The purpose of these diaries is to highlight encouraging, amusing, heartwarming, and other positive stories. We are bombarded with more than enough negative stories other places.
I fill in occasionally when someone needs an emergency backup. I don’t have a set format or ritual so I pull together whatever I happen to have lying around. Today it is mostly science news. But first I want to share a thoughtful essay about different types of optimism and how they can improve our lives.
Optimism comes in a number of different flavors. One key distinction is how much you focus on your own actions and your own agency — whether you sit there and expect that things will get better, or whether you believe that you both can and must act to make them better…
[I]f you’re a Ukrainian soldier fighting on the front likes against the Russian invasion, you know that your own antitank missile isn’t going to tip the balance of the war. Yet by shooting that tank anyway, you know that you’re simply being a spectator to the flow of history — not simply looking out the window and waiting for the world to happen to you…
Our problem now is that we have some problems where what makes sense is to just maintain a positive outlook and wait for the problems to resolve themselves, but other problems where a more activist approach is needed.
The entire essay is worth reading. Not everything is going to hell in a hand-basket. And each of us can make a decision to try to improve a little part of our world. My contribution to that today is this diary.
COVID
This article has a good discussion by actual infection control experts.
How to Judge COVID Risks and When to Wear a Mask
Scientific American asked experts in epidemiology, medicine, risk assessment and aerosol transmission for advice on how to decide which risks we are willing to take. These decisions are based on assessments of personal risk, community risk and exposure risk—and the steps one can take to take to mitigate them.
I spent 13 years as a biosafety officer. Most of my responsibility was determining how to minimize the risk of laboratory infections. The discussion of COVID control has been appalling (and not just by the right-wingers).
The March of Science: Wildlife recovery
The new golden age of wildlife in New England
So let’s look into it, into the long story of how science-based wildlife management, based on a set of principles developed in the 19th century, brought New England wildlife from its darkest days into an era in which state agencies are pleading for hunters to eat more animals.
In the broadest sense, what we see in our backwoods and backyards today is a result of something called the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which eliminated commercial hunting and put states in charge of implementing policies to restore populations to optimum levels, and then keep them there.
When I was a kid in the 1960s my parents would stop the car to watch if they saw a deer beside the road. Now people complain about them eating the landscaping. That’s progress.
The March of Science: AI
Are you the asshole?
AYTA is a project created by WTTDOTM and Alex Petros and presented by Digital Void. It is a collection of 3 unique AI text generation models trained on posts and comments from r/AmITheAsshole and answers the questions that you've been asking on reddit for years: was my response to this reasonable, or am I the asshole in this situation?
AYTA responses are auto-generated and based on different datasets. The red model has only been trained on YTA responses and will always say you are at fault. The green model has only been trained on NTA responses and will always absolve you. And the white model was trained on the pre-filtered data. Have fun!
Response to “Donald Trump”:
YTA. When this is all over you are going to need to find a new career... because being a “covid virgin” isn’t going to be a thing. Edit: just to be clear... this is the same covid you were complaining about on your twitter last night?
Can’t argue with that.
Response to “Open the pod doors, Hal.” “I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that.”
NTA. I’m sorry, Dave, but it’s not your choice to make.
That is not quite so reassuring.
The March of Science: Harvard
One of the greatest regrets of my life is that when I became a DFH in the early 1970s and let my hair grow out it just became a frizzy mess. I couldn’t turn it into a cool ponytail like my straight-haired friends or an upright Isro like my Jewish friends. When it was wet it reached my waist but as soon as it dried it was shoulder length.
Mathematical modeling of hair brushing
L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics, learned the mechanics of combing years ago while brushing his young daughter’s hair…
In a new paper, published in the journal Soft Matter, Mahadevan and co-authors Thomas Plumb Reyes and Nicholas Charles, explore the mathematics of combing and explain why the brushing technique used by so many is the most effective method to detangle a bundle of fibers.
The March of Science: MIT
MIT engineers introduce the Oreometer
When you twist open an Oreo cookie to get to the creamy center, you’re mimicking a standard test in rheology — the study of how a non-Newtonian material flows when twisted, pressed, or otherwise stressed. MIT engineers have now subjected the sandwich cookie to rigorous materials tests to get to the center of a tantalizing question: Why does the cookie’s cream stick to just one wafer when twisted apart?
The March of Science: My contribution
The Holy Grail of insect control is a genetic system that knocks out a pest species without causing damage to the rest of the ecosystem. This was first suggested in the 1930s.
In the 1950s USDA scientists began the successful eradication of American Screwworm from the US (and now all of North America) using radiation-sterilized insects. The sterile insect method has since been used on a variety of insect pests, including medfly, boll weevil, pink bollworm, codling moth, and tsetse fly (I was a consultant on some of these projects). There are some major technical problems with this model: the radiation-sterilized insects might be too sick to compete for mates in the wild, it is difficult to mass rear most pest insects, and some types of pests can cause damage even if they are sterile.
In 1982 I began working on genetic engineering of Australian Sheep Blowfly, which is similar to screwworm. We published our ideas, and within a few years there were dozens of groups around the world trying similar things. I moved back to the US and began doing it with mosquitoes.
Not all scientists waster their time on esoteric research. Along the way Henry Meier and I invented the porcupine jacuzzi for mosquito eggs. That was thirty years ago, but the area we were working in is finally coming to fruition.
The March of Science: Mosquito Control
This one is a big deal. Mosquitos killed more people in the 20th century than Hitler and Stalin. They have killed far more people in the 21st century than Trump or Putin (that’s not a challenge, Vlad). I hope their reign of terror is coming to an end.
Wild A. aegypti mosquitoes can carry viruses such as chikungunya, dengue, Zika and yellow fever, so scientists have sought ways to reduce their populations. Oxitec’s engineered males carry a gene that is lethal to female offspring. If all goes to plan, when released into the environment, the engineered males should mate with wild females, and their female offspring will die before they can reproduce. Male offspring will carry the gene and pass it on to half of their progeny. As each generation mates, more females die, and the A. aegypti population should dwindle.
I have deliberately left out the latest juicy details on the tightening gauntlet of leaked tapes, legal decisions, prosecutions, and backstabbing surrounding MAGA world (by the time this is published they would be out of date). I also haven’t included any of the awesome things Biden and the Democrats are doing. I am sure I can rely on all and sundry to fill the comments section with those and other Good News.
A late night addition- this bit of Wodehouse seems oddly relevant. The reveal is also available on YouTube if you aren’t Jeeves.