This is a short (and late) edition - but I’m preparing a larger bumper end of year edition for early next week! Happy Christmas to everyone who reads every edition, or just pops in now and then.
I will be on Adrian Weckler’s Big Tech Show podcast (a subscriber!) later this week to discuss the winners and losers in tech in 2021 - keep an eye out!
Thankfully JWST has been successful thus far 🙏 - but still a long way to go to first light. Lots of JWST content to come.
Hi, I’m Gavin. This is my experimental newsletter that explores thinking - how we might think better and learn together as we do so.
I explore several key topics through the lens of several core themes: systems thinking, scenario planning, trends, and cross-disciplinary innovation. These often relate to key issues: climate change, pandemics, astronomy, physics, health, history, philosophy, culture, rocketry, conflict, the impact of technology on society and more (lol!). With a larger question behind it all: how do we progress and how do we progress better?
I hope you like where we go. (917 - nope - 931 of us now! - welcome all new arrivals)
Gavin
PS: if you like the newsletter please share it! (And I always appreciate tweets about it too!) 🙏
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Reading list - the best stuff to read
(The best reads I’ve come across, with excerpts, links, authors and how long it will take to read. Climate change, COVID and China are consistently the stories at the top so are semi-permanent)
🌏 Climate change & biodiversity loss
PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ constantly cycle through ground, air and water, study finds.
The Stockholm research team collected aerosol samples between 2018 and 2020 from Andøya, an Arctic island, and Birkenes, a city in southern Norway. It found correlating levels of PFAS and sodium ions, which are markers of sea spray. The chemicals’ transfer occurs when air bubbles burst as waves crash, and the study found that PFAS can travel thousands of kilometers via sea spray in the atmosphere before the chemicals return to land.
Some regulators and the chemical industry have long claimed that dumping PFAS into the ocean is an appropriate disposal method because it dilutes the waste to a safe level. The study concluded that the approach isn’t safe because the chemicals are returned to land, which can pollute drinking water sources, among other issues.
“The common belief was that PFAS would eventually wash off into the oceans where they would stay to be diluted over the timescale of decades,” said Matthew Salter, a co-author of the study and researcher at Stockholm University. “But it turns out that there’s a boomerang effect, and some of the toxic PFAS are re-emitted to air, transported long distances and then deposited back onto land.”
Bonus link: Watch this documentary about Teflon/PFAS. (90 mins)
People are leaving jobs to help and prepare for climate change. “‘Green defectors’ ditch high-flying careers in business and finance”. (5 mins by Pilita Clark)
Bendell says he knows of at least eight people who have changed their working lives after reading Deep Adaptation, including two from the European Commission, but few came from the world of finance and business. Those who have switched acknowledge they are fortunate to have the financial security to allow them to quit their jobs. To those who would like to follow suit, but fear the consequences, many say the shift is ultimately worth it. “I did find it difficult for a while,” says Cat Jenkins, communications co-ordinator for the Deep Adaptation Forum, a global network inspired by Bendell’s paper. Based in the Isle of Man, Jenkins spent nearly 30 years in the offshore finance sector and says her identity rested heavily on being “the kind of person that has a big house and a big car and a big job title and respect”.
🦠 COVID-19
This is a great interview with one of the earliest members of my COVID Twitter list, Trevor Bedford. Gauteng’s Omicron Wave Is Already Peaking. Why?
Whether what we’re seeing reflects immunity or reduced severity.
But in some sense, it doesn’t really matter. This is going to be less severe, either because of immunity or intrinsic severity or both. What matters much more than what drives that reduced severity is how reduced it is. People are arguing about those factors like, if it is intrinsically less severe, that means we don’t need to worry about it.But the difference between being 30 percent less severe and 30 times less severe is really, really important.
Yeah, exactly. So the scale of reduction is much more important than the mechanism.And then two is, even if we’re not completely at endemicity, we’re pretty close. And so this may be, effectively, what endemicity looks like, and we can see how bad that feels. If we continue to have things like Omicron continuing to emerge, we can maybe expect this every year.
