Interesting Links for 16-12-2014
- Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation.
(tags: Amazon punctuation epicwtf ) - Identical Twins' Genes Are Not Identical
(tags: genetics twins ) - Jobcentre sanctions woman for being pregnant
(tags: welfare work pregnancy UK ) - Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use (so far)
(tags: graphene technology research ) - What ( Read more... )
I got a bit depressed recently when there was another ONS release of mortality data ... and so far as I can see, not one single large news organisation picked it up. Because the story was the same as last year, and the year before, and the year before: fewer people are dying. Overall, out of everyone, all causes included, significantly fewer deaths last year. This is excellent news! It's about as good news as you could reasonably hope for! But except it's not news at all. It's just good stuff that you can only point to in the most distant and abstract sense. It's impossible to personalise: the people who would've died either didn't get ill, so they just didn't know, or they did get seriously ill, in which case they're still going to rate it as a pretty rum year overall even though they made it.
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(And yes, it is sad that more good news isn't publicly visible!)
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I think there's something profound about what we like about news that means that this stuff just can't work as news, even with the most noble intentions. I suspect I am quite unusually fond of, say, charts showing long term improvement trends, and even I hardly mention them or pass them on via Twitter or LJ.
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Which is a massive shame, because they do. An awful lot of the time.
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But eventually we will reach critical mass; we've already passed Peak Oil and Peak Water-the state of declining supply (of oil and water, respectively, and increasing demand.)
Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but that's my take on it.
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I very much agree that there are huge problems with the large large and growing human population, and there this year's news isn't so good: we previously thought that the demographic shift was occurring fast enough that world population would probably peak during the C21st, but now it's not looking so likely (see e.g. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/18/world-population-new-study-11bn-2100).
The obvious solutions to do better on that are very appealing though - increased education for women and better access to contraception. At least, they're appealing to me; clearly not everyone in, say, Nigeria feels the same way or this would be less of a problem.
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And that's happening (if not as quickly as I'd like.)
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