Rotundus.com

To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats

"He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising."

Child Deaths Resulting From Inflicted Injuries: Household Risk Factors and Perpetrator Characteristics

"Children residing in households with unrelated adults were nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries than children residing with 2 biological parents ... Children in households with a single parent and no other adults in residence had no increased risk of inflicted-injury death"

AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can't Go Quietly

"we've also been primed in another way for the AI takeover of art: Endless reboots, remakes, sequels, next chapters, and prequels have replaced new stories. We've basically be doing AI by hand, pulling in all the old stuff and spitting out an amalgamation of that past work."

Food for thought. Suspect most people think most of these go a lot further back:

Today’s traditions are yesterday’s innovations. pic.twitter.com/wFOoBQ7PVB

— Lionel Page (@page_eco) November 28, 2022

Ethan Mollick on Twitter

Pointer to a research paper - makes sense but seems potentially a bit dangerous in current political environment: "Tell students: “Your goal is to feel awkward and uncomfortable.” Giving an explicit goal of aiming to feel uncomfortable in order to grow makes folks persist in classes, write better, seek out more info & learn more from political opponents."

Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Act Alone: If not for their competitors, Nixon would probably have survived Watergate

"Almost none of the first year’s revelations about Watergate came from 'real' political reporters, who for the most part trusted Nixon’s denials and mingled at swanky Georgetown cocktail parties." (HT: Paul Thacker, who point out its similarity media behaviour re: lab leak possibility)

Laurent Cordonier on Twitter

"1/ Our new preprint with @F_Cafiero on the link between #corruption and #conspiracy_beliefs. We show across 26 Western and non-Western countries that higher corruption levels are associated with greater belief in conspiracy theories. A thread" Phrased differently, conspiracy thinking is strongest where conspiracies are more likely?

Over time I fairly regularly bump into quotes like these (and agree with them), which is one reason that this site never got shut down despite remaining idle for quite some time.

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

— Shane Parrish (@ShaneAParrish) November 24, 2018

Writing is the best way to discover that many things you think you’re sure about make no sense when you put them into words.

— Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) May 17, 2020

In the meantime it wasn't that I stopped writing but that, rather than posting here, I wound up just using a private instance of Wackowiki instead. Will see if the return to posting here continues or just gradually (or abruptly) fades away again.