WaPo is on a roll of good opinion articles. Today’s had advice on coping with the many crises we are told we are facing:

One cannot usefully address a threat to birds if they do not delight in individual birds. (Maybe not all of them, but some.) One cannot meaningfully answer the climate crisis if they lack excitement about the human capacity for invention and reinvention. One cannot make progress toward equality and inclusion if they don’t see and love the potential of humankind — enemies included — and one cannot build the future if one fears the future.

Indeed.

Subscribing to the Financial Times continues to pay off splendidly: just look at this Twitter thread from their chief statistician on the plummeting life expectancy in America. His (paywalled) column is even better.

Oh and it’s guns, drugs, and cars, in case you were wondering.

“The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.”

The Spectator has a profile of Nassim Taleb out today, and it is entertaining enough. E.g.:

Taleb had been busy. He had already published two papers since the new year, on statistical concepts that I asked him to explain to me as if I was five years old, to which he said, “you’re not five years old.”

Any of his 12 conversations with Russ Roberts would, of course, be a better use of your time. And as entertaining!

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.