Welcome 2021
Last night, Katie and I watched a 2020 retrospective on the year and, honestly, it was incredibly depressing. The awful of the year echoes and overloads the year recap such that any positives in the show were footnotes while we spent so much talking about the President and BLM and the absurdly awful response to Covid. Here's hoping 2021 is better.
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Is there a summary of top math or science discoveries / publications of 2020? Primarily I'm curious about any math discoveries / proofs from last year.
The Carnyx, an ancient Celtic war horn
The host, John Kenny, plays an excellent trombone and gives a quite enjoyable lecture in lead-up to playing this ancient instrument. Watching this made me wistful (temporarily) for the time in middle school when I played the French Horn. And I can easily fall down a rabbit hole about ancient instruments, I find them fascinating.
WaPo: Vaccination Rates by State
This page by WaPo is tracking vaccine distribution by state. Our vaccine response is about as far from 'warp speed' as possible. It looks like roughly 54k people have been vaccinated in Washington state, with a delivery of over 400,000 more doses coming this week. I will be curious to see how that vaccination rate changes.
When something on the internet doesn't work immediately for me, I go through an immediate reaction of frustration. Then, as I consider the complexity of the system at work and the interconnected nature of the Internet, I realize that maybe I need to cut the systems some slack. For example, I'm currently waiting on a DNS resolution change which directly involves three different companies (Godaddy, Amazon, the registrar for the domain) as well as the intermediating network connections and systems. Not to mention the complexity of DNS records across the Internet to my internet provider to my router to my wireless laptop.
Technology is pretty stunning if you think about it. Even if you think about it because things aren't working as quickly as you'd like.
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Podcast idea: Founding a Nation.
A weekly show that is the creation of a fictional country from the ground up. Would want a rotating cast of experts in politics, game theory, science, etc.
It's a way of exploring political ideologies in a fictional vacuum.
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