According to the book "The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator" by Timothy C. Winegard, the mosquito has killed an estimated 52 billion people from a total of 108 billion people that have ever lived. (Not sure how those numbers were determined.)
This book is in a genre I like (microhistories) but I found it pretty dull reading. It's basically a very superficial history of "the world" (mainly Western Europe) that posits malaria to be the cause of pretty much every world event. I'm sure there's some truth to this, but the plodding military metaphors and oversimplifications really started to wear on me.
Evolution doesn’t care about longevity or quality of life: it’s all about passing genes on. If some kind of mosquito resistance didn’t lead to increasing the number of children you have there’s not going to be much selection pressure for it.
Possibly but it’s a complicated trade off: first, there’s the question of how much advantage it could confer – if young people get through a disease and the deaths are mostly old people who are past reproductive age, there might not be enough advantage (especially since humans are social - a 10 year old losing a parent is a tragedy but probably not fatal if you live with older siblings, relatives, or a tribe). Depending on what people are dying of and when, this might not be enough to select for.
The second big factor is what it would need to develop. This isn’t a directed process - something needs to confer a benefit of some sort early to be selected for, not just after hundreds of generations. If you’re talking about a major change like completely changing mammalian skin, that sounds very complicated compared to other things (such as improved immune function for the specific disease killing people), and there’s an arms race if all you’re doing is selecting for mosquitoes with better bites which might not be winnable.
Finally, there’s the question of downsides: do the mutations producing this leave you more vulnerable to other conditions, less likely to attract mates, etc. If that tough skin costs more to grow, you’re paying the cost upfront even if you’re living somewhere without a huge mosquito population, so it might be maladaptive for too much of the total population to maintain.
The downsides discussion is particularly relevant in the case of sickle cell anemia, which is believed to be a side effect of an evolved malaria resistance – beneficial if you live in an area where it’s common but a net loss if you do not:
"the right way to build a remarkable life is to first identify the traits that define your vision of “remarkable,” then pursue only jobs that will reward you with these traits if and when you master rare and valuable skills."
That's a tough read. I think I read this sentence 10 times, and I still didn't know what it meant.
Finally moved on to the rest of the article to discover that he's talking about aspects of a job, such as having an impact.
So to rephrase, if you want to make an impact in your career, take the job that will allow you to make an impact if you do that job very well. Substitute 'impact' for whatever aspect of a job you'd like to have. Maybe a bit obvious when stated this way.
It's talking about genocide. If internal strife gets to the point of extreme hatred, then you don't need guns to kill each other. Not saying I agree that would happen in the U.S., but that's what they're talking about. Not Vegas.
I keep reading about how the "notch" is ugly and annoying, but "you get used to it". Like sitting behind someone with a big hat in the movie theatre, after awhile, you don't even notice. Personally, I change seats in that scenario.
I just find it hard square claims of "the future of the smartphone" with reviews like "you get used to it".
I don't have the iPhone X yet, but I'm actually kind of excited about the notch and the round corners for a (perhaps) silly reason: it brings us deeper into the sci-fi age where screens are organic objects with shape, rather than just hard, rectangular squares. It feels more exciting, more human, somehow.
(Also, all the various status bars will now finally have the same height; basically no software properly responds to the double-height status bar when something special is going on.)
Meaning the GPS and phone call background process status bars will no longer be taller than the standard status bar. This caused lots of issues with third party apps whose developers didn’t test the auto layout edge cases.
> I keep reading about how the "notch" is ugly and annoying…
If you think of it as a "notch", sure. Another way to think of it is that the screen has a little extra space in the form of "ears", used for instruments (time, signal strength) that would otherwise eat screen space used by apps.
This is why I think that screen space shouldn't be useable. It should be reserved by the OS to show the status, have a black background (which would work really well with the OLED), and from an app's perspective the screen is just a rectangle.
I think the point the OP is making is: what is the advantage to "getting used" to it? It's not immediately clear what this oddly shaped screen provides in terms of functionality.
At least Ontario has increased the price for 1 million litres of water from $3.71.
The popular assumption that future wars will be fought over water is overblown when you consider water prices like this. I couldn't understand why the government was basically giving the water away, so I was happy to see the price increase to $503.71 per 1 million litres. Although the article says it still costs more than that to manage the ground water.
As of August of 2016, in B.C., the price for 1 million litres of water was $2.25 -- which is ridiculous. Hopefully that price will go up as well.
Personally, I am skeptical of studies that count tax breaks as subsidies. If the company's BATNA is to go to a lower tax state, surely one cannot count the entire break as a subsidy, as opposed to a necessary cost to retain the company's presence. But, yes, in principle I agree that Boeing is subsidized to some degree or another.
> The plain email—which took no time to design or code—was opened by more recipients...
That's interesting. I wonder how this would have any effect on opening an email. In my mail clients on mobile and desktop, I cannot tell if an email is styled or not just by looking at the list of messages in my inbox. I have to actually open it to see if it's styled.
