I had a great conversation this week (it'll be on Hankschannel soon) with science writer Virginia Postrel, and she has an amazing quote: "Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature." This, of course, is an inversion of Arthur C. Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Ever since reading that line in her book "The Fabric of Civilization," I have been thinking about how technology moves from being cutting-edge to convenience to necessity. Like, GPS, for example. Can you imagine a world where everyone knows exactly where they are on Earth all the time? They have a device in their pocket that just pinpoints their location on Earth?? This is magic. THIS IS MAGIC! When that technology was first being introduced, it was so cutting-edge that it was a military secret and a potential massive advantage for any number of wartime applications.

And now, if you broke my GPS while I was on a trip in another city, I would simply have no idea what to do. And that's not just because I have become less capable, it's because the world is now built to be a world with GPS. Gas stations don't sell road atlases anymore. NO ONE IS BUYING THEM because we all have the most comprehensive road atlas in the world in our pockets. It's a casual miracle...but it's so powerful that it changes the world in a way that converts it from a convenience to a necessity. Now everyone NEEDS a smartphone. It's no longer convenient; it's an obligation you can't really opt out of. But it’s a miracle with enough gravitational pull that it reshapes the world around it. A convenience becomes a necessity not because anyone demanded it, but because everyone quietly agreed that this is better. And honestly, I do prefer it! Finding my way around used to be a whole project. Now it is very easy.

Our world is full of these bargains. Magic that becomes nature. Luxuries that we have no choice but to consume. Tools that start as optional and end up woven so tightly into daily life that opting out isn’t really an option. And what’s wild is that this isn’t new. People have been living through these transitions for as long as there have been people. The first time someone lit their home with gas instead of a candle, the first time a town got a reliable clock tower, and the first time clean water came out of a pipe instead of a well. Now we have LEDs and clocks everywhere, and hot showers, and we never think of a world without them.

What a wild thing we are to be!

Hank

What difference does it make when people can choose their leaders? One area where the right to vote for political leaders may matter is corruption.

Democracy and corruption are hard to measure. One possible way to understand how countries perform on these fronts is to ask experts who study them closely. These expert judgments aren’t perfect, but we think they’re useful.

The V-Dem project surveys experts to assess how democratic each country is. Are elections free and fair? Do all citizens have equal voting rights? Are fundamental freedoms — like speech and assembly — respected? Experts also rate how frequent corruption is in public institutions, from bribery and embezzlement to whether laws are enforced fairly.

This chart combines these expert estimates: democracy on the horizontal axis and corruption on the vertical axis, with both scores on a scale from 0 to 1.

There are four corners in the chart. In the top left, you find many countries that are both autocratic and corrupt, such as Myanmar and Russia. In the bottom right, there’s a thick cluster of nations that have stronger democratic institutions and lower levels of corruption. What also stands out is that no country appears in the top right: none are rated as both having strong democratic institutions and being highly corrupt.

This chart shows correlation, not causation — but research on the causal link suggests democratic systems can indeed help expose and reduce corruption. And there is also a causal impact running the other way: corruption can weaken democratic institutions, for instance, by lowering voter turnout.

Przewalski’s horse, also known as the takhi, roamed wild across Eurasia continuously for tens of thousands of years. And with their disappearance, Earth lost the last of its truly wild horses. But the story of the takhi actually has a happy ending.

66 million years ago, after an asteroid slammed into the Earth and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs, the world became a dark wasteland. But among the survivors were two distantly related groups of animals that, on the surface, seem to have nothing in common: tiny mammals and a group of lizard-like reptiles. They did share one important trait, though: the ability to chew their food. Really well. And it turns out, this strange ability might have helped them survive when the world almost ended.

Quordle (by Merriam-Webster)

SpellCheck.xyc (by Answer in Progress)

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