A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.
Some good links from the past week:
Once a decade, I am obligated to read a book from Eric Topol. Ten years ago it was during a rotation at Georgetown where they were handing around copies of The Creative Destruction of Medicine like candy. Of course, if those books had truly been candy they would have been of the sort that quickly congeals into an inedible hard lump because nothing in The Creative Destruction… aged well.
Well this year Topol has a book out on aging, and if it weren’t for some high-profile endorsments I would not be paying it two cents. But then I saw Nassim Taleb praising its rigor and scholarliness, highlighting as an example that Topol cites multiple trials for each claim. One can hope the trials he cites actually back up the claims, and to confirm that is indeed the case I now have Super Agers on the pile. Kindle version only: physical space in our library is too precious for Topol.
🍿Annie (1982) was messier than I remembered. I guess it’s hard to make a throwback to 1950s musicals when none of the skills survived — all that staircase dancing would have made much more sense with Gene Kelley doing the moves.
If not for Carrol Burnett it would hardly have been worth the rewatch.
A random window that popped up on my Mac yesterday. Nothing on it is selectable, including the traffic light buttons in the top left. Guess I’ll have to restart, like it’s Windows 95.
📚 Finished reading: The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, the intellectual basis for THS. An important book when it first came out in 1943 and even more important now when embryos are being selected for their longevity and human intelligence reduced to a large language model.
Noah Smith writes about health care costs:
So overall, health care is probably now more affordable for the average American than it was in 2000 — in fact, it’s now about as affordable as it was in the early 1980s. That doesn’t mean that every type of care is more affordable, of course. But the narrative that U.S. health costs just go up and up relentlessly hasn’t reflected reality for a while now.
And he has the data to back it up, though some of it feels like playing the denominator whack-a-mole. Interesting regardless. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
Scott Sumner notes some underappreciated movies, most of which I haven’t seen, so now my to-watch list has grown threefold. He thinks that the greatest films of all time were mostly done in the 1920s through the 1970s, and I absolutely agree! My favorite came out in 1952. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
I had MAID — Canada’s euthanasia program — on my radar ever since they announced expanding their “services” to people who are not terminally ill, touting “substantial savings”. And things do not look good for Canada’s unwell. The ending of that New York Times Magazine article is gut-wrenching.
After four months of waiting, I’ve received a Daylight tablet yesterday. The good: the e-ink display is better than I expected and writing with the pen is as smooth as can be. The bad: at the end of the day it’s Android and needs a Google account for everything. Also, it’s on the heavy side.
🍿 Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) was a riot. Reading about the intricacies of how they managed to fit all the celebrities into 22 days of planning and 18 days of shooting — on an $8M budget and with a constantly shifting cast — was almost as entertaining.