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Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 19:12
Back in 1991, when yours truly earned his first PhD​ with a dissertation on decision making and rationality in social choice theory and game theory, I concluded that “repeatedly it seems as though mathematical tractability and elegance — rather than realism and relevance — have been the most applied guidelines for the behavioural assumptions being […]
Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 18:14
This Tuesday report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for several months at Kyoto University in Japan. It’s slightly cooler now in Kyoto but still warm. I have spent a lot of time in my life in the Netherlands and Belgium and they are very bike friendly countries…
Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 17:19
It’s a movie we’ve seen over and over again in US politics. Centrists engage in respectful discussion with a thoughtful conservative[1], only to discover they are actually talking to a dishonest troll. Yet, just like Charlie Brown lining up to kick Lucy’s football, they keep coming back for another try. Examples include Paul “policy wonk” […]
Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 11:00
I will be eternally grateful to all the scientists who made the mRNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives during he COVID pandemic. Today two of them received the Nobel Prize for medicine: Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases. Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman were cited for contributing “to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health,” according to the panel that awarded the prize in Stockholm. The panel said the pair’s “groundbreaking findings … fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system.” Traditionally, making vaccines required growing viruses or pieces of viruses and then purifying them before next steps. The messenger RNA approach starts with a snippet of genetic code carrying instructions for making proteins.
Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 09:30
It’s just as bad as you thought The Guardian reports on the latest “intellectual” vomit spewing forth from the centers of right wing academia:  June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”. In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
Created
Tue, 03/10/2023 - 08:00
Democrats are being pouty because they don’t have a young, dazzling superstar like Barack Obama to fall in love with. But they will vote and they will vote for Biden because they hate Trump. Negative partisanship is as powerful a motivator as 2008 style adoration.