

    Advanced computing is core to the security and prosperity of the US. We need to lay the groundwork now.

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  • The Most Polluted U.S. Cities in 2024

    Six of the top seven cities are in California, and four in the state’s Central Valley, a 450-mile flat valley that runs parallel to the Pacific coast, and bordered by the Coast and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. As a result, when pollution from the big population centers on the coast is carried inland by the wind—cities #5 and #6 on the list—it tends to get trapped in the valley. 

    Bakersfield (#1), Visalia (#2), and Fresno (#3) are located at the drier and hotter southern end of the valley, which is worse for air quality. The top three local sources of PM2.5 emissions in 2023 were farms (20%), forest management / agricultural waste burning (20%), and road dust (14%). 

    Continued here

  • Predicting the Future with Bayes’ Theorem

    In episode #37 of The Knowledge Project, we talked with professional poker player Annie Duke about thinking in probabilities, something good poker players do all the time. At the poker table or in life, it’s useful to think in probabilities versus absolutes based on all the information you have available to you.

    Thomas Bayes was an English minister in the 18th century, whose most famous work, “An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” was brought to the attention of the Royal Society in 1763—two years after his death—by his friend Richard Price. The essay did not contain the theorem as we now know it but had the seeds of the idea. It looked at how to adjust our estimates of probabilities when encountering new data that influence a situation. Later development by French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace and others helped codify the theorem and develop it into a useful tool for thinking.

    Continued here

  • How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time

    Despite having been published in 1910, Arnold Bennett’s book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day remains a valuable resource on living a meaningful life within the constraints of time. In the book, Bennett addresses one of our oldest questions: how can we make the best use of our lives? How can we make the best use of our time?

    Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum…but I have never seen an essay ‘how to live on 24 hours a day.’ Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time, you can obtain money-usually. But…you cannot buy yourself a minute more time.

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  • Dyslucksia — LessWrong

    Also, I don't actually technically know if I'm dyslectic cause I was never diagnosed. Instead I thought I was pretty dumb but if I worked really hard no one would notice. Later I felt inordinately angry about why anyone could possibly care about the exact order of letters when the gist is perfectly clear even if if if I right liike tis.

    Later I found out my mother made sure my siblings never made me aware it was unusual I was still reading out loud. Instead she signed me up for competitions to read books on the local radio. This was before the wide-spread internet and audio books. Later I'd read to my parents sometimes, who were always excited about how much energy I threw into the endeavor.

    Continued here

  • How Exceptional Is China’s Crony-Capitalist Boom? | by Yuen Yuen Ang - Project Syndicate

    Yuen Yuen Ang explains how corruption both drove the country's GDP growth and sowed the seeds for its current economic problems.

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  • We've entered a world of zombie inflation. Wall Street is scared witless. - Business Insider (No paywall)

    The sudden resurgence of inflation has caused some more alarmist analysts to suggest that the US economy is in deep trouble.

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  • Low testosterone levels linked to higher risk of dying early, new research suggests - Business Insider (No paywall)

    Low testosterone is can cause symptoms like brain fog and fatigue, but new research suggests it's linked to higher risk of dying early, too.

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  • Weight loss jab could reduce heart attack risk, study finds

    The jab could reduce heart attack and stroke risks regardless of the amount of weight people lose.

    Continued here

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