This is why I hate driving through North Virginia. Maryland’s highways are somehow not as aggressively modern.
📚 Finished reading: The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, one of those books that should have been a blog post. The fluff is a rapid-fire succession of case studies that are too brief to be memorable but too detailed to be quickly filed away. Just listen to the podcast episode and skip the book.
DC and its suburbs have some of the worst drivers in the country (see r/MarylandDrivers), and this post from Dave Winer reminds me why: no sense of personal car space. The demographics of people trying to kiss my bumper are similar to what Dave encountered, too: middle-aged women and elderly men.
M. John Harrison writes about agency:
For one thing, “main character” is a foundational pillar of storification; & the storification of everything has led directly to the Babel we live in now. The least fiction can do, now that everything–from “news” to science–is presented/exploited as story, is to destorify itself. & that’s before you get to consciously fake news & science.
One reason I liked his books is that this perspective comes out very clearly. Now only to destorify science…
From the Institute For Progress-supported newsletter, Macroscience:
Last year, IFP brought together some of our closest friends and collaborators to put together a podcast series that would serve as a beginner-friendly introduction to metascience.
The result? “Metascience 101” – a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. We investigate why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.
So far so good. First guests?
Journalist Dylan Matthews sits down with economist Heidi Williams and IFP co-founder Caleb Watney to set the scene.
Bah-rump. Episode two?
OpenPhil CEO Alexander Berger interviews economist Matt Clancy and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison to talk about whether science itself is slowing down, one of the key motivating concerns in metascience.
A journalist, an entrepreneur, two economists and a policy wonk gather around the fireplace to talk science. What seems to be missing is actual scientists. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
And if your retort is that few if any scientists have metascience as there full-time field of study, well, are any of the above doing it full time? I am sure the discussions will be brilliant — I will write up updates as I listen along — but the start looks a helluva lot like an echo chamber. Hope I’m wrong!
(↬Tyler Cowen, because who else. He will also be a guest in a future episode.)
John Carroll, the founder of Endpoints News has stage 4 Merkel cell carcinoma and quite a story to tell:
If I had stayed at Valley Baptist and been treated with chemo, I likely would have seen Merkel cell carcinoma rear back up within a few months, putting me on a statistically short path to the grave.
[…]
My case manager said that if I wanted to leave they would have to arrange a transfer. But I already had the lay of the land from the small army of assistants and nurses who kept the hospital on its rickety track. A nurse told my wife and I — sotto voce — that as we were headed into the weekend, that could take days.
You should just go, she said quietly.
My wife drove the get away car after I signed the AMA (against medical advice), and a friend in the industry helped text my way into MD Anderson as we made the six-hour trip north.
At the other end of that journey was immunotherapy, from a company that Carroll disparaged as a journalist. So it goes…
The family looking forward to one last weekend at the beach, but no:
Swimming was banned at beaches in Ocean City and on Assateague Island on Sunday after used hypodermic needles and other medical waste washed ashore, authorities said.
Maryland officials closed Assateague State Park to swimming, wading, surfing or any other activities in the ocean. The Assateague Island National Seashore, which is in both Maryland and Virginia, prohibited swimming along “ALL” ocean-facing beaches, according to alerts sent Sunday. The island is 37 miles long.
Most news is noise; local news is an exception.
“With everyone who does that in the District of Columbia, they’re singling me out?”
Here are a few unrelated articles that crossed my inbox this morning:
It’s been exactly 3 years since Norm Macdonald died from acute myeloid leukemia, which was itself a know. complication of treatment he received for multiple myeloma.
But none of that is important. Anwyay, here’s Norms last stand-up performance on Letterman.
This is why I hate driving through North Virginia. Maryland’s highways are somehow not as aggressively modern.