Favorites February 3rd 2023

January 2022, Stanford

Alex Lee 李天明 @alex_lee

Today, we introduced AB 413 to institute daylighting to improve public safety. CA’s pedestrian fatality rate is more than 25% higher than the national average. Daylighting is an important measure that increases visibility of pedestrians & bicyclists at crosswalks & intersections

Alex Lee has been introducing absolutely amazing bills, I like this one too. Even better would be if they'd pay for bulb-outs or bollards to physically block cars from parking in those spaces, rather than just red paint, but it's a start.

Heather Long @byHeatherLong

JUST IN: The US economy gained an astonishing 517,000 jobs in January – much better than expected. Unemployment rate: 3.4% --> Lowest in decades. Wages: +4.4% for past year (up 0.3% in January) Bottom line: This is NOT an economy in recession

This is great news and hard to overstate, it's also not supposed to be possible, here's a short thread about the way all economic indicators have bounced around in the 2020s. Also, the bureau of labor statistics updated their numbers, and there are a million more people in the US than they thought.

Ethan Mollick @emollick

The liking-learning gap, what students like is not what they learn from: 📊We like graphics, but fun slides hurt long-term recall (boring ones help) 🧑‍🏫We think we learn more from slick lecturers, but we don't 🍪 When given cookies in a final class, we report we learned 20% more

Cookies! Cookies make them think they learned more! Amazing.

Hannah Ritchie @_HannahRitchie

99% of the Indian population has access to electricity. In 2000, this was just 59%. Even in 2010, just 76%. A massive achievement over the last few decades. ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-…

If you're wondering what happened in 2011, that was when they changed the accounting from per village to per town.

Threads

• I just mentioned spy balloons the other day, there's a long thread about a Chinese spy balloon floating around US airspace. Key point though: "it does not create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit."

• Great thread about scaling up production of things generally, but then gets into how it applies to the difficultiies of building nuclear power plants. Here's an Ars Technica article on the same subject.