We're still here!

Mark Honeychurch - 9 June 2025

It’s been interesting to see the world’s richest man going toe to toe with the world’s most powerful man. Nope, actually, interesting isn’t the right word. I’m not sure what you call it when you can’t tear your eyes away from two influential grown men acting like spoiled children. Maybe disappointing? Like when you tell your child you’re disappointed in them. Anyway, Trump’s still not pressed the big red nuclear button, and we’re already nearly an eighth of the way through his presidency, so maybe we’ll survive this yet.

In this week’s newsletter, we start off with an article from Margaret Coe about how in her job she meticulously goes about ensuring that the results she gets from her scientific analysis are trustworthy. Although the article focuses on a fairly specific test, it’s an interesting window into how science is done at a practical level, and how much effort is put into making sure that the chances of an erroneous result are minimised.

After this we have an article from Katrina, who’s been weighing up the chances of Trump’s Golden Dome missile defence system matching up to the promises being made - no prizes for guessing what her conclusions are. Patrick has written another summary of a recent climate change article, this one attempting to look at measuring climate damage from a more comprehensive perspective, considering all the positive and negative effects from different sources of greenhouse gases.

Bronwyn’s looked into the history of cryonics, and some of the unfortunate mishaps that have happened. Having chatted with her about some of her findings, I’m looking forward to when she reveals some of the weird and wonderful connections cryonics companies and longevity researchers have to New Zealand in her follow-up article. And finally I started off writing a simple article about some weird gardening advice someone found in the Brooklyn Tattler, a local magazine, but quickly found myself investigating a far-right Russian homeschooling group centred around a work of fiction that its author insists is pure fact.