LOUDER THAN BOMBS

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- Bombing for Show (Weekly Standard) "On the one hand, the fact that the Trump administration was willing to reverse the president's long-touted intention to cede Syria to Assad and Russia, regardless of the consequences, has undeniably provoked a reassessment of U.S. intentions. Was it a one-off strike for the television cameras? Or does it portend greater U.S. involvement? The uncertainty itself can be unsettling to adversaries. On the other hand, nothing about the strike exceeded standard expectations of the United States' war-fighting capabilities. If anything, the Shayrat strike confirmed the unfair, but widely held, conventional wisdom that the United States is only willing to fight from a safe distance. More troubling is how the Shayrat strike might bolster, rather than undermine, the governing myth that has been essential to the Assad regime's political legitimacy for nearly half a century. Assad's governing myth is based on resilience, not invulnerability. He and his family can weather anything; even an attack by the most powerful military on earth. And by launching his squadrons from Shayrat Airbase the very next day, Assad himself sent an unmistakable message."

- A ‘Cuban Missile Crisis in Slow Motion’ in North Korea (NYT) "While there are dangers in drawing a historical analogy...one parallel shines through. When national ambitions, personal ego and deadly weapons are all in the mix, the opportunities for miscalculation are many."

- Trump’s administration doesn’t understand the meaning of power (WaPo) "...a useful, kinetic statement has been made. The United States will no longer be constrained by President Barack Obama’s infinitely varied excuses for inaction. Nor, apparently, will the nation follow President Trump’s incoherent campaign pledge to disengage itself into preeminence, to somehow retreat into greatness. The problem with the Trump administration’s foreign policy — as represented in its proposed budget — is that it does not fully understand our threats or the meaning of power."

BUSINESS:

- Want Real Choice in Broadband? Make These 3 Things Happen (Wired) "Republicans argue that the government should stay out of regulating the internet. Ideally, if your internet service provider slipped permission to use your browsing history for ad targeting into its fine print or decided to charge you more to access Netflix than Hulu, you’d just switch to a different provider that offered better terms. But that’s not an option most people in the U.S. have. According to an FCC report released last year, only a little more than one-third of the population had more than one internet provider that offered speeds of 25 Mbps or more... For rural America, the situation was even more dire. Fewer than half of rural residents had access to a single 25 Mbps provider."

HEALTH:

- How CRISPR can fight antibiotic-resistant infections (Technology Review) "The way it works is that bacteria store memories of viral DNA in their own genomes as 'clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats'—or CRISPRs. They use this memory, plus a DNA-slicing enzyme (the best known is called Cas9) to recognize and chop up the genes of invading bacteriophage."

- Treating Brain Disorders With Sound (Ozy) "Patients wear a helmet-like device and lie in an MRI scanner that relays real-time images of the brain to clinicians. Much like a magnifying glass focuses sunlight to singe a leaf, a 'lens' concentrates ultrasound beams to destroy abnormally functioning neurons deep inside the brain..."

NEWS:

- Racism motivated Trump voters more than authoritarianism (WaPo) "Trump was said to be unusually appealing to low-income voters... True or false? While the wealthy are usually most likely to vote for the Republican, they didn’t this time; and while the poor are usually less likely to vote for the Republican, they were unusually supportive of Trump. And the degree to which the wealthy disdained the 2016 Republican candidate was without recent historical precedent. Authoritarians or not? Trump’s voters appear a little less authoritarian than recent white Republican voters. Did racism affect the voting? Racial attitudes made a bigger difference in electing Trump than authoritarianism."

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE:

- Does Trump want to be the president who broke health care? (WaPo) "More desperate than clever, Mr. Trump’s talk of annihilating Obamacare, for which he would be justly blamed, is unlikely to coerce Democrats into supporting anything like the House Republican repeal-and-replace plan he backed, which failed to attract enough GOP support to pass the House. The indecency of Mr. Trump taking millions of Americans’ health care hostage is compounded by his suggestion that repeal-and-replace is about freeing budgetary space for Republicans to tinker with the tax code rather than about fixing health care. Even posing his threat, meanwhile, is astonishingly reckless."

- Sorry, Republicans, but most people support single-payer health care (WaPo) "As a country, we’ve long since acquiesced to the idea that Uncle Sam should give insurance to the elderly, veterans, people with disabilities, poor adults, poor kids, pregnant women and the lower middle class. Many Americans are asking: Why not the rest of us, too? A recent survey from the Economist/YouGov found that a majority of Americans support 'expanding Medicare to provide health insurance to every American.' Similarly, a poll from Morning Consult/Politico showed that a plurality of voters support 'a single payer health care system, where all Americans would get their health insurance from one government plan.'"

SPORTS:

- Baseball’s Data Revolution Is Elevating Defensive Dynamos (NYT) "There’s a newfound appreciation for players who do their best work with their gloves, not their bats."

TECHNOLOGY:

- A Chip Revolution Will Bring Better VR Sooner Than You Think (Wired) "These changes have already pushed through the massive data centers that underpin the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Because their sweeping online services can no longer handle all tasks on CPUs alone, these companies are moving major processing loads onto GPUs, programmable chips called FPGAs, and even custom-built chips... Neural networks and other forms of AI are often the driving forces behind this shift."

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:

- Why You Shouldn’t Walk on Escalators (NYT) "It may sound counterintuitive, but researchers said it is more efficient if nobody walks on the escalator. ...walking up the escalator took 26 seconds compared with standing, which took 40 seconds. However, the 'time in system' — or how long it took to stand in line to reach an escalator then ride it — dropped sharply when everyone stood... When 40 percent of the people walked, the average time for standers was 138 seconds and 46 seconds for walkers, according to their calculations. When everyone stood, the average time fell to 59 seconds. For walkers, that meant losing 13 seconds but for standers, it was a 79-second improvement."

TODAY'S SONG:

- Panic (The Smiths)

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