this week i

decline shaped as signature: would scrawling "absolutely don't" protect when confronted with impossible multi-page agreements?  wolfaroni thinks so

 there once was a very bad mutt
other dogs' throats he wanted to cut
but he also was cute
and despite disrepute
received scratches galore on his butt


 
watched coda (2019), sps 2irretrievably typecast 4me. some pianists think that walking on stage is the scariest part of the evening, and they're right

read..

(1) camus says, "one must imagine sisyphus happy" and not that he is happy

it's fine not to be convinced by a philosopher

struggling, not content

the gods can make us toil, but they cannot make us miserable

there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn

buddhism provides a simple commentary: we cannot control external conditions, only our response to them

that camus imagines sisyphus alone is another idiocy of modernity that eulogises solitude

aphantasia (the inability to imagine)


(2) as in spikes, not backbones

about 2.7 million years (ma) ago

analogous interchanges occurred earlier in the cenozoic, when the formerly isolated land masses of india and africa made contact with eurasia about 56 and 30 ma ago, respectively

crocodyliforms with ziphodont teeth

one of the largest turtles of all time

the independent development of spines by new and old world porcupines is another example of parallel evolution

tortoises are aided in oceanic dispersal by their ability to float with their heads up, and to survive up to six months without food or water.  south american tortoises then went on to colonize the west indies and galapagos islands

surprisingly, south america's burrowing ambhisbaenians and blind snakes also appear to have rafted from africa, as does the hoatzin, a weak-flying bird of south american rainforests

terror birds

southwardly migrating nearctic species established themselves in larger numbers and diversified considerably more, and are thought to have caused the extinction of a large proportion of the south american fauna.  (no extinctions in north america are plainly linked to south american immigrants)

before 12,000 years ago, south america was home to about 25 species of herbivores weighing more than 1,000 kg

the pacific coast of south america cooled as the input of warm water from the caribbean was cut off.  this trend is thought to have caused the extinction of the marine sloths of the area

during the last 7 ma, south america's terrestrial predator guild has changed from one composed almost entirely of nonplacental mammals (metatherians), birds, and reptiles to one dominated by immigrant placental carnivorans

any species that reached panama from either direction obviously had to be able to tolerate moist tropical conditions.  those migrating southward would then be able to occupy much of south america without encountering climates that were markedly different.  however, northward migrants would have encountered drier or cooler conditions by the time they reached the vicinity of the trans-mexican volcanic belt

brainier

dire wolves

lions, dholes, cheetahs

poison dart frogs

silky anteater

lungless salamanders

the quaternary extinction event that delivered the coup de grace

 

(3) five days after it ended, bryan, who had stayed on in dayton to do some speaking, died in his sleep

although he opposed an anti-lynching bill, talked about the "yellow peril" of asian immigration, and said he was a proud member of the "greatest of all the races, the caucasian race," bryan was, on most other issues, a progressive.  he supported labor unions, women's suffrage, the income tax, public ownership of utilities, a ban on corporate campaign contributions, and food and drug safety laws.  not for nothing was he known as the "great commoner"

extra police from chattanooga

street performers offered the chance to be photographed with chimpanzees

"a group of university students . . . petitioned the legislature to consider a few more bills" to "amend the law of gravity, for instance, and do something about the excessive speed of light"

if the serpent had been condemned by god to forever slither on its belly, darrow asked, how had it gotten around before then?  on its tail?

many women no longer include the word "obey" in their wedding vows

darrow had supported bryan in two presidential campaigns.  bryan volunteered as prosecutor out of christian belief, not vindictiveness: he even offered to pay scopes's fine


(4) the 1990s in russia were worse than the great depression had been in germany and the united states

the rise of a wasteful and extractive financial sector, the atomization and immiseration of formerly unionized workers, the pervasiveness of tax avoidance and evasion

what is the moderate, piecemeal path that leads to child slaves in the drc being treated with dignity and respect?

