Nate Silver does the math and finds that until vaccines were introducted, COVID death rates in the US were not influenced by partisan politics; only once vaccines became available did a pronounced difference appear. The difference does not disappear when you correct for age. Right now the evidence seems to say that differences between the degree of state mandated lockdown did not impact death rates, but conservative attacks on the vaccine led to fewer people in conservative states getting vaccinated, which led to higher death rates in those states.
The US Air Force drone swarm program, the Replicator Initiative. (article, 23-minute video)
Tyler Cowen linked to this Bronze Age Pervert essay about Argentina. I can't read this kind of foolishness but it seems to be an argument against the Steve Bannon/J.D. Vance populist right, given that Argentina has had governments that are right wing on culture but left wing on economics since Juan Peron and the results have been lousy. Says now some of the rebel energy is shifting to libertarians.
The Rebel Drone Maker of Myanmar.
An argument for believing that acrostics in classical poetry were intentional, and that some of them refer to Jewish themes.
The Japanese myth of the three-legged crow and its origins on the Asian continent.
Alex Tabarrok reports that while firms saw a major fall in productivity when people started working from home in the pandemic, that has now reversed itself and hybrid systems (working from home part of the time) are now very productive.
More data from Case and Deaton: Right now a 25-year-old American with a 4-year college degree can expect to live to be 84; without a degree that falls to 75. (NY Times) According to responses I have read, the real issue is with people who drop out of high school.
More electoral graffiti in Pompeii.
New Webb telescope image of the Orion Nebula seems to show 42 pairs of Jupiter-sized objects that orbit each other: "There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation — or both." (NY Times, BBC)
The behavior of Matt Gaetz in the House budget blow-up might best be described using a line from Game of Thrones: "Chaos is a ladder." (Ross Douthat, NY Times)
Using ChatGPT and Claude 2 to translate Renaissance treatises on demonology and medicine.
Scott Siskind revisits the theory that people with more older brothers are more likely to be gay.
What would it mean for an academic discipline to succeed? "If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work."
The Supreme Court wrestles with the legal issues surrounding "testers," people who sue for discrimination they may not have experienced.
Interesting musings on misinformation, suggesting that the real problem is that voters have no interest in the truth: "Modern democracies are not very good about figuring out what to do when voters get exactly what they want and what voters want is actually bad for democracy."
Tyler Cowen interviews novelist/historian Ada Palmer, mainly about history: "a few years ago. I was sitting down at a table of four historians and six art historians, and we asked the question, “If you could go back to our period, our period that we know best — if you could go back in time, would you?” All the art historians said yes, and all the historians said no because we study the violent side and the nasty side."
More on the 20,000-plus years old footprints in New Mexico. New dating backs up the previous results, but look at the pre-excavation photo (never trust what archaeologists do with a trowel) and ask yourself if those really look human. Opinions differ.
Kevin Drum ponders the declining life expectancies of the poorest Americans, says the cause can't be health care because that is getting better, thanks to Medicaid expansion. Also hard to explain using income, which is also improving. He wonders if it might be diet. I wonder if our miserable mood is a factor.
Ukraine Links
"Scouts from the 36th Army of Group V of the Russian Armed Forces report that for each of our tanks that goes to test the positions of Ukrainian formations on the Vremevsky ledge, up to 4 enemy fpv drones fly out." (Source on X)
How Ukraine converted its old Soviet S-200 surface-to-air missilies into dangerous surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 250 miles.
Unable to defend its naval base in Sevastopol against Ukrainian attacks, Russia is moving more vessels to other bases. If that link won't work for you, summary on X here.
Very intelligent German blogger says German chancellor Olaf Scholz won't supply Taurus missiles to Ukraine because they would be perfect for destroying the Kerch Bridge, and Scholz knows how important that bridge is to Russia.
There is a lot of complaining in America about how our military insists on buying very expensive bespoke versions of stuff that costs a tenth as much on the open market, but then there's this: "Pickup trucks of the kind driven around suburban America last a week to ten days when they're trying to outrun shelling in areas with no roads." The whole thread is about trying to get civilian manufacturers of things like drones to make something the Ukrainian military can use. (Article at Wired)
Right now the evidence seems to say that differences between the degree of state mandated lockdown did not impact death rates, but conservative attacks on the vaccine led to fewer people in conservative states getting vaccinated, which led to higher death rates in those states.
ReplyDeleteSo alarmist conservative anti-vaccine rhetoric can be directly linked to needless deaths of innocent people? Nothing a reasonable person couldn't have guessed, but nice to have data clearly showing it.
Not that said data matters to the conservatives at all - they either won't believe or simply won't care about the blood on their hands. The inalienable right to life of others is worth less to them than their own imagined right to refuse vaccines and break quarantine based on their own flagrant ignorance and delusional hysteria.
More on the 20,000-plus years old footprints in New Mexico. New dating backs up the previous results, but look at the pre-excavation photo (never trust what archaeologists do with a trowel) and ask yourself if those really look human. Opinions differ.
ReplyDeleteThose look perfectly human to me? To the point that I'm kind of confused anyone would think otherwise?
Even if we humor the idea that they might not be human - what ELSE could they even realistically be? Primates went extinct in the Americas 26 million years ago - and most primate footprints look drastically different from human footprints anyway.
Some people say that black bear footprints can sometimes resemble human ones - but those are the hind feet only, and they're really only easily confused when a print is shallow, incomplete, or washed/eroded away, and need to be lacking claw impressions. In contrast, these are complete and clear footprints, which clearly are were not made by a black bear.
There is a lot of complaining in America about how our military insists on buying very expensive bespoke versions of stuff that costs a tenth as much on the open market, but then there's this: "Pickup trucks of the kind driven around suburban America last a week to ten days when they're trying to outrun shelling in areas with no roads." The whole thread is about trying to get civilian manufacturers of things like drones to make something the Ukrainian military can use.
ReplyDeleteI dunno - there's a LOT of variety in civilian market pickup trucks.
Now, I would absolutely believe that an overpriced, consumer-hostile piece of junk like a Ford F-150 wouldn't last long at all.
But compare that to the Toyota Hilux, which has been the preferred truck platform for creating "technicals" in third-world warzones all across the globe for more than a quarter century now. A truck made in huge numbers, with legendary reliability, able to run on a massive assortment of fuels, able to repaired with nothing but hand tools, with spare parts available cheaply and globally, rugged enough to be used off-road in bad terrain... there's a very good reason they're the default choice for wartime conversion.
In fact, both Russia and Ukraine have employed their own "tachanka" technicals in the current war, and the Hilux has been a popular choice for this exact usage.
And that's just the technicals - they still enjoy all the same benefits being used as troop transports rather than as converted weapon platforms.
@G- the people who think those footprints are not human lean toward ground sloths, whose footprints do look a lot like those.
ReplyDeleteI'm totally unfamiliar with ground sloth footprints, but a quick Googling seems to suggest... no?
ReplyDeleteEvery picture I've seen for "ground sloth footprint" looks extremely different from a human footprint when it's a clear impression - only the muddiest, least well defined examples start to become something that could be mistaken for a human footprint.
The foot structure itself is remarkably different, from what I can see in pictures of fossils and reconstructions. And while I find plenty of references noting that the footprint of a ground sloth is similar to a human footprint in outline (hence why muddy and unclear prints can be mistaken), you'd have to be drunk to think that the clear, crisp footprints from White Sands with distinct toes, the curvature of a human foot arch (which ground sloths lack), and a complete lack of claw impressions indicates a ground sloth rather than humans.
Utterly wild.