For Tuesday February 7th these are my top reads

1. Devastation and death of more than 2300 people in Turkey and Syria due to two major earthquakes

The calamity unfolding in Turkey and Syria is on an enormous scale. Two huge earthquakes have struck so far. At least 2300 people died in an earthquake ( of 7.8 magnitude, followed by one of 7.5 ) on the Turkey-Syria border.

When earthquakes strike in densely populated urban areas, especially where buildings have been put up quickly and with insufficient care for preparing for an earthquake, the human toll is typically high. When people are caught asleep—the first quake struck soon after 4am local time—natural disasters are often more deadly. Add the difficulties of wintry weather, the risk of exposure for those trapped in debris and the troubles of a war zone and already vulnerable refugees. All this points to an exceptionally grim outcome reports the Economist.

The quake was the biggest in the area since 1939, and its scale was magnified by the region’s poverty. The area holds millions of refugees, and its buildings are “extremely vulnerable” to earthquakes, the United States Geological Survey said. The death toll is expected to rise significantly: Hospitals were damaged, and snow-blocked roads are hampering rescue efforts. A comparable earthquake in Turkey in 1999 killed 17,000.

^2. This an interesting article -Can India Industrialise ?, which is a long but worthwhile read, by the economist Noah Smith in his blog eponymously called Noah Pinion.
He ends on an optimistic note:
“All in all, I have to say I’m optimistic about India. Development seems to have a momentum that’s as much psychological as economic — once the people of a country know that they can achieve rapid growth, their hunger is whetted for more. The reforms of the 1980s and 1990s didn’t get India all the way to developed status, but they gave Indians a golden 25 years during which they started to realise just how great their country could become. And I think much of the rest of the world realised it as well.”
“The world’s largest country will find its way out of the darkness of deprivation, and take its rightful place among the industrialized nations of the world.”
Well we hope so too.

3. Discomfort often serves as a signal to stop whatever you’re doing. When you experience physical pain, you stop exercising. When you feel emotional pain, you withdraw from the experience. Because we have this intuitive response, discomfort is often a bad sign for self-growth.

However, discomfort is expected when taking on new challenges. Our research suggests that seeing discomfort as a sign of progress and actually seeking it out can boost your motivation in these situations. While a sharp physical pain is often a good reason to quit what you’re doing, a moderate muscle ache is a signal you’re getting in shape. Likewise, moderate emotional discomfort is a signal that you’re developing as a person, and it often happens before you can detect the benefits of self-growth.

Read this article by Ayelet Fishback and Kaitlin Woolley.

4.Tech geniuses, nation builders and famous artists have praised the benefits of a Montessori education – but does it hold up to scientific scrutiny? David Robson and Alessia Franco investigate.

When considering the lives of the rich and famous, it is always tempting to look for the secrets of their successes. So here's a brain teaser: what do the cook Julia Child, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, the singer Taylor Swift, and Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin all have in common?

The answer is that they all attended Montessori education as young children.

4.Lastly, Google unnerved by the success of Chat GPT, bought a $300 million stake in the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic in a bid to keep up with its rivals. Microsoft invested $10 billion in the chatbot’s creator OpenAI, and is integrating the platform with its software. Google’s search engine is still its biggest income stream, and ChatGPT — able to give relevant natural-language answers to questions rather than a string of links — is the first real threat to its dominance. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, is developing its own chatbot, Claude, although it is not yet public.