To Make Claims About Genetic Difference
In today's edition: in praise of maintenance, all the trees, Mumbai's housing, the Panthers and genetics, nutrition science, and the best damn story you may read all week.
1. Capitalism is good at technological innovation, maybe less good at maintenance.
"We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour, from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food preparation, is of this type: upkeep."
2. How many trees are there on Earth?
"His simple question—how many trees live on Earth?—eventually grew into a two-year study that was published recently in Nature. He and other scientists at Yale used a process similar to the one Gonzalez’s team did. To the tallied amount of trees in 429,775 plots, spanning more than 50 countries, Hintler and his colleagues applied predictive models that 'link tree density to spatially explicit remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) layers of climate, topography, vegetation characteristics and anthropogenic land use.' Their models gave them 'the first spatially continuous map of global tree densities at a 1-km2 resolution.' When they defined a tree as 'a plant with woody stems larger than 10 cm diameter at breast height,' Hintler’s team calculated that the world holds about 3 trillion trees, roughly 10 times the previous estimate. Then, they compared this number to United Nations estimates of global forests 10,000 years ago, at the dawn of agriculture. They found that the number of trees had fallen by roughly half, from 6 trillion, and that humans cut down over 15 billion trees every year."
3. For an American in the Bay, it is fascinating to look at housing problems outside the US.
"Typically, cities in which topography creates a constraint on land supply compensate the lack of land by increasing the height of buildings. In that manner, they are able to provide to their inhabitants about as much floor space as cities without topographical constraints. This common sense solution has usually not been promoted by wise urban planners but by a simple market mechanism: where land is scarce, it is expensive, and when land is expensive, people consume less of it. Therefore, there is a demand for high, compact buildings. This is why cities located on islands – for instance, New York, Hong Kong or Singapore – are well known for their skyscrapers while cities located in flat plains without major water barriers, – like Paris, London and Berlin – are not. In Mumbai, which, although not anymore an island, has similar topographical constraints as New York or Hong Kong, the amount of floor space which is allowed to be built on the land available is drastically restricted by regulations."
4. The Black Panthers and the emerging science of genetics.
"What’s so interesting about the Black Panther case is that in the early 1970s, on the occasion of an international meeting of genetic scientists at UC Berkeley, the Black Panther party held a press conference, because they’re upset about racist claims that are being made by some geneticists in the 1970s. One of the things that they say that’s so radical is 'We want better science.' If you want to think about what might be a Left way of thinking about genetic science, either in that moment, or in our moment almost 50 years later, I don’t think our first impulse is to say, 'We want better science.' I think a Left response is too often misunderstood as being like 'Shut it down. Science is bad.' A kind of anti-science perspective. And surely there’s some of that, but what the Black Panther Party brought to the conversation, using their coverage of their own press conference, was an understanding about the categories that scientists use to make claims about genetic difference."
5. At this point, that the public has any faith in nutrition science is a wonder.
"Unsurprisingly, then, repeated attempts to prove a correlation between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol failed. For the vast majority of people, eating two or three, or 25 eggs a day, does not significantly raise cholesterol levels. One of the most nutrient-dense, versatile and delicious foods we have was needlessly stigmatised. The health authorities have spent the last few years slowly backing away from this mistake, presumably in the hope that if no sudden movements are made, nobody will notice. In a sense, they have succeeded: a survey carried out in 2014 by Credit Suisse found that 54% of US doctors believe that dietary cholesterol raises blood cholesterol."
1. aeon.co 2. nautil.us 3. alainbertaud.com | @marketurbanism 4. ethnographymatters.net 5. the guardian.com | @annegalloway
To Make Claims About Genetic Difference