 in a surprising convergence with the sweaty imagination of j.d. vance, parents should get votes for their children

indian independence - something churchill spent decades opposing, claiming that democracy was impossible "east of the suez"

to awaken the consciousness of the global bourgeoisie

i am not free to eat your dinner, even if i am starving and you intend to throw it away - even if i cooked it.  hence the basic insight of amartya sen and jean dreze that famines can take place without anyone's property rights being violated

the notion that capitalism and democracy are mutually harmonious is a relic of cold war ideology..nineteenth-century capitalism did not widely overlap with democracy: the british empire and the united states were not places with egalitarian universal suffrage

wolf does not say that any of his earlier critics have been proved right by subsequent events.  he was not wrong; "the prevailing assumption" was..the distinctive elite construction that the journalist william schneider named the "past exonerative"

warren buffett's famous quote that "there's class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning"

 

(5) during macron's first term, from 2017 to 2022, his main opposition was the street

peak matcha latte

the french tax authority now includes "influencer" as a self-employment category

macron as "a spiritual londoner"

it is tempest-tossed but does not sink

its mushroom-colored stone


(6) gisèle pelicot insisted on a public trial

the video was screened, the first time the accused had seen it.  'i think i pleased the husband, not the couple,' he conceded

they all met in a chatroom called 'without her knowledge'

her state would have been more akin to a coma than traditional sleep.  this did not stop more than one of the defendents from putting his penis in her mouth, in some cases prompting her to choke


(7) the wobblies

the iww regarded the afl as too conservative and opposed their decision to divide workers on the basis of their trades

industrial democracy

separation rather than unity within groups of workers by organizing according to narrow craft principles

the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class

carry on production

helen keller, iww member, 1911

decentralize

community co-op grocery stores

mainstream-media blackout

 the australian..labor party..declared the iww an illegal organization

the spanish revolution..the cnt's ensuing defeat at the hands of both fascist and republican forces

parodies of christian hymns

pie in the sky has passed into common usage

 

(8) mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of iraq: cluster sample survey by burnham et al.

two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster

violence was the primary cause of deaths

58 times higher(95% ci 8.1 - 419)

air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths

no surveys or census-based estimates of crude mortality have been undertaken in iraq in more than a decade

morgue-based surveillance data

we assumed that every household had seven individuals

to lessen risks to investigators, we sought to minimise travel distances..by clumping pairs of governorates

because the probability that clusters would be assigned to any given governorate was proportional to the population size in both phases of the assignment, the sample remained a random national sample.  this clumping of clusters was likely to increase the sum of the variance between mortality estimates of clusters and thus reduce the precision of the national mortality estimate.  we deemed this acceptable since it reduced travel by a third

we assumed the population was living within a rectangle

once at that point, the nearest 30 households were visited

interviewers asked about any discrepancies between the 2002 and 2004 household compositions

at the end of interviewing every 30 household cluster, one or two households were asked if in the area of the cluster there were any entire families that had died

stata (release 8.0)

five (0.5%) of the 988 households refused to be interviewed

no households were identified in which all the household members were dead or gone away, except in falluja, where there were 23

more than a third of the reported post-attack deaths (n=53), and two-thirds of violent deaths (n=52) happened in the falluja cluster.  this extreme statistical outlier has created a very broad confidence estimate around the mortality measure and is cause for concern about the precision of the overall finding

in our falluja sample, we recorded 53 deaths when only 1.4 were expected under the national pre-war rate

with modest funds, 4 weeks, and seven iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained


(9) bias in epidemiological studies of conflict mortality by spagat et al. dr. c once told me (re accepted methodology) survey statistics is a bloodbath

residents of households on cross-streets to the main streets are more likely to be exposed to violence than those living further away

a natural habitat for patrols

non-coverage bias

many cities worldwide have homicide rates which vary by factors of ten or more between adjacent neighbourhoods

the cross-street sampling algorithm will miss any neighbourhood not in the immediate proximity of a cross-street

our model makes no assumption whatsoever about whether people are killed in their homes or not

if r=3 actually is the true ratio, then they overestimate the number of deaths by a factor of 3.  indeed, the survey of iraq family health survey study group (2008) covered virtually the same time period as the burnham et al (2006) study, used census-based sampling techniques, and produced a central estimate for violent deaths that was one-fourth of the burnham et al. (2006) estimate

if q=1, violence is not localized

release of high-resolution data by the authors..would facilitate progress on the issue of bias

standardize epidemiological surveys of mortality and nutrition in emergency situations

cluster sampling is used primarily for reasons of convenience, practicality, and safety


