Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

The party that wants to criminalize your healthcare and restrict your healthcare travel has made its decision. It's been there throughout 2023. #usa #donaldtrump #GOP #republican #2024election

The insects in the spotlight this year were bedbugs, which ravaged first Paris (during Fashion Week, no less) and then Asia. But buggy concerns go far beyond this.

While pests are spreading and making pests of themselves, there’s a parallel problem of insect decline (sometimes called the “insect apocalypse”).

Learn more about insect invaders and other major science news from 2023: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2023/top-scientific-news-and-breakthroughs-of-2023?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=graphic&utm_campaign=originals

#KnowableMagazine #ScienceMastodon

John von Neumann, born 120 years ago today, laid the foundation for AI. But beneath this revolution in the mystery of minds lurks a haunting exposure of the limits of logic, tugging at the nature of reality itself https://t.co/cAK95lGnVh

Italy ‘concerned’ by Israel’s choice of settler leader as ambassador

> The Italian government has expressed “concern” over Israel’s choice of its next ambassador to Rome because of his close ties to the settler movement in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli media reported on Wednesday.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231228-italy-concerned-by-israels-choice-of-settler-leader-as-ambassador/ #Italy #Israel #Palestine #WestBank #GazaWar #Gaza

Finally! The EU has found a legal way of supporting Ukraine, circumventing the Hungarian blockade, using special rules introduced under the pandemic.

This means an end to the veto blockade from Putin's Hungarian helper, Victor Orbán.
https://news.yahoo.com/eu-covid-19-mechanism-bypass-072100214.html

Via @accretionist

'In Novo Nordisk’s case, thanks to the success of GLP-1s, its owner is now bigger than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Wellcome Trust, the two other powerhouses of medical research funding and philanthropy.'

https://www.ft.com/content/69324884-a626-4787-a4ce-aece410d1dcc

"O racismo e a ausência de sentido crítico em relação ao colonialismo, em Portugal, vêm de longe. Não vale a pena negar que é assim. A inferiorização de pessoas e uma descrição idealizada do processo dos Descobrimentos fizeram parte dos manuais escolares da grande maioria dos portugueses."

https://www.publico.pt/2023/12/27/opiniao/opiniao/ventura-traficante-louro-prensado-2074907

'The Russian government’s invasion cut off pharmaceutical supplies (...) More than 100,000 Ukrainians with H.I.V., for example, were threatened with losing access to the lifesaving antiretroviral medications they needed.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/25/opinion/global-immune-system-public-health.html

…some dreams, like the dream of a complete scientific account of human consciousness, might be too difficult…and impossibly remote. In this case, we have the unhappy result of witnessing the inexorable creep of computation—computing existing theories—into science and everywhere else…
—Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
#ai #computation #computing

George Bellows. Rain on the River, 1908.
We often cannot see the tipping points coming, the black ice, the lightning strikes, infections, betrayals - the sudden pivots which alter everything forever, from normal to irretrievable. Just a few years after this Hudson River scene, the promising young American artist painted some of the most psychotically gruesome images of WW1, and then not long after that died at 42.

#Painting

It's interesting; most of the classic bell-shaped curves don't arise purely do to susceptible depletion as predicted by the SIR model. This is true even for the plague example in the original SIR model, as Bacaër (2012) noted.

If you're running into a paywall: https://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2023PNAS.pdf

One of these epidemic curves is unlike all the others
Carl Bergstrom and Bill Hanage in PNAS today explain why
http://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2023PNAS.pdf

“Humans were never meant to exist in a society that contains 2 billion individuals,and if you consider that #Instagram is a society in some twisted definition…of course they’re going to fail.

Here’s the good news. We’re in a rare moment when a shift may be possible; the previously intractable systems and #platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/17/1081194/how-to-fix-the-internet-online-discourse/

This bit is quite shocking
"Despite the flippant observation – often made by European officials – that Russia’s economy is the same size as that of Italy, the Kremlin is producing more shells than all of Nato. "

@guardian