yellowdoorknob: Internet reading Q1 2022

1. I'm tired all the time. You're tired. We're all tired. How could living at the junction of the third year of a global pandemic and the threat of World War III be anything but completely, thoroughly, absolutely exhausting?

Pandemic reading

Are you mentally ill, or very unhappy? Are we experiencing a parallel pandemic, or having a rational response to a traumatic world?
The Omicron Question by Tomas Pueyo
America Is Not Ready for Omicron by Ed Yong
Much of our Omicron problem can be traced back to a false binary: That the variant is less of a danger too often gets misconstrued as the variant is not a danger at all.
‘PR-chitecture’ won’t save us from the pandemic
Workers in Vietnam lived inside factories to keep Samsung’s products on shelves during the pandemic
The Pandemic Made the Rich $1.7 Trillion Richer

2. How do you love a book that hates you? On CS Lewis' Narnia

Media, Languages, and Short stories

For three years running there have been precisely zero white men nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and the last one to actually win was John Scalzi all the way back in 2013. This suggests a clear aesthetic shift in how sci-fi works. Also: two competing tendencies in queer fiction, Hugboxing vs Scab Picking
Raya is doomed from the start on the representation front. Southeast Asia has about the same population as Europe—imagine if Disney announced that they are going to make a movie representing ALL of Europe’s cultures.
I love that Rocky and Grace would naturally start to collaborate on their shared science problem because even on Earth, civilian scientists would happily fraternise even when their nations of origin are hostile to one another because being nerdy about a shared interest is a glue that can bind all of us. This is a direct rebuke to the cosmic sociology in Three-Body Problem where all sentient, technologically-advanced life in the universe are maximally hostile to one another.
Learning Gaelic and Ojibwe online during the pandemic (by Paul Meighan-Chiblow)
Duolingo Data Vault. See also: Comparing all Courses for English Speakers
The Revolution Will Not Be Served with Fries
The Love Song of the Predator Drone
By the Pricking of My Robotic Thumbs by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books: In January 2021, NYPL had purchased 310 perpetual audiobook licenses for Obama's memoir A Promised Land at $95 each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought 600 and 39 one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these cost about as much as 3,000 copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about $18 per copy. As of August 2021, the library has spent less than $10,000 on the 226 hardcover copies.
John Scalzi interview at Galaxy's Edge
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
SF reading protocols by Jo Walton
A question for Lambda Literary
It's just Oscars takes all the way down
Schwarzenegger's speech was a demonstration of high rhetorical art.
Ngênani About Mengenai

3. I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This, but You Are Bi Enough by Zachary Zane

Sexuality/LGBTQIA, Friendship, Relationship

There Is No Sexual Liberation Without Bisexuals
Cis-Het Actors Should Not Play LGBTQ+ Roles "In the case of Schitt's Creek, Noah was playing a character who was not aware of his sexuality. I also knew that I was there to authenticate the experience and ground that experience and it was a choice that I made as a gay person for the story,"
We need to talk about romantic love and why it's so horrible
Men in Netherlands with older brothers are more likely to be enter a same-sex union
100 Bisexual Books
'Heartstopper being a graphic novel certainly helps the filmmaking process' and 'It’s more of an episodic story, so I decided a comic would be a better format.' Also: 'I began with the desire to write a story about the power of platonic love.'
The older we get, the more we need our friends—and the harder it is to keep them
There I Almost Am: On envy and twinship by Jean Garnett
What’s R(ace) Got To Do With It?: White Privilege & (A)sexuality
Surveillance in a Little Fortress of LGBTQ Oppression
A Secret Asexual Traitor to Her Country

4a. The rightful outpouring of support for Ukraine teaches us that the West can condemn occupation when it wants to. By Yousef Munayyer

4b. I saw a TikTok recently in which a blue-haired teen declared their commitment to “BLM” and Jewish “return” and “decolonization” by occupying Palestine. If you’re thinking that something about this whole thing feels weird, well, you’re not wrong.