(ten out of ten) comparing seven approaches to poverty measurement in terms of their relevance to wellbeing by kathryn o'neill, 1 may 2024.  how income, wealth, and consumption measured predict wellbeing, compared to the u.s. opm.  at her talk i attended october 12th fcsm 2024, she'd expanded the comparisons to all vs. all.  keep linear variables "poorer v richer" rather than truncating information to binary "poor v rich" if you can

within-person, within-age, and within-cohort variation

there is little clear consensus on the prevalence and definition of poverty

one reasons this measure has persisted is a lack of consensus about an alternative

household income is measured using high-quality income data, incorporating taxes and transfers, using the cross-national equivalent file (cnef) supplement to the psid

the wealth poverty measure also frequently predicts health, though it often does not remove the significance of the income-based opm

in 1963, a statistician in the social security administration, mollie orshansky, constructed an estimate of poverty based upon 1955 family consumption data

orshansky never intended this measure for policy, president johnson's administration chose to adopt it as the official poverty measure (opm) as they began their "war on poverty."  orshansky criticized this decision promptly

for example, adults living in the same home who are not related by blood, adoption, or marriage are not considered to be in the same household by the opm, even though unmarried couples now make up a substantial portion of u.s. households

the phenomenon of poverty

as many as a third of u.s. households are net-worth-poor, and the majority of these are not also poor in terms of the u.s. official poverty measure, suggesting net-worth poor households represent a largely separate group of households

material hardship is more severe for those with low consumption than for those with low income

the richer the country, the more income becomes a better measure

relative measures of income have been shown to be better predictors of health than absolute measures of income

examining only the relative poverty measure may obscure relevant changes to the income distribution.  anchoring the poverty threshold to a year prior to an economic shock can provide a clearer image

multiple observations are needed for fixed effects analysis

the consumption/expenditures data in the psid is rarely used

the psid definition of a household differs from the opm definition

the only measure considered here which adjusts thresholds for geography, urbanicity, and renting or owning

an estimated 75.6% of respondents in this sample are considered to be poor by at least one of these measures in at least one year that they are observed by the psid

there is a great deal of movement into and out of poverty, however measured

50% of person-years considered wealth poor are poor only by this measure

the pattern of results for life satisfaction is quite distinct.  the opm never significantly predicts respondents' life satisfaction, while all other poverty measures do.  anchored poverty and wealth poverty appear to have the strongest ability to predict life satisfaction

the limitations of using binary poverty thresholds


1/30

this week i

ain't no turkey gobble gobble. txt2v told me doctor congo rails at rwanda. cheesy doorstops every color but yellow, glen echo fire glow open 24 hours

watched the last showgirl. on date with you're probably going to haunt this theater dave bautista, pamela looks exactly like kevin mccallister's mom

remix luke (war criminal, fingerpaint thyself) and [different mutiny] caine (some men just want to watch the capitol burn).  libertarian left might've ignited world war one, capitalists & communists lit the fuse to all the other dynamite.  moulin rage in the bronzer age, new cyrus riding wrecking ball

read the wall street journal guide to information graphics: the dos and don'ts of presenting data, facts, and figures by dona m. wong who misspelled²

unlike a mispelled word in a story, one wrong number discredits the whole chart

serif type has a stroke added to the beginning or end of the main strokes of the letter

hue is how we normally describe color..saturation is the intensity of the color..red becomes..less pink..value is how light or dark..adding black ink

don't use red for positive numbers in a bar chart

about 1 in 10 men have some form of color blindness

imagine reading a pie chart as you would a clock.  it makes the most sense to place the largest segment of the pie on the right at 12

never shade below a line unless the chart has a zero baseline.  filling in below a line turns a line chart into an area graph

even if color is available, do not plot more than four lines on a single chart.  you won't find a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow

always label the data point of the broken bar

 a donut pie chart can be used to display the total value inside the pie

to calculate annualized volatility: daily standard deviation x √number of trading days in a year

describe a 20% change as a 20% increase from $10 or 20% increase to $12..we would not give directions such as "drive 20 miles" without noting the direction north or south

