Links
Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war
It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of thousands of lives, faces no meaningful international censure.
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Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence?
Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their countrymen than what is understood to be Catholicism in the rest of the world. Another flank in America’s pernicious global influence?
Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex - Vanity Fair
Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents.
Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy.
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right - Olivia Paschal in HNN
Worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.
In one of the University College Cork buildings they have a Mac (the same model that my Dad bought for our family and that I used as a kid) on display in a glass case, like it’s some sort of early hominid tool. I’ve rarely felt so old.
We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth.
Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain.
Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar.
Worryingly it is free tools like Google Scholar, and fields like environmental and health sciences that have obvious policy and practice relevance, that seem particularly vulnerable.
Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more widespread than we realise.
A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and NASA and JPL’s sexist culture in the ’60s.
A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair
“the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the long-running digital archive, upholding an earlier ruling in Hachette v. Internet Archive that found that one of the Internet Archive’s book digitization projects violated copyright law.”
The Internet Archive Loses Its Appeal of a Major Copyright Case wired.com
Zuckerberg is clearly preparing for a Trump Presidency:
Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke - The Verge
“The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.”
A sewage crisis in San Diego County reveals the unpolluted truth about the U.S.-Mexico border
Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?
That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.
On the huge achievement that malaria vaccines represent
The vaccines — the first to target any human parasite — represent a feat of both scientific grit and fundraising ingenuity. Researchers took on a sophisticated biological adversary that eludes our immune systems’ schemes to identify and dispatch it. They also had to find ways to nudge forward products that would never result in blockbuster sales, a reality that sapped much of the biopharma industry’s interest.
Behind the malaria vaccines: A 40-year quest against one of humanity’s biggest killers