9/1 – 9/7
listened to hans zimmer’s childhood dream come to fruition. just desserts for me. just deserts for the haters.
am certain trump and tito ortiz put their own drawings up on the fridge. dave rubin always one idea short of a good one.
laughed at this..
noted classic images of underdevelopment: inhabitants too stricken to brush flies from own eyelids, small children clutching even smaller babies, swollen infants, red-eyed street fighters, dictators with toothbrush mustaches.
read..
when [the shaykh] led prayers, his halo filled the dark corners of the mosque, and the people lavished him with coins. but beneath the fine linen of his turban, his secret squirmed: he had woven forty glowworms into a hairnet.
when he strolled along the shore, the fish leapt from the waters to kiss his feet. but the creatures were drawn to something besides his spiritual purity: he had coated his toes with a potion—one part human feces, one part basil, and one part persian gum resin, all mixed with jasmine oil—that worked like catnip on fish.
there are quack medical remedies reminiscent of a certain former ruler’s suggestion to inject bleach.
fraudulent alchemists used a “sauce,” or dukkah, to make it appear that they could turn base metals into gold. they tricked wealthy patrons into becoming their benefactors, including the legendary sultan nur ad-din, who successfully fought off the crusaders but was fooled by the sauce.
while tricksters lurk on the margins during periods of calm, in times of crisis, when we are all on edge, they tend to become the center.
(2) scott fitzgerald’s early success. ironic title since poor scottie burned out at forty-four but c’est la vie.
it was like the fox and goose and the bag of beans. if i stopped working to finish the novel, I lost the girl.
america was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history… the whole golden boom was in the air… all the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as thomas hardy’s peasants.
premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will-power—at its worst the napoleonic delusion.
the man who blooms at thirty blooms in summer. but the compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. in the best sense one stays young. when the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, i had fair years to waste, years that i can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal carnival by the sea.
although the revisions [which abolished term limits on national leaders, making it possible for president xi jinping to stay in power indefinitely] unsettled china’s legal world, the outrage was expressed sotto voce.
as ever-new projects and vanity policies are pursued with immoderate enthusiasm, we are actually witnessing the handiwork of an autocratic roué.
watched a conversation between nikki giovanni and james baldwin (1971).
jb: the whole institution was threatened if a slave woman could produce a freeman. the dilemma begins there.
ng: god is our responsibility, not vice versa. there’s billions of us. only one of him.
ng: my issue as a black woman is that black men will say to me, in order for me to be a man, you must walk ten paces behind me. it means nothing. i can walk ten paces behind a dog. but for a man, i’ll never get far enough behind. i can’t walk slowly enough.
jb: malcolm said that too, you know.
ng: malcolm said everything.
9/18 – 9/14
resolved to conquer insomnia and caffeine addiction. surrendered day one bc masochism.
preferred work to the classroom. getting corrected by field epidemiologists > listening to chmessy tangents on world bank diversification.
retitled abecedarian literature:
(1) War and Ps by Leo Tolstoy
(2) You Would Too With This Last Name by Edward Gorey
(3) Chicka Chicka Boom Shaka Laka by Bill and John
(4) Try This At Home, Kids by Pilobolus Contortionists
watched the dig (2020). retelling of famed sutton hoo excavation on eve of world war two. vikings and space pilots, one and the same.
did the people who made these mounds have mustaches?
and beards. they were a beardy lot. not like them there romans. they liked a close shave.
this boat’s hers. her people gave her treasure for her own voyage. and she was sad when the ship came. because she knew she was leaving everyone behind. and she knew she had to follow the king into the sky. so she set off, through the earth and up into the cosmos. space is a funny thing. time operates quite differently up there and 500 years can pass in a flash. and the queen looked back down to earth. she could see that her son had grown up and that he was now a space pilot. and she knew that when he made his first journey up to the stars, she would be there to meet him.
read the world social report.