"the dow" is the world's most frequently quoted and longest-serving market indicator of its kind, measuring the u.s. market since its creation by charles dow in 1896

in accounting, a fudge factor known as the cumulative translation adjustment (cta) is used to reconcile the differences that arise from using average and end-of-period exchange rates together

work hard to make it effortless for your readers

 

1/23

this week i

tucked in short shirtsleeves of youth a pack of bubblegum cylinders wrapped in cigarette sheaths, powdered sugar between the two imitated smoke when we blew.  my father announced habit responding rebel, kids today vaping dragons layered in ironic lungs.   all of my pleasures are complicated

sigh openai a lie.  me: abrupt (ok, rude) communication / since debut, friends & colleagues who tolerate me nonetheless: plz use ai to brighten tone / me: fuck that, i'll just be nicer instead.  we've no privacy, sing in the shower like it's your stadium tour.  add'l faves: aristo, bingo (cat, dog name-os)
 
murdered fare free capital hotel spider rather than unsheathe plastic-wrapped cup cuz both currently r-selected entities tho only one sustainably so
 

 
 
read tobacco culture: the mentality of the great tidewater planters on the eve of revolution by t. h. breen

this type of historical study - the french call it l'historie des mentalites

virginia where it all began..the great revolution..the second revolution and we lost it..the third revolution..won't be california after all.  it will be settled in virginia where it started

fear of centralized power lay at the heart of the country ideology

 plants often assume special significance for the grower, and over several generations the products of the fields may become associated with a particular set of regional values, a pattern of land tenure, a system of labor, even a festive calendar

in the case of cuba, for example, scholars speak of a "sugar mentality"

what one must understand is that the rhythms of debt were not the same for all planters.  the great tidewater planters were extremely hard pressed to meet their obligations in the early 1760s, a time when the small producers were holding their own.  during this period, the little men did not sympathize with the plight of their richer neighbors.  but in the early 1770s everyone found themselves in straitened conditions.  the scottish factors as well as the consignment merchants were seen as instruments of economic and political oppression.  in fact, the great credit crisis of 1772 probably did more to unify white virginians than did any regulatory act of parliament

sometimes the pressure on the tobacco cracked the staves, bursting the hogshead

the great planters owned more land and slaves, but there do not seem to have been important economies of scale in eighteenth-century tobacco cultivation

leaf by leaf . . . . the ideal of the tobacco man . . . is distinction, for his product to be in a class by itself, the best

the virginia gentry generally subscribed to a calm, reasonable, low-church anglicanism, a theology that did not challenge their rather inflated notions of human capabilities.  how different the experiences of the wheat farmer.  he found himself dependent upon natural elements beyond his direct control.  the vulnerability of the cultivator, his enforced passivity during much of the growing season, may have convinced him of god's terrible omnipotence

though he savored even the slightest praise from neighbors, he showed almost no interest in how his hogsheads were actually marketed in england

"and [i] shall tie up the rest; for i love a good quid"

in relations between great tidewater planters, it was the creditor, not the borrower, who made excuses

commercial friendship

in the absence of an adequate money supply, private credit instruments, particularly bills of exchange, circulated as a sort of unofficial currency

the problem was liquidity

the planters' situation in comparative perspective.  though they accounted for only 21 percent of the country's population in 1776, they held approximately 46 percent of the officially documented debt claims..the per capita chesapeake debt - maryland and virginia - was nearly twice than that of britain's other mainland colonies

he could not call himself an independent man "till i have pay'd the old score"

after 1766 genteel forbearance was out of the question

external credit disrupted relations between social peers

the source of friction was contraction of british credit

"a scheme of a lottery" ..involved many of the more prominent planters in tidewater virginia.  anyone reading the newspapers would have recognized their names.  one typical lottery offered 145 tickets at £5 apiece.  there were to be fourteen winners, lucky persons who would cart away the planter's slaves and livestock, take possession of his land and buildings

jefferson hated debt, was suspicious of the merchant class, and when his colleague in the new federal government, alexander hamilton, brought forth schemes for funding a national debt, the virginian led the agrarians in revolt 

