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.
Working with lymphocytes in one way or another for the last 15 years, I am obligated to link to yesterday’s xkcd comic despite at least two (probably) unintentional but still glaring mistakes: a “B” making its way into the plasma and T-reg cells. What is with this pro-B bias?
We all know that talk is cheap, so we tend to believe what we see more than what we hear. Your real friends are the ones who show up to help you move, not the ones who tell you how they’ll always be there for you. A good boss is the one who gives you time off when your mom dies, not the one who says, “I care about you!” and then asks you if you might have time to polish the PowerPoint between the wake and the funeral.
Unfortunately, when we want to transmit wisdom, words are often all we have.
Which continues to be an immense, unsolvable, and underappreciated problem.
🍿 Jumanji: Welcome to the Junge was as silly and mindless as you would expect, and sometimes (often!) that’s exactly what’s needed. Jack Black’s role in particular was a delight — just enough to soothe the pain of switching the mechanics from board games to video.
📺 The Last of Us was the best and the worst of modern-day American television. Great acting. An engaging and dynamic storyline. A powerful message. Green screens galore.
At least (some of) the giraffe was real.
Here is a list of appliance lifespans from our new home owner guide:
To me, born and raised in 20th century Serbia, these seem awfully short! Have things become unrepairable?
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!
For your weekend reading enjoyment, FT’s Janan Ganesh on (un)healthy eating:
- It is easier to fast than to eat healthily.
- You must be willing to upset people.
- Beware pasta.
- Don’t expect to “burn it off”.
- Know thy weight.
Sound advice. I may have also posted a few excerpts.
As far as discoveries go, 2023 is shaping up nicely. Yesterday we had electricity from air, today there is some movement on superconductors.
Sure, none of these will be immediately life-changing. But I vaguely remember reading about some new super-slick materials years ago, and today I don’t have to worry about how to get leftover ketchup out from the bottom of the bottle.
Progress!
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.”