This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain.
Reflections: x.com/patrickc/status/1872592892373487765
[Couldn't post here because of the Threads length limit.]
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Receiving a mere thumbs up reacji always gives me Sunny Balwani "ok" vibes
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"Researchers uncover on/off switch for breast cancer metastasis."
Potentially significant finding in cancer immunotherapy. Led by Arc Institute investigator Lingyin Li and also featuring incoming investigator Hani Goodarzi.
news.stanford.edu/2023/12/20/breast-cancer-metastasis-off-switch-revealed/
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I was shocked at the refusal to condemn calls for genocide during yesterday's Congressional testimony from the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn. I ended up watching a few hours of the hearing, and the answers were shamefully evasive and equivocal throughout. As an alum (albeit fleeting) of the first of those institutions, it appears that something is very broken.
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Spent Thanksgiving in Charleston SC. Maybe I'm very late to this party, but the architecture and urbanism really are terrific.
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Had some travel this week. I really enjoyed:
- @tylercowenfairfax's new book (https://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/en).
- amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X. Found it very thought-provoking.
- amazon.com/Medieval-Mind-C-S-Lewis/dp/1514001640. Somehow quite different to what it looks like. Middle chapters left me wanting to read more Lewis; have ordered some.
- amazon.com/Civilization-John-Stuart-Mill/dp/1162895071
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"Collective intelligence" now has faintly nostalgic, 2007-era web 2.0 vibes, but the @strava Route Explorer is such a great example of what's possible. I keep finding new trails and routes in areas I think I know well.
In particular, it doesn't just produce a rank or a score. It actually creates new layer of collective knowledge.
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Solar deployment is now happening at a roughly $500B annualized rate.
Which technology deployments were larger than this? The US's aircraft production during WWII seems to have peaked at ~$400B/year (inflation-adjusted). Global datacenter construction appears to be maybe $200B/year.
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So first there's a credible RCT supporting use of Sarno techniques for ameliorating back pain[1]. Then this weekend I learned that there's a reasonable literature supporting the use of nausea bands[2].
(Learned this weekend during some flight training that commonly produces nausea. Sure enough, it did, and, sure enough, it was entirely cured by these.)
Not sure how to update priors around treatments that sound suspicious.
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Interesting update on incumbency dynamics: economist.com/business/2023/08/21/americas-corporate-giants-are-getting-harder-to-topple
"We found that only 52 of the 500 were born after 1990. [...] In 1990, 66 firms in the Fortune 500 were 30 years old or younger."
cc @levie
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At 440GW, the amount of new renewable electricity generation capacity (mainly solar) added this year will, for the first time, apparently be greater than total global nuclear generation capacity (413 GW).
(Sources: iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-june-2023/executive-summary, iea.org/energy-system/electricity/nuclear-power.)
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This is quite good: amazon.com/Europes-Growth-Champion-Insights-Economic/dp/0198789343. Poland an underappreciated success story; should be up there with Vietnam and Taiwan as an positive example.
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The Bay Area has a preposterous, unreasonable number of fabulous hikes. This weekend,
alltrails.com/trail/us/california/cypress-trail-and-dipsea-stairs-loop and
alltrails.com/trail/us/california/crystal-springs-to-lonely-trail-loop. I highly recommend an AllTrails account -- I hadn't realized just how many I was oblivious to. (Are there other major metros with similarly intricate and extensive trail networks?)
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Learning about this bifurcated solution space a few years ago was a big deal: bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/math-tie-shoes-correct/. If your laces ever come undone, you're probably doing it wrong.
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Canada vs UK is remarkable. Australia very striking too. (Note: half of this chart is an extrapolated forecast.)
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Threads and SVB somehow feel related as phenomena. Everything just happens so quickly today.
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While I don't typically read much fiction, I recently read *Beware of Pity* (Stefan Zweig) and *Transit of Venus* (Shirley Hazzard). Both are really fantastic.
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