■ The Mercator projection may be useful for navigation, but it’s terrible as a flat representation of a round Earth. The distortions involved are massive, particularly around the relative sizes of different landmasses. The “Equal Earth” design is intended to replicate the basic familiar look of a world map but with the landmass sizes corrected and standardized. This makes Africa look much larger and Greenland much smaller, among other things. The US delegation opposed the change.

■ But why? In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “We must face the facts as they are.” And the fact is that the Mercator map doesn’t usefully represent the facts of the globe.

■ A principled objection is raised by Ukraine, which opposes the way some of its territory is represented in one of the versions of the map. That objection is sound. But the broad principle that a map should try to reflect a usefully accurate view of the world is one worth supporting.

■ That may be fine, as far as it goes, but it’s dangerous to forget that every existing order is generally the product of lots of small corrections, forgotten iterations, and embedded pieces of information that incrementally built up along the way. Even an object as seemingly simple as a bathroom faucet represents a long cumulative history of changes that led to the present state.

■ Someone may come along and invent the revolutionary “HandWashr” app to completely disrupt the old industry, and it might even work. But the revolutionary step always risks omitting important insights from its incremental predecessor. And even when it does not, it still only resets the clock on a whole new generation of incremental changes to follow.

■ Sooner or later, the new innovation becomes the old order. It’s up to the broader public not only to recognize these tendencies, but also to prepare for the changes, Real disruptive events don’t make incremental changes go away, they just move us to a different place in the evolutionary cycle. Some useful knowledge is often lost in the the disruptive event, and we have to beware of the risk that the architects of the new reset don’t get away with pretending that they are immune to the need for their own corrective evolutions. Nobody is that brilliant.

■ To bestow a name is an act of power. To try to change a name is an attempt to exercise power, as well. Sometimes it’s an act of aggression (as when a bully coins an unflattering nickname for a victim). Other times, it merely looks pathetic (as when someone tries a little too hard to self-apply a nickname).

■ To give, adopt, or change a name is always an act of power -- one that can be used with love and respect or with hostility and malice. Names are so sacred to individuals that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says explicitly that every child “shall have the right from birth to a name”.

■ Google and Apple have capitulated to a preposterous attempt to change the name of a lake that has been in place for hundreds of years longer than the United States has been a country. Microsoft and Mapquest have not.

■ Those who have participated in this attempted act of maritime unpersoning will have to apologize, sooner or later. What has always been the name will always remain the name, and it’s morally treacherous to pretend otherwise.

■ The National Weather Service had been warning day after day after day about the need to remain hydrated and take regular cooling breaks from the heat. But that’s not what happened in the hockey workout, according to attorneys for the family, who say the workout lasted more than an hour and “not everyone” got water breaks.

■ The story is unsettlingly familiar on two levels. First is the level of the basic facts of the situation. Workouts that claim a basis in military training (the ASU incident was purportedly led by a Green Beret veteran) are faddishly popular, and they often involve drills meant to mimic the relationship between an overbearing drill instructor and a bunch of ill-prepared recruits. Deprivation of things like rest, shade, and water are sometimes used to bolster the “tough” image.

■ But that points to the second level of familiarity: Where superficial demonstrations of “toughness” are revered regardless of their hollowness. Physical strength doesn’t always look like a muscle-bound tough guy ripping through a sleeveless shirt; sometimes, it looks like the 4’8” frame of Simone Biles. Power can sometimes be best expressed through self-control. Discipline can be demonstrated by knowing when to pause rather than pressing on. Real athletic dominance sometimes emerges by mastering the brain rather than any particular muscle.

■ No 21-year-old should end up in a coma because of a workout. Whatever the specifics of the case may be, the familiarity of the environment apparently created by coaches and coaching adjuncts is tragically unnecessary -- and it reflects a misguided mentality about toughness that ought to be quashed.

■ Of course, there are exceptions: Invasive medical procedures, for instance. But even in the medical field, there’s very little that patients seem to want more than to just have someone make eye contact and listen empathetically. A recent article in the British Medical Journal called the “ability to demonstrate compassion and empathy” a “vital professional competency” for doctors.

■ The realization that we often have involuntary physical reactions to empathetic one-on-one attention is an important one to really internalize. It’s one of those important signs that we exist as both body and soul, no matter how mysterious the workings of that “soul” portion remain.

■ It’s not just doctors who need this reminder, either. The seductive quality of tools like chatbots lies not just in the tendency to validate what the human user expresses, but in giving the impression of the same focused, intimate attention of a one-on-one interaction with another human. The interaction may be synthetic, but it tickles some of the same sensations.

