Newmark's Door

"Beautiful Day" and three other songs with just Bono, Edge on acoustic guitar, and backing from a teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Impressive.

"If you’ve ever ordered a Coke at McDonald’s and thought it tasted better than any other Coke in your life, you’re not alone. And the taste difference isn’t in your head."

The Door, answering the Important Questions: why does "modern songwriting" have so many writers?

Made me laugh.

For a laugh from the teacher's viewpoint: "How did I do on my research paper?"

At state schools it's already happening. But if universities keep hiring administrators, it could well spread to all but the most elite schools.

There's a competitive threat, too: see "Microcredentials’ poised to disrupt higher ed as degrees lose relevance to employers" and "21st Century Credentials for 21st Century Learning".

And there's a proposed competitive threat: "America is fighting the wrong university wars".

The headline is misleading: it should state only that marriage seems inversely correlated with the incidence of dementia. Once they figure out a causal mechanism, it will be more encouraging.

Maybe there should be a replacement phrase for the "Big Bang" then but I guess we're stuck with it.

Full disclosure: my favorite no-calorie soda and my favorite low-calorie chocolate bars have erythritol. So I'm rooting against this study being confirmed. The presentation here seems a reasonable criticism of the study's findings, at least as exaggerated by the mainstream press. (14-minute video.)

You just can't make stuff like this up.

Not a surprise:

It turns out that, like COVID-19 itself, a lot of our early guesses about it turned out to be considerably wide of the mark. 

But that's good news here:

This time, fortunately, the surprises are mostly on the positive side. Long COVID is neither as common nor as severe as initially feared.