Notices by Carl T. Bergstrom (ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org), page 2

My daughters and I are feeding cows 10,000 pounds of macadamia nuts each and that's what makes us so relatable and makes it so clear we don't need to be taxed at 95+ percent of our income.

What no one is talking about is how fucked it is that a totally mid billionaire that no one had ever heard of before he blew a gasket in public was able to accumulate a net worth equal six months’ operating budget for the world's premier university.

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/william-ackman-harvard-donor/

@liztai Others have addressed at ID issue well. I'm speaking largely about voting by mail. In the US, people don't get time off work to vote and in minoritized communities, voters may face lines with wait times upward of four hours.

"It’s hard to overstate how important Google traffic has become for publishers.
These incentives are how we’ve ended up with a web full of content farms instead of diverse and interesting sites.

The rise of AI-powered content farms and other platforms like TikTok could destabilize this entire ecosystem. Users and creators are beginning to look elsewhere to find information as the web gets more and more polluted."

@liztai But Elon is not writing about your country.

BREAKING: Apartheid tool has thoughts on how voting ought to work.

This is a fantastic story about how the search engine tail wags the online content dog.

It's a form of enshittification, but it's a two-sided one that involves google's algorithmic choices and web designers' responses via Campbell's law (when a metric becomes a target, people do stupid shit)

https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization

Yet again Rufo spills the entire plot like he's got Bond suspended over a pool full of sharks — and somehow it doesn't occur to anyone to think "hey, maybe we shouldn't listen to this manipulative opportunist any more."

"Incredible usage growth", "people use social media a few percent more during week with paid holidays" — it's a potato potahto sort of thing.

@o_simardcasanova @CassandraZeroCovid @CloudyMrs @vfrmedia FWIW I don’t follow anyone on threads, my Instagram account follows on bird photographers, and I don’t have a Facebook account.

Thinking to myself this morning “Threads can’t be as bad as I recall…”

First post in my feed: Instagram influencer with a cup of coffee watching the sunrise from her balcony in a $1000/night hotel built with slave labor in a country where women can’t drive, telling me about how she has discovered that the secret to life is learning to savor the little things.

No, lady, apparently the secret to life is to be born rich, white, beautiful, and oblivious.

Anyway, that’s enough Threads for 2024.

US residents: If you haven't ordered your free COVID tests through USPS in the last five or six weeks, you're eligible for four more per household. It takes about a minute to fill out the online form, and USPS delivers them to your mailbox.

Testing is a great way to keep friends, family, and coworkers safe.

https://special.usps.com/testkits

Today Bill Hanage and I have a commentary in PNAS, where we discuss the role of factors other than acquired immunity in generating bell-shaped epidemic curves. Our purpose is to provide context for Saad-Roy and Traulsen's model of human behavior and disease dynamics in the same issue.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2317211120

It's interesting; most of the classic bell-shaped curves don't arise purely due 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

Wawurritjpal (2021). Etching on abandoned road sign.

One of the most amazing and moving artistic expressions I have ever seen, from First Nations artist Wukun Wanambi (1962-2022).

At the National Gallery of Victoria.

Just in case you missed the memo.

The thing I don't understand about the evolution of parrot coloration is how they can afford to stand out so strikingly from their environments...

Oh. Right.

@inthehands So far ahead of his time. It's brilliant.

I'll use that in our Calling Bullshit course next year. Thank you.

I've read this supposedly important email from my employer a dozen times and still can't parse the first sentence, let alone understand it.

It's sort of like a neutron star: bullshit corporate neologisms get layered so thick and so self-referentially that grammar itself begins to collapse.

So color spaces are really starting to piss me off. Anyone have a favored tutorial / explainer about what they are, how they work, and how to use them to e.g. post photos online?