this week i

published on health inequities among the elderly and disabled.  meps has a bruce springsteen variable.  nchs copes with pandemic response rates

the census bureau made extensive efforts to match telephone numbers to the addresses in the nhis sample; however, collecting data by telephone rather than personal visit resulted in a reduction in the household response rate from 60.0% in quarter 1 (q1) to 42.7% in q2

drove past a license plate of sevens, twos, and zees: impossible to remember.  conquer the world as an afterthought, retain laughter as the goal 

watched the cameraman, eminently relatable


read..

(1) the garbagemen of the sea

camden by the sea, rockland by the smell

it is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you

 tanks of live lobster, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point

is it significant that "lobster," "fish," and "chicken" are our culture's words for both the animal and the meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like "beef" and "pork" that help us separate the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was?  is this evidence that some kind of deep unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in english usage, but that the unease diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (and is "lamb"/"lamb" the counterexample that sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for the equivalence?)


(2) population ethics

if our species does destroy itself..it will be a death in the cradle-a case of infant mortality

the meaning and value of our own lives depend on their being situated in an ongoing flow of generations


(3) the avian brain

crows and parrots perform as well as dogs in tests of reasoning and learning

birds can see ultraviolet light.  some birds that look plain to us probably shine and sparkle to other birds.  birds can also detect the earth's magnetic field, a sense that humans lack entirely

bar-tailed godwits - pigeon-sized long-legged shorebirds - travel nonstop each fall from alaska to new zealand, a distance of over seven thousand miles.  lacking waterproof plumage, they cannot rest on the water.  seven or more days of uninterrupted flight requires a radical marshaling of the body's energy sources, during which the godwit loses half its weight

hummingbirds have a sophisticated internal map that permits them to keep track of which flowers in a vast field they have already drained of nectar and which ones remain untapped

 scientific consensus that traces migration as an evolutionary adaptation to the end of the last ice age, when new territory became available, with abundant food and little competition but a harsh winter

 

(4) hajji malcolm

sanded down for safe handling

instead of striving toward a respectability of dubious value, malcolm turned service work in jazz clubs and as a porter on the new haven railroad into a set of lucrative hustles that he plied from harlem to roxbury.  dodging the world war ii draft, he dealt drugs, ran numbers, robbed, and steered clients to sex workers.  wearing zoot suits louder than the swing bands he sold reefer to, malcolm adopted the name "red," in reference to his naturally red hair, which he flamboyantly wore "conked," or chemically straightened with lye

 the klan, assuming mutual interest in the defeat of racial integration, asked the noi to assist in murdering king

 

(5) the digital tulip

imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved sudokus you could trade for heroin

 

(6) algeria always in the air

we push some out of helicopters above their villages

it's not even a war, it's a nightmare

resettle a people that live everywhere yet nowhere

 the daughter of one appele..walked into the bathroom one day to find her father waterboarding her younger brother

the gaullist myth of france's unity against the german occupation


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