 

1/16

Labels:

this week i

watched episode 9,000, with guinness world recordholder johnny gilbert cake. (for those of you / who didn't know / of) jeopardy / the perfect show

think he looks like the v.p.e.  lavender tisane must be best tasting soap ever cuz i consume it intentionally which makes it unique among all the soaps

see sas software founders flee with more taxpayer billions than there are r core team members.  public funding / means to me / freedom, reciprocity

snow ran jan six, flags at half mast, "where's everyone?" pre-dawn we laughed

 

read lessons in chemistry by bonnie garmus

the number-two pencil she always wore either behind her ear or in her hair

so you think you're going to marry your work like the nuns marry jesus?

pass the sodium chloride

you've basically rediscovered nylon

"just so you know," the bishop said as if selecting from a list, "your real mother died in childbirth, and your real father couldn't cope"

"i see you've got the bible," mrs. sloane said, noting dr. spock's book on the table

legally mad, six-thirty thought.  what could possibly go wrong?

of all disciplines, shouldn't science be able to weed out its own intellectual zeroes?

no discernible skills other than making chains out of paper clips

"i didn't have a chance to finish, okay?  what about you?  why aren't you a phd, zott?" frask shot back.
elizabeth hardened, and without meaning to, revealed a fact about herself that she'd never told anyone other than a police officer.  "because i was sexually violated by my thesis advisor, then kicked out of the doctoral program," she shouted.  "you?"
frask looked back, shocked.  "same," she said limply

 "we all need our jobs," elizabeth seethed.  "the problem is, you've never done yours"

"robert wadlow died from being too tall," madeline said, tapping the cover of the guinness book of records

by the way.  what was that thing she said last week - about being unable to solidify helium at absolute zero.  was that supposed to be a joke?

"we never say fairy godfathers.  the fairy person is always female."
"because of organized crime?" madeline asked

if i've told you once, i've told you a thousand times..never leave a bunsen burner unattended

if a man were to spend a day being a woman in america, he wouldn't make it past noon

he listened politely, then commented on her trousers - called them a bold choice.  she looked at him surprised, then congratulated him on his same bold choice

out of everything in the article, it was the tree that did the most harm.  because on it, madeline had not only written in walter as a relative - readers instantly assumed this meant elizabeth was sleeping with her producer - but had also included a small drawing of a grandfather in prison stripes, a grandmother eating tamales in brazil, a large dog reading old yeller, an acorn labeled "fairy godmother," a woman named harriet poisoning her husband, a dead father's tombstone, a kid with a noose around his neck, as well as some hazy ties to nefertiti, sojourner truth, and amelia earhart


1/9


this week i

pedal-assist biked (a motorcycle for those of us who value self-preservation) to or from each wmata terminus this december, paranoia a healthy emotion sharing roads with cars.  you fit that hair in your helmet?  are the flashing lights in our stop signs permanent or just a christmas thing?

 

submit book chapters, not the whole neverest, two polite 'n' scathing rejections taught me.  you will prolly live forever, just so long as you stay clever

 

watched flow (2024), open source software generated, secretarybird (a raptor) raptured, bay of fundy life of pi, sentient whale sans petunia sidekick

 

resolve to work, nothing big like a this machine kills fascists laptop sticker.  happy new yeah, & may kids today look back and laugh at the both of us

 

read..

