Featured Links - October 3, 2022

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A classic Thunderbird

• ‘Bit of panic’: Astronomers forced to rethink early Webb telescope findings. "Revised instrument calibrations are bedevilling work on the distant Universe."
• Working With Robert Jordan's Papers. "It you don’t know, the Wheel of Time series of books contains some 14 million such words, but the materials that Jordan used to compose them are far, far more numerous. And, word-hoarder that he was, he saved an extraordinary amount of these materials. This. Is. Awesome."
• Our Democracy Is in Trouble, but We’ve Been Here Before (With Heather Cox Richardson). "Make no mistake, America’s experiment in popular sovereignty is in jeopardy. Here’s how this moment compares to past crises."
• Putin sees himself as engaged in an existential war with the West. "The most important strategic decision a wartime leader must make is determining the nature of the war they are fighting. With Putin’s most recent announcement, it looks ever more as though Moscow sees the conflict in Ukraine as part of an existential struggle against the West."
• Margaret Atwood Doesn't Think We're Doomed. "Doomerism is not helpful." I hope she gets the Nobel this year. 
• Reservoir population ecology, viral evolution and the risk of emerging infectious disease. "Which viruses in animal reservoirs are at risk of emerging in human populations? Key parameters include: average lifespan of host, rate of viral mutation, and the virus causes persistent infections and/or a transient immune response in the reservoir host."
• Artificial intelligence reduces a 100,000-equation quantum physics problem to only four equations. "The work, published in the September 23 issue of Physical Review Letters, could revolutionize how scientists investigate systems containing many interacting electrons. Moreover, if scalable to other problems, the approach could potentially aid in the design of materials with sought-after properties such as superconductivity or utility for clean energy generation."