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Corona Aid to the Church

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.
The church’s haul may have reached — or even exceeded — $3.5 billion, making a global religious institution with more than a billion followers among the biggest winners in the

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Science, Society, Politics and History

Is Sex Binary?

content note: discussion of biological sex and a binary classification thereof

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Sperm-egg.jpg — two different gametes

Update: Maybe one point warrants a bit more clarification: I indeed believe that people use definitions as weapons. Especially definitions about sensitive topics. And this definitely is one. I also think that quite a few people who commented on this thread seemed to take this as a ‘gotcha moment’ to validate sometimes very problematic opinions regarding trans people. I do not endorse this – … more

20. July 202020. July 2020

Technology

This Person Does Not Exist

A powerful testimony to the advances AI has made in the last years: thispersondoesnotexist.com

Make sure to check out the “How it works” links that appear in the bottom right of the page after a while.

16. July 202016. July 2020

Society, Politics and History

The Privilege of Beauty

I came across an interesting article titled The Greatest Privilege We Never Talk About: Beauty. My favorite quote:

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future we use deepfake technology to make criminal defendants’ looks homogeneously beautiful (or ugly).

15. July 202015. July 2020

Society, Politics and History

The Insanity and Injustice of College Sports

The Atlantic has an interesting opinion piece called College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students. In the US it is quite common for colleges (also including elite universities like Harvard and Yale) to admit a significant portion (often around 20 percent) of their students based more on athletic performance than on academic achievements. Even if you don’t subscribe to the racial perspective taken by the article, it becomes fairly evident that this highly advantages those who have … more

14. July 202014. July 2020

Health, Science

First Attempts to Reverse Aging in Humans

Most people think of aging as something inevitable. But not all agree and the research into aging and how to reverse it has become more and more prominent over the last couple of years. Most attempts to slow or reverse aging have of course been conducted in rats and mice. They focused, for example, on giving older animals blood or plasma concentrates from younger animals or simply replacing some of the old plasma with albumin.

Anti aging drugs for

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12. July 202012. July 2020

Health

1 Day Sooner

Covid-19 has stirred up a lot of discussions about the ethics of science. I have written before about experiments on humans to learn more about the virus and help speed up the development of a vaccine. If you are interested in this, you might want to have a look at 1 Day Sooner. They advocate for a quick introduction of human trials, arguing that speeding up the development of a vaccine could help save thousands of lives. Some of … more

10. July 202010. July 2020

R Cheat Sheets

I really wasn’t aware of that for a long time, but for anyone who is using R, these R Cheat Sheets can prove tremendously helpful. They have a short overview for functionality in many packages. There is one for ggplot2, one for working with times and dates, one for package development, even one for doing maps in R, and many more.

8. July 20208. July 2020

Economics

China’s two Currencies

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/Renminbi_banknotes.JPG — The Renminbi

It was only today that I learned that China, in effect, has two different currencies. I’m not even trying to get the nomenclature right, but the relevant terms are Yuan and Renminbi and they both somewhat overlap in meaning.

What makes China’s system a dual currency system is that they have a separation between onshore currency (that can only be used on the mainland) and offshore currency (used for international transactions, but not on the mainland). The exchange … more

6. July 2020

Science

The Effect of Sci-Hub on Science

In 2016 Alexandra Elbakyan was listed as one of the top 10 people who mattered in science by Nature. And indeed, her impact on science was and is profound. Elbakyan is the founder of Sci-Hub.

The Sci-Hub Logo

Sci-Hub is a platform where you can download millions and millions of journal articles for free. These articles are taken from journals that restrict access behind a paywall and are made available to users. Technically, this is not legal, but the … more

4. July 20204. July 2020