Why is natural gas so cheap in the US? Part of the answer—it’s very easy to build interstate gas lines.

It’s wild how airlines make boarding deliberately inefficient in order to squeeze a few extra dollars out of passengers.

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan failed to report direct admissions of rape by multiple priests, lobbied against extending the statute of limitations for sex abuse, and moved money off the church books to hide it from victims of sex abuse. In case you were wondering.

In addition to further improvements to the model, we hope that this tool can be of use to stakeholders including NGOs, utilities, and government agencies.

For area estimation, our model achieves 0.99 accuracy and an F1 score of 0.77.

Our project was specifically motivated by one of the many challenges facing post-civil war reconstruction of Syria's electrical grid: estimating decentralized residential solar production.

GitHub - baraa-abd/syria-solar: This project introduces a novel workflow for identifying solar panel assemblies in the challenging, post-war urban landscapes of Syria. This project introduces a novel workflow for identifying solar panel assemblies in the challenging, post-war urban landscapes of Syria. - baraa-abd/syria-solar

Very excited to share this project I've contributed to over the past few months: a deep learning model that can identify, compute the area, and find the cardinal direction of rooftop solar panels in cluttered urban environments.

github.com/baraa-abd/sy...

Moving the Population in Gaza is a Manifest War Crime We wrote this essay to fulfill our human, conscientious, and civic duty, as Israelis – and as Zionists – who have expertise in areas related to the IDF’s order.

"Evacuating the entire population? Call it ethnic cleansing, call it transfer, call it deportation, it’s a war crime.”

Originally published in @haaretzcom.bsky.social

www.justsecurity.org/116459/israe...

incompleteness theorem—no axiomatic system can prove its own consistency.

Suppose T is the theorem “A is consistent.” Well, you could prove this if A were not consistent because you can derive anything from a set of inconsistent axioms!

So if we have some theorem T that is deducible from A, T /cannot/ prove that A is consistent.

This is the essence of Gödel’s second

R.A. Fisher came up with really cool intuitive demonstration of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

Suppose we have a bunch of axioms A={A1, A2, … , An}. If A is inconsistent, /any/ theorem can be proven from A.

I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.

Anyway, Happy 4th everyone. If you want to see genuine and engaged citizenship, do yourself a favor and witness a citizenship ceremony. Genuinely inspiring.
This essay from fellow Irish ex-part @kjhealy.co brought back memories of my own swearing in.
kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

Amazing to see the Attorney General of the US say, in so many words, that the President doesn’t have to follow the laws Congress has passed and signed into law!

They’ve destroyed American medical research, the American education system, the American university research system, and the aid system that protected millions of lives, and they’ve given our anti-immigrant masked paramilitary police force a budget the size of a nation

Imagine being New Hampshire. You tried a work requirements program in 2018, but it didn't work. You were about to kick 2/3rds of people off Medicaid.

You cancel the program. Interesting idea. Doesn't work.

Now the federal government is REQUIRING you to start it up again!

These aren’t work requirements, they’re reporting requirements and evidence shows that these requirements are onerous enough to cause significant health insurance coverage losses without producing increases in employment. (Because 92% of Medicaid beneficiaries are already working or would be exempt)

Iran signaled their missile attack on Qatar strikes in advance, which suggests they are face-saving and Iran wants deescalation. Markets seem to interpret it this way as well:

Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to target significant elements of Iran's nuclear materials and production infrastructure. RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER are tactically brilliant, but may turn out to be strategic failures. 🧵 1/17

Impeach and remove.

don’t forget thought middle-managers

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on.

slate.com/technology/2...

Moreover, they never explain what their alternative is— Sweden? The Great Barrington Declaration? What exactly should public health authorities have done differently?

The most rigorous studies available are consistent with restrictions having no effect on mortality. - Boston Review Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee reply to their critics.

Macedo and Lee totally sidestep the question of whether NPIs /slowed transmission/ to keep hospital systems from becoming overwhelmed when flattening the curve was always the primary argument for NPIs.

www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-di...

A still from the Simpsons with Grandpa Simpson sitting on a hill beside a tree surrounded by kids, telling them a story. He is pointing his cane at the tree.

In 2003, we had to watch the war on CNN and scream obscenities at the rear-projection TV.

"But Iraq doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction," we'd yell as the president Bush struggled to pronounce words in English.

mood

DTLA today:

In 2018, Donald Trump, then in his first term as US president, let Iran out of nuclear restrictions in exchange for nothing.

Many people, very much including me, warned that he put things on a path with only two possible outcomes: large-scale war, or a nuclear-armed Iran.

And here we are.

It’s completely insane that the media pretends every random protester or activist in America speaks for the Democratic Party, but Trump’s agencies can directly quote white supremacist accounts on Twitter and the same media won’t link these people to Trump

This is not a good sign.

The contrast and absurdity is so brazen. They're literally raiding Home Depots to find whatever guys are there to get work as day laborers. People eager for work. And the ICE agents has zero idea who they are or any criminal background.