Weekly

A new study on the early pioneers of abstraction found that artists with diverse social networks were most famous, regardless of the creativity of their work.

‘Eat local’ is a common recommendation to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet. But transport tends to account for a small share of greenhouse gas emissions. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it’s come from?

A visual introduction to probability and statistics.

Perseverance, the Fermi Paradox, and the Great Filter.

The conventional wisdom about how to spot a liar is all wrong.

Why does the Chinese Communist Party, which actively curtails the rights of those who live under its rule, still have the support of its people? What exactly is the relationship between the Chinese people and their government? And why might a Western observer of China be obscured from the Chinese point of view? Kaiser Kuo answers these questions and more in the context of recent history, showing us what the world looks like through Beijing’s windows and the extent to which Beijing’s worldview is shared by China’s citizenry. If you need one article to explain why contemporary China is the way it is, this is it.

An analysis of recent Morning Consult poll results found that Gen Zers currently between ages 13 and 23 are less likely than the general population to identify as sports fans.

See discussion of this essay on the forum, Hacker News (a), Marginal Revolution (a), Andrew Gelman’s blog 1 (a), 2 (a), 3 (a), 4 (a), /r/slatestarcodex (a), Twitter (a), listen to BBC interviewing me and Walker himself about it or listen to my interview with Smart People Podcast discussing it. Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest …

Truly unlocking competition in tech means increasing interoperability; an absolutist approach to privacy is doing the exact opposite.

Explore our surprisingly simple, absurdly ambitious and necessarily incomplete guide to the boundless mathematical universe.

(Cross-posted at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.) Remember when, inspired by Sam Harris’s TED talk, we debated whether you could derive “ought” (morality) from “is&#82…

The successful development of mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 is ‘transformational’ and opens the doors to new types of vaccines for other infectious diseases as well as cancer, according to Dr Özlem Türeci and Dr Uğur Şahin, the co-founders of Germany’s BioNTech.

Education News: BSIP Scintists Analyse 4000-Year-Old Food Balls

Serum Institute of India may be the world’s best hope for producing enough vaccine to end the pandemic.

New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

Archival footage married with part of a Christopher Hitchens speech, showing Saddam Hussein's final purge of the Iraqi Baath Party leadership. You'll notice a couple of small details are different than Hitchens remembers. The audience is larger, and the confessor does not come in wearing chains (metaphorically, perhaps, but not literally.) We don't know exactly how many hundreds of party members were killed in this purge in the whole of Iraq, but of the 68 taken out of this room on July 22, 1979, at least 22 were executed (by their fellow party members). Sadly, the bloodbath for Iraqis and ...

Here’s what’s become of them.

Violet Gibson from Dublin never made it into the history books. But she did come very close to changing the course of 20th-century Europe. She shot Benito Mussolini in 1926. Nearly a century later, the Irish capital is going to honor her.

In 1900, a civil engineer called John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would be like in 2000.

Personality traits have been found to be related to a variety of health outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine how personality traits were associated with adjustment to the COVID pandemic in college students. The sample included 484 first-year university students (76% female) attending a northeastern university who completed the Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality assessment at the beginning of a semester that was disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Using a phone-based app, students completed daily ratings of mood, perceived stress levels, and engagement in a number of health promotion activities (exercise, mindfulness, adequate sleep, etc.) throughout the semester both before and after the onset of the pandemic (e.g., a within-person longitudinal design). Results, as expected, showed that mood and wellness indices generally declined during the COVID period, although stress levels actually decreased. Further, irrespective of COVID, improved mood, less perceived stress and greater participation in health promotion activities were significantly associated with a number of personality traits including neuroticism (lower), extraversion (higher), agreeableness (higher), and conscientiousness (higher). Of primary interest, mixed-effects models were used to test how major personality traits interacted with any changes in daily ratings from the pre-COVID to COVID period. Significant interactions terms were found suggesting differential impacts of the COVID epidemic for students with low versus high levels of particular traits. Higher levels of extraversion, for example, were found to be related to decreases in mood as the pandemic progressed in contrast to those with lower extraversion, for whom there was a slight increase in mood over time. These data support the conclusion that personality traits are related to mental health and can play a role in a person’s ability to cope with major stressful events. Different traits may also be more adaptive to different types of stressors.

On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).

Interview with Balaji Srinivasan on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast

Historian William Rosenau investigates the May 19th Communist Organization in a new book about the little-known militant group

Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist turned computer scientist, has a new project: charting his every bodily function in minute detail. What he’s discovering may be the future of health care.

The story of a few good men's struggle, against their own commanders, their own fleet, their own ships and their own men.Want to support the channel? - https...

“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter…