D.C. Revamps Driver’s License Design:
“USA” was added directly next to Washington, DC on the top left, making sure that TSA agents, bouncers, and other security gatekeepers know the District is indeed part of the United States. The cards once read “District of Columbia,” which confused some.
Only in America.
🏀 USA Basketball starts fresh with new players and coach for FIBA World Cup:
USA Basketball has won gold at the past four Olympics but is seeking to avenge an embarrassing seventh-place finish at the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China, where an underwhelming roster lost to Serbia and France.
No shame in losing to the homes of Nikola Jokić and Victor Wembanyama, even though the first didn’t play and the second was still in diapers back then.
Magic, Mundanity and Deep Protocolization:
Nudge technology as conceived by behavioral economists turned out to be irreproducible nonsense, but nudge technology as embodied by AI will be real, and beyond anything Sunstein and Thaler dreamed of.
I haven’t appreciated Venkatesh Rao recently, but this is a good article! Bonus points for teaching me about the Balenciaga meme.
Cool resource alert: Improving Your Statistical Inferences by Daniël Lakens has the best introduction to p values I’ve seen on the free web. Frank Harrel’s Biostatistics for Biomedical Research has been available for a while, but only suitable for advanced readers.
Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.
We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.
Another one on our travel list: Calvert Cliffs State Park — home to the most fossils per square foot on the East coast, and neighbor to the state’s only nuclear power plant.
Chesapeake Bay is a natural wonder of the world and Maryland has its best parts, making it clearly the best state in the union — no contest.
Duck (🦆), North Carolina.
This morning’s story in The Washington Post on a slow-rolling climate disaster has this as the subtitle:
Maryland’s iconic Smith Island faces one of the nation’s most dire forecasts for rising seas, but real estate is booming
In the story we learn that the “booming” real estate market means that
More homes have sold on Smith Island in the last three years than in the previous 11 combined, according to sales data.
…
Woutila and Pueschel lived in the Baltimore suburbs for years, but she always dreamed of living on a sailboat and he of owning waterfront property. As they scouted real estate listings, they hit upon a marshy plot in the middle of the Chesapeake: Smith Island.
Waterfront homes run roughly from $100,000 to $200,000 — far less than most spots on the mainland — so it was one of the few places that fit the couple’s budget. In comparison, a two-bedroom condo on the water in Annapolis recently sold for $530,000 and a small home near a dock in Shady Side, Md., went for $360,000.
Framing is everything: a journalist’s “real estate boom” is a thinking person’s exodus.
