I present to you the Italian cover for Jurassic Park

In his new piece for The Fitzwilliam, the excellent Peter McLaughlin does a deep dive on Ireland's proposed new organ donation law, and argues that it replicates just about all of the problems of existing systems (link below)

Global annual steel production is just over 1.8 billion tons. The metal in the Eiffel tower weighs 7,300 tons. So humans make about 250,000 Eiffel Towers' worth of steel per year.

Saddam Hussein car decals are not uncommon in Jordan.

I'll be sitting here reading this if anyone needs nothing from me!

TIL that Brazil has almost no immigrants (or else bad data).

In Italy, the central government can dismiss elected municipal governments and rule directly for 3 years when there is evidence of mafia infiltration. Doing so seems to improve the economy (higher employment, business formation, & real estate prices).

youtu.be/5yGv1WGN_Io

Chart-topping original movies have gone extinct. People have a lot of explanations for this, but they're all incomplete because they don't realize the same thing is happening everywhere. An oligopoly has conquered all of popular culture.

I will never stop enjoying the quantity of metal worn by North Korean generals.

(ft.com/content/e0dd36…)

I am pleased to announce the launch of the Fitzwilliam, a new publication about policy, philosophy and literature from an Irish perspective. Subscribe to receive posts by email! thefitzwilliam.substack.com

Fact of the day (source: CTBUH):

TIL: Hydrogen Peroxide (H₂O₂) freezes at -0.43°C. Water (H₂0) freezes at 0°C. But mixtures of the two can have freezing points as low as -56°C. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_…

Great interview with Moderna’s CEO about the COVID vaccine and the RNA platform it’s built on. I was astounded that they not only developed the vaccine in two days, but two separate teams developed the identical vaccine separately over the same two days. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bio…

Came across this Our World in Data graph in a student project I just read. Let's hope that trendline stays down for the count.

There is a very real possibility of Britain largely eliminating the fatality risk of the virus by early spring.

Harry Lambert 🌻 on how Covid-19 vaccines could rapidly reduce the UK’s death rate: newstatesman.com/science-tech/c…