In this morning’s EconTalk, the guest Kevin Kelly mentioned Upstract as a web page he goes to every day. An old fashioned news headline aggregator with no adds that you can personalize for a small fee? Sign me up!

Not two months have passed since I declared (in Serbian) that we should ban cars — which, yes, is the same sort of hyperbole that something like defund the police was, but that is why I am not a politician — and I have discovered a treasure trove of like-minded podcasts and Twitter accounts. And now that DC has, for better or worse, Mostly for the worse, as written, and I say this even as someone who has gained the right to vote thanks to the bill. allowed non-citizens to vote, I may get to do something about it!

Today’s WaPo:

The Washington Post and KFF surveyed one of the largest randomized samples of U.S. transgender adults to date about their childhoods, feelings and lives.

There is, of course, no such a thing as a randomized sample. Samples are random, trails are randomized. Let’s not present opinion polls as high science.

Did you know that the T in DST stands for Torture? Just ask people with school-age children. It also doesn’t save anything, it shifts hours around, so the S is for Shifting. Only, to be more precise, you should really swap the f with another t.

That’s more like it.

Swatch Internet Time may have been a gimmick, but having a universal time with shifting opening hours (why not wake up at “midnight” and have school and work start at “2am”) would be preferable to… this. That is what, in effect, the strange beasts who like DST are doing, their jobs allowing them to sleep in and start their days whenever the sun actually comes up. No such luck form farmers, bakers, doctors, and most other professions that have to deal with the physical reality.

Science can do many things, but until we all move to an indoor habitat and bask in artificial sunshine it cannot increase the number of daylight hours. Pretending that it can — and codifying it into law — is a triumph of stupidity.

FT writes about Silicon Valley Bank:

“It turned out that one of the biggest risks to our business model was catering to a very tightly knit group of investors who exhibit herd-like mentalities,” said a senior executive at the bank. “I mean, doesn’t that sound like a bank run waiting to happen?”

Not really. By the end of the article we realize the senior executive and his colleagues were just plain incompetent, and that “the herd” was rightly concerned.

Ultimately, [SVB] committed a cardinal sin in finance. It absorbed enormous risks with only a modest potential pay-off in order to bolster short-term profits.

Give them the Ig Nobel Prize for economics!

From Phys.org:

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”

1. Biotech for the win (?)
2. Or does this pave the way for a dystopian post-biology future in which insatiable human appetites deplete all hydrogen from the atmosphere?
3. Mycobacterium smegmatis becoming the savior of humanity and a household name would provide fodder for middle school humor for generations to come.

Yes, there is dire inequality in clinical trial enrollment, but this is the precisely wrong way to address the lack of diversity.

Legislating behavior leads to made-up plans that are at best a waste of an intern’s time and at worst a six-figure donation to “providers” selling their “solutions”. If you will ultimately grade on the outcome — and you should! — well, what do you care how it was achieved, provided that all the other laws and guidances were followed?

Silly, silly games.

Here is a short blog post in an enthusiastic style about “My browser is now able to write blog posts for me”:

You read that right! I have discovered a new feature in my browser that allows me to write blog posts with just a few clicks. It’s amazing!

How does it work? Well, it’s simple. I just type in the topic of my blog post and the style I want it to be written in. Then, I press a button and voila! My browser generates a blog post for me in seconds.

The best part is that the blog posts are original, engaging and informative. They are not copied from anywhere else on the web. They are written by an intelligent system that learns from millions of sources and adapts to my preferences.

I can edit, tweak and customize the blog posts as much as I want. I can also add images, links and other elements to make them more attractive. The possibilities are endless!

This feature has saved me so much time and effort. I no longer have to worry about writer’s block or deadlines. I can create as many blog posts as I want without breaking a sweat.

If you want to try this feature for yourself, you can find it here: www.bing.com/blog-writ…

Trust me, you won’t regret it. It’s the best thing that ever happened to blogging!

A few things:

• This was supposed to be a “short” draft. Bing and I clearly have a different understanding of how short should a “short” blog post be.
• Bing interprets enthusiasm as “exclamation points”! It should add a subtlety slider.
• The options for tone are “Professional”, “Casual”, “Enthusiastic”, “Informational”, and “Funny”. Can it trully be called a blog writing tool without “Cynical”, “Snarky, “Caustic”, and “Blowhard”?
• The URL just redirects to its namesake search engine. Poor product placement.
• There is also an “Add to site” button at the bottom that as of yet does nothing. Good.
• It can also do paragraphs, emails, and ideas and, full disclosure, I have already used it once today to generate the first draft for a paragraph I needed for work, and it’s only 8am!

It is far from being the best thing to have happened to blogging(!) per se, but I’d call it a contender ⊕ To be clear, against meager competition. for the best work tool the 21st century has so far produced.

For Valentine’s Day, The Washington Post decided to write about a promising new male contraceptive drug being studied in mice. That’s fine. What’s unusual, bizarre, and a bit of a troll is hanging a red banner over the front page presenting it as breaking news. Seriously, WaPo?

Roses are red,
    Violets are blue,
Guess who had a flooded basement
    On Super Bowl night.

I don’t watch American football, but every plumber in Washington D.C. does!