It has again been while, so some of these feel a little stale. But some are timeless!
- Our Worst Idea About “Safety” – “risk compensation” (the idea that, say, if you make people wear seatbelts they’ll just drive more recklessly and it’ll still be as dangerous, so why bother?) really infuriates me! And it popped up during the pandemic, too, where some people thought encouraging people to wear masks was a bad idea because what people should be doing was staying home. Grr.
- Is ‘hacking’ the ocean a climate change solution? U.S. experts endorse research on carbon-removal strategies. – I am bullish on all sorts of geoengineering; even under the rosiest projections of reducing carbon emissions, we’re going to need to do more to keep the temperature from getting too hot. See also: We’ve Never Seen a Carbon-Removal Plan Like This Before.
- Beijing Silenced Peng Shuai in 20 Minutes, Then Spent Weeks on Damage Control – an interesting and kind of scary look at a Chinese censorship campaign. Related: another look at how the Chinese government track down critics on social media.
- A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems – do more stuff!
- An interesting look at how the city of Montreal deals with the large amount of snow they get – it’s quite an operation!
- While we weren’t looking Congress has managed to accomplish stuff!
- How Barnes & Noble Went From Villain to Hero – ah, how things change…
- He Spurred a Revolution in Psychiatry. Then He ‘Disappeared.’ – wow, I had never heard of Dr. John Fryer – what a brave thing to do in 1972!
- What You Don’t Know About Amazon – yeah, this is not great
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation