Edmund Gordon · Bye-bye Firefly: Carnival of the Insects · LRB 12 May 2022

Almost a million species of insect have been identified – around 90 per cent of all known types of animal – but it’s thought there may be up to nine million more. The Smithsonian Institution puts the total number of individual insects at around ten quintillion, or ten million million million, almost 1.3 billion of them for every human. Ants alone outnumber us by something like a million to one, and if you squashed them all into a gigantic ant-ball, they would equal us in mass.

Friday 2 December, 2022 – by John Naughton – Memex 1.1

John Naughton writes:

As you may remember, I’ve been impressed by Brad DeLong’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia and have been tracking the reviews via his blog. When I enthuse about the book to people they often ask for a thumbnail description (something like an elevator pitch, I suppose) and I struggle to come up with something compact and succinct. So I was pleased to discover yesterday that Brad now has one, courtesy of Robert Reich (who, if memory serves me right, was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration. Anyway, here it is:

My thumbnail description—which Bob Reich suggested to me—is that, while we have made extraordinary progress at figuring out how to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that, potentially, everyone can have enough, the problems of slicing and tasting that economic pie have completely flummoxed us. Thus while we are rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice of previous centuries, that is all. We can neither equitably distribute our wealth nor properly utilize it to live wisely and well, so that people feel safe and secure, and live lives in which they are healthy and happy. To say “have not been distributed particularly evenly” and “our desires have grown” catches only half of it. Distribution has not been inept, but has been positively poisonous. And utilization has fallen vastly short not just because of our rising expectations: people 200 years ago would also have hoped along with us for a world in which they were not stalked by flying killer robots, and in which sinister people in steel and glass towers did not attempt to hypnotize them via dopamine loops to glue their eyes to screens in terror so they could be sold fake diabetes cures and crypto grifts.

That’ll do nicely. (JN)

Henry Marsh is a retired neurosurgeon who has lived an interesting life and who writes with great insight about the NHS and medicine. The following are from an interview in the Guardian.

Marsh retired from the NHS at the age of 65, after growing disenchanted with bureaucratic managers and his reduced surgical schedule. “I just got more and more frustrated,” he says. “Which is very sad because I believe deeply in the NHS. I think straying away from a tax-funded system is a terrible mistake.”

The final straw was a meeting in which Marsh was threatened by a senior manager with disciplinary action for wearing a tie on ward rounds. “That was the end as far as I was concerned,” he says. “Being threatened with disciplinary action by a fellow doctor because I was wearing a tie! That was too much.” He is concerned about the long-term prospects for the health service. “There are a lot of unhappy doctors around,” he says.

Been there: done that. “By a fellow doctor” sticks.

A dog at the master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state.

Its madness…

Former US mental-health tsar calls for a care overhaul

A kidnapper holds a psychiatrist and a cardiologist hostage. He pledges to release the one who has done most for humanity — and shoot the other. The cardiologist explains that drugs and procedures in her field have saved millions of lives. The psychiatrist begins ruminatively: “The thing is … the brain is the most complicated organ in the body.” “I can’t listen to this again,” says the cardiologist. “Shoot me now.”

This is one of the jokes that Thomas Insel, former head of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), scatters through early chapters of Healing, his probing analysis of what has gone so wrong with the treatment of people with mental illness in the United States.

Another telling quote

US prisons hold ten times as many people with severe mental illness as do state psychiatric hospitals.

Debt is the sexually transmitted disease of finance. People won’t discuss it in public.

Rich People’s Problems: My debt is becoming an albatross | Financial Times

F Scott Fitzgerald remains correct that first-class minds can handle ambiguity and contradiction. The rest of us need structure.

No grand theory can explain the Ukraine crisis | Financial Times

When it comes to Ukrainian refugees, the Home Office can be forgiven for not predicting the latest twitch. Cruelty is a feature of Britain’s asylum system, not a bug. Welcoming refugees is a reversal of previous policy. Indeed, the department has spent the past year coming up with schemes of near comic-book villainy to deter migrants from crossing the Channel. These plans have ranged from wave machines to processing arrivals on St Helena, an island in the South Atlantic. (A deal to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda is now being mooted.) An engine built to reject people has suddenly been told to accept people, akin to slamming a car into reverse while speeding along a motorway.

The cruelty of the British state | The Economist

Our laws are unfortunately not widely known, they are the closely guarded secret of the small group of nobles who govern us. We like to believe that these old laws are scrupulously adhered to, but it remains a vexing thing to be governed by laws one does not know. I am not thinking here of various questions of interpretation and the disadvantages that stem from only a few individuals and not the population as a whole being involved in their interpretation. These disadvantages may in any case be overstated. The laws a(er all are so old, centuries have worked on their interpretation, even their interpretation has in a sense become codi)ed, and while there is surely room still for interpretation, it will be quite limited. Moreover, the nobility has no reason to bend the law against us, if only because the laws were in their favour from the very beginning, the nobility being outside the law, and that is why the laws seem to have been given exclusively into their hands. There is wisdom in this disposition – who could question the wisdom of the old laws? – but it remains vexing for the rest of us. Presumably that is not to be avoided…

Franz Kafka. The Problem of Our Laws’ – ‘Zur Frage der Gesetze’ – translated by Michael Hofmann. Link

Via John Naughton

”Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.” Anthony Trollope

He would know. According to some reports, he paid a servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words.

And he did that while holding down a serious job in the Post Office. Infuriating, isn’t it? [JN]

Indeed…

Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument

Nature today revisits the publication fifty years ago of The Limits to Growth by the System Dynamics group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The journal (then) referred to is as another whiff of doomsday.

Zoologist Solly Zuckerman, a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said: “Whatever computers may say about the future, there is nothing in the past which gives any credence whatever to the view that human ingenuity cannot in time circumvent material human difficulties.”

Which is surely akin to saying, there is nothing in the past to suggest we are already extinct. As for computers, there are three branches of science: theory, experiment, and computation. The song goes:

You’re obsolete, my baby

My poor old fashioned baby

I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

Well, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

Yes you are left out, out of there without a doubt

‘Cause baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time

(Rolling Stones)