henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

Recent quotes:

Retail Traders Are Aggressive Buyers of US Stocks This Year Despite Volatility - Bloomberg

JPMorgan’s data shows that 60% of the inflows from retail traders went to individual stocks, with electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc. and chip giant Nvidia Corp. accounting for nearly half of that, and 40% went to ETFs. Mega-cap technology companies have consistently been retail favorites, with Elon Musk’s Tesla a major beneficiary of the trend.
#USAUSA #trump #etf #tariffs - bloomberg.com

Mnuchin says he's staying at Treasury, defends Trump after classmates' call to resign - CBS News

"We call upon you, as our friend, our classmate, and as a fellow American, to resign in protest of President Trump's support of Nazism and white supremacy. We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing," the letter read.
#trump #Yale - cbsnews.com

Scent: The Hidden Influence on Friendships

The study found that both initial diplomatic odor judgments and brief visual exposure independently predicted friendship potential ratings following live interactions. More notably, the quality of the live interaction predicted changes in how participants rated the same person’s diplomatic odor afterward, suggesting olfactory associations update based on social experiences. Statistical analysis showed these effects were driven primarily by idiosyncratic preferences (approximately 45-47% of variance) rather than by universal perceiver or target effects. This indicates that personal, unique preferences drive friendship formation more than generally agreed-upon characteristics. The researchers found that diplomatic odor cues may be even more influential than visual cues in predicting live interaction judgments, though they caution against over-interpreting this comparison due to methodological differences between the visual and olfactory judgment conditions.
#friends #smell - studyfinds.org

Association Between Alcohol Consumption, Cognitive Abilities, and Neuropathologic Changes | Neurology

Compared with participants who never consumed alcohol, moderate (odds ratio [OR] 1.60, 95% CI 1.19–2.15, p = 0.001), heavy (OR 2.33, 95% CI 1.50–3.63, p < 0.001), and former heavy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.41–2.54, p < 0.001) alcohol consumptions were associated with hyaline arteriolosclerosis while only heavy (OR 1.41, 95% CI 1.10–2.30, p = 0.012) and former heavy (OR 1.31, 95% CI 1.02–1.68, p = 0.029) alcohol consumptions were associated with neurofibrillary tangles. Former heavy drinking was associated with a lower brain mass ratio (β −4.45, 95% CI −8.55 to −0.35, p = 0.033) and worse cognitive abilities (β 1.31, 95% CI 0.54–2.09, p < 0.001). The association between impaired cognitive abilities and alcohol consumption was fully mediated by hyaline arteriolosclerosis (β 0.13, 95% CI 0.02–0.22, p = 0.012).
#brain #alcohol #Alzheimers - neurology.org

Inflammation May Be the Link Between Chronic Pain and Depression < Yale School of Medicine

Almost 30% of people worldwide suffer from a chronic pain condition such as lower back pain and migraines, and one in three of these patients also report co-existing pain conditions. Now, a new study published in Science Advances shows that a person’s risk of depression increases alongside the number of places in the body in which they experience pain. Furthermore, inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein (a protein produced by the liver in response to inflammation) help explain the association between pain and depression. This finding suggests that the mechanisms underlying chronic pain and depression may be driven by systemic inflammation, the researchers say. “Pain isn’t only physical,” says Dustin Scheinost, PhD, associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), and the study’s principal investigator. “Our study adds to the evidence that physical conditions can have mental health consequences.”
#depression #inflamation #pain - medicine.yale.edu

Opinion | The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line - The New York Times

