I wish King Charles the best in light of his cancer diagnosis. Reading some of the old coverage of his health issues I noticed that both of his parents had “old age” listed as the cause of death. Any certifying MD that tried to pull that over here would have had the paperwork returned in an instant.

🌎 The Washington Post: “Watch the Earth breathe for one year”. No, seriously, watch it. One of the best works of data art I’ve seen, beautiful and scary.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.

This morning’s Financial Times has the headline of the week: “Ben & Jerry’s calls for permanent ceasefire in Gaza”. Straight, serious, factual, and comically absurd.

The Washington Post has your weekend reading covered: “He spent his life building a $1 million stereo. The real cost was unfathomable”.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

So it goes…

🏀 And the award for the most poetic basketball headline goest to The Washington Post: “Wizards cast hopeful look into mirror of future, see Thunder looking back”.

At least they are only the second-worst team in the NBA this season, topped only by the worst-ever team in the league’s history.

The Washington Post reports another wave of covid is coming to America. Well, it certainly came to our household. And much like the first time around, I got it days after a vaccine — just my luck. At least this time it’s only 3 days of sore throat and runny nose, and not a full week of high fevers.

Today’s Washington Post has a good write-up on how genetic engineering of the near-extinct American chestnut tree to make it more resistant to infection went wrong:

After he enlisted the help of Ek Han Tan, a geneticist at the University of Maine, to analyze the chestnut’s genome, they made their discovery this fall: The plants they were working on were, in fact, not Darling 58 trees.

Instead, they found they were working with a different chestnut line — called the Darling 54 — where the gene was inserted in another chromosome entirely, potentially corrupting one of the tree’s existing genes.

…

In a phone interview, Newhouse, the SUNY ESF director, acknowledged the mix-up but said he wasn’t sure what transpired.

“As far as exactly how it happened, we don’t know,” he said. “It must have been a label swap between these two trees that we were working with at the same time” in or around 2016.

The brilliant minds who think engineering mosquitos is a good idea can’t foresee that even a seemingly innocuous clerical error can lead to disaster, never mind the second-order effects to nature if your project succeeds. Whoever’s read Taleb’s Incerto (or some of his tweets) knows better.

What kind of a wimpy autocrat has complete control of the media, no serious opposition, gives pre-election handouts left and right, but still needs to bus people from out-of-state to stuff the ballots? Serbia’s president, apparently. Maybe that’s why Putin hasn’t yet called to congratulate.

The best newspaper article I’ve read in ages is also about government dysfunction. The Washington Post lays out in great detail all the ways in which much of D.C. is vulnerable to flooding, and some of the ways to overcome it, yet:

It is the quintessential story of how Washington works that none of these proposals has reached senior decision-makers. That’s because more than a dozen federal agencies own land and buildings there, each with its own congressional appropriation committee to please.

But that is just a wrinkle in a dissertation about climate change, urbanism and governance. Highly recommended.