4c. Hallelujah! A Brief History of Bombing People by Ben Mauk

Race, Politics, and International: Ukraine, Panama, and Xinjiang

The incomprehensible thing about this war is that Russia is not a belligerent young nation in need of expansion; it is not filled with frustrated young men hoping to assert themselves in conflict, as with Syria, Afghanistan or the world’s other conflict zones; it is already elderly, ageing quickly and in some parts heading for oblivion.
Why do so many Indonesians back Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Devon Zuegel's Field notes: Panamá, SEZs, & biotech
In 2015, the E.U. created the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which has since spent nearly six billion dollars. Much of its work involves pressuring African nations to adopt tougher immigration restrictions. “Make Libya the bad guy. Make Libya the disguise for their policies while the good humans of Europe say they are offering money to help make this hellish system safer.”
What makes Ukraine into the object of Russian power is not just it geography, but the division of its politics, the factional quality of its elite and its economic failure, by Adam Tooze
Philanthropy benefits the super-rich
What Rashida Tlaib Represents
Modern Capitalism Is Weirder Than You Think. It also no longer works as advertised.
Chumbawamba’s Long Voyage
The BLM Mystery: Where did the money go?
How to Argue With a Racist -- review
A fortuneteller in Saigon told me that in my darkest hours of life, cooking and sewing would carry me. That prediction proved true in unexpected ways: I have worked as a cook for a brothel and a suture-nurse in a refugee camp, a tofu-maker and a silk-weaver. I have been through poverty and back out again.
Polysilicon from Xinjiang
The death spiral of an American family
The homevoters and the haut precariat
The Cult of Adam Tooze

5. In what sense is the science of science a science?

Science and Technology

Why is our Moon's farside so different from its nearside?
Physics envy among Biologists (a really hilarious read)
Mobolaji Williams's syllabus for Harvard Physics 95 -- an attempt to answer the question: What does it mean when people say they are a physicist?
The creation of Soulver
https://numbr.dev
Interactive maps of solar eclipse paths
A potential hangup for quantum computing: Cosmic rays
How Software in the Life Sciences Actually Works (And Doesn’t Work)
For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff
Researchers are discovering that the soil is full of noise produced by the many life forms that spend time underground, from bacteria to insects to moles, mice and rabbits.
Why Isn't There a Replication Crisis in Math?
Why Are Mathematicians So Bad at Arithmetic?
The rediscovery of Wallace’s giant bee in Halmahera uncovers disheartening truths about the tenuous fate of hidden insect species
Total energy use of continuous hot water bottles use for a household is almost 30 times less than the heating energy consumed by the average Belgian household.
Why is the Nuclear Power Industry Stagnant? by Austin Vernon
Solar PV's Path to Dominance (also by Austin Vernon)
USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables
Zombie science goes through the motions of scientific research without a real research question to answer, it follows all the correct methodology, but it doesn’t aspire to contribute to advance knowledge in the field.
The Calorie Counter
Why are computers so complicated? 'Skew' in the history of computer systems
Will there be a day when we can engineer a medication or gadget that causes brains to get rapturous pleasure from virtue and feel nothing from vice? To create geniuses for whom studying physics gives them the feeling of cumming day and night?
A Google Replacement Will Not Look Like Google

6. I know a lot about my “friends,” but not because I’ve spoken to them, but because I’ve seen them. I swim daily through this cybersea of pictures, devoid of language save for the sparsest of captions, images haunted by splendor or sadness, but always laden with meaning. Most of social media is not literate, but visual: pictures, videos, gifs, memes. (by Arjun S. Byju)
Also: When I was young and visited my grandmother in India, I often marveled at how long it took her to look at photographs. My grandmother came of age during a time in which photographs were at once posed, momentous, and infrequent. Now, I scroll past more pictures than she might have taken in her entire life while I wait for the subway. My grandmother savored pictures. I burn through—genuinely consume—them.

