2023-07-08
Readings
Use of ultrasound to orient small particles (which seems like magic): https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ultrasound-small-particles.html
Fast, cheaper fabrication of nanosheets: https://phys.org/news/2023-05-technique-fabricate-nanosheets-minute.html
Reversing the decline of stem cells in aging cell cultures (note the term of art use of “cultures” here): https://phys.org/news/2023-06-drug-delivery-method-reverse-senescence.html
A software system to decode social cues of fruit flies based on observed behaviour: https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ai-decode-fruit-fly-behaviors.html
Soudamani Singh, a professor at a medical school in West Virginia, recently filed a lawsuit to try to stop a journal from publishing an expression of concern over problems with one of her papers, seeking a restraining order and compensation. This is a very negative trend for efforts to push journals to correct/amend/annotate/retract problematic or bad articles, and Dr Singh’s lawsuit is shameful. https://retractionwatch.com/2023/07/05/scientist-sues-publisher-to-block-expression-of-concern/
This is just a preprint, but reports of a 0.4 megapixel single-photon camera for neuroimaging are really exciting: https://spectrum.ieee.org/single-photon-camera
The Nanograv 15 year data release: https://nanograv.org/news/15yrDataSet
On a social issue - this is Tom Wolf’s take on homelessness (which largely coincides with mine on many of the subissues, which is why I’m sharing it): https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/formerly-homeless-man-says-denver-next-san-francisco-leaders-change-course/
Thoughts
Recently Tim Mak, a reporter who left his job to start a news org based in Ukraine on Russia’s invasion, did a series on trans issues and was surprised and angry to lose a lot of his subscriber base, saying that his org’s mission means nothing if it doesn’t hold to its values. This, I think, illustrates a failing in intersectional thought - the idea that all activism goes well together. The problem is that every cause people believe in makes sense to them, from their religious faith, their philosophy, anti-semitism, anti-colonialism, environmentalism, atheism or opposition to anti-clericalism, there are endless causes. Many of them are opposed to each other, and while it can be tempting to think one can or should sign on to all of them, this is incoherent. One must both make choices and economise. This is part of growing up. Growing out of radicalism comes from those two steps - at age 25 you’ll learn that anti-zionist movements are often (but not always and definitely not intrinsically) anti-semitic. At age 35, you’ll realise that not everything is the most important thing, and how to have a box for “these groups should be seen as weird but tolerated but definitely never mainstreamed” distinct from “mainstream” and “never ever ever”. And so, the problem with intersectionality comes into focus - for every additional cause you bring into a movement, you reduce its potential scope and effectiveness. The further you move away from “a la carte” in activism, the worse you make it. Tim Mak doesn’t get this, and so he’s damaged his reporting on Ukraine in a way that millenials often do. When you bring all your activism, what you have is a blog, not journalism and not professionalism. There’s a place for a blog (you’re reading one now). They’re fun to write, and sometimes fun to read. Still, to the extent he understood it, he was trying for professionalism. Hopefully a suitable replacement for Mak’s work will come about, or he will learn from this. Or both.
People will go fishing for insults almost as often as they will go fishing for compliments because they prefer enemies to critique. We resist course corrections far more than we resist a new foe
The problem with a lot of moral legalism is that the rules cease to be a shorthand for what we believe and instead become a replacement - rather than being our moral default that we keep clarifying, they become our internal enemy that we want to be brittle rules that we can outsmart. Once we do that, we are lost - we cease to be good people and just become rule-followers, with those increasingly thin rules that we resent and no longer identify with hopefully holding back the monsters we become
Current Events
Ukraine - The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues, with Ukraine continuing to slowly regain territory. The US delivered cluster munitions to Kyiv, Turkey released some POWs Russia didn’t want them to, Erdogan is advocating for Ukraine’s NATO’s membership, and Bakhmut is believed likely to return to Ukraine’s control in the coming weeks despite the symbolic cost to Russia of the loss.