■ To those who are sufficiently aware of their surroundings, that synthetic “attention” isn’t very fulfilling. But as a society, we need to consider how much emphasis we place on making sure that people get the real thing from other real people. And we had better grapple with it quickly, because lots of people aren’t sufficiently aware of their surroundings, which can lead to problems exactly of the type Bill Gates flagged in his top three dangers of AI in his new essay.

■ These are not problems easily solved by institutions or rules. They are, however, extremely important for discussion among people who care about other individual people. The technology isn’t going to become worse, only faster and more convincing. The answers will need to come from people.

■ Perhaps Google omits a reliable attribution because it isn’t from Maya Angelou, at least not originally. The indispensable website Quote Investigator helpfully identifies the originator as one Carl W. Buehner. The misattribution is failure enough: Knowledge worth keeping is worth keeping well, and errors confidently delivered can easily eclipse or squeeze out the truth.

■ But it’s almost worse to be “told” by a computer program what to think about a quotation that is fundamentally about human feelings. The entire point of a quotation like this is to cause reflection. Reflection is a process that takes place internally; it is not a list of bullet points to be memorized.

■ Information technologies make it ever easier for us to figure out how to do things and understand why they happen. We have entered an age of the “Teach-Yourself Economy”, in which the motivated learner can figure out how to do countless things through independent study. The barriers to “how to” have fallen in so many places and in so many ways as to be truly astonishing.

■ As it becomes easier to figure out “how”, though, it also becomes much more important to thoughtfully consider “why”. Aphorisms and proverbs exist because we humans need to reflect on meanings and reasons. That’s far different from merely regurgitating explanations or suggestions in “how-to” format.

■ There’s a temptation to call it reductionism when Google (or any other service) uses AI to offer purported explanations for deeper thoughts on what makes for meaning. But it’s really something even worse: A misdirection. Nobody needs a checklist entitled “How to Love Grandma” -- but we often do need to be reminded that real and abiding care for others is quite central to the meaning of life. Any sense of “intelligence” that doesn’t distinguish between the two and know better than to put the wrong one first probably shouldn’t be called intelligence at all.

■ Even classic cartoons observe limitations -- and not just in the strict sense of ink and paint on celluloid. Chuck Jones, who directed many of the best-known Looney Tunes shorts, wrote that Bugs Bunny was only successful as a character when he was constrained by certain rules.

■ Among those rules, Jones wrote: “His adversary must be worthy of him, for there is nothing heroic about beating an opponent who is in no position to beat you.” Additionally, “Bugs never engages any opponent without reason”. Once engaged in a conflict, “his wits are his basic weapon; he tries to avoid physical conflict when possible”. The first rule of all? “Bugs must always be provoked rather than being the aggressor.”

■ The cartoons may be vintage, but it’s no real stretch to say that Bugs Bunny -- specifically, the Bugs Bunny who follows those rules -- is the most American pop-cultural character of the last 100 years.

■ And it’s a crying shame that too many Americans (including many with power and influence) don’t recognize that the constraints were what made the animated hero, because the same constraints are what draw the line between heroism and villainy among us today. If you can’t even aspire to the honor code of a cartoon rabbit, then you’re probably not one of the good guys.

■ Dexter Holland of The Offspring, with his Ph.D. in molecular biology, and Brian May of Queen, with his Ph.D. in astrophysics, are both recognizable scholar-celebrities by conventional measures. But Dolly Parton was a different kind of scholar: Formally educated only through high school, she was honored as a doctor of humane letters by the University of Tennessee for her dedication to advancing literacy.

■ For three decades, she funded and promoted the “Imagination Library” to send a free book a month to young children. It was an act of homage to her father, whose own illiteracy she saw first-hand as a limitation on his life. One thesis written on the effects of the Imagination Library program reported real evidence of important effects on literacy and cognitive development.

■ She may have been famous in no small part for her colorful and sometimes cheerfully irreverent personality, but we find the gentlelady in her acts: The books for children, the funding of medical research, and the quiet reinvestment in communities, among other honorable works.

■ At a time when other rich and famous people are feverishly chasing immortality by biohacking and putting their names on buildings, Dolly Parton has easily assured herself of a much more favorable place in popular memory by choosing the purely human route of being a gentleperson and a scholar.

■ Maybe Mark Twain could have been a great accountant, but it’s better that he focused on writing instead. Taylor Swift might fold a mean paper crane, but (at least as a professional pursuit) she should probably focus on recording music instead. And a great heart surgeon should probably hire someone else to run the woodchipper.

■ All of this is a matter of comparative advantage, an economic concept so important that Greg Mankiw, the author of the preeminent introductory textbook on economics, listed it as the #1 economic principle he would try to imprint on as many minds as possible.

