Monday, February 20, 2023

20: Ukraine

पार्टी एकतासहित राष्ट्रपतिको उम्मेदवार बन्न नेपाललाई ओलीको प्रस्ताव
राष्ट्रपतिमा नाम चर्चामा ल्याउनु एउटा कुरा, टुंगोमा पुग्नु अर्कै कुरा : माधव नेपाल
‘अमेरिका र भारतसँग नेपालको सहकार्यमा चीन खुसी छ’

20: ChatGPT

राष्ट्रिय सहमतिमै राष्ट्रपति, अन्तिम निर्णय प्रचण्डको : नेपाल
नजिकिँदै पुरानै गठबन्धन दल जसपाले सत्तागठबन्धनभित्र उपराष्ट्रपति, केन्द्रमा तीन मन्त्रालय र मधेस प्रदेशमा मुख्यमन्त्री दाबी गरेको थियो । त्यसमध्ये मुख्यमन्त्रीको माग सम्बोधन भए पनि केन्द्रमा मागेअनुसार चित्तबुझ्दो मन्त्रालय नपाएपछि सरकारमा सहभागी छैन ।

Nurses Are Burned Out. Can Hospitals Change in Time to Keep Them? The pandemic has pushed already stressed nurses away from a demanding field. Does the job need to be rethought?

Here’s how Biden’s visit to Kyiv unfolded. after the flight to Poland, Mr. Biden crossed into Ukraine by train, traveling for nearly 10 hours to Kyiv ....... “We’re not leaving,” Biden said. ......



How One President’s Day Became Presidents’ Day The United States began celebrating its first president when he was still a general. Nearly 300 years since George Washington’s birth, the holiday has morphed into a celebration of the presidency. ........ George Washington was not a huge fan of celebrating his birthday........ Washington looked to his foes for inspiration. The birthday celebrations during the war, he said, “began as a snub to King George.” ........ Finding something to celebrate was key to Washington’s success ........ “Washington did not love the limelight; he did not have patience for excessive praise or nostalgia, but he understood the importance of mythmaking,” Ms. Coe said. “He was well aware that he was a unifying figure.” .......... Every year since 1896, the Senate has selected one of its members, alternating between the parties, to read Washington’s 7,640-word farewell address in a legislative session on or around Feb. 22. ......... The idea was to give federal employees more three-day weekends. ........ “When they talked about the three-day weekend, they said, this will be good for business. They didn’t sugarcoat it.” ......... Some of the former pro-slavery states still treat Confederate figures with respect ........ In Virginia, where Washington was born and lived for much of his life, it is simply known as George Washington Day. ........ and New York, where he delivered a powerful speech that helped launch his presidential campaign in 1860, give Lincoln and Washington their own holiday rather than lump them into one. ...... Kentucky has public holidays for the birthdays of Washington; Lincoln; Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy; and Franklin D. Roosevelt. ........... (Washington was also a slaveholder.) ......... Washington left the office after two terms because he did not want to die in office and risk setting a precedent that the role would be inherited, Ms. Coe said. “Then,” she said, “you would take the most promising country in the world in the 19th century and set it on a clear path toward monarchical rule.”

A Doodle Reveals da Vinci’s Early Deconstruction of Gravity Long before Galileo and Newton used superior mathematics to study a fundamental natural force, Leonardo calculated the gravitational constant with surprising accuracy. ....... and spent untold hours exploring how the “attraction of one object to another” could affect such things as the flight of birds and the fall of water. ........ Now, scientists have discovered that Leonardo did detailed experiments that sought to illuminate the nature of gravity a century before Galileo and some two centuries ahead of Newton’s making its investigation an exact science. ........... the new study revealed a man determined to find an iron law of nature that would shed light on the overall dynamics of falling objects. ......... He also made advances in geology, optics, anatomy, engineering and hydrodynamics, the arm of science that explores the behavior of fluids. ......... as a close observer of nature, he gave much attention to how birds shift their center of gravity as they twist, turn and maneuver in the wind. He also said that Leonardo realized that gravitational attraction kept the seas from falling off the earth. ......... revealed that gravity was a constant force that resulted in a steady acceleration — a steady gain in speed. Leonardo illustrated the gain as the pitcher’s contents falling lower and lower over time. He succeeded in deconstructing gravity. ....... he witnessed fast-moving clouds from which pellets of hail had fallen, which they believe inspired the experiment. ........ “the fascinating part” of Leonardo’s feat was that it let him estimate a constant of nature, the gravitational constant, represented today in physics by the letter G. The constant quantifies the exact strength of gravity’s pull and thus how quickly it can accelerate an object. ........ was able to calculate the gravitational constant to an accuracy within 10 percent of the modern value.......... Galileo and Newton could better address the gravitational question because they had better tools of mathematics and better ways of measuring time precisely as objects fell. ....... more than 7,200 pages of Leonardo’s notes and scribbles survive to this day.