(1) the most beautiful flowers sometimes bloom on the edge of the abyss

because of the constant and unpredictable bombardment, my book presentation, like most cultural events, was held underground.  the most desirable hotel, too, is not the one with gorgeous views from the eighth floor but rather the one that has windowless underground bedrooms

i've rarely encountered such a place with such intense local patriotism.  at another event, i asked a group of students what they would consider victory for ukraine.  one replied, "when everyone in our country loves ukraine as much as we love kharkiv"

during the cold war the city was a center of soviet military-industrial complex, which is why its subway is dug deep and strongly fortified, in order to survive an american attack

the population of the city is holding up at over one million (it used to be 1.4 million), although perhaps 300,000 of those are refugees from the territories to the east that are either occupied by the russians or close to the front line.  how do they know the overall number?  terekhov gave the ghost of a smile.  it's a very old method, he said: we count the loaves of bread sold.  but to cross-check, they also monitor how many mobile phones are in use

george orwell's homage to catalonia teaches political writers who follow in his footsteps that you must be honest about the failings of your own side

(2) kidnapping children to punish parents is a mythic kind of barbarity


(3) if the fighting stopped tomorrow, both ukrainians and russians would immediately begin to prepare for the next round

ukrainians kept asking me why the us was helping to shoot down missles aimed by iran at israel but not doing the same for them.  if it did, they said, then everything would be different.  the difference, of course, is that, at least for now, iran is not a nuclear power

four shopping bags stuffed with possessions, including some orchids

when the war began in 2014 and russia seized most of the donbas region, ukraine lost 80 percent of its coal deposits

the difference is that east germans and north koreans remained and remain germans and koreans.."anything ukrainian is wiped out"



(4) ketill ketilsson, the last man to touch a living great auk

two hundred years ago..the word "extinction" was used almost exclusively in relation to britain's landed gentry - a lineage described as having become "extinct" when the family name died out

flightless, the north atlantic's ecological equivalent of the penguins

funk island, newfoundland

kept at the court of louis xiv at versailles

the cambridge museum of zoology's oological collection

the tenkile tree kangaroo of papua new guinea, whose last colony, of around a hundred individuals, survived in a place called sweipini, which was reputed to be the haunt of evil spirits.  the village priest exorcised the demons, and within a year the tree kangaroos were almost entirely killed off

the icelanders' sense of time.  some did not know how old they were


(5) i'm mark smith, and i live in an english village in deepest buckinghamshire, with..pip the crazy cockapoo

giving a presentation to the cambridge university railway club


(6) ransomware as a service (raas)

'spear phishing', where the attack is tailored to a specific victim

the world's most prolific hacker was revealed to be the us government.  the backlash following snowden's revelations forced congress to repeal the bulk surveillance programme in 2019

(7) despite the collapse in population, the english government was still collecting 95 per cent of its pre-plague tax revenues between 1352 and 1354

a plague pandemic around 3000 bce..cleared the way for the incursion into europe of the western steppe herders, speaking the indo-european languages

the pathogen of bubonic plague is the bacterium yersina pestis..'strains had their origin in the tien shan mountains,' in modern kyrgyzstan, where the host has always been the grey marmot

england did not return to its pre-plague population until about 1625, 280 years after the first strike.  during most of the that period western europe had about half the population it had in 1345.  and yet 1400-1500 'is the very century in which western europe's global expansion began'

plagues are different from other catastrophes.  fire, flood and war destroy property as well as people.  famine makes people eat their seed corn and their animals.  plague does none of these things.  if it halves the population then it doubles the amount of capital available per head

 

(8) the indian ocean used to be a great ocean

in 1415, portuguese explorers began incursions into western africa and finally landed in senegal in 1444.  two papal bulls followed, dum diversas (1452) and romanus pontifex (1455), granting king alfonso v licence 'to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all saracens and pagans whatsoever . . . and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery'

of the 1500 ships from the us that visited east africa between 1786 and 1860, roughly half were merchant vessels, most of them slavers.  the rest were whalers, and the indian ocean was an important hunting ground: more than a third of moby-dick takes place there

(9) the seville, a grim new apartment house at 11th and n streets with a beauty salon on the ground floor and a swimming pool on the roof

a second period of creative experimentation that (in hindsight) reached its peak with calvin and hobbes - only to die suddenly, with the death of the physical newspaper, almost exactly a century after its birth

 

(10) "the one capacity that distinguishes homo sapiens absolutely from other creatures"

chomsky himself

the argument between the long-timescale and short-timescale folks rages on

the metabolically expensive enlargement of the hominin brain that began in earnest around two million years ago

