this week i

updated our key facts about the uninsured using the american community survey.  the onion, however, reliant on the survey of consumer finances

ate with rupak: soba, momo.  what's that pang?  perhaps your fomo.  arriving to leave no trace graffitied on the subway walls, i learned baltimore's superlative (tallest pentagonal building), al smith signed letters smoking to your health, english speakers toggle between our own language and the german translation to distinguish whether or not ice mountains the seafaring kind, putin derivative of annie leibovitz's 1988 mounted schwarzenegger






 
see huseyin quoted by name among the rest of this weekend's reporting.  blessings to both those who've recently sneezed and those who've not alike

innovative drugs are expensive, and their costs do not always justify the benefits they offer
 
tokyo's bet on the magical powers of the four-day week comes as the number of babies born in japan in 2024 is on course to fall below 700,000 for the first time since records began in 1899

"macron is a president in a bunker, and his new prime minister must take into account the new political situation," said jordan bardella, rn party chief

elsewhere, agitated detainees displaying symptoms of mental illness were typically subdued by violent force, including beating with truncheons and batons.  though private contractors were obliged to provide detainees with activities such as computer literacy courses and access to religious representatives, these appeared largely "chimeric", the report said

saudi arabia was confirmed as the sole bidder soon after.  saudi aramco, the state-run oil company, later became fifa's top global sponsor
 
 

read..


 

(3) 'how many did it make sleepless?'

kant thought this story obscene: any theophany which commands so fundamental an ethical transgression as child murder cannot be considered divine; still less can obedience to it be celebrated as exemplary piety.  this was his pretext for arguing that moral reason must never submit to authority, even when that authority seems to speak with the voice of god.  it wasn't just a theological matter.  isaac's binding by his obscene and irrational father, abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage kant wanted society to escape.  prudently, the prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again

genesis probably reached its current form by the fifth century bce, though some of it is much older

the parallel between noah's flood and that of utnapishtim, narrated in the epic of gilgamesh, precisely because they 'differ crucially at the points of similarity'.  for mesopotamian cultures, the universe was subject to capricious, amoral, powerful but limited gods who were often in conflict and whose sole interest in humanity was as a substitute labour force which fed them through sacrifice.  in one version the flood is causeless, in another it is prompted because the din of humanity interferes with divine sleep

'the story..was always about cain'..abel's name means 'vapour'

 

(4) modern smallpox killed a third of its victims - between 300 and 500 million in the 20th century alone - and blinded a quarter

sequencing of smallpox dna found in the mummified remains of a lithuanian child buried around 1650 has shown that variola major, the vicious form of the disease that devastated much of the world in modern times, only emerged after 1500

a roman amulet protecting against plague, found in the thames in 1989, warns against kissing

demographic studies suggest that the city of rome would have produced 45,000 kilos of faeces and 1.3 million litres of urine a day.  going by the frequency of signs daubed on pompeian walls forbidding their use as a toilet, plenty of it was produced in public.  and that wasn't the only distasteful form of fly-tipping: archaeologists have found pits full of infant remains in cities throughout the empire.  they appear to confirm ancient reports that romans regularly abandoned unwanted babies in the streets, as well as elderly slaves - which may explain why the emperor vespasian's breakfast was once interrupted by a dog carrying a human hand.  rome's famous sewers only made things worse, backing up during the frequent floods.  add fluorine and lead poisoning as well as mosquitos, and it's no surprise that osteology reveals average heights across the roman empire in the first four centuries ce were on average ten centimeters shorter than those of people living the same lands before or after

the latin pax means 'pacification' rather than 'peace'

galen describes people watering the wheat they paid in tax to the state to add to its weight, and so inviting fungus, rot and vermin



(5) 'handle with extreme care - egg of extinct bird!'

snakes in a drawer

oology - the study of eggs

in moby dick, ishmael considers the possible 'gradual extinction' of the sperm whale but argues that the whales can always retreat to safety in their 'citadels' in the icy polar seas, 'as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty swiss have retreated to their mountains'

when police searched his home they found three thousand eggs.  the defence argued that his addiction to taking eggs was a mental health issue, and it's hard to disagree

 

(6) almost no economists look in their models at how wealth is distributed

there are other ways of getting rich, and in our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it.  but for an ordinary citizen who wants to become rich through working at a salaried job, finance is by an enormous margin the most likely path.  and yet, the thing they're doing in finance is useless.  i mean that in a strong sense: this activity produces nothing and creates no benefit for society in aggregate, because every gain is matched by an identical loss.  it all sums to zero

'he's called fifteen of the last zero recessions'


(7) when rabindranath tagore visited south-east asia in 1927, he wrote: 'everywhere i could see india, yet i could not recognize it'

just as the greatest surviving greek temples lie mostly in her colonies across the sea, at paestum, segesta, and agrigento, so the greatest monuments of indic civilization lie at its furthest eastern reaches

laden to the gunwales

until the 17th century india had the world's only diamond mine

scraps of papyrus from the rubbish dump at oxyrhynchus suggests that customs taxes on trade with india may have generated one-third of the total income of the roman exchequer

india invented chess too, although it reached us via persia.  rukh is a persian word meaning 'chariot' and 'checkmate' comes from shah maat! - 'the king's frozen'

 

(8) four percent of the world's population speaks 96 percent of its languages

staten island, where probably all of liberia's seventeen languages are now spoken

the only north american indigenous languages that are not endangered are cherokee, dine bizaad (navajo), and yup'ik, a language of the far north

the sherpa who set the world record for fastest ascent of mount everest works at a whole foods in manhattan

more speakers of seke now live in a single apartment building in flatbush than remain in any of the home villages

explaining the pronunciation of the word "nahuatl," he says, "the last two letters add up to a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, a single sound that's rare outside the americas"


(9) before the venezuelan people he is complete naked



(10) antibotanical bias

there are botanists who maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, a la pavlov's dogs, and scientists who think that tropical vines possess a sort of vision

spider orchids synthesize chemicals that very precisely mimic the pheromones emitted by female wasps.  these chemicals attract male wasps, which try to mate with the orchids..the wasp is frustrated, while the plant gets pollinated

he points to octopuses, which, like plants, lack a centralized brain but clearly are quite clever, and cites the example of craig foster, the south african filmmaker who chronicled his relationship with a tender eight-legged creature in his award-winning documentary, my octopus teacher

the plural brain and hydrostatic form of the octopus is not so different from the fluid body plan of a vine, through which its particular consciousness diffuses 

 

12/19

 

this week i

e-biked to nagadi, piranesi.  cali h.i.s. first asks "are you driving?" to the cell phone sample, tho j'assume cawi mode also takes eyes off the road

 

this week i

debut 4-line play: how do we figure out which ones are edible? / [bites mouthful, speaks chewing] mushroom roulette / russian roulette? / [dies] fin

12/5