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The Fad Diet to End All Fad Diets - The Atlantic (No paywall)
There isn’t much evidence that intermittent fasting leads to lasting weight loss. Why is it still so popular?
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Stormy Daniels’s American Dream - The New Yorker (No paywall)
Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to portray the scrappy adult-film actress as a lying profiteer. Instead, she emerged as an intelligent, credible witness who is also very good at making money.
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South Korea's ambitious plan to rescue its population
The fertility rate in Asia's fourth-largest economy dropped for the fourth consecutive year in 2023.
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Who’s the father? For these baby animals, one doesn’t exist.
More animals can occasionally reproduce asexually than scientists realized.
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The United States Has a Keen Demographic Edge - Foreign Policy (No paywall)
Competitors of the United States face plunging birthrates and social gloom.
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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.
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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%).
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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.
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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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Tuesday 14th May 2024
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