- The nightmare continues. Novartis should ask for its money back.
- Thread of the week: some RECOVERY trial updates. And if you prefer vaccines, there is a thread for that.
- Tool of the week: SciTLDR. Turns your abstracts into tweetable one-liners. Not sure it’s a positive development but it’s interesting.
- Taleb tweet/video of the week: discussing the Danish mask study with Yaneer Bar-Yam. Here is the paper if by some miracle you’ve missed it.
- More Prince, less Covid-19, please.
- A toddler’s giggle
- A third-grader’s pout
- Foam mat floor tiles
- Child locks
- Apple TV+, including but not limited to Ted Lasso, Tiny World, Mythic Quest, Fireball, and Wolfwalkers which even before being released has provided hours of entertainment for my children by the virtue of its most excellent trailer
- Essential workers
- A working internet connection, on weekday mornings in particular
- My coworkers, each and every one
- Overcast
- Belgian beer, more specifically Duvel and Chimay Tripel (aka Chimay White)
- Wireless buds, even though they remind me of that one episode of Doctor Who
- Fresh towels
- Reliable pens (this one too, and here’s a good mechanical pencil)
- Good journalism
- Blurred backgrounds (but I may soon start using these instead)
- Physical mute buttons
- Reliable cars
- Fast pipelines
- Thoughtful interviewers
- Saturday afternoons when we’re all back from a long walk outside and tired enough to have a good appetite but not too tired to spend the evening doing something fun knowing there’s also Sunday to look forward to
- Long sentences
- Good endings
At a hundred pages, a fifth of which is the preface, this is a slender book that compares the 1950s state of the art computer and neuroscience, but more importantly gives the answer to the burning question in oncology: how much are a few months of overall survival benefit worth? Well, if you are John von Neumann and you have boney metastasis from a cancer of unknown origin eating away first your energy and then your mental capacities while your are writing a series of lectures on how similar and different brains are from “modern-day”1 computers, and you are way ahead of your time in thinking about both, well, the answer to that question is quite a lot. It is in fact an unthinkable loss that he died before he could even finish his writing, let alone hold the lectures.
It was also somewhat eerie to read about the comparison between humans and machines shortly after Apple announced its quite literally game-changing M1 processor. There is fierce competition among the big tech companies to build the Skynet of our universe, and as of last week Apple is winning.
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i.e. 1950s, though apparently the architecture hasn’t changed at all, save for the size and number of the components. ↩
Netflix has a knack for producing empty calories, and Enola Holmes is not an exception. Pretty visuals, female empowerment, and decent to above-average acting can’t hide the blandness of its storyline nor the absence of any reasoning, deductive or otherwise.
It is, by the way, hard to think of Enola’s character as particularly empowered when the next three women in screen time order are her mother the polymath rebel, her friend the black martial arts teacher, and an aristocratic evil mastermind. Not to mention the brief appearance of a coitery of female anarchist geniuses. In Victorian London!1 A bit too on the nose, maybe? To paraphrase the Incredibles, when everyone’s special, no one is.
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What’s worse, there is a story where this particular cast of characters makes perfect sense in this particular setting, one where a downtrodden young woman — think female Oliver Twist — meets them in order to learn what’s possible. But Enola is built up to already be the self-reliant Victorian anti-lady. Running into even more of the same archetype on her way to saving the prince makes for boring and lazy storytelling. ↩
- USMLE Step 2 CS is now virtual. I am trying hard to find reasons for this other than the purely cynical and so far I’m failing.
- ABIM has its issues too.
- Idea management tools. I was using Roam Research this time last year and stopped as soon as it became clear privacy would always be an issue with an online-only tool.
- Article of the week: Exceptional responders.
- Taleb tweet of the week: Eggs!
- Remember how people blamed sugar for tumor growth? Well, they can now start blaming fat as well.
- Life is complex.
- Article of the week: super-spreader parties.
- Taleb tweet of the week: if you are in six+ sigma territory time and again, your probability distribution is wrong.
- Quote of the week: “Live your life honestly and make sure you are never caught”. Truly a quote for our times.
It’s full of style, has excellent casting, and pretty good chess1, which is enough to make it into an enjoyable but forgettable miniseries. If only they had put in as much effort and thought into character development as they did in Beth Harmon’s dresses…
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I hear, never being much into chess, except that now thanks to the show I’m a paying member at chess.com and am very much looking forward to playing a few games with my own children once they’re old enough not to chew on the figures constantly. But I still think Twilight Struggle is the superior game. ↩
As long as I can remember1, any protagonist of a movie or a TV show who wasn’t world-weary and cynical was either naïve, stupid, or both. In American popular culture, “good” people are the way they are only because they don’t understand how the world truly works. As side characters they are mostly comic relief. As protagonists they can only succeed through piercing the veil of ignorance — becoming worse people in the process — or by pure dumb luck. Ned Flanders, Forest Gump, Kimmy Schmidt all come to mind.
Not so with Ted Lasso, the only character in recent memory who is well aware that the world is harsh and that there are people out to get him2, yet defaults to thinking the best of everyone he meets. He is still capable of mild deception in the service of punishing the wicked, but he can’t even punish someone without an endearing monologue on what he’s all about: being curious and not judgmental.
Being more curious and less judgemental would serve everyone well at any time, but never more so than this year, when everyone suspects the worst of everyone else. The default behavior is mistrust, the default sentiment cynicism. This show starts with plenty of both, yet they melt away under Lasso’s high-power beam of un-ironic and very self-aware goodness. If the 2000s were the decade of The Wire and the 2010s were the decade of the Game of Thrones, I wish, hope, pray that the 2020s turn out to be the decade of Ted Lasso.
- Abolish time zones! (I’ve had this idea for a while, glad I wasn’t the only one)
- Taleb on 538’s election model
- Knowing the result ≠ counting all votes, legal or not
- I finally understand Bayesian statistics.
- RIP Sean Connery and Alex Trabek.