In fact, only two regional cultures consistently exhibit urban-rural vote splitting, and together they account for just 15 percent of the population. Only in the Midlands has the split been a stark one. While urban Midlanders preferred Democrats by between six and 18 points in the three elections, their rural counterparts voted Republican by 15.2, then 22.6 and finally a blistering 40.8 in 2016. As in Yankeedom, this dramatic Trump surge among rural voters had an outsize effect on the Electoral College outcome. Nor should cities be assumed to be reliable bastions of Democratic support. The core counties of major metropolitan areas, including Phoenix, Jacksonville, Fla., and Virginia Beach — and lots of smaller ones, like Boise, Idaho; Colorado Springs; Mobile, Ala.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Wichita, Kan. — went Republican in all of these presidential elections. Notably, not one of them is in Yankeedom, the Left Coast or New Netherland, even though those nations account for nearly 30 percent of the United States population. Look at counties within medium-size metros — those with a population of between 250,000 and one million. Instead of being blue strongholds, such counties in four of the “nations” — Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Far West and New France — voted for Republicans in all three contests, and those in the Midlands did the same in the latter two. Yet in the reliably “blue” nations, this same county type supported Democrats. Collectively, the very biggest core metro counties do vote Democratic in every nation, but by margins that vary enormously, from nine to 20 points in most “red” regions to 40- and 60-point landslides in “blue” ones.
#USAUSA #politics #cities #cosmopolitan - nytimes.com

Bessent Is Wrong About Banks Saving Treasuries - Bloomberg

When senior politicians start talking about technicalities of obscure financial regulations on mainstream TV you can be sure something is up. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did just that in the middle of the US bond market selloff last Wednesday, a few hours before President Trump postponed most of his Liberation Day tariffs. Bessent was talking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Wednesday morning when he bought up plans for deregulation, claiming they’d be very powerful. “Part of the deregulation that’s coming in the banking industry will be changing what’s called the Supplementary Leverage Ratio, which will allow banks to buy more Treasuries without a big capital charge,” he said. “So I would expect that we will have created a new buyer for Treasury securities, a larger more durable buyer.”
#USAUSA #interst-rates #bessent - bloomberg.com

Bessent Says Treasury Has Big Toolkit If Needed for Bonds - Bloomberg

“We are a long way” from needing to take action, he said. But “we have a big toolkit that we can roll out” if so. Included in that toolkit is the department’s buyback program for older securities, Bessent said. “We could up the buybacks if we wanted.”
#trump #inflation #interst-rates #bessent - bloomberg.com

The Bookseller - Comment - The tragedy of tariffs

I have concluded that the US policies of currency depreciation, defunding of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), attempted elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the imposition of fines on Columbia and other universities, the dismantling of the Department of Education (DOE), and much else are not fair and, specifically, have created a potential loss of 20% of authors’ earnings from US sales. Reluctantly, I have been forced to raise the prices of all Mensch titles in the US. A 20% increase would clearly damage unit sales significantly and thus I have restricted myself to an average 10% increase across the range. These increases will have immediate effect. Prices in all other territories, including Canada, China, Australia, Mexico, the EU and the UK, have been frozen.
#adbiblio #booksellers - thebookseller.com

A visual guide to the elected officials who fly Christian nationalist flags at the Capitol – Baptist News Global

It’s interesting to note how Americans responded to the changing nature of the swastika during and after World War II. An archived article from The New York Times dated June 11, 1938, announced that New York Hospital was removing two swastikas from its 335-foot chimney and replacing them with crosses because the symbol no longer pointed toward well-being. “Sometimes the meaning behind a symbol becomes so horrifying that the symbol must be retired from use.” “More than 100 anonymous donors contributed $1,000 for the alteration, which is being made in response to numerous complaints that the swastika has taken on a new meaning since the pre-Hitler days when the chimney was designed and constructed,” the article explained. “The two swastikas, which were built into the east and west faces of the chimney as age-old symbols of human welfare, are being converted into Greek crosses to conform with those on the north and south faces.”
#USAUSA #fascism - baptistnews.com

Trump Reminisces About the 'Great Hannibal Lecter'

They used to go crazy when I talked about when I talk about Hannibal Lecter. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. Right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say, “Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.” He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border. He’s actually not. But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, “We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.” The great Hannibal Lecter. He was uh, he was a very important force. But the press would go absolutely crazy if I mentioned Hannibal Lecter’s name because they say he’s a fictional character. No, but it was making the point and the point is they’re emptying mental institutions and insane asylums. Not anymore they’re not.
#trump #dementia - mediaite.com

