Hasnain says:

This article was fascinating; though I don’t know if I would be able to read the full book the author is trying to drum up excitement for.

“One could hardly imagine a more comprehensive or devastating attack, and yet it is hard not to be amused by ​­it—by its relentlessness, its obsessional intensity. It is difficult to see its scare ​­quotes—”his ‘certain’ history . . . his ‘undoubted’ history . . . his ‘facts’”—​without imagining Round speaking, delivering the index out loud, a livid sarcasm in his voice. This is the subject index in its most extreme form, as far from the concordance as it can get. Where Marbeck’s method was meticulously neutral, Round’s is the polar opposite, all personality, all interpretation. Where Marbeck’s concordance was thorough, Round’s index is partial. It would be fair to say that John Marbeck owed his life to the difference between a concordance and a subject index.”

Hasnain says:

I feel like I still haven’t done enough reading for Black History Month, but this was a start.

“The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents.

Which means, as Whitman notes, “that American racial classification law was much harsher than anything the Nazis themselves were willing to introduce in Germany.””

Hasnain says:

I find it really crazy that child poverty was cut in half - half! - last year and that wasn’t heralded as both a massive indictment of how things were done in the past and a great achievement by the public. And now it’s so infuriating to see that the public and lawmakers are okay with millions of children going hungry again.

“Shame on Pat Toomey! Shame on Joe Manchin! And shame on the broader system that sees 3.7 million kids slip sliding needlessly into poverty as business as usual, and not as the biggest scandal in America right now, which it is. Even Biden — whose administration deserves credit for devising the scheme and getting the temporary version passed last year — seems to have moved on. With lobbying for Build Back Better on life support, Team Biden is busy drafting the largest Pentagon budget in American history, expected to target $800 billion or more for new tanks and stealth fighter jets, the only “need” that both Democrats and Republicans support without question.”

Hasnain says:

UK focused but I think the points generalize.

“If the government is genuinely concerned about the birth rate there are things it could do: make renting more secure, or invest massively in childcare or, hell, even reform planning rules to build enough new family homes. But it has so far chosen not to do those things — chosen, indeed, to raise taxes on the young to protect the interests of the old. This is not an irrational way for a government elected by the grey vote to behave. By the same token, waiting much, much later to have kids is not an irrational way for the under-40s to behave either.

Why is Britain’s fertility rate declining? Gee, I dunno, why does it hurt if you punch yourself in the face?”

Hasnain says:

“The difficulty is that high-dimensional shapes often behave in ways that defy our human, low-dimensional intuition. For example, in dimensions 10 and up, it is possible to build a cube and a ball such that the cube has larger volume than the ball, but every slice through the center of the cube has smaller area than the corresponding slice through the center of the ball.

“The beauty of high-dimensional geometry is exactly that it doesn’t look anything like dimension two,” said Sébastien Bubeck of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.”

Hasnain says:

Such a well written human interest story. Makes you think, and want to read more stories like this - and maybe even get the book (which covers even more examples of abandoned cities and islands)

“How would you live on your own private island? This is how the Rosies did it: They kept chickens, they kept cattle, they kept house. Their five children ran wild, scrambling in the rocky geos and paddling in the shallows (although they didn’t climb trees, because there are no trees). They weeded and darned and mended nets. They scavenged on the shoreline for items washed up – revelations from the outside world. They read everything they could get their hands on. They wrote letters, and received them too: handwritten notes addressed simply ‘Swona’, or sometimes to their house, which was named for them: Rose Cottage. They played instruments, and formed for a while an island orchestra with fiddle, pipes, squeezebox and a makeshift set of drums made of oil cans. Their father built boats, manned the tiny lighthouse, and in 1935, after a cargo ship ran aground off the western shore, salvaged enough from the wreckage to install electricity in their house – powered by windmill and a diesel generator. After that they listened to the radio: news, plays, tunes, the shipping forecast.”

Hasnain says:

““When the public saw you had U.S. government figures getting hacked, that quite clearly moved the needle,” Wyden told Reuters in an interview, referring to the targeting of U.S. officials in Uganda.

Lina al-Hathloul, Loujain’s sister, said the financial blows to NSO might be the only thing that can deter the spyware industry. “It hit them where it hurts,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

Just reading all the math involved here makes my brain hurt. Like… I’d heard how type 1 diabetes was hard but this make me appreciate it in a whole new way.

“”The worst part about it is that; If you are better at math you will live longer. Who makes a disease where the good math people live longer? — Scott Hanselman T1D”

I call the maths of T1D unreasonable because I am finding all this stuff difficult and stressful. Even though I know all the relevant numbers, even if I have all the information, even if I am comfortable with the calculations, even if all the factors are accounted for; when we give Sam food or insulin (and sometimes when we do nothing at all) his BGL changes in wildly unexpected ways.”

Hasnain says:

This is a great read - a mix of human interest story and science. This goes into nutrition, physiology, biology, and has a commentary on how a lot of the knowledge here is still evolving. I learnt a lot from this one.

“PONTZER GOT A LESSON in the value of food sharing in 2010, when he traveled to Tanzania to study the energy budgets of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. One of the first things he noticed was how often the Hadza used the word “za,” which means “to give.” It’s the magic word all Hadza learn as children to get someone to share berries, honey, or other foods with them. Such sharing helps all the Hadza be active: As they hunt and forage, Hadza women walk about 8 kilometers daily; men, 14 kilometers—more than a typical American walks in 1 week.

To learn about their energy expenditure, Pontzer asked the Hadza whether they’d drink his tasteless water cocktail and give urine samples. They agreed. He almost couldn’t get funding for the study, because other researchers assumed the answer was obvious. “Everyone knew the Hadza had exceptionally high energy expenditures because they were so physically active,” he recalls. “Except they didn’t.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis.

“More prosaically, she thinks President Joe Biden could transcend the limitations of narrow congressional majorities by making bolder use of executive actions. She hedged a bit but left little doubt of her view that it’s a good thing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in her party’s geriatric class of House leaders almost certainly will be moving on soon.”