Audiences Prove that the Experts Are Dead Wrong: Ted Gioia on the return of long-form music and writing.
Audiences Prove that the Experts Are Dead Wrong: Ted Gioia on the return of long-form music and writing.
Happy is England, just because it’s lovely and seasonal.
My weight loss has been very slow. I have been on Mounjaro now for eight weeks, having taken my ninth injection last night. As of this morning, I have lost 6 ½ pounds. Considering the extent of my obesity at the beginning, I definitely anticipated initial weight losses at a more rapid pace.
I think the underlying problem has been that when I found my appetite quite suppressed and found myself experiencing fewer cravings between meals, I almost explicitly decided that I could eat what I wanted (sweets excluded) and that the drug would limit my quantities sufficiently to promote rapid weight loss. (I also tried to avoid snacks or to keep them down to just enough to take the edge off my appetite.) And what I wanted was sandwiches on good bread. What I wanted was my favorite tasty food at my favorite restaurants, which invariably serve large portions which I somehow felt obliged to finish.
I have now turned back toward lowered carbohydrates and, what I surprisingly find more difficult, avoiding restaurants because of their portion size, and I think things are turning downward again. That last half pound out of 6 ½ put me at a new low.
I remind myself that I asked for Mounjaro not expecting to get a beach bod by August, but expecting that BP, lipids and T2D - the whole metabolic syndrome army - would also be improved eventually - perhaps to the point of dropping most of my other meds.
Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.
“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.
The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.
This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.
Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia and Ethan Singer, Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard (shared link)
FedEx was conceived in a paper that Mr. Smith wrote as a Yale University undergraduate in 1965. He argued that an increasingly automated economy would depend on fast and dependable door-to-door shipping of small packages containing computer parts. He got a C.
For several years, WaPo was completely blocking me because I no longer subscribed. Now they’re bombarding me with clickbaity headines - but they won’t allow me to read beyond a paragraph or two unless I subscribe.
I’d appreciate the approach of a few freebies per month, as works elsewhere.
Four minutes into game six, I was ready to turn off the TV and go to bed because I didn’t think the Pacers belonged on an NBA court. Then things changed. Boy, did they ever change.
A lot of thoughtful conservatives have had to eat crow for supporting the Iraq War, famously fomented with tales of Sadaam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. I’ve felt pretty smug because my feelings were “I suppose Dubya’s got to kill somebody after the twin towers, but ‘humbler foreign policy’ is why I voted for him.”
Now, I almost got sucked into this year’s version, guiltily half-hoping that we’d drop a bunker-buster on Iran’s deeply-subterranean centrifuge enrichment facility. Not so fast, says Ray McGovern:
Just to be clear. Since 2007, US Intelligence high-confidence judgment: Iran NOT working on nuclear weapon. Wm Burns expressed “reasonable confidence the US would detect such work relatively early on.” Ergo, “unconditional surrender” is about REGIME CHANGE. nbcnews.com/investiga…
Vaporware update:
The Trump organization is launching a new $499 smartphone and mobile plan offering unlimited talk, text, and data for $47.45 a month. The new smartphone, announced yesterday, will feature a gold-colored metal case with an etching of an American flag.
Generalizing on something I just posted by way of reply: As I age, I become more and more ruthless about closing a book, unfinished, if it just feels like I’m throwing good time into an improvident purchase.
Why did nobody tell me about Brandolini’s Law (a/k/a the bullshit asymmetry principle)? I’ve felt it in my bones (and sore fingertips) for almost ten years now.
A 39-year-old man was shot on Saturday at a “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City, Utah, and later died from his injuries. Police have detained a 24-year-old suspect and two others connected to the shooting. The victim was not the shooter’s “intended target,” law enforcement officials said, stating that he was an “innocent bystander.” They added that there were no other reported disturbances at the city’s “No Kings” protests—described by its organizers as “a mass, nationwide protest rejecting authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics, and the militarization of our democracy”—on Saturday. Meanwhile, police in Culpepper County, Virginia, arrested and charged a 21-year-old man with reckless driving on Saturday after he allegedly “intentionally” drove his SUV into a “No Kings” protest crowd, striking at least one person, though no injuries were reported.
Well, I was half right. I thought we’d never deport illegal immigrants en masse because their labor was too important in too many places. We started to do it anyway, then reconsidered.
The Courts likely will invalidate this asymmetrical bond requirement as violating, for instance, the right to petition for redress of grievances.
I think I’m going to love this: “Voila – AI Assistant, Copilot and AI Writer”, an extension for Firefox.
I open an awful lot of tabs every day and would love quickly to cull things. This extension gave me a terrific summary, in outline form, of a blog post. (This one was worth the time.)
Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones.
Writers, Abandon Literary Prizes - by Sam Kahn - Persuasion
I literally laughed out loud.
Father Sues Newspaper for Not Adequately Covering Son’s Basketball Games
Sigh. The state of the disunion runs deep.
It was good to see Oscar Robertson in the stands last night. Unfortunately, Reggie Miller was standing in front of him most of the game so I couldn’t see his reactions. He looks very good for 86.
Hard (and bitter) to realize that his high school in Indy, Crispus Attucks, was segregated.
I just spent half an hour listening to people talk about the betting odds on tonite’s NBA game. It was my most depressing half hour this week. I hate sports betting.
Okay. The critics have persuaded me. “Woke Right” is out. But we need something, and “MAGA Maoism” seems even better.
(H/T The Economist)