■ It not only serves to explain why individuals should specialize in what they do best, it also succinctly explains why trade generally makes most participants better off. This isn’t new; David Ricardo explained it in 1817, and we’ve lived in a world brimming with examples ever since.

■ Trade comes with friction, of course, and just because almost everyone ends up better off on net doesn’t mean that some people won’t be set back along the way. But, overwhelmingly, if two entities (generally countries, but sometimes regions, provinces, states, cities, or city-states) have generally comparable foundations of law, then the freest possible movement of goods, money, ideas, and people will tend to make everyone better off, on balance.

■ Legal compatibility matters because a wild structural imbalance can be introduced if one side of a trade allows for slave labor, flagrantly steals intellectual property, or commits acts of war to steal resources. Those circumstances aren’t reflections of authentic comparative advantage.

■ But when generally comparable rules are observed on both sides of a trade, free exchange lets comparative advantages mount, and those results are ultimately measured in wealth. Not only that, they tend also to be reflected in a general goodwill -- the kind of thing Adam Smith identified in 1776. Starting fights where compatibility once prevailed is self-defeating and foolish, and ultimately impoverishes virtually everyone.

■ That much may be all well and good, but it seems oddly incomplete. Whether it’s really “grief” or not, the sensation of ennui isn’t anything new (Merriam-Webster cites the word itself all the way back to 1732). Surely some people really do need to be taught to show self-compassion, but there’s something much larger missing from the story.

■ If the painful sensation really comes from a sense of underfulfillment, then the solution probably lies in a perspective voiced by Viktor Frankl: “The more one forgets himself -- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love -- the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”

■ Lots of people can feel happy, at least in a passing sense, when surrounded by material trappings. (Who can be grumpy while riding a jet ski?) But fulfillment is a different sensation, much bigger and more durable than fleeting happiness, and it comes from doing things that are meaningful and worthwhile.

■ That’s a lesson we should try to teach people as early as possible in life: Not in the sense that they can only be happy by subsuming themselves to the will of a larger group (because that would be untrue), but in the sense that material considerations alone are usually incomplete for creating a really well-rounded sense of satisfaction in life.

■ Everyone does better with a sense of purpose, and it’s really hard to discover a purpose that doesn’t contain at least some element of love or service to others. People could quite literally save a fortune on therapy sessions later by adopting a quest for meaning much sooner.

■ Similarly, extraordinary recognition should require extraordinary merit. We do not use the same standards for naming park benches and national parks. This does not stop people from making contests out of individual name choices, like whether William McKinley really deserves to eclipse the traditional name of Denali. At least, though, we can recognize the need for elevated standards.

■ Doris Miller’s actions on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked were worthy of extraordinary recognition, not because we can do any more to applaud him in life, but because he stands as a lofty role model worth emulating. Plans to name an aircraft carrier after him seem like a worthy way to recognize him (with the intent of urging sailors to live up to a similar standard).

■ Talk of rescinding that name would be a serious mistake. Names aren’t everything, but they do stand for something. How we choose to apply those names says a lot about what we profess to value most.

■ The catastrophist says that because of AI: No one will read anymore! No one will believe anything they see anymore! Everyone will fall for fakes, propaganda, and misinformation! Nobody will know how to write anymore!

■ Because they go too far, their catastrophic claims are readily dismissed. And that’s a very big problem. The all-or-nothing tendency risks crowding out the much more modest but much more likely claims with which we really should grapple, thoughtfully and critically.

■ The catastrophic projections are too much. But their 5% versions are both more realistic and potentially more frightening. What if 5% of kids grow up to be functionally illiterate because of AI over-exposure? What if 5% of voters believe anything in their tainted information diets without applying any critical thought? What if well-meaning people dismiss 5% of the things they used to take seriously because their mental filters are calibrated too high? What if 5% pure nonsense creeps into the mainstream of published literature and commentary (and search results) under the names of legitimate writers who nevertheless use AI carelessly and without disclosure?

■ A degree of harm is still harm, but mitigation of harm is not the same as binary approval or disapproval of a thing. It’s harder to speak in nuance, but generally much more important. The telegraph, the automobile, and the Internet all arrived without causing society to crumble -- but they caused very big changes that should neither have been catastrophized nor overlooked. The extreme versions of events tend to distract us, though, from the 5% outcomes that are vastly more likely to occur.

■ Dwight Eisenhower, who indisputably knew how to win wars, remarked in his memoirs of World War II: “I believed that the proper attitude of the commander toward representatives of the press was to regard them as quasi staff officers”. Eisenhower knew that good journalism wasn’t just something for the public at home. Tough, fair-minded reporting also provides commanders with information they need to know both from and about their subordinates.

