NYT facts for 2020

74 of the New York Times’ interesting facts that were part of a story in 2020 (although most of the facts come from another year, or even another century).

I was especially impressed by #30.

Some examples…

17. One study, published in Nature Climate Change in March, found that more than half of the world’s sandy beaches could disappear by the end of this century.

27. Before the Industrial Revolution, the principal sources of noise were thunder, church bells and cannon fire.

30. George Washington survived smallpox, malaria (six times), diphtheria, tuberculosis (twice) and pneumonia. ((People say that things are terrible today, but I feel that that’s because they don’t know much history, and how awful things used to be. Do you know anyone who has had smallpox or diphtheria? Do you know the difference between typhus and typhoid?))

42. Over the past five years in Minneapolis, the police have used force against Black people at seven times the rate it has been used against white people.

65. Often, the screams we hear in movies and TV are created by doubles and voice actors. One stock scream is so well-used it’s got a name, the Wilhelm. It’s in hundreds of films.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/insider/74-of-our-favorite-facts-for-2020.html

State of the Universe 2021

Swami Beyondananda explains what’s going on and how to fix it. Excerpt:

Welcome to the 2021 State of the Universe address. And the state of the Universe, I am happy to report, is everchanging, same as always. And expanding. Last year they had to let the photon belt out another notch.

Meanwhile, back on this planet known throughout the Galaxies as Comedy Central, we are witnessing the changes of the Ages. Prior to the U.S. election last fall, both sides predicted the “end of the world” if their guy lost, or worse yet if the other guy won. Well, they were both right, sort of.

https://laughlearnlinks.home.blog/swami-beyondanandas-state-of-the-universe-2021

Also see the Swami’s website, https://wakeuplaughing.com/beyondanews.php.

The Real Reason Republicans Couldn’t Kill Obamacare

Two reasons, actually: Democrats did the work, and Republicans didn’t.

An article about how Obamacare was put together, and how it survived the recent Republican president. (The article is adapted from a book.) 3,500 words:

Obamacare’s very survival seemed so improbable just a few years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidency. Wiping the law off the books had become the Republicans’ defining cause, and Trump had pledged to make repeal his first priority. As the reality of his victory set in, almost everybody outside the Obama White House thought the effort would succeed, and almost everybody inside did too.

One very curious exception was Jeanne Lambrew, the daughter of a doctor and a nurse from Maine who was serving as the deputy assistant to the president for health policy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/03/why-trump-republicans-failed-repeal-obamacare/618337/

I found especially amazing the amount of work needed, by thousands of people over several decades, to get a major piece of legislation passed:

It demands unglamorous, grinding work to figure out the precise contours of rules, spending, and revenue necessary to accomplish your goal. It requires methodical building of alliances, endless negotiations among hostile factions, and making painful compromises on cherished ideals. Most of all, it requires seriousness of purpose—a deep belief that you are working toward some kind of better world—in order to sustain those efforts when the task seems hopeless.

Democrats had that sense of mission and went through all of those exercises because they’d spent nearly a century crusading for universal coverage.

Also interesting was that the previous President apparently could not understand that pissing off a powerful Senator might not be a good idea. That one Republican Senator, John McCain, prevented the repeal of Obamacare.

How a new pill could spell the end of ageing

Not immediately, of course. But one cause of ageing (British spelling) is cells that have aged until they can’t do their job any more:

Senolytics (is) a branch of medicine that targets senescent cells; the various faulty cells that have been identified as instrumental in our eventual demise. These so-called “zombie” cells linger and proliferate as we age, emitting substances that cause inflammation and turn other healthy cells senescent, ultimately leading to tissue damage throughout the body.

Works in mice!:

A team at the Mayo Clinic (…) showed in 2011 that “using a genetic trick to get rid of these senescent cells can significantly improve health and lifespan” in prematurely aged mice. In 2016, the same group achieved similar results in naturally aged mice, releasing an arresting image of two elderly rodents born of the same litter. The one cleared of its senolytic cells seems spry and glossy, while its sibling is shrunken, greying and looks its age.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/sep/02/the-science-of-senolytics-how-a-new-pill-could-spell-the-end-of-ageing

Reasons to be cheerful

A website from David Byrne of The Talking Heads. Categories:

Here’s the start of one article, Cops and Hippies:

It sounds like the plot of some cop-buddy movie: an anarchic hippie social worker (Snoop Dogg or Owen Wilson) is forced to team up with a straight-laced conservative cop (Clint Eastwood, the Rock). Chaos and hilarity ensue. Life lessons are learned. In this case, it actually happened.

It started decades ago in Eugene, Oregon, where police responses to drug- and mental health-related calls were ending badly. So Eugene tried something different: When one of these emergency calls came in, the city dispatched social workers instead of cops. Thirty years later, the strategy has reduced conflicts between police and the public, and made Eugene a national model for harm reduction-oriented policing…

Link: https://reasonstobecheerful.world.

Headline of the week, 2021.02.25

A Capitol rioter texted his ex during the insurrection to call her a ‘moron,’ feds say. She turned him in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/02/25/capitol-richard-michetti-girlfriend-moron/

Some of the comments are good, or at least amused me:

“Who’s the moron now?”
“Something something a woman scorned.”
“There should be additional charges of felony stupid.”
“He must be a graduate of the Trump school of wooing women.”
“Having worked in a District Attorney’s office (albeit as a secretary), I assure you that if there was a sentencing enhancement for utter stupidity, jails would never have an empty bed.”
“When I saw the forest of cell phones being used to document what they were doing, I said to myself, ‘Here’s your sign.’”
“That’s known as an ‘own goal’.”
“Nothing says I don’t love you anymore than the FBI showing up at your front door.”
“Not exactly a Mensa convention was it?”
“BRB. Experiencing schadenfreude.”

404 page not found

No no, you got here correctly!

“404” is the HTTP error code that a website sends to you (well, to your browser) if you try to read a page that doesn’t exist. Normally it means that you typed the link incorrectly, or that the page has been renamed or deleted. The website can, however, redirect you to a special page to explain the problem. Some of them are funny:

Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/sljdfsdfh (you can type any garbage at the end):

Why wasn’t this page found?

We asked some leading economists.

Stagflation: The cost of pages rose drastically, while the page production rate slowed down.

General economics: There was no market for it.

Liquidity traps: We injected some extra money into the technology team but there was little or no interest so they simply kept it, thus failing to stimulate the page economy. (etc)

Bernie Sanders: https://berniesanders.com/lajsdklajsdlas.

Analog Devices: https://www.analog.com/en/products/xyzad5423.html.

FloatHub: https://floathub.com/foobar.

And more, with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20489668.

Sight restored by turning back the epigenetic clock

In mice, but that’s where things start.

‘Reprogramming’ approach seems to make old cells young again…

An emerging model in the field of ageing is that, over time, cells accumulate epigenetic noise — molecular changes that alter patterns of gene expression, including transcriptional changes and shifts in the patterns of methyl groups on DNA. Collectively, these changes cause cells to lose their identity and so to lose the DNA-, RNA- and protein-expression patterns that once promoted their youthful resilience.

Articles (on the same day!): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03119-1 and https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03403-0.