The world has become a weirder and more dangerous place in the last few weeks (if that was even possible!). Just remember to take care of yourselves and those closest to you. That's about all we can do right now ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Why Lab Coats are White — That's something, I'm sure, most of us have never thought to ask. The reason is quite fascinating as it turns out.

From the article:

The standard garb of laboratory workers also began to shift to white during the turn of the 20th century, when the relationship between medicine and laboratory science became more entwined. Lab scientists likely adopted surgical fashion as a result.

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government — DOGE was a near-perfect case study of what happens when you let a gang of arrogant tech bros loose on something they don't understand and let them try to reshape that something in their leader's ideological image. The results were as disastrous as they were predictable.

From the article:

Zero-based budgeting rarely succeeds in cutting costs. Its real effect, in Musk’s hands, was the concentration of power. His approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data – whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff or illegitimate people – could simply be deleted. What Doge sought to automate, the media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was “not paperwork but democratic decision-making”. Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.

Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars — This is probably something not many of us think about, but overly-bright headlights can be a problem for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. Maybe a grassroots movement can make a difference in this area.

From the article:

Going by the publicly available data of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, headlight brightness has roughly doubled in the past 10 years—although you probably don’t need convincing if you’ve been paying attention over that span. Something happened out there, and a zap of light causing you to grimace behind the wheel suddenly went from a rarity to a routine occurrence.

The Passion of strangers: a philosophy of friendship — A fascinating mediation on the concept of friendship, and of that concept's social, personal, and philosophical aspects and ramifications.

From the article:

Friendship introduces its own logic into relationships of belonging, and interferes with their strategies of obedience and subordination. Accordingly, there is no specific institution of friendship and, indeed, a good many institutions are designed not to favor it, or even to do away with it by submitting it to all sorts of disciplines (separation, rivalry, etc.) as well as suspicion (of sexual relations, favoritism, and even corruption).