99 Percent Invisible: Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital

As Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski observed in the early 1900s: “the map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” The point, in part, is that maps are representations of places rather than substitutes for reality, which has various physical and philosophical implications. At the same time, though, the flow of data from places to maps is not always one-directional — maps may be representations of reality, but they can shape reality, too. [...]

Finally, in 1744, the famous Cassini family of scientists in France created the first topographically accurate national map. The process was painstaking and piecemeal, and Britain wanted to do the same. Still, the whole-map approach they took wasn’t complete until 1853, 62 years after it was officially started. Then in the 1930s, they did a re-triangulation, to get more granular measurements, which took another 29 years. [...]

Occoquan, Virginia is one of those quiet, historical towns where wealthy middle-aged people go away for the weekend and buy art and BoHo clothing in small boutiques and then stroll along the waterfront, or at least, it was. Artist Lauren Jacobs was excited when in 2015 she won a juried place in a cooperative gallery in Occoquan called The Artists’ Undertaking, both to have an outlet for her work and to be part of a group of other like-minded artistic community. Her earthy, surreal mixed-media paintings and sculptures sold well for a while… until Pokémon GO came to town.

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Freakonomics: Why Rent Control Doesn’t Work (Ep. 373 Rebroadcast)

As cities become ever-more expensive, politicians and housing advocates keep calling for rent control. Economists think that’s a terrible idea. They say it helps a small (albeit noisy) group of renters, but keeps overall rents artificially high by disincentivizing new construction. So what happens next?

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The New Yorker: The Coronavirus, and Why Humans Feel a Need to Moralize Epidemics

Every plague must have its point. That’s been more or less the universal human response to sudden or unexpected bursts of pestilence, of the kind that seem to put not just individuals but entire societies at risk, for as long as we have kept records, literary and narrative, of what happens when these things happen. The truth that there is a constant, unending, and unpredictable warfare between human and bug, which takes place in a state of moral indifference, at least on the bug’s side, is somehow profoundly counterintuitive. This war, of course, takes place not just between human and microbe but engages all life on earth, with each living thing in a constant state of unequal warfare with microscopic bugs of all kinds, parasites and bacteria and viruses. [...]

Again and again, in the history of illness, we find the same desire to attach a moral to a microbe. Even as late as the nineteenth century, when scientific medicine was just beyond the toddler stage, the idea that a “miasma” was responsible for cholera was widespread among even educated people, and with it came a moralizing: the poor and the immigrants died because they were always in sickness, or brought it with them, or kept it inside them. [...]

One of the ironies of the moment is that, where it’s been the usual path, in modern times, to find small, incremental measures having big effects on public problems, in this case, big, seemingly outsize measures—cancelling public activities, closing schools and offices—are necessary to create the small changes in vectors that can at least manage the pandemic. This novelty perhaps explains why it is so hard to wrap our minds around the changes: it turns out that it is possible for something to be at once a huge public-health crisis while creating, so far, a minimal number of visible, obvious cases of illness.

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SciShow: How Green Energy Could Bring More Rain to Africa

Africa’s Sahara desert is a prime location, some say, to build arrays of solar panels and wind turbines. But scientists are aware that building these structures can potentially have large-scale effects on the surrounding environment that are worth studying first.

Notes from Poland: Most Poles religious but few “strongly committed” to their faith, new data show

Just over 60% of Poles display “religious commitment”, according to new data released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a government agency. But just 5.5% of them are “strongly committed” to their faith, while 23% are “moderately committed” and 33% are “weakly committed”. Meanwhile, some 34% of people are “uncommitted” (meaning that they have a religion, but are not religiously active), while the remainder, 5%, are outside of any religion, reports Onet. [...]

Katarzyna Zielińska, a sociologist at the Jagiellonian University, told Notes from Poland that, although the new figures do not directly indicate any change in religiosity, the wider trend observed in recent years – shown in data from the CBOS polling institute – has shown a decline in terms of declarations of practices as well as religious belonging. [...]

The new Statistics Poland data also show significant differences between age groups, Onet notes. The 25-34 age group is the least religious – more than half of respondents in this group (51%) are either religiously uncommitted or outside of any religion, and just 17% are either strongly or moderately committed. [...]

This has been confirmed by CBOS’s data – which show that the proportion of school leavers declaring themselves believers has dropped from 81% to 63% in a decade – and also by the Pew Research Center, which has found Poland to have the biggest decline in religiosity between the oldest and youngest generations.

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Engadget: EU plans to introduce sweeping 'right to repair' legislation for electronics

If the European Parliament were to pass legislation, it would extend its eco-design law to cover phones, tablets and computers, and likely force tech companies to completely rethink the designs of their products. The legislation would also require those same companies to provide easy to access information related to the repairability and durability of their products. At the moment, most consumers have to turn to websites like iFixit to find information on how to fix their devices. "Single-use will be restricted, premature obsolescence tackled and the destruction of unsold durable goods banned," the Commission said. [...]

The plan is one part of the European Green Deal, a policy initiative the EU announced last year. Like the Green New Deal advocated by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the goal of the European Green Deal is to transform the continent's economy in light of the climate crisis. [...]

The plan is the latest attempt by the EU to tackle electronic waste. In January, European Union lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of legislation to push to device manufacturers to adopt a shared charging cable standard. The new legislation is likely to face stiff resistance from manufacturers. Ahead of the charger vote, Apple said any regulation would "stifle innovation" and ultimately hurt consumers more than it would help them.

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The World Economic Forum: Coronavirus: how to keep things in perspective

The first cases of AIDS were described in June 1981 and it took more than two years to identify the virus (HIV) causing the disease. With COVID-19, the first cases of severe pneumonia were reported in China on December 31, 2019 and by January 7 the virus had already been identified. The genome was available on day 10. We already know that it is a new coronavirus from group 2B, of the same family as the SARS, which we have called SARSCoV2. The disease is called COVID-19. It is thought to be related to coronavirus of bats. Genetic analyses have confirmed that it has a recent natural origin (between the end of November and the beginning of December) and that, although viruses live by mutating, its mutation rate may not be very high. [...]

The strong control and isolation measures imposed by China are paying off. For several weeks now, the number of cases diagnosed every day is decreasing. A very detailed epidemiological follow-up is being carried out in other countries; outbreaks are very specific to areas, which can allow them to be controlled more easily.

The disease causes no symptoms or is mild in 81% of cases. Of course, in the remaining 14%, it can cause severe pneumonia and in 5% it can become critical or even fatal. It is still unclear what the death rate may be. Be it could be lower than some estimates so far.

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EURACTIV: Six EU countries join call for 100% renewable energy scenario

But none of the eight options, which range from business-as-usual to net-zero emission cuts, included a scenario based on 100% renewable energies. And only two of them achieve climate neutrality, which in the meantime was chosen by EU heads of states and government as the preferred option. [...]

Last week, the Commission tabled a landmark Climate Law, aiming to make the EU’s 2050 climate neutrality objective “irreversible” by turning it into a legally-binding obligation on all 27 member states. [...]

The detailed impact assessment was requested by EU member states as a prerequisite for raising the EU’s 2030 target to 50-55% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, up from 40% currently. [...]

Researchers from Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) recently unveiled their own model of a 100% system, which would involve 20 independent European regions or “islands” connected together through a “super grid”.

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