■ News doesn’t always travel to where it’s needed. Information needs to reach those at the top, and even the lowliest private has the right to be commanded by those who seek the full picture, not just rosy sentiments that reinforce what top officers want to hear.

■ The truth sometimes hurts, but ignorance hurts more. Eisenhower knew it: “In the handling of the press, the American practice was to provide every facility that would permit an individual to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted. While this imposed upon us some additional administrative burdens, it paid off in big dividends because of the conviction in the minds of all that there was no attempt to conceal error and stupidity. These, when discovered, could be promptly aired and therefore did not grow into the festering sores that would have resulted from any attempt at concealment.”

■ For example, it’s not necessarily intuitive that Seoul is only 200 to 250 miles from two different sites in mainland China, and only about 400 miles from the nearest part of Russia. Shenyang, a Chinese city of 9 million people, is 350 miles away (as the crow flies), and Beijing is just shy of 600 miles in the distance.

■ These are, in modern terms, very short distances. From New York to Washington, DC, is just a little more than 200 miles. Los Angeles to San Francisco is about 350 miles. Chicago to Fargo is, like Beijing to Seoul, only about a 600-mile hop. All are distances easily crossed by airplanes in times measurable more precisely in minutes than hours.

■ Among many potential nightmare scenarios for our future is this: Driven by irrational motives, North Korea launches an invasion of South Korea. The invasion itself doesn’t have to be successful for China to step in, declaring the region to be within its “sphere of influence”, and asserting dominance over North Korea. China has been propping up North Korea economically for some time, so it’s not unreasonable to imagine a domineering reaction. (All this, of course, involving multiple parties with nuclear weapons.)

■ What stops China from going farther than the DMZ? The deterrent effect of America’s very real and tangible defensive alliance with South Korea. But deterrence depends upon credibility, and that credibility has taken a sudden and serious hit. So serious, in fact, that South Korea’s president promptly reiterated a call for greater domestic control of its defense forces than the country has had since the 1950s.

■ Alliances should never be taken lightly. It’s not cheap to maintain an overseas presence the way the United States does in South Korea, but the cost of prevention should never be examined in isolation. What always matters is the cost (whether potential or likely) of what’s being prevented.

■ Desalination plants have been targeted in the Middle East. Russia has drained reservoirs and viciously attacked freshwater infrastructure in its war against Ukraine. Cyberattacks have gone after Canadian and American water systems.

■ The problem on the global scale isn’t exactly one of simple water scarcity. It’s more a problem of supply and transportation, getting the right types of water to where it’s needed and away from where it’s not, and the needs may vary considerably within a short period of time.

■ Almost no culture on Earth has better claim to that kind of knowledge than the Dutch, and their present condition may be illustrative. Low-lying Holland no longer just needs to pump water out, it also needs to be able to combat drought, which is a condition without vast historical precedent that is becoming more common.

■ This should alarm us and be a call to action. If even the Netherlands is having to reassess the meaning of water security (from too much to too little), a similar reassessment is going to be a matter for everyone, worldwide.

■ Social conditions like crew morale may be mostly subjective, but it’s objectively true that the aircraft carrier has been deployed for more than eight months, longer by a quarter of a year than originally anticipated.

■ Everyone’s choices are bounded, in part, by the appeal and availability of alternatives. The people on board an American aircraft carrier are specialists and technicians, not mere drones (in the sense of bees, not UAVs). They are the products of a sophisticated, all-volunteer military force in a technologically advanced age. They are people with other options.

■ Of course, part of the promise of service in the military is fair pay and transferable career skills. But, even more than that, we implicitly promise character: That a veteran with an honorable discharge leaves with more character than the newly enlisted or commissioned recruit. But character isn’t a one-way projection. It acts as a mirror, reflected off the surrounding people and environment.

■ If we want an honorable fighting force, high-quality recruits, and an effective defensive shield in a world of ambitious adversaries, then we (through our elected officials) have to ensure that both environment and leadership rise to the level that will form the right outcomes. If those fall short, then it’s imperative to change course before it’s too late.

■ This means we should not be surprised when they act in ways that cause problems, break rules, or appear immoral: There doesn’t appear to be any effort to impose moral training on them, so they behave as though they have unrelenting task focus. This is a problem, because people are all too often anthropomorphizing them -- treating “Claude” and “Gemini” and their ilk like they might treat people of the same names, as sentient beings.

