Alles wat Jan bezighoudt, interesseert en irriteert... en ook een beetje onzin...

dinsdag, juni 29, 2021

The War on Reality - Tablet Magazine

For COVID-19 the average age of death is 73, and about half of all deaths are in people 80 or older. While the CDC projected a one-year decrease in life expectancy for the U.S. population, the overall decrease in life expectancy was only five days, and the U.S.'s excess mortality in 2017 was greater than its excess mortality in 2020.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-war-on-reality-gutentag

maandag, juni 28, 2021

Heb jij altijd al het nieuws in het Latijns willen horen?

Nuntii Latini — Nuntii Latini Occidentalis Studiorum Universitatis Vasintoniensis

donderdag, juni 24, 2021

We Don't Know, But Let's Try It | Boston Review

An asset in his role as public intellectual, if possibly a regrettable one for the reception of his work as whole, was Hirschman's persistent, aphoristic habit of elevating deceptively simple, counterintuitive observations as grand principles of the human condition. 

The most famous of these, the "Principle of the Hiding Hand" (a knowing nod to Adam Smith's invisible hand), states that in large human undertakings—dam construction, say—we tend to underestimate the difficulties involved. This makes us likelier to get going than we otherwise would have been, had we known all the problems in advance. We also underestimate our creativity in solving problems as they arise, which makes us likelier to succeed than a sober assessment might have determined at the outset.

http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics-philosophy-religion/simon-torracinta-we-dont-know-lets-try-it

zondag, juni 06, 2021

Publish and Perish - The Intrinsic Perspective

What this is saying is that we have 18 citations, there are no more actual zoonotic jumps to study, but, you know, "salient questions remain." So let's just take the viruses we have and start studying ways to manipulate them, turning that dial, maybe passing it back and forth between human cells and animal ones, and just see what happens.

Oh play me that Science Game™! Play it as the ship goes down.


https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/publish-and-perish