it has been observed that current rural and agricultural development strategies that led to deforestation and loss of wilderness contributed to the emergence of zoonotic diseases, including covid-19. due to their close contact with domestic animals and wildlife, rural residents—especially those working in agriculture—are often central to the human-animal interface.
about 17 per cent of total global food production is wasted (11 per cent in households, 5 per cent in food service and 2 per cent in retail). this means that about 8-10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food that is not consumed. for example, producing one kilogram of beef leads to 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases, while producing one kilogram of peas causes just 1 kilogram of green-house gas emissions.
van duijne (2019) finds evidence of hidden urbanization in villages surrounding rapidly growing secondary cities in bihar, india. while most villagers make their primary living outside of agriculture, village leaders attempt to hold on to their rural status since this has implications on, inter alia, access to rural development funding.
“urbanization without growth” … in some countries, population shifts to cities accelerated without sufficient expansion of employment opportunities.
rainwater harvesting involves the collection and storage of this resource, rather than allowing it to run off. in rajasthan in india, the installation of such harvesting structures brought back water to 1,000 drought-stricken villages, with five rivers that used to run dry but are now flowing again, and groundwater levels rising by an estimated six metres.
9/15 – 9/21
rated met gala outfits. compared with expert ratings online. concluded i do not understand fashion.
watched 1967 paulie walnuts fuss over his nails in the many saints of newark (2021). a marvel movie for sopranos fans.
saw this and smiled:
among the 27 club, him and amy unparalleled.
sid complained that week one of his online machine learning course too easy. i said insofar as you can skip ahead to week two, this is a non-issue.
linear regression is the simplest form of supervised learning.
your mom is the simplest form of –
shut up.
learned a few things from rub-a-doug-doug:
read..
the cdc developed a “case definition” of the havana syndrome, consisting of a biphasic syndrome, with the first phase of symptoms (sometimes closely after an auditory or sensory event) followed by “cognitive deficits or vestibular disturbances” some time later.
roughly 130 total possible cases of attacks have been reported, with about 50 affecting cia personnel, and the rest being primarily u.s. military personnel, state department personnel, and their family members.
the 2018 jama report concluded that a “wholly psychogenic or psychosomatic cause” was very unlikely, given the physical evidence of brain trauma.
the new yorker reported that the u.s. government’s “working hypothesis” was that gru agents “have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at u.s. officials” …. russia has a history of researching, developing, and using weapons that cause brain injuries, such as the cold war-era “moscow signal” targeting the american embassy in moscow.
(2) choice architecture in medicine
just as the design of a physical environment can influence our behavior (as seen in coffee shops that skimp on electric outlets to discourage laptop users), the design of a process can also shape our behavior.
a checklist is what it sounds like – a reminder of all the mandated steps a clinician should take. it plugs memory holes and hangs a safety net under human errors so they don’t add up. proper icu care, for instance, requires nearly 200 separate actions each day. complications can arise from missing even one or two.
after a structured decision-making tool was introduced in the state of illinois, the disparities between psychiatric hospitalization of young, low-risk hispanic and black patients and white patients shrank. when the mayo clinic instituted a system of automatic referrals for cardiac rehabilitation after heart attacks, the gender gap between men’s and women’s referral rates disappeared.
researchers gave kids a cup of carrots the moment they arrived in the cafeteria, when they were at their most hungry. it worked: kids ate a lot more carrots. the key was to put the carrots “in a competition they actually can win” – a contest not against fries, but against being really hungry.
(3) legal pedophile rings. stomach-turning human experimentation persisted in post-nazi germany. helmut kentler a sanctimonious mengele.
beginning in the late sixties, kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. the experiment was authorized and financially supported by the berlin senate. in a report submitted to the senate, in 1988, kentler had described it as a “complete success.”
the postwar years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation’s moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt.
ulrich told [kentler] about a man he called mother winter, who fed boys from the zoo station and did their laundry. in exchange, they slept with him. “i said to myself: if the prostitutes call this man ‘mother,’ he can’t be bad,” kentler wrote.
“do you know people who have no lips?” marco said. “they are always egotistical and mean—i noticed that.”