Notable & Quotable: Robert Bartley on Trade Balance Fictions - WSJ

In fact, the United States ran a trade deficit in nearly all of its first 100 years, and ran surpluses in the midst of the Great Depression. A trade deficit is typical of rapidly growing economies, which require a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, and provide investment opportunities to balance the equation. Indeed, under the accounting identity, investment inflows must be balanced with a deficit on the trade account. The mystery is why we even collect these figures; if we kept similar statistics for Manhattan Island, Park Avenue could lay awake at night worrying about its trade deficit.
#USAUSA #trump #tariffs #trade-balance - wsj.com

The manufactured nostalgia of Trump’s tariffs

From the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, Black men and white men in the U.S. were employed in manufacturing at roughly similar rates. Yet, the average white man working the industry was paid substantially more than his Black counterpart — a difference of more than $10,000 a year in today’s dollars. On top of those wage differences, Black families also faced further discrimination in access to education, low-cost mortgages, and rapidly growing suburban neighborhoods.
#USAUSA #racism #tariffs - msnbc.com

Do smartphones and social media really harm teens’ mental health?

To try and make sense of the conflicting literature, researchers have done dozens of reviews analysing many studies together, again with varying results. Many have found relatively weak associations and small effects of these technologies on mental health. One 2020 analysis3 of more than 80 reviews concluded that there was, on average, a “negative but very small” association between adolescents’ use of digital technology, and social media in particular, and psychological well-being. A 2024 literature review4 by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level”. It’s also unclear in some studies, say Odgers and some other researchers, which comes first: whether social media causes depression, for instance, or whether young people who are depressed are more likely to spend time on social media. “We might have the arrow pointing in the wrong direction,” Odgers says.
#depression #social-media #causality - nature.com

Transcript: What Does Trump See in Putin? - Fiona Hill – The Singju Post

There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully. Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to kind of see how he will react. And the translation, you know, smooths over all of that. That context is obviously missing and he doesn’t do a readout afterwards. And, you know, we heard, for example, that Witkow spent several hours one on one with Putin.
#trump #Russia #putin #translation - singjupost.com

Is the international monetary system “unfair”? | Banque de France

Over the longer term, the geopolitical and climate uncertainty could push Europe to finance a growing portion of its public investment jointly, by increasing the European budget and issuing common European debt. The sovereign debt of large euro area countries will also continue to provide a close substitute for a genuine European debt instrument, provided these economies comply with European fiscal rules.
#debt #mar-a-lago-accord #dollar - banque-france.fr

What Is the Average HRV? Check This Heart Rate Variability Chart

Heart rate variability (HRV) measures the variation in milliseconds (ms) between your heartbeats. HRV is linked to your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the balance between the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) and sympathetic (fight-or-flight) branches. “What we measure at Oura is largely parasympathetic activity, due to how the parasympathetic system impacts heart rate beat-by-beat,” explains Altini.
#health #hrv - ouraring.com

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Yet they will also have wider and more profound cultural consequences. We don’t yet know if these consequences will be as great as those of earlier technologies like print, markets, or bureaucracies, but thinking of them as cultural technologies increases rather than decreases their potential impact. These earlier technologies were central to the extensive social transformations of the 18th and 19th centuries, both as causes and effects.
#LLM #McLuhan - henryfarrell.net

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

But these systems do not merely summarize this information, like library catalogs, Internet search, and Wikipedia. They also can reorganize and reconstruct representations or “simulations” (1) of this information at scale and in novel ways, like markets, states and bureaucracies. Just as market prices are lossy representations of the underlying allocations and uses of resources, and government statistics and bureaucratic categories imperfectly represent the characteristics of underlying populations, so too Large Models are ‘lossy JPEGs’ (6) of the data corpora on which they have been trained.
#LLM #McLuhan #simulation - henryfarrell.net