The Perfect Retirement Investment Nobody Wants Two of your biggest financial risks in retirement involve your health, but they’re almost opposed to each other. One is that you will require expensive long-term care early on. You will probably die young, but not before going broke from nursing home bills. Another is that you will stay healthy enough to live a very long life, but as a result you will run out of savings — even if you never require long-term care. ......... Insurers understandably worry about adverse selection, which is the risk that they’ll get precisely the customers they don’t want and none of the ones they do. ......... there are relatively few people who are willing to give away a big chunk of their savings all at once, even if it’s for a rational reason, namely to buy an annuity that will pay them monthly checks for the rest of their lives. .......... If you don’t like broccoli and you don’t like brussels sprouts, you probably aren’t going to like a broccoli and brussels sprouts salad.

The Problem With Russia Is Russia On Oct. 18, Ukraine’s Parliament declared the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation.” ....... When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Chechnya was one of the two autonomous republics of the newly independent Russian Federation that claimed independence. (The other one was Tatarstan.) ....... The dismemberment of the Soviet empire was duly halted at the borders of the Russian Federation — at the cost of two devastating Chechen wars, for which the Kremlin was given a free hand both domestically and internationally. As a result, Chechnya-Ichkeria became a testing ground for the military strategy now applied against Ukraine: state terrorist warfare. ........ Alas, the West agreed to blame Communism alone for all the atrocities of the Soviet regime. Russian imperialism was never identified as a problem. ........ so many in the West clung to the irrational belief that democratic transformation in Russia was just around the corner. .......... Russia will not become a democracy until it falls apart. That’s because Russia is not really a nation-state but the same premodern multiethnic empire living on geographic expansion and resource looting as 300 years ago — and is thus doomed to reproduce, again and again, under whatever ideological cover, the same prison-ward-like political structure that alone keeps it together. ........... One intellectual holdover from the imperialistic 19th century is the idea that preserving the Russian empire would be less catastrophic, in terms of humanitarian consequences, than recognizing the right to life of dozens of peoples whose lot under Moscow’s rule was never anything other than dogged survival, under the threat of extinction. This prejudice helped the empire to survive twice in the 20th century, in 1921 and in 1991. It is high time to rethink it. ........... — any discontent about the superiority of everything Russian was labeled Ukrainian nationalism, the worst political crime of the time .........

We will survive the Russian Federation, just as we survived the Soviet Union.

........ We know what it is like to be sentenced to disappear as a nation .......... The disproportionately large conscription among Russia’s ethnic minorities in 2022, a form of ethnic purge of potentially mutinous regions, was not half as widely discussed as the plight of Moscow office workers fleeing abroad. ......... If there could be any positive result found in the 12 months of this horrific war — in tens of thousands of people murdered, raped and mutilated, in millions of lives ruined, in the best black soil on earth littered with mines, in innumerable treasures of cultural heritage turned to debris — it would be that we Ukrainians have all together, in a united effort of resistance, proved that non-Russian lives matter.


What if Hale County, Ala., Is the Heart of America? In these juxtapositions — of Black experience and white experience, of poverty and wealth, of art and violence, of history and memory and imagination — Hale County, Ala., is arguably the very heart of America. There is no reckoning with the history of this country without reckoning with the institution of slavery and its pervasive repercussions. “The Black Belt is the home of our social construction — it is from here that we are everything America has permitted us to be,” Mr. Ross said in the Dissent interview. “There was no better place for innuendo, for subtlety, for inference; no better setting for presenting Black folks in ways that are simultaneously basic and complex, historic and contemporary.”

Biology Is Dangerously Outpacing Policy The original source of the coronavirus pandemic remains unconfirmed. While it was likely the result of a spillover from animals to humans, a lab origin cannot be ruled out. Given the uncertainty, additional scrutiny on research with pathogens that are engineered to be more transmissible or dangerous is warranted to prevent any future devastating pandemics.