Last week protests broke out in France, sparked by a police killing of a minority teenager at a traffic stop, tied to minority community feelings of disenfranchisement and majority feelings of minority misbehaviour; the protests have spread across greater France
Israeli expansion of settlements with the usual militancy in them, combined with a raid on Palestinian militants in a refugee camp in Jenin, has led to escalating violence across Israel-Palestine (my usual stance on these issues is that people from either side could find adequate justification for violence given what’s at stake and the long history and the awful politics involved and I refuse to consider either side decent but consider both sides very, very human)
Nederlands government fell over asylum policy, forcing new elections later this year.
Polls
There’s a brief Pew Poll that I don’t identify with here, indicating that self-employed workers tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than other workers. Maybe the reason for this is that most jobs really have that much employer-worker tension, but for me the stability and having all the paperwork involved in having benefits (particularly healthcare) all squared away outweigh any tension with managers. I wonder if this is only true for the tier of jobs that I’ve worked - maybe at lower tiers these benefits are not that solid (or present at all) or the manager tension outweighs it substantially. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/30/self-employed-people-in-the-us-are-more-likely-than-other-workers-to-be-highly-satisfied-with-their-jobs/
While I don’t have any concrete “shoulds” that come out of this right now, I’m in the mainstream on this poll preference here, thinking that it’s ideal that a POTUS be in his or her 50s, with it being undesirable that a POTUS be older. Being in my 40s and working in neuroscience (but not specifically on human aging), I have both firsthand and some professional knowledge on aging and the brain - we lose sharpness and gain wisdom, and lose energy as well. Not everyone ages quite the same way, but everyone is impacted. I’d rather have national leaders (also state leaders and legislatiors and supreme court justices) be people with that high-wisdom-weight while still having the energy needed to do the job well and some level of sharpness. I’m not saying I wouldn’t vote for people older - that’s always at least partly strategic and depends on what’s on the menu - but I’d prefer the menu go lighter and wouldn’t mind means to ensure (with constitutional amendments if necessary) that we actually keep older folk off that menu after a certain date. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/06/about-half-of-americans-say-the-best-age-for-a-us-president-is-in-their-50s/
I’m also on board with treating pets as family members; I’ve mentioned before that I have thought of pets as family, and would treat threats or injury to them exactly the same as I would threats to one of my siblings (accepting whatever consequences this may lead to down the line): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/07/about-half-us-of-pet-owners-say-their-pets-are-as-much-a-part-of-their-family-as-a-human-member/
Policy Focus
In the US, in Groff vs DeJoy, the US Supreme Court clarified that employer hardship must be substantial rather than minimal to deny a religious accomodation request. Religious freedoms in the US are being clarified in a number of ways, both bad (in this case) and good (in compelled speech matters). I worry about the broad use of claims of faith being used to create specific rights for people of religious communities - it may be acceptable to let the existence of creeds illustrate existing broad limits of commercial and state power but far less so to let people lift any public or private rule they don’t want to follow because they decide their creed isn’t compatible with it. Reconciling that instinct with a general desire to avoid compelled speech incompatible with creed is tricky (and I find current efforts in that direction promising but there’s a rocky road ahead as corporate policy and individual creed get closer). In this particular case, I think a better solution would’ve been to have the USPS have broadly flexible working days, letting people pick their days of work while still meeting a set amount, rather than nailing them down in a way where people who choose a creed that doesn’t involve sunday work face a conflict. If they had landed there, there would not have been a conflict and it would not be a special favour to this Groff guy or anyone with his creed.
