Rotundus.com

Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight

"A belief exists in the United States about public support for NASA’s human spaceflight activities. Many hold that NASA and the cause of the human exploration of space enjoyed outstanding public support and confidence in the 1960s during the era of Apollo and that public support waned in the post-Apollo era, only to sink to quite low depths in the decade of the 1990s. These beliefs are predicated on anecdotal evidence that should not be discounted, but empirical evidence gleaned from public opinion polling data suggests that some of these conceptions are totally incorrect and others are either incomplete or more nuanced than previously believed. "

China’s Marxist Tyranny Shouldn’t Be Ignored

A quote to ponder: "Because totalitarianism is often imagined as a decidedly 20th-century phenomenon, the notion that it can exist in a place as outwardly modern as China — with its skyscrapers and flat-screen TVs and high-speed rail lines — is sometimes hard to process. Yet the great totalitarian regimes of the past existed in what once seemed impressively futuristic societies, too. Indeed, this was a key element of their appeal."

Fantastic arctic fox: animal walks 3,500km from Norway to Canada

Technically from the Svalbard islands rather than continental Europe but still crazy!

Ranting about “broken” systems full of seemingly very dumb people is a sign you’re in a complex system and not dealing well with it because you’re bringing non-complex-systems thinking to your experience. Ranting may help force system to do what you want but it will cost you.

— Venkatesh “Tactical in LA” Rao (@vgr) June 21, 2019

The whole thread is worth reading.

Does Apologizing Work? An Empirical Test of the Conventional Wisdom

"Overall, the evidence suggests that when a prominent figure apologizes for a controversial statement, the public is either unaffected or becomes more likely to desire that the individual be punished."

Flying first class on a single domestic round trip can contribute more greenhouse gas emissions than a year of driving

"The average annual carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per occupant of a light-duty vehicle (7,958 pounds) are about the same as the emissions per passenger from a round trip from San Diego to Frankfurt flying economy class (7,938 pounds), or from a round trip from Atlanta to Los Angeles flying first class (2,646 pounds times 3 equals 7,938 pounds)."

No funding for uncomfortable results

"In 1997 Latanya Sweeney dramatically demonstrated that supposedly anonymized data was not anonymous. ... In her paper Only You, Your Doctor, and Many Others May Know Sweeney says that her research was unwelcome. Over 20 journals turned down her paper on the Weld study, and nobody wanted to fund privacy research that might reach uncomfortable conclusions."

Found this quote by Vaclav Havel (famed for his role in the collapse of communism in Czechoslovakia) hidden in Thinking in Systems:

I realize with fright that my impatience for the re-establishment of democracy had something almost communist in it; or, more generally, something rationalist. I had wanted to make history move ahead in the same way that a child pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly.

I believe we must learn to wait as we learn to create. We have to patiently sow the seeds, assiduously water the earth where they are sown and give the plants the time that is their own. One cannot fool a plant any more than one can fool history.