Nate Silver, who so vehemently defended Daylight Saving Time, does not in fact know what DST means. No, I will not call him a clown — though he has made himself appear to act like one — because he may actually be on our side!

A one-two punch on clinical trials from Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman today: first their on-point agenda for clinical trial abundance as a guest post in Slow Boring, then Ruxandra’s longer essay which has been so thoroughly research that even yours truly gets a name-check. As I noted elsewhere, every US institution has made one bade tradeoff after another in how it conducts clinical trials to the point that it’s impossible to conduct a RECOVERY trial equivalent over here. That needs to change.

Never was a fan of Daylight Saving Time, but knowing that Nate Silver is a proponent gives me additional conviction.

The article is titled I Say Forbidden Things About Sports, and he does! Here are the six actual benefits:

1. To promote physical fitness and healthy living
2. To celebrate the values of sportsmanship and fair play—because these will make athletes better human beings, better citizens, and better participants in their communities.
3. To teach the benefits of unselfish teamwork and counter the intense promotion of selfish individual behavior in society.
4. To show youngsters how to deal with defeat and setbacks (as well as winning)—because they will face these again and again in life.
5. To bond together a community—both among fans and between opponents by the goodwill created via fair competitions.
6. To instill valuable life habits of discipline, hard work, courage, and persistence.

Instead, notes Gioia, the young athletes are taught that:

• Winning is more important than anything.
• There’s no value in losing. Losers get the ridicule and mockery they deserve.
• Maybe you need to play on a team, but rewards will depend on your success and fame as an individual—so always look out for your own selfish interests.
• Healthy living is okay, but don’t let it keep you from clubbing and late-night partying—because those are the perks of the athlete’s life.
• Cheating will enhance all these beneifts (sic!) — just don’t get caught.

How very true. To take NBA, an American sport with which I am the most familiar, you can see it in the large swings in score when the losing team snaps and realizes they can’t win the game and therefore they don’t even try.

Do read the whole thing.

For some light weekend reading, may I suggest this Chris Arnade quartet:

• Why I Walk
• How to Walk (12 miles a day)
• How to Travel
• Why and how to walk 200 miles

The inconsistencies in capitalization are entirely Arnade’s.

Quote of the day is from The Hinternet:

This, then, is the real transformation, of which Jones’s addiction diagnosis is merely a symptom: that absorption, which used to represent a secret inner life, has been sneakily transfigured into a siphon by which our native curiosity is sucked away and sold. Where once we were rapt, now we are gift-wrapped. The text is reading us.

Including this one, if you are reading it on anything other than an RSS client.

Some weekend links, old and new:

• A Case Against the Placebo Effect
• Frank Auerbach and the unexamined life
• The Worst Generation (from the year 2000!)
• Merlin Mann on The Great Discontent (2013!)

Whether it’s on micro.blog, mastodon, bluesky, threads or in your favorite RSS client, thank you for reading!

Judging from the number of new follows BlueSky is becoming a new hub for MDs. So, it was time for a new profile pic. And because I cross-post from micro.blog to BS (which is how I will henceforth call it, just because) this… ugh… skeet will make for an interesting loop.

I am at ACR Convergence all weekend, but here are some quick shots:

• How it went
• Epistemic hygiene
• Maybe Bluesky has “won” (ᔥDave Winer)
• I hated Dubai until I learned about it