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Adopting Herbert Simon’s terminology (1), large models are a new variant of the “artificial systems of human society” that process information to enable large-scale coordination. Our central point here is not just that these technological innovations, like all other innovations, will have cultural and social consequences. Rather we argue that Large Models are themselves best understood as a particular type of cultural and social technology. They are analogous to such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies. Then we can ask the separate question about what the effects of these systems will be. New technologies that aren’t themselves cultural or social, such as steam and electricity, can have cultural effects. Genuinely new cultural technologies, Wikipedia for example, may have limited effects. However, many past cultural and social technologies also had profound, transformative effects on societies, for good and ill, and this is likely to be true for Large Models.
#social-media #LLM - henryfarrell.net

NY ‘Times’ Crossword Editor Will Shortz Is Back in the Game

The decades-stale fill of the pre-Shortz crosswords, when any reference less than 25 years old was deemed suspect, has been replaced by BABYSHARK. Female constructors and constructors of color have ticked up but still fall far short of parity. (The Times runs an annual Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship to try to address this.) When Shortz started out, he was the Times’ sole full-time puzzle employee; now, there are roughly 100. The main crossword has been joined by the Mini and new games like Wordle and Connections with more likely to come. The “Games” department is a major moneymaker and subscription driver to an increasingly polyvalent company. The paper is cagey about specific numbers, but more than 11 billion of its puzzles were solved last year. More than 150 crossword submissions come in every week, of which 10 to 15 percent make it to the weekly Thursday “maybe” meeting. Shortz has the final say.
#quizlab - vulture.com

Do You Have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS)? Treatment Advice Has Changed > News > Yale Medicine

Specifically, the academy changed its previous strong recommendation for the use of dopamine agonists to a conditional recommendation against them in response to clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and the experience of doctors in the field showing the drugs cause augmentation. This affects medications including the drugs pramipexole (Mirapex®) and ropinirole (Requip®) among others. “What really moved the needle on these drugs is an increase in the number of people who take them and develop augmentation,” Dr. Koo says. “It takes years to develop augmentation, but many of the patients who were started on these medicines in the early 2000s, when they were considered breakthrough medications for RLS, have been on them now for 20-plus years.”
#dopamine #augmentation - yalemedicine.org

The Echoes of Hitler

“If Tom can be master, what is to prevent Dick and Harry from having their turn too?” Hitler asks, with the implication that Dick and Harry are imbeciles. “We cannot be too sharp in condemning the absurd notion that geniuses can be born from general elections,” he says, because the majority “is not only a representative of stupidity, but of cowardice as well,” and thus democracy means “placing the ultimate decision in a matter in the hands of men totally lacking in every prerequisite to the task,” so that “the decision is always made by a majority of ignoramuses and incompetents.” It is “the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.” It is the good of the nation rather than equal participation that should matter: “The law of democracy seems holier to such a principle-monger than the welfare of a nation.”
#USAUSA #democracy #MAGA #fascism #hitler - currentaffairs.org

The Echoes of Hitler

“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture…”
#racism #GOP #MAGA #hitler - currentaffairs.org

The Horrifying Fascist Manifesto Endorsed By J.D. Vance

Notably, Posobiec and Lisec do not seem to care at all about civil liberties. They say that they “believe in beauty, truth, law, and order.” Tolerance and freedom of expression are absent from that list. They are very explicit in saying that democracy is not a priority, admiringly quoting Franco saying “we do not believe in government through the voting booth.” They comment that “Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” The “great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists” must be conducted “with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” Beyond Franco, McCarthy, and Pinochet, their models include “Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pyotr Wrangel, [and] Chiang Kai-shek.” These men were not squeamish about using violence, or terribly concerned with popular legitimacy.
#USAUSA #trump #democracy #MAGA - currentaffairs.org

‘Time for It to Die’: The Chaotic Killing Off of the Government

Let’s start with the weather. The Verge reports that the Trump administration is canceling leases for facilities crucial to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s many missions, and plans to lay off half of its employees. One cancellation on the list is the National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction in College Park, Maryland. There are nine centers specializing in hurricanes, storm predictions, flight safety, weather forecasts, and other essential information (and I hope those nine links are still active by the time you read this). One of them, the Environmental Modeling Center, is the data nerve center that produces daily forecasts for meteorologists and consumers. I’d like to keep those, thank you very much.
#DOGE - thebulwark.com