 

1/2


this week i

added recommended readings, grateful to Dr. Jim Walsh at Oberlin math, to Dr. Brian Caffo for teaching us R in the biostats 650 series, to Jean Roth at NBER (zero exaggeration world class) for one decade's lead on me publishing microdata analysis code, and to Dr. Roger Peng and Dr. Thomas Lumley for reasons, both noted and not, in my 2009 R Journal article that spiraled into this reference text.  thanks to all five for time devoted, expertise shared on various foss projects to promote the general Welfare.  ouat my old friend djalma asked about my typing, i replied there's only one single letter worth capitalizing in the entire alphabet and we laughed - i still consider it my second best joke.  my best joke, from solo rear center seat of kelly and michael's jeep driving lushoto to dar discussing difficulty remembering city names a la mbeya, mwanza - maybe you should try a mnemonic

watched chimera (2023), ouija-guided (divining twig) grave robbers (tombaroli).  my understanding of italian cinema it's always two women waterside laughing and one manages, "so he cheated?  tsk tsk poor dear, well he's ugly anyway so now you'll enjoy your affair with that handsome gardener" and the other laughs and lights side by side cigarettes in her mouth and passes one to the speaker and they laugh more and the scene ends and i like it

do not recall fillip, seems new word to me.  use-case: how'd this beheaded backyard plastic knick-knack meet its chimera (2023) spoiler of a demise?  nella mia mamma lingua, maybe only fillip or flick (surprisingly not synonyms) humanely launches harmless expeditionary solitary ant off of the picnic blanket and safely across the county line.  and to think, till today, i'd only known half of them.  (we tetrapods won the denovian & don't you forget it)

wonder when iata's twenty year forecast sees total person-flights (expected to exceed 5b for the first time in 2025) exceeding worldwide population?

 
assume coked-up scorsese named last waltz from evangeline song lyrics, not longfellow's epic.  she rhymes both mississippi queen & of the maritimes
 
 
read..

(1) wallace shawn

the american military was not particularly paranoid about what the press might write, and schell was able to gain remarkable access to people and places using only his college newspaper's press card

the new yorker, where my father was the editor-in-chief

"the village of ben suc" was grotesque

 

(2) "no one ever wins a competition of trying to prove that their pain hurts worse than someone else's"

 a more expansive definition of poverty, one that considers someone to be poor if a $400 emergency would prevent them from covering their basic monthly necessities.  using that metric, he estimates that in a country of 337 million people, an astonishing 140 million are poor or low-income

empty dog food cans in the kitchen of a family with young children but no dog

if the right sows division through the culture wars, the left engages in a politics of grievance that emphasizes our differences at the expense of recognizing our shared struggle

"these assholes who told us our [gay] kids were going to destroy the community have handed it over to companies that are willing to blow up the mountains"

one-on-one conversations "maybe the most fundamental organizing of all"

 

(3) the most substantial discovery of euripides in half a century

a wadi, a desert valley where the sand forms eddies and currents, a river in negative

a horizontal line called a paragraphos that often indicates a change in speaker

we have full texts of fewer than forty of the nine hundred tragedies we know were performed in athens in the fifth century bce

it is an accident of history that the stages of london and new york have seen so many medeas and no inos

the papyrus may contain a selection of greatest hits

a machine-learning model to recognize subtle changes to the texture of the papyrus where ink had saturated

(4) 18th-century travel literature and statistics gleaned from the latest censuses

john maynard keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for malthus, attributed the first world war and the russian revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food.  the 'great acceleration' of the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented energy consumption, economic prosperity and demographic growth, produced its own peculiar versions of malthusian catastrophism, from the neoliberal to the cosmological (the american scientist garrett hardin seriously entertained 'interstellar migration' as a solution to 'the population problem')

because land is finite, agricultural yields can only increase (by extending cultivation) in an arithmetic ratio: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  population, however, can increase exponentially: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16..assuming intervals of 25 years, in two centuries the proportion would be 256 to 9

obsessed with rousseau

in the 18th century a tourist industry had developed around these hunter-gatherer 'lapps', a scandinavian safari complex that enabled enlightenment intellectuals to gawk at a primitive mode of existence which endured at the edge of european civilisation

