Blogaround

1. William Shatner, TV’s Capt. Kirk, blasts into space (posted October 13)

2. LinkedIn is shutting down its China platform because of a 'challenging operating environment' (posted October 15)

3. James Michael Tyler, who played Gunther on 'Friends,' has died (posted October 25)

4. My Black Generation Is Fighting Like Hell to Stop the Whitelash (posted July 13) "Yet, over the past eight years, that most critical law has been gutted by the Supreme Court. Our one unelected branch of government has taken away the key thing put in place to keep the elected branches from sliding back into the whites’-only rule that plagued the first 150 years of the American experiment. There’s no white American equivalent to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no thing we can weaken or take away from white people that would threaten their ability to participate in self-government."

5. This tweet with an infographic about "Where we donate vs Diseases that kill us" (posted October 22), and in the replies there's another infographic "What Americans die from, what they search on Google, and what the media reports on." This is FASCINATING to me because in 2016 I wrote Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk. As a math person, I have spent a very long time fascinated by the fact that the things Christians spend the most time praying against aren't the things that really pose the most danger; instead, they pray most about the things they are most worried about. And if it is really true that prayer actually affects real things (outside of one's internal psychological state) then we need to get everyone organized to pray against the things that really do represent the biggest danger- so probably heart disease.

It's so interesting to see this same idea explored but not related to prayer; rather, related to the money that people donate towards these causes. And yes you could argue that the ideal distribution is not as straightforward as "this one has the most deaths, so it should have the most funding"- you should also take into account how promising the research is (ie, where is your donation actually going to make the most difference), and also maybe it could be true that the number of deaths from some certain disease has decreased precisely because there has been so much money spent on research.

Overall, though, yeah it does seem there is a mismatch.