Favorites March 27th 2022

Woofers @NotWoofers

Video of Russian troops in combat after their convoy came under Ukrainian attack.

This reminds me of the article a few days ago covering an interview with a former US marine who went to help Ukraine. "In Afghanistan, I used to feel jealous of those tankers, buttoned up in all that armor. Not anymore." This may be part of why the Russians are abandoning so many vehicles. Presumably this is a helmet-mounted Gopro, but also, WTF is up with those branches?

Paul Baumgart @improbapaul

A nice reminder that we live in an age of miracles: “Oxitec’s modified mosquitoes… were developed with a special protein so that when they pair with a female mosquito the only viable offspring they produce are also non-biting males.”

theguardian.comUS poised to release 2.4bn genetically modified male mosquitoes to battle deadly diseasesThe future isn’t female, at least not for the invasive Aedes aegypti: the altered males are engineered to produce only male offspring

Very cool, I wonder how they sort their candidate mosquitos... I remember DeepMind developing a neural net to do it automatically a few years back.

Dr Sarah Taber @SarahTaber_bww

More wheat stats. My personal favorite Misleading Wheat Stat is "Ukraine/Russia grow 25% of world wheat exports." Why's it misleading? It's technically true, but doesn't mean what people think! Missing wheat from the war is actually less than 1% of global wheat crop!

This is followed by a teriffic thread, higlights that the global futures market predicted a conflict early enough to result in more wheat to be planted months ago. There really are challenges caused by the war, but it's not a shortage, it's a problem of logistics of getting the wheat to the people who need it.

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 @Noahpinion

Wolf Ladejinsky, the economist who advised the Japanese and Taiwanese governments on how to do land reform, viewed himself as an anti-communist -- perhaps the most effective anti-communist ever -- because land reform removed farmers' impulse to support communist revolutions.

I'm a huge fan of the book How Asia Works¹, Japan and Taiwan are huge successes from that book, so naturally I'm a fan of Ladejinsky. I had no idea he was also a Georgist.

• Long thread covering SF Planning department's plans for more homes, with a focus on the new concept that cities must actually take into account the probability that the units will ever actually be built.

• You may have heard that the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has been nearly leveled, along with the human cost, we've also lost a ton of buildings that were created using an experimental kind of concrete that is associated with less CO2 emissions.

• If you want to know about the Will Smith / Chris Rock altercation from the Oscars, here's an excellent breakdown of the video. But also, maybe who cares?

July 2018

1. I have repeatedly brought up insights from this book at parties with people who definitely do not care.