I think we have to expand our thinking about the toroidal sphere even more. When looking at maps, I noticed the da Vinci map, from 1514, which uses the Reuleaux Triangle. This triangle is formed from 3 intersecting circles, and is in the center of a trefoil.

Here's more on the new mitigation scenario for 1.5C. How does it work? What would society look like? Are we willing to do what's required to stop climate breakdown? See thread.

1. Most models assume we need to keep growing the economy indefinitely. The problem is this makes it impossible to transition to zero emissions quickly enough; so they speculate on geoengineering and negative-emissions technologies to save us. Scientists reject this as too risky.

2. By contrast, this scenario proposes that high-income countries don't *need* more growth, and can scale down unnecessary production and consumption. This reduces energy demand (from 140 EJ in 2020 to 40 EJ in 2050), and enables a rapid transition to renewable energy.

3. What does it require? In the global North (Annex 1 countries)
•a shift from private cars to public transportation
•reduction in flights
•smaller average house size

Meanwhile, consumption in the global South (non-Annex 1 countries) rises to converge.

4. Significant reduction of aggregate material use. How? Longer product lifespans; regionalization of production and consumption; ban on advertising; a shift in taxes from labour to resources. All of this allows us to reduce ground freight, which cuts energy use.

Heres the story of how I volunteered to be infected with 50 parasitic worms (hookworm) for a year as part of a research study. Check out this thread & follow me for more #parasite & marine biology content [t]
#ScienceTwitter
imgs: https://t.co/hH5YsfS0ay https://t.co/kVurE6BbTS

1st some background on the parasites I got. Hookworms are blood-feeding nematodes that live in the intestine of mammals including cats, dogs & humans. ~500 million people are infected with hookworm, mostly in tropical and subtropical areas including the southern USA

Infection with many worms (100+) can cause anemia, which is most problematic in kids, pregnant women, and the elderly. This clinical study was launched to try to develop a vaccine against hookworms to prevent infection

People become infected when baby worms living in the soil penetrate their skin. Baby worms hatch from eggs that infected people poop out. Where plumbing is scarce, poor waste disposal is a common source of heavy infections (100s to 1,000s of worms)

I volunteered to be vaccinated with an experimental hookworm vaccine (I was also paid). After vaccination, the vaccine (or placebo idk) was tested by infecting me with 50 hookworms (Necator americanus) that penetrated my skin from a patch of gauze I wore on my wrist for 1 hour

https://t.co/odzm9VTdwZ

Thread for today. /0

It is fashionable for people to create sympathy to the unseen / unknown organisms. The poor things that can't stand up and fight for their own existence.

It makes for a brilliant narrative. It melts your hearts. And you get to play saviour of the oppressed by outraging. /1

But, for most part, such things are also false.

Amazon are the lungs of the world. Never mind that most of the world's oxygen production happens in open oceans. But these are harmless ones. Of course, we all love to maintain forests.

However, some things are sheer scare mongering.

For instance - take this: coral reefs will be permanently gone if mean / median temperatures raise by 1°C ..

But, really - how? Then you get a lecture on how CO2 will affect calcification.

Dig a bit deeper from another angle+

+ and you find that the earth was much much warmer during the age of Dinosaurs. So much so, that we had cold blooded lizards growing to sizes of buildings. Surely, there must have been tons of CO2 then!

And the ocean temps were quite high too.

@engexplain @nntaleb 1/10
Science is assumed to be “evidence-based” but that term alone doesn’t mean much. What constitutes good evidence? How is evidence being used? Is it supporting or refuting a hypothesis? Was the hypothesis and experimental design predetermined or found ex post facto?

@nntaleb 2/10
The reality is you can find “evidence” for almost any narrative. Limit the sample size, cherry-pick studies, etc. Systematic reviews, meta analyses, and randomized controlled trials are all susceptible to selective interpretation/narrative fallacy.

@nntaleb 3/10
At the heart of the problem is the over-reliance on simplistic statistical techniques that do little more than quantify 2 things moving together.

@nntaleb 4/10
Take Pearson’s correlation, based on covariance. Variation can increase simultaneously across 2 variables for countless reasons, most of which are spurious. Yet this simple notion of “causality” undergirds much of scientific literature.

@nntaleb 5/10
Information-theoretic (entropy based) approaches on the other hand can assess *general* measures of dependence. Rather than some specialized (linear) view based on concurrent variation, entropy encompasses the amount of information contained in and between variables.