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