💊 no overnight miracles.
on the agenda this week: hornets, ancient doodles and the incredible decline in heart disease deaths.
📖 reading time: 4m 42s.
hi :) happy monday. i hope you’re keeping well, as always. i got a little creative last week and finally finished my latest video from australia. i hope you like it.
tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain.
a special thank you to my paid subscribers: i appreciate the support.
👂 earworm: listen to arlo parks.
📚 word of the week:
“
indelible
”.
impossible to eliminate, forget, or change.
there in a classroom, amid a cohort of presumed losers and layabouts, i took my lessons in the great sin of idleness. the venue at least felt appropriate: the classroom had always been the site of my most indelible failures and losses.
- ta-nehisi coates, 2017
🧠 brain candy:
🇳🇴 the svart resort, due to be completed in 2021, is the world’s first hotel with a positive energy performance. stunningly designed by architecture office snøhetta, the hotel offers a breathtaking view of norway’s svartisen glacier. it’s worth a look.
🐝 heavily protected crews in washington state have destroyed the first nest of so-called murder hornets in the united states. how did they find it? they trapped individual hornets and used dental floss to attach a tracking device (seriously).
🦠 back in march, a study on how long the coronavirus lasts on surfaces fuelled what one author called “the great fomite freakout.” people scrubbed everything from mail to groceries. here’s what we now know about surface spread (wash your hands).
🐈 a 2,000-year-old cat etching has been found at the nazca lines site in peru. thousands of years, continents, cultures and with every technology available, it turns out people have always just liked doodling cats.
🐍 have you heard of the cobra effect? the cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse, as a type of unintended consequence. the anecdote that gives the effect its name is an unusual one.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
👁 does palantir see too much?
on a bright tuesday afternoon in paris last fall, alex karp was doing tai chi in the luxembourg gardens. he wore blue nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head.
under a canopy of chestnut trees, karp executed a series of elegant tai chi and qigong moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently under his feet as he twisted and turned. a group of teenagers watched in amusement. after 10 minutes or so, karp walked to a nearby bench, where one of his bodyguards had placed a cooler and what looked like an instrument case. the cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic german beer that karp drinks (he would crack one open on the way out of the park). the case contained a wooden sword, which he needed for the next part of his routine. “i brought a real sword the last time i was here, but the police stopped me,” he said matter of factly as he began slashing the air with the sword.
those gendarmes evidently didn’t know that karp, far from being a public menace, was the chief executive of an american company whose software has been deployed on behalf of public safety in france. the company, palantir technologies, is named after the seeing stones in j.r.r. tolkien’s “the lord of the rings.” its two primary software programs, gotham and foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify connections, patterns and trends that might elude human analysts. the stated goal of all this “data integration” is to help organizations make better decisions, and many of palantir’s customers consider its technology to be transformative. karp claims a loftier ambition, however. “we built our company to support the west,” he says. to that end, palantir says it does not do business in countries that it considers adversarial to the u.s. and its allies, namely china and russia. in the company’s early days, palantir employees, invoking tolkien, described their mission as “saving the shire.”
👉 read more via the new york times.
💊
no overnight miracles.
an important thing that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news happens instantly.
dwight eisenhower ate a hamburger for dinner on september 24th, 1955. later that evening he told his wife the onions gave him heartburn. then he began to panic. the president had a massive heart attack. it easily could have killed him. if it had, eisenhower would have joined more than 700,000 americans who died of heart disease that year.
what’s happened since has been extraordinary. but few paid attention.
the age-adjusted death rate per capita from heart disease has declined more than 70% since the 1950s, according to the national institute of health. so many americans die of heart disease that cutting the fatality rate by 70% leads to a number of lives saved that is hard to comprehend.
had the rate had not declined over the last 65 years – if we hadn’t become better at treating heart disease and the mortality rate plateaued since the 1950s – 25 million more americans would have died from heart disease over the last 65 years than actually did.
25 million!
even in a single year the improvement is incredible: more than half a million fewer americans now die of heart disease each year than would have if we hadn’t made any improvements since the 1950s. picture the population of atlanta saved every year. or a full football stadium saved every month.
how is this not a bigger story?
why are we not shouting in the streets about how incredible this is and building statues for cardiologists?
i’ll tell you why: because the improvement happened too slowly for anyone to notice.
👉 read more via the collaborative fund.
🦶 footer:
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