Links. Tweets. Photos (2021.52)
Links of the Week
Myths and falsehoods about the myths and falsehoods of MSG (monosodium glutamate).
The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications. “Just to clarify: This post is about the issues with semantic intelligence platforms that predominantly leverage the published academic literature. Bioinformatic knowledge apps that integrate biological omics data or clinical datasets are actually very valuable.” — could this means that the average added value of interpreting data (beyond generating it and depositing it in databases) is close to zero? This does track with my personal rule of “Never read Discussion Sections”.
Tweets of the Week
There is a new emerging genre of prestige tv show that I’d like to attempt to describe. I call it faithpunk.
The two exemplar shows are The OA on Netflix and The Leftovers on HBO. Each show gets better with every season.
It took me a while to grok them, but I did. Here:
“If you want a mental image of the fall of the Roman empire, you should imagine something like 200 years of GDP shrinking by about 1% a year. That’s a more accurate picture than the barbarians burning everything down”—@SamoBurja
This is just not true
High income countries have used a disproportionate fraction of the doses, but it's closer to 25% of doses (for 19% of global population). Nowhere near "most"
nature.com/immersive/d415…
wait a minute... Mexico City has only been doing a day of the dead parade since 2015 bc they saw it in James Bond film and they decided it looked cool?