LinkFest 2020-09-17

I haven’t done one of these since March of 2019, but they used to be pretty popular posts, so I’m going to re-introduce the LinkFest format.

Pox populi: Study calculates 18th century syphilis rates for first time

Cities often provide more opportunities for infectious disease to spread, but data is usually sparse before the late nineteenth century. A clever researcher stumbled on medical records for the city of Chester in England and used some simple assumptions about length of treatment to calculate rates of the pox, as syphilis was called at the time. For the city of Chester, 8% [!!] of the city residents were infected by the age of 35.

Playing whack a mole with mining, enrichment and nuclear power

There are a lot of different ways to look at the impact of different kids of power generation, and this blog post goes through things like footprint, mass of materials needed, and mining.

Sensor Sweep: Whisper Network, Bradbury, James Bond, Isle of Dread

I’ve been featured a couple of times on Castalia House’s blog, so I’ll return the favor and boost the Sensor Sweep series, which covers a wide range of topics in adventure fiction.

The larger strategic goal was to puncture the myth of communist inevitability

The wide-ranging blog Isegoria repeats the nearly unbelievable story I referenced in my review of Jerry Pournelle’s Red Heroin, that Jerry had been involved in a Cold War plot to overthrow Communist Albania.

Cycles: The Science of Prediction by Edward R. Dewey and Edwin F. Dakin

An old book review of mine, about growth rates and business cycles.

The Long View: On the Nature of the Coming World Government

Why a universal state would be neither paradise nor Hell on Earth.