Why China Didn’t Invent ChatGPT The state’s hardening censorship and heavier hand have held back its tech industry; so has entrepreneurs’ reluctance to invest for the long term. It wasn’t always that way. ......... Just a few years ago, China was on track to challenge United States dominance in artificial intelligence. The balance of power was tilting in China’s direction because it had abundant data, hungry entrepreneurs, skilled scientists and supportive policies. The country led the world in patent filings related to artificial intelligence. ........ China’s tech entrepreneurs are shocked and demoralized. It has dawned on many of them that despite the hype, China lags far behind in artificial intelligence and tech innovation. ......... Have censorship, geopolitical tensions and the government’s growing control of the private sector made China less friendly to innovation? ....... If a decade ago China was the wild, wild East for tech entrepreneurship and innovation, it’s a very different country now. ......... Starting in the 1990s, all of the country’s biggest tech companies were private enterprises funded with foreign money. The government mostly left the industry alone because it didn’t understand the internet and didn’t expect it to become so powerful. .......... By the mid-2010s, China had become a tech power that could rival the United States. Its top internet companies were worth about the same in the markets as their American counterparts. Many of the Chinese companies’ products, like the messaging app WeChat and the payment service Alipay, worked better than similar American mobile internet products. Venture capital flooded in from all over the world. For a while the country was producing as many unicorns, or start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, as Silicon Valley. ......... All of that changed over the past few years as Beijing went after some of the country’s biggest tech companies and its highest-profile tech entrepreneurs. The aim was to ensure no institution or individual could wield influence on the Chinese society comparable to the Communist Party. The government took minority stakes and board seats in some of those companies, giving it effective control. ..........

the government has been the biggest barrier to A.I. — its obsession with censorship perhaps its heaviest club

.......... In 1986, he analyzed why the Soviet Union and China lagged the United States and Japan in developing computers. It was clear to him even then that innovation took place when people could pursue their interests and think freely. ......... central control stifles growth and tech innovation, just as it did in the old Soviet Union. ........ national mobilization cannot catch up with freewheeling development that comes naturally on its own


For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest Living Carbon, a biotechnology company, hopes its seedlings can help manage climate change. But wider use of its trees may be elusive. ......... Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters on Monday hope to transform forestry. ....... Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change. ......... “There were so few companies that were looking at large-scale carbon removal in a way that married frontier science and large-scale commercial deployment” ........ “We’re taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we’re cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally a win-win.” ....... By next year Ms. Hall and Mr. Mellor hope to be putting millions of trees in the ground. ...... Living Carbon’s modified poplar trees are all female, so they won’t produce pollen



Her Plan for Putting the World Back Together? Trees. Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s connection to trees stems from an ancient Irish prophecy she heard in childhood. And she thinks trees are crucial in addressing climate change. ........ trees are the best and the only thing we have right now to fight climate change cheaply and do it fast. ......... In the United States, you had the terrible dust storms of the 1930s, and we’re actually returning to this. ....... When we were taking down these forests, we did not know that they were molecular machines. And they are intelligent machines that are capable of farming the photons of the sun. ........ if you plant, every person — this is my global bio plan for saving the planet — one tree, native species to native area, for the next six years, you will have in the ballpark of 50 billion trees put back into the planet. You will pull the CO2 event down from the 410 backwards into the three hundreds. You can stabilize that in the 300s and it reduces the temperature, it reduces the greenhouse effect. It gives us time to re-regulate the carbon cycle. .......... And it’s a very simple thing. It’s very cheap. You can go out and get an acorn .........

The only thing we have are stories. We have nothing else.

......... the prophecies are that — the Irish prophecies actually are, too — that we will put the land together.


Nurses Are Burned Out. Can Hospitals Change in Time to Keep Them? The pandemic has pushed already stressed nurses away from a demanding field. Does the job need to be rethought? ........ She was on the phone with her parents, a ritual she’d developed as a way to decompress after a shift ........ Burnout has always been a part of nursing, an effect of long working hours in physically and often emotionally taxing environments. ........ 57 percent of 12,581 surveyed nurses said they had felt “exhausted” over the past two weeks, and 43 percent said they felt “burned out.” Just 20 percent said they felt valued. .......... She found herself reassessing the two-hour commutes, the emotional labor of the job, the compartmentalization. ......... In October 2021, she left Hopkins for a travel-nurse job that paid her three times what she made at her previous role but also put her face-to-face with different tragedies: gunshot wounds, car accidents, stabbings, train crashes. She was regularly disassociating, she said, looking down at her hands and wondering whose they were. In the bath one day she envisioned the light above her falling into the tub and electrocuting her. ......... “Whenever people ask casually — like, ‘How are you doing?’ — nobody really wants to hear the answer,” Ms. Littleton said. “So much of what happens in the hospital, it’s almost impossible to describe to your friends or family members who aren’t involved in health care. And it’s hard to talk about mental health. In nursing, sometimes it’s frowned upon when people say, ‘Oh I feel so burned out.’ It’s almost like a shameful way to approach it.” ........ she’s also in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, and, like every other nurse interviewed for this story, has felt some level of guilt for her decision to leave her job. ........ Yet there were 60,000 qualified nursing applicants turned away from nursing schools this past year