Internet, Crypto

Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are. Their claims to decentralization and immutability fall apart under scrutiny
David Rosenthal's Stanford EE380 Talk on cryptocurrency and blockchain
In our cashless society, we need to take digital jail seriously
The Wire investigates claims behind the use of ‘Tek Fog’, a highly sophisticated app used by online operatives to hijack major social media and encrypted messaging platforms and amplify right-wing propaganda to a domestic audience.
Scammy Instagram ‘war pages’ are capitalizing on Ukraine conflict
Why Is Matt Damon Shilling for Crypto? In the ad, his words are high-flown but they amount to a macho taunt: If you’re a real man, you’ll buy crypto. The bleakness of that pitch is startling.
A single Dogecoin transaction uses the equivalent to the power consumption of an average U.S. household over 18.32 days. (Bitcoin's is equivalent to 2.5 months of power)
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen. (by Johann Hari)
An Engineer's Hype-Free Observations on Web3 (and its Possibilities)
Roxane Gay - Why I’ve Decided to Take My Podcast Off Spotify
Moxie Marlinspike's impressions of web3
Every sentence of this “explanation” of blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) from the Harvard Business Review is false
Tech giants like Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian climate activists.

7. Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (by Ben Kuhn)

(Development) Economics

Unrolling the new MNREGA system in a tearing hurry in Bihar might lead to a jam in wage payments. Indeed, the additional delays were huge ... dwarfed other treatment effects throughout the intervention period. The academic account of the experiment (Banerjee et al. 2020) is very thorough, precise, and nuanced. However, in the “dissemination accounts”, the delays in wage payments are not mentioned.
Pritchett: to sustain growth and to initiate growth, you need to identify at least a set of binding constraints, which are what the obstacles truly are to your economy
Who earned PhDs in economics in 2020?
Fame makes for poor human capital
Rejection by Arthur Spirling
Is war necessary for economic growth? A review, and some aviation history by Nintil
Precolonial Legacies in Postcolonial Politics examines the long-run effects of precolonial statehood in rural Senegal. When our theories pertain to ongoing socio-political dynamics, we gain insight by taking our questions into the field. Precolonial legacies are spatially dependent. The effects of the precolonial past on contemporary development outcomes has been intermittent over time.
Water Conflict Chronology Timeline list
The Stata Frames Guide
Markdoc
Alex Albright's So you want to go on the job market
Mostly Harmless Big Data: MIT OCW lecture notes

8a. If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying by Sasha Chapin

8b. No one reads your paper. But you should publish nonetheless. And: No one reads your blog: Reflections on the middling bottom.

Learning and Thinking

When you’re taking notes, handwriting is good for absorbing knowledge. But when you’re trying to produce knowledge — to develop and express thoughts of your own? Then the winner is often typing.
On Bloom's two sigma problem: A systematic review of the effectiveness of mastery learning, tutoring, and direct instruction by Nintil
The Learning System - Decentralized Knowledge Transfer as Alternative to Education
The unreasonable effectiveness of one-on-ones (by Ben Kuhn)
Heuristics That Almost Always Work (astralcodexten)
Things you're allowed to do
Multitasking Isn't Progress—It's What Wild Animals Do for Survival
Phil Torres response to a critique of his essays against long-termism: archived lesswrong, EA forum
We could have apprenticeships, which were effective but didn’t scale, or we could have schools, which were ineffective but scaleable. We couldn’t have both. This was the trade-off we faced. We choose school.
Twitter and Anti-intellectualism
The dangers of high status, low wage jobs
What wipes in Star Wars teach us about the brain and also interface design
What is an 'interruption', anyway?
Try Asking People Why Things Matter to Them: It can make your conversations weirder and more interesting
Every Argument We're Having Is Secretly About One Thing: the fear that we were never really alive at all