The following really well video from the German channel Kurzgesagt provides a very balanced view, using lots of sources, to answer if organic vegetables and fruits are really better. The overall recommendation that I can extract from their message would simple and seems quite logical: eat more fruits and veggies that are produced locally and in season.
As an author from Wired tried to sell his personal data and found out it isn’t worth much, some economists made the following valid remark.
Yet data can be worth a good deal in the aggregate — just ask some of the major tech companies. The economics here are a bit like the economics of voting. If it were legal, and you tried to sell your vote and your vote alone, you might not get much more than 0.3 cents. That vote is unlikely to prove decisive. Yet average and marginal value do not coincide. If someone could buy a whole block of votes, which in turn could swing an election, the price could be much higher.
An interesting interview with Professor Mark Blyth on the “crisis of globalisation”. His view on commodification of our personal data seems a bit unsophisticated though: how would we actually be able to put a price on the use of our data, and wouldn’t this still leave all the power with the big companies to buy them off from us? But I agree that there is a general problem in governance.
An opnion piece on The New York Times discusses why deleting your Facebook account may not be an effective way to drive the company to change and may cause harm by “recasting a political issue as a willpower issue”.
The New Yorker writes on the doomsday preparation strategies of the super rich in America, preparing for survival and escape from the society they helped create.
Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.
Happy to learn more about Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers. Learn more about her here in an introduction by Bruno Latour.
Isabelle Stengers has chosen to look for a touchstone distinguishing good science from bad not in epistemology but in ontology, not in the word but in the world.
Just two things I noticed/read this week. Some of the most advanced humanoid robots and get a lot of attention are modelled as women (e.g. Sophia or Jia Jia). Tech shows such as CES where technology such as robots are showcased such as CES show a history of being linked with the sex industry and a lack of women in the industry.
Just love this picture of Moai at Rano Raraku, Easter Island by Horacio Fernandez, how they are just scattered seemingly randomly and half disappearing into the ground. Reminds me also of the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
It seems that some "literary elites" feel threatened by the approach of Marie Kondo to only keep books that “spark joy”. I agree that books don’t have to necessarily give you joy, and from my perspective you should only keep the ones that had an impact on you and you reach for regularly. But if you care so much about hoarding your books, is there not some part of you that simply needs them to keep up your profile as an intellectual? I have a few books myself that I want to keep, but most of the books that I have read and shaped me are also on the shelves of public libraries, or I have given away again.
Finished a second novel of Elizabeth Strout, "My Name is Lucy Barton". What a wonderful short novel full of heart and sincerity, I had to read it in one go! 📚 Elizabeth Strout is an exceptional writer I must say; there are some many lovely phrases I was underlining throughout this book. The book is written in a concise way, but there are a lot layers in this story about Lucy Barton who is recovering after a surgery (and who is also writer in the novel), and has an opportunity to reconnect with her mother through gossip. Which allows Lucy to understand more about her own and her mother’s difficult lives.