As I told a guy today up at Slater Park, I plan to live to 100 because very few people die after that age. I didn’t tell him that I plagiarized that George Burns line. I could also have quoted Woody Allen: I plan to achieve immortality by not dying. There are certainly things one […]
The crisis is epistemic. The cognitive infrastructure that allows citizens to share a world, to deliberate together, to recognize one another as participants in a common project, has been corroded by industrial-scale disinformation, by the collapse of shared informational ecosystems, by the deliberate cultivation of factional reality. ~Mike Brock
I’ve read over 200 history books and biographies. The two great drivers of history are war and money. For a dose of military history, I recently read “The Dark Path” by Williamson Murray. A big take-home of that book was how often victory depended on superior finances. For economic history, I’ve read “Money: The true […]
Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet this month. If you are Taiwanese or care about them, this is what you need to know: China holds $760 billion in US debt, which it could call by beginning to sell its bonds at any point. It wouldn’t crash the US economy, but it would put a […]
Craig Venter died yesterday at the age of 79. As a grad student, I wondered whether it would be possible to sequence the human genome. As a postdoc, I did both Maxam and Gilbert sequencing and Sanger sequencing (first with E coli Klenow fragment, then reverse transcriptase) a couple hundred nucleotides per reaction, each reaction […]
I’m not enough of a scholar of international affairs to possess a highly differentiated opinion on Taiwan. Superficially, a PRC invasion of Taiwan seems analogous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: the PRC brands Taiwan as a renegade state, just as Putin brands Ukraine as “little Russia.” The historical antecedents are very different, and the […]
From a friend who has worked at the NIH for many years: “Can AI help doctors make better decisions? At NIH, we brought together scientists and clinicians from across the country to explore exactly that. Their consensus was that with continued research, ethical and responsible guardrails, and strong collaboration, AI could become a helpful and […]
Gallons of digital ink are spilled weekly about how AI will be a job-destroying juggernaut. But it’s far from clear that all jobs will be vulnerable and on what time scale the AI replacement will occur. “Who gets laid off first? Writers and editors are at the greatest risk, the report says — 57 percent […]
Several years ago, I read Isaac Deutcher’s monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Naturally, it included an account of Trotsky’s assassination. I’ve also read a couple of Stalin biographies and Richard Pipes’ “The Russian Revolution.” I don’t recall how “The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy” by […]
Godwin’s law states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” In my experience, a similar law applies to the words “socialist,” “communist” and “Marxist.” All three words are used interchangeably and as epithets, not descriptions of governments or economic systems. Let’s start with Marxist: “The […]