I find mandating a policy preference for an architectural style in DC to be weird political-cultural move. It’s icky rather than deeply objectionable - I like classical architecture, but I don’t only like neoclassical architecture, and the populist fascination with it isn’t something I’m keen on feeding even though opposing it isn’t something I’d spend a lot of political capital on (maybe easier to just wait until populism recedes and roll it back later as a rider on some boring spending bill in 15 years). https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/07/trump-conservative-federal-building-architecture-00104985
Florida recently faced criticism for a law designed to limit foreign ownership of certain kinds of land assets within the state; in recent years these kinds of purchases have faced increased scrutiny as wealthy foreign investors as well as foreign state interests have bought up expensive apartments as well as as farms, as personal or strategic investments in assets in the US. While criticisms of such laws are usually made on civil liberties grounds, the concerns that lead to the laws tend to be aimed at entirely different matters (but poor drafting brings the concerns closer than they probably should be). Equal Protection and questions of standing tend to test these laws regardless. My stance is that, regardless of specifics of such laws, it can be reasonable to want to restrict ownership (effective or actual - making sure that people can’t dance around restrictions through use of corporations is important if there are to be restrictions) of real property by people who are neither citizens nor permanent residents of the US. But such restrictions are not reasonable if they significantly limit US citizens or permanent residents. Here’s the Florida Law. https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/264
Reviewlets
Night City: Big City Dreams (Comic) - These Cyberpunk 2077 comics are of really inconsistent quality, but this one was touching and really well drawn (almost Sandman quality). It also left me thinking, with a number of conflicting meanings that could be pulled out of it. It helps that there isn’t a big story commitment to these.
Night Maize (Venezuelan restaurant, Manhattan) - Really unimpressive food. Not actively bad, but nothing to say for it. Customer service is actively terrible - waited for about 15 minutes at the empty window-style storefront before someone bothered to show up and service the 3 of us waiting. Definitely not worth it. Avoid.
Dark Souls 3 (video game) - Having played and enjoyed Elden Ring, this feels like stepping back slightly in time from a classic, having seen exactly why the earlier games had a fanatical-but-niche following and what needed to improve for them to go mainstream without losing their soul (haha) and turn into guided-tour games like Assassin’s Creed (which have their charms but are hampered by an overaccommodating design philosophy). The music, as expected, is bad like ER’s is. Unlike ER, the mechanics are a little less forgiving, the UI significantly worse and more symbol-laden, the graphics lack oomph. The controls are also very wonky (I spent about 10 minutes trying to do it’s overcomplicated jump mechanic, running back to the place where it’s indicated after every failure until I got it, and I have yet to do a single successful parry after dozens of tries). But.. there’s depth and a lot of mechanics visible and I’m kinda into it. I’m not sure I’m committed to the full game, but it’s strangely addictive even though clearly Elden Ring is a far more polished product.
Synners (scifi novel) - I’m having trouble following this, but I’m enjoying it anyhow. It’s a cyberpunk-themed scifi novel and part of the problem is that I’m not giving it a lot of dedicated reading time (it’s getting bits of time where I’m walking to/from work or in a supermarket. There’s a lot of worldbuilding that went into it (which I really appreciate), the main character has a lot of flavour (reminds me of the “Zoey Ashe” series), and I like how things unfold so far. Good stuff. I probably should commit to reading it differently and find another casual reading book.
Hair Philosophy (stylist in NYC) - I’ve been looking for a new regular stylist for awhile, ideally a place I’d be going to for years, without annoying ideologies they wear on their sleeve (a lot of places have ideology flags on their door or website), nor specialised for groups that are not me, nor too far or too expensive or cheap. After some browsing, I was amused by the name of this place and it seemed to fit all the other categories and I was able to get an appointment today, so I went down to the (Taiwanese) Chinatown in Manhattan and went in, deciding to mildly go after a a look inspired by Anders Hellman from Cyberpunk 2077 while waiting. They’re mostly cash-only, and they gave a high-quality-economy experience I normally associate with that particular Chinatown (I like it). I liked my stylist, and the haircut turned out well. I’ll probably become a repeat customer - I’m not deeply committed, but it at least seems like a good default choice for my repeats.
Amusements
There’s something I find charming about videos teaching old dances:
Horse kissing a golden retriever:
I took this as a challenge (some of them, including the first, were pretty questionable, but many were not) but it’s fun how much it illustrates how well-explored musical spaces are:
Recent Music
Not My Slave - Oingo Boingo - Very early Oingo Boingo, I like that the song is about getting a relationship to settle down into a comfortable and workable cadence. The music itself has the roughness of a lot of the band’s early work - it feels a bit like a demo
One Flight Down - Norah Jones - This is the kind of song that sells good speakers.
Sail to the Moon - Radiohead - There’s a limited tonality in this song that I find intriguing;