In a HUGE breaking news story, the New York Attorney General has sought to dissolve the NRA over rampant corruption! The complaint is nearly a couple hundred pages, but our esteemed Andrew has already read it and has the breakdown for us in a truly rapid response Friday! Questions he answers include: what are the alleged facts? Can NY actually do this? Could LaPierre simply re-form the NRA somewhere else? And more!
Is there any more fitting end to a day of working from home, deep into months of a fully remote world, than using your smartphone to finish up a little Python code with your head resting on your pillow? Paul has no regrets. If you look at that big, bright, shiny computer monitor late at night, you'll never fall asleep.
Sara helps us trace the origin of the word software. It was originally meant as a joke, a clever play on computer "hardware" used in casual conversation, not as an iron clad piece of marketing. Over time, as it was used in correspondence - at public talks, and eventually in academic papers - it began to take on serious weight as a term of art for the product you produce with computers and code.
Ben would prefer to be Less Wrong, and is starting to use the podcast to put his deference to a supreme AI into the historical record, just in case Roko's basilisk rears its ugly head.
Our lifeboat this week is about an error in some non-standard syntax. Who among has not missed a paren, but hey, sometimes you just need another pair of eyes. Two kind members of our community answered this question, elaborated on how to improve the code, and earned a lifeboat. Congrats!
And finally, a bit of recommended reading on just how much power is consumed by the data centers that make cloud computing run 24/7, and what that means for our planet.
On the Gist, New York’s elections are not unlike Georgia’s.
In the interview, our resident vexillologist Ted Kaye is back to talk about the latest in flag news. He fills Mike in on what’s happening in Mississippi as they try to swiftly get a new flag design added to the ballot in November, and the recent proliferation of the ‘thin blue line’ American flag. Kaye’s book is Good Flag, Bad Flag.
States are scrambling to replace older poll workers with younger ones. The two major political parties will hold their conventions mostly online. And in one big battleground state, the pandemic is shifting the political geography.
Tuesday’s primaries lead to Missouri victories for Medicaid expansion and Black Lives Matter activist Cori Bush, the Biden campaign announces the biggest advertising buy in history across 15 states, and the Trump campaign makes debate demands while lowering expectations for Joe Biden. Then Manny Garcia and Cliff Walker, the leaders of the Texas Democratic Party, talk to Dan about what it will take to turn the state blue in 2020. And Ben Rhodes talks to Tommy about his new Crooked Media podcast, Missing America.
Chicago was once a coronavirus hotspot. So why are covid-19 positivity rates down in the city, but rising with alarming frequency in the suburbs and surrounding counties? Reset talks with a reporter, and two county health officials to find out where, and why rates of infection are up.
If the world does not curb its greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of this century, the number of people dying annually because of extreme heat will be greater than the current global death toll from infectious diseases - that’s all infectiousness diseases, from malaria to diarrhoeal diseases to HIV. This is the grim assessment of climate researchers and economists of the Climate Impact Lab in the largest global study to date of health and financial impacts of temperature-related deaths. Roland Pease talks to Solomon Hsiang of the University of California, Berkeley.
UK ecologists have new insights about how diseases jump the species barrier from wildlife to humans. With a global survey of land use and biodiversity, they’ve discovered that when natural habitats are converted to farmland or urbanised, the animal species that survive the change in greatest number are those species which carry viruses and bacteria with the potential to spread to us. This is particularly the case, says Rory Gibb of the University College London, with disease-carrying rodent species, bats and birds.
Do past infections by mild cold coronaviruses prepare the immune systems of some people for infection by SARS-CoV-2? Could immune memory T cells made in response to these cold viruses lessen the severity of Covid-19? Alessandro Sette and Daniela Weiskopf of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology lead the team which published the latest contributions to these questions.
Anglerfish are perhaps the weirdest inhabitants of the deep sea. Their sex lives are particularly strange because finding partners in the dark expanse of the ocean abyss is hard. Females are much bigger than males. When a male finds a female, he latches on her body with his teeth and over a couple of weeks, their flesh fuses so he is permanently attached. Her blood supplies him with all the food and oxygen he needs and he becomes an ever present supply of sperm whenever she produces eggs. But this fusion should be impossible. The female’s immune system should be rejecting her partner like a mismatched organ transplant. German scientists have now discovered that these fish do this by giving up the production of antibodies and immune T cells – essential for fighting infections in all other animals including us. It was a shocking discovery for Prof Thomas Boehm at the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg.
(Image: Relatives of heatstroke victims, their heads covered with wet towels, wait outside a hospital during a heatwave in Karachi. .Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP via Getty Images)
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker
Dr. Selgin is a Senior Fellow and director of the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives as well as Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Georgia.
In this eye-opening conversation, he and NLW go deep on the history, present and future of central banks, including:
Why the Scottish and Canadian banking systems in the 19th century show that central banks aren’t a prerequisite for stability
Why the U.S. “free banking” system wasn’t free at all
Why the instability in the late 19th century U.S. banking system was caused by regulation, not the lack of a Federal Reserve
Why the Fed’s first decades were a disaster
Why the Fed gets more power when it underperforms
The problems with the Fed’s response to 2008
What lessons the Fed could have learned (but didn’t) between the Great Financial Crisis and COVID-19
For many people, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is the measure of the health of the overall stock market. In reality, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is really just the performance of a collection of 30 blue-chip stocks.
The index was created in 1896 and back then there were only 12 stocks in the index, and most of them are no longer household names.
Could the United States impose nationwide martial law? What is a Silkwood Shower? Do humans play host to mind-controlling parasites? Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they explore these questions and more.
