“To achieve peace of mind it’s important to have patience and it’s people who are hostile and antagonistic rather than our friends who teach us patience. It’s not difficult to make your friends smile, but bringing a smile to your enemy’s face is a real achievement.” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Bring a smile to your enemy’s face! — Silent Songs of Sonsnow

Source: WTF: Brain-Eating Amoeba Found In Florida Tap Water

Here’s what we know: It takes a lot to get people to wear masks. Information campaigns have a fairly limited effect. Mandates have a much larger one. “A general stylized fact in behavioral economics,” Abaluck told me, is that “it is very hard to get people to do anything differently than they were doing beforehand.”

Increases in mask-wearing do appear to reduce disease transmission during a pandemic, though it’s hard to extrapolate how large that increase would be if everyone wore masks.

Source: The controversy over the Cochrane review on Covid masks, explained – Vox

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Source: Writing Process Wednesdays, Novel Journals, and Project Do Better – collaboration with learners

Galatina, 2019

După ce a vizitat mănăstirea Sfânta Ecaterina din Sinai, notabilul Raimondello Orsini a comandat în 1384 o basilică în stil romano-gotic pentru cetățenii de cult latin care nu vorbeau grecește.

Source: Cherchez la femme – hours of travel

The U.S. intelligence community is “divided” over whether COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan or from natural exposure to an infected animal, and is only sure it wasn’t a deliberate bioweapon, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate on Wednesday.

Asked by Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, why she would not say categorically that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese virology lab, Haines said the intelligence community “remains divided on this issue,” with different agencies offering different analyses.

“Basically, there’s a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering,” Haines said. “What there isn’t a consensus on is whether or not it’s a lab leak, essentially … or natural exposure to an infected animal.”

Source: US intel chief: Agencies ‘divided’ over COVID origins — Radio Free Asia

• Earth’s climate is controlled by a complex network of interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, lands, ice and biosphere. Many elements in this system are now being pushed toward tipping points, beyond which changes become self-sustaining, with the whole Earth system potentially shifting to a new steady state.
• A recent study analyzed 40 years of air temperature measurements at more than 65,000 locations to investigate how changes in one region rippled through the climate system to affect temperatures in other parts of the globe. Computer models then simulated how these links may be affected by future climate change.
• Researchers identified a strong correlation between high temperatures in the Amazon Rainforest and on the Tibetan Plateau. They found a similar relationship between temperatures in the Amazon and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
• Deforestation in the Amazon likely influences the Tibetan Plateau via a convoluted 20,000-kilometer (12,400-mile) pathway driven by atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. The study suggests that a healthy, functioning Amazon is crucial not only for the regional climate in Brazil, but for the whole Earth system.

Source: Amazon deforestation linked to reduced Tibetan snows, Antarctic ice loss: Study