- “The Waze algorithms don’t care about the societal cost they inflict and neither does Waze“
- From Intellectual to influencer: “In the case of the public intellectual, the institution was the academy and the role was thinking. In the case of the public influencer, the institution is the corporation and the role is marketing. The shift makes sense. Marketing, after all, has displaced thinking as our primary culture-shaping activity, the source of what we perceive ourselves to be.”
- Read this long, detailed exploration of how renewables are more cost-competitive than fossil fuels for electricity. Also see this detailed forecast.
- A young ecologist disrupts the conversation on ecosystems
- “These results indicate that using measures such as citation number, h-index, and impact factor are useless when comparing researchers in different fields, and even for comparing researchers in the same subfield.”
- Cities, markets and people
- “‘If we go into a runaway climate effect, the damage may be between €100 trillion and the loss of civilisation,’ he said. ‘The probability, I would say, is about 10% that this is going to happen. And when it comes to the urgency of decarbonising society and keeping the forests alive, we need at least 20 years. We have only 30 years left to do this… [Taken together, this] simply means that we are in a deep state of climate emergency.'”
- Dictators are great performers, so let’s yank them off stage.
- India’s demonitization is a great example of how engineers do not understand
economicspeople. - A lovely comparison of Dutch and English, e.g., “I realized then that the trouble was in the tuning of the ear. Past the words, there is the listening to place. To the sea winds that blow inland, speaking the hollow, quickened syllables of flames, and blow over the dunes…”
H/T to PB