Favorites February 20th 2024
I'm happy they're working on fixing this, but what an absolutely insane system. Here's the article the graphics are from.
So, I already knew that vehicle weight was not a clear contributor to pedestrian deaths, but I always thought it was just vehicle height. Turns out it's mostly.. phones? Vehicle height still contributes a bit, but phones are the main element. The biggest problem with this explanation is that the trend isn't as clear in other countries, although one possible explanation is that the standard of manual transmissions outside the US make it harder to use a phone. Oh, and child pedestrians are actually safer now!
I think the pizza metaphor quite nicely demonstrates the problem with subsidised housing mandates. The obvious outcome of putting a tax on production of a good is less of the good being produced.
Longer Reads
• Here's a thread covering the explosion of new tools for programming DNA and RNA. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– We make a lot more food with the same amount of land compared with 60 years ago. (src)(cached)
– You can paint it in various ways, but it's clear that the SFPD wildcat strike continues, at least for ticketing cars. (src)(cached)
– Susan Wokinski's son OD'd, apparently because of fentanyl contamination in some other drug, really seems like fentanyl is a much worse problem than previous drug waves. (src)(cached)
– The Alabama supreme court has basically made IVF nonviable in their state. This used to be a hypothetical, but now it's real, and anyone who didn't think they'd do this should rethink their affiliation with Republicans (src)
– Fallout from last year's Hugo nomination censorship: the Hugo winner for Short Story wouldn't have even been nominated if it hadn't been for all the nominated books being pulled. The author has now decided to essentially 'return' the award. (src)
– Lithuania's Foreign Minister is quite gloomy prospects for the war in Ukraine because the rest of the West is simply not stepping up aid enough. (src)(cached)
– The education divide in America is now between *Postgrads* and everyone else. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Great video of competative bedmaking in Japan. (src)
– ElevenLabs is already making AI generated sound to match the Sora videos (src)
– Brianna Wu has really come around to the anti-tankie/anti-american communist view. I tend to agree, he DSA has lost the plot, they're no longer just further along on a linear scale, it's a horseshoe (src)(cached)
– Another tetris world record has been broken, this one for highest score. Here's a ~20 minute video about it. (src)
– A play on the old saying, but: "Apple TV+ Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix" (src)(cached)
– List of items that are unexpectedly named after a person. (src)
– US battery storage installations will be three times greater in 2024 than they were in 2022 (src)(cached)
– Chinese company is having success at censoring people on Twitter. (src)(cached)