Always read Ed Yong. I Canceled My Birthday Party Because of Omicron
Our Christmas will also be quiet. I don’t know how to think about everyone else’s. For two straight years, America’s leaders have largely punted the responsibility for controlling the pandemic to individuals, and now Omicron leaves said people with few options beyond boosting, masking, and—the one nobody wants to hear—avoiding social gatherings. If people really hunker down over the next week, eschewing the kinds of exposures that they would have felt comfortable with a mere month ago, they might be in a more secure position to gather by Christmas. But as my colleague Ian Bogost has written, to have to wrangle with these choices again, just as the holiday season begins, feels like a cruel joke.
And: America Is Not Ready for Omicron
Vaccines can’t be the only strategy, either. The rest of the pandemic playbook remains unchanged and necessary: paid sick leave and other policies that protect essential workers, better masks, improved ventilation, rapid tests, places where sick people can easily isolate, social distancing, a stronger public-health system, and ways of retaining the frayed health-care workforce. The U.S. has consistently dropped the ball on many of these, betting that vaccines alone could get us out of the pandemic. Rather than trying to beat the coronavirus one booster at a time, the country needs to do what it has always needed to do—build systems and enact policies that protect the health of entire communities, especially the most vulnerable ones. Individualism couldn’t beat Delta, it won’t beat Omicron, and it won’t beat the rest of the Greek alphabet to come. Self-interest is self-defeating, and as long as its hosts ignore that lesson, the virus will keep teaching it.
Preliminary laboratory data hint at what makes Omicron the most superspreading variant yet. Much to my own annoyance now for more than 18 months, the Irish health authorities still do not accept aerosol transmission as the primary mode of infection. (5 mins by Megan Molteni)
While the Hong Kong team analyzed tissue of the bronchi — the big tubes that move air from the nose and mouth into the lungs — the types of cells that Omicron infected, and replicated rapidly inside, are found higher up in the airway as well. “This suggests much increased potential for aerosol generation during breathing,” said Don Milton, an aerobiologist at the University of Maryland, who has studied the physical dynamics of respiratory viruses for decades.
Breathing, he explained, is essentially the process of opening and closing your airways. When they close, they become covered in a thin liquid film, which acts kind of like the surface of a bubble. When you breathe in and your airways open, the bubble bursts, creating tiny particles known as aerosols, which you then breathe out and can hang around in the air and be breathed in by other people.
Studies going back to the 1970s have shown that when people are infected with a respiratory virus or bacteria, those microorganisms tend to concentrate on the thinnest part of the bubble. The result is that the tiniest particles, the ones that can stay aloft the longest and travel the farthest distances, tend to have higher concentrations of disease-causing pathogens than the larger particles you generate when coughing or sneezing. Despite much scientific debate early on in the pandemic, the evidence now suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is primarily spread through infectious aerosols that people breathe in.
🇨🇳 China - Taiwan
Binkov looks at whether Taiwan is strong enough to defend against a Chinese invasion. (20 mins)
🎵 Art - Stephen Sondheim
A 2008 interview of Stephen Sondheim, who died last month. (15 mins)
🧠 Astronomy - touching the sun
The fastest object ever built by humans - 147km/sec - the Parker Solar Probe. Scott Manley takes a look! (12 mins)
🧠 Biology - cognition
A fascinating look at how non-human animals might think, and where human perception of cognition might be biased. She mentions the “major transitions framework”. (link) (8 mins)
Philosophy Corner (a journey through thinking about thinking every week)
(A serialised section that started with Greek Tragedy and moved to philosophy. Something to spark ideas. Feel free to go backwards!).
Another new one for me: Frantz Fanon. (41 mins)
Documentary
(A good thing to watch - also serialised - so feel free to go back through past editions!)
Christmas hiatus!
Podcast(s)
(The best stuff I’ve listened to, or been recommended by subscribers)
No recommendations this week! Take a break.
Still in my tabs
(Or stuff I haven’t read yet, but looks promising)
Citizen Militias in the U.S. Are Moving toward More Violent Extremism
Your DNA Test Could Send a Relative to Jail
Largest collection of free-floating planets found in the Milky Way
Ancient DNA study reveals large-scale migrations into Bronze Age Britain