How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years Construction Physics
How the Soon-to-Reopen Folger Shakespeare Library Came to Be Smithsonian
Climate
A Big Tool to Fight Climate Change Is Hiding in Plain Sight The New Republic. Civil forfeiture (!).
Zero-carbon cement process could slash emissions from construction New Scientist
Climate change could be about to make flight turbulence a lot worse CNN
Something weird is happening with tornadoes Vox
Natural disasters hit 1 in 5 US adults’ finances in 2023: Fed Phys.org
Japanese Study Warns of Deadly Air Pollution Risk from Siberian Wildfires Nippon.com
The Vital Near-Magic of Fire-Eating Fungi JSTOR Daily
America’s Hottest City Is Having a Surge of Deaths Scientific American. Phoenix.
California’s giant sequoias face a new threat — and the world’s largest tree may be at risk SF Chronicle
Water
Mexico’s drought, heatwave and water shortage are so bad even police are blocking traffic in protest AP
Syndemics
NNU invited to join CDC’s HICPAC workgroup on infection prevention (press release) National Nurses United. Good news, for once.
Covid Makes A Comeback In Andalusia As Cases Triple Murcia Today
DOH: Philippines keeps low COVID-19 risk despite rise in cases PhilStar
Lying to Ourselves at The End of The World Jessica Wildfire, OK Doomer
A global pandemic treaty is in sight: don’t scupper it Nature. How unfortunate that WHO completely ruined its credibility by declaring that Covid was not airborne, and fighting aerosol scientists tooth and nail.
Reporting standards for outbreak data: A systematic review (preprint) medRxiv. Systematic literature review. From the Abstract: “The current landscape of data reporting for outbreaks is ad hoc and inconsistent. Public health authorities have discretion to determine when, where, how, and what outbreak data to report. This uneven information flow hampers response efforts by decreasing the accountability and transparency needed to build public trust in the public health response.” As we see all too plainly with the ongoing H5N1 debacle.
USDA expands support for H5N1 response to more dairy producers Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
Despite growing concerns over bird flu, many US dairy workers have not received protective equipment FOX
Influenza H5N1 and H1N1 viruses remain infectious in unpasteurized milk on milking machinery surfaces (preprint) medRxiv. From the Abstract: “Cattle H5N1 and human 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza viruses were found to remain infectious on surfaces commonly found in milking equipment materials for a few hours. The data presented here provide a compelling case for the risk of contaminated surfaces generated during milking to facilitate transmission of H5N1 from cattle-to-cattle and to dairy farm workers.”
Long COVID research advocates hammer Biden over ‘minimal funding’ in budget request The Hill
Moderna’s long Covid plan Politico
China?
America must face reality and prioritise China over Europe FT
China says Taiwan drills served to test its ability to ‘seize power’ over island France24. Handy map:
Looks like a blockade to me, as Yves has long suggested.
China pressures Afghanistan’s Taliban to stop attacks on its interests in Pakistan, dangles economic carrot South China Morning Post
Brussels and Washington seek ways to rely less on Chinese shipbuilding output Splash 247
India
How do you find a bride? The new struggle in crisis-hit rural India Al Jazeera
Africa
Pentagon orders all US combat troops to withdraw from Niger Politico
Syraqistan
Israel and Hezbollah Inch Closer to War Foreign Policyd
This 94-year-old Holocaust survivor recommended arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders Forward
ICC prosecutor threatened: Court ‘built for Africa and thugs like Putin’ Anadolu Agency
From crisis to prosperity: Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza 2035 revealed online Jerusalem Post. From early May, still germane. “AI generated image of Gaza found in the [Prime Minister’s Office’s] plan for a post-war Gaza”:
It almost restores my faith in human nature to consider the idea that for Bibi, genocide might not be the end, but merely a means to the end: Successful real estate speculation. The scheme is more ambitious than that, but let’s start there. Optimism!
This AIPAC Donor Funnels Millions to an IDF Unit Accused of Violating Human Rights The Intercept
European Disunion
Macron tells New Caledonians he will not force through voting reform that sparked riots France24
Battle Machine New Left Review. Spain, Podemos.
Dear Old Blighty
Sunak suffers series of setbacks on first day of UK election campaign FT
New Not-So-Cold War
Rosenberg: Putin’s military purge echoes Prigozhin’s call to act BBC
‘New ground is being broken’: EU seizes Russian profits for Ukraine Al Jazeera
Putin Allows US Assets in Russia to Be Seized for Retaliation Bloomberg
Italy repeats it is not sending soldiers for war in Ukraine Anadolu Agency
Biden Administration
Lawmakers formally refer Big Oil investigation to DOJ: “The deception and the deceit must end” Climate Integrity
The Supremes
An extraordinarily important legal decision just dropped, and no one is talking about it Popular Information
The Presumption Against Novelty in the Roberts Court’s Separation-of-Powers Caselaw (PDF) Harvard Law Review. From the Abstract: “After contrasting Burkean minimalism with the originalism the Roberts Court has recently applied in several high-profile constitutional rights cases, this Note traces and critiques the operation of the presumption against novelty in the Court’s recent separation-of-powers decisions. It ultimately concludes that the presumption against novelty produces results that are themselves quite novel, and in so doing expands judicial discretion — and judicial power — at the expense of the democratic process.”
Assange
A Reprieve for Assange New Left Review
Digital Watch
AI follies (1):
AI follies (2):
It’s not a “knowledge update” ffs. What an enormous category error (or flagrant marketing hype, take your pick MR SUBLIMINAL Or take both!)
The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’ Wired. Same for “smarts.”
How does ChatGPT ‘think’? Psychology and neuroscience crack open AI large language models Nature. The deck: “Researchers are striving to reverse-engineer artificial intelligence and scan the ‘brains’ of LLMs to see what they are doing, how and why.” Too funny. We don’t even know how to debug the stupid things.
International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (interim report; PDF) UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This caught my eye: “[C]urrent techniques for explaining why general-purpose AI models produce any given output are severely limited.”
The Bezzle
State of Wisconsin Buys Nearly $100M Worth of BlackRock Spot Bitcoin ETF CoinDesk
Our Famously Free Press
Selling Your House For Firewood Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
Linkrot Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic. Worth considering that a paper-based library is far more hardened against the Jackpot than a (power-sucking, water-gulping) data center.
Supply Chain
These Choke Points Pose Global Shipping’s Biggest Risks Bloomberg
Class Warfare
Why the Alabama Mercedes Union Campaign Faltered but Review: How Reformers Doubled Vermont AFL-CIO Membership Labor Notes
Part I: The Case for Sectoral Co-Regulation On Labor. Part II, Part III.
Janet Yellen says many Americans still struggling with inflation FT. No. They are struggling with falling real wages.
Millionaires tax revenue reaches $1.8 billion, on pace to double estimates WGBH. Now do inherited wealth….
Less of this, please:
Antidote du jour (Bernard Gagnon):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