(5) central asia was the intellectual center of the medieval world

biruni..predicted the existence of continents beyond afro-eurasia

among his criticisms of early muslims was that they had refused to introduce leap years into their calendar

(6) my young nieces..argue about whether or not they should say please and thank you to the family alexa

the bot never expressed a personality beyond unconditional support

griefbots..offer a form of relief, a way to express their feeling and confide in something more responsive than a blank page, but less judgmental than a person

when the telephone, telegram and radio were invented, many people were so in awe of the capacity of the devices to communicate at a distance that they imagined their reach might extend into spiritual dimensions.  it was a common trope that one might telephone the dead or tune radios to the frequencies of heaven

 

(7) he claimed to have won a competition for the dullest headline with 'small earthquake in chile'

many top officials and aristocrats, not only tories, were still intensely relaxed about hitler.  the week and its well-placed informants went after them ferociously, breaking news from the secret german opposition and exposing furtive british moves toward a pact with the third reich.  a special target was lady astor, who was antisemitic and violently hostile to both france and soviet russia, britain's only plausible allies in a war with germany

patricia byron, who at 24 had already led an expedition to make a language map of the congo

(8) hearing thiel speak on campus in 2011 'remains the most significant moment of my time at yale law school' - he met his wife there too

'she sped up to what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both.'  she lost a nursing job after she rollerbladed through the hospital emergency room, high on painkillers.  vance likes to connect his mother's drug problem to us immigration policy, claiming in one campaign ad that he 'nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border', though it seems that she mostly stole opiates from her patients.  to pass a drug test to keep her nursing license, she made vance give her a sample of his urine.  but 'of all the things that i hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures'

his maternal grandmother, mamaw vance..once 'calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match and dropped it on his chest'.  vance's mother, then eleven, 'jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life'.  he comes close to acknowledging that his grandparents' 'violent marriage' damaged his mother, but ultimately decides that he's proud of them for honouring their wedding vows

in 2022, when he announced his third presidential bid, not even donald jr or ivanka turned up.  the white house reporter jonathan karl was struck by the 'strikingly lame excuses' of the many no-shows, such as sean spicer, trump's first press secretary, who claimed he hadn't 'adjusted to daylight savings time yet', nine days after the clocks had gone back

supposedly trump's first words to vance at their mar-a-lago meeting were 'you said some nasty shit about me.'  vance apologised and spent the next three years making it up to him

(9) skin in the game

cost-sharing curbed both needed and unneeded care in similar measure

the "energy boost" infusions our local urgent care center advertises

"a hospital bed built is a hospital bed filled"

when quebec implemented its universal health care program in 1970, a study in the new england journal of medicine reported that "physician visits per person per year remained constant at about five but were markedly shifted from persons in higher to lower income groups"

profit seeking in medicine is not new.  pliny the elder complained of physicians' "avarice, their greedy bargains made with those whose fate lies in the balances"

private health insurers now derive most of their revenues and up to 90 percent of their profits from medicare and medicaid


(10) technology titans are not just men worth 50 or 100 billion dollars or more.  they are increasingly the most powerful people on the planet

the euphemistic term "hallucination," as if the ai happened to accidentally swallow a tab of lsd

a recent survey of chief financial officers conducted by researchers at duke university and the federal reserve found that more than 60 percent of us companies plan to use ai to automate tasks currently done by people.  in a study of 750 business leaders, 37 percent said ai technology had replaced some of their workers in 2023, and 44 percent reported that they expected to lay off employees this year due to ai

at a facility in kenya, murgia found workers subcontracted by meta who spend their days watching "bodies dismembered from drone attacks, child pornography, bestiality, necrophilia and suicides, filtering them out so that we don't have to"..in some of these cases, workers are required to sign agreements that absolve the tech companies of responsibility for any mental health issues that arise in the course of their employment and forbid them from talking to anyone, including family members, about the work they do

 

12/26

 

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

 

Labels:

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

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