■ And that’s a very big problem for a reason also highlighted by Wired: “AI agents do not learn the kind of moral reasoning exhibited by even small children.” We expect sentient beings to have feelings and moral capacities: Who hasn’t seen a dog with a guilty look? (Even that look, though, is more a biological instinct than evidence of moral reasoning.)

■ We need a great deal more habituation around drawing boundaries around our expectations of technology, as well as our expectations of the people furnishing that technology. Thinking of an AI agent as a pal with a given name instead of the product manufactured (however digitally) by a business with consumer-safety responsibilities is a huge mistake. The computers don’t have souls, but people who do have them need to know better.

■ A writer at Axios has taken to extolling the virtues of AI as a “reading buddy” that makes it easier to process “the way many of us actually read books”. Behold, says the writer: AI can “keep track of plots and characters”.

■ The overreaching for meaning is painful. Sure, you can ask AI to generate a cast of characters or a plot summary -- but for most widely-read books, one already exists on Wikipedia or in another reference somewhere. The Book of Ecclesiastes gets it right: “What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!”

■ The Axios way of reporting -- what they have trademarked as “Smart Brevity” -- both attempts to make these old practices sound new and offers a prime example of the error itself. It is nothing new to suggest that writers ought to get to the point: Clear, crisp, memorable writing has been celebrated since long before Ben Franklin started printing punchy aphorisms.

■ Nor is the value of good layout anything new. Axios really just follows two classic rules. Rule #1: Keep columns of text narrow and space the lines generously. Newspapers and magazines have followed these principles for many, many decades. Line spacing even has the lovely trade jargon “leading”, based on the strips of lead once used to separate lines of type.

■ Rule #2: Give the eye convenient anchoring points. (This is why people like bullet lists!) There’s nothing new about this, either: Old books are full of initials, pilcrows, numbered paragraphs, and other eye-catching wayfinding marks.

■ If you’re finding it hard to read a book, especially if it’s a well-regarded piece of time-honored literature, then there’s a non-zero chance that it’s the fault of sloppy layout or lazy typography. None of this is new and none of it is solved by adopting an AI reading buddy. It’s solved by attention to detail and perhaps a dose of reader self-discipline.

■ In and of itself, the decline is not necessarily a cause for alarm. The reserve is supposed to cover 90 days’ worth of imports, and for the last five or six years, the US has been a net petroleum exporter -- a situation that was basically unimaginable when the Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in 1975. But with the war between the US and Iran continuing its unsteady path and the hostilities around the Strait of Hormuz specifically disrupting a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade, it’s a time to be alert to uncertainties and contingencies.

■ The United States has, for instance, an enormous nuclear-powered fleet of submarines and aircraft carriers. But the US Navy has about 150 non-nuclear combat surface ships. They don’t run on coal, and they aren’t sailboats, either: They need petroleum-based fuels.

■ The Naval Petroleum Reserves have been fully divested for years, and though ongoing domestic production of petroleum is strong, what would happen if we simultaneously experienced a global supply crunch (like the current one) and a significant naval conflict (like an abrupt invasionary expedition in the South China Sea)?

■ Even if the Strategic Petroleum Reserve isn’t primarily intended to serve a strategic defense purpose, it still sends a bad signal about readiness when we run low on both petroleum reserves and reserves of munitions at the same time. An enormous factor in conflict deterrence is credibility, and it’s a lot easier to be credible when a seemingly inexhaustible supply of resources stands ready.

■ Our behavior may be sending highly undesirable signals to the rest of the world, and those signals run the risk of inviting adversarial behavior that benefits nobody in the long run. We should heed the advice of Dwight Eisenhower: “[A]s long as there persists a threat to freedom, [free nations] must, at any cost, remain armed, strong, and ready for the risk of war.”

■ There’s good reason for college athletics to exist as a common practice, of course: It provides a common base for entertainment, offers publicity to colleges, gives alumni a reason to feel bound to the alma mater, and (theoretically, at least) encourages the formation of a well-rounded person.

■ But these things are also not exclusive to athletics; collegiate notoriety and common cause can be found in the arts, social events, publications, community service, and academics. As with all such things, balance is essential.

■ It’s hard not to see certain expenses as outliers, as when the report notes, “The 14 highest spending Power colleges each spent more than $38 million on coaching.” That’s a lot of money to spend on management for a pursuit with wildly uncertain returns on investment and a very high rate of unprofitability.

■ Much like the case with economic-development spending, it’s hard for any individual institution to opt out of the practice of high spending on athletics, no matter how irrational the behavior might be. It’s a real collective-action problem: Nobody has the incentive to rationalize those budgets if it would mean taking the risk of irritating alumni and others by under-performing on the field of play. But it would still make sense for cooler heads to weigh in before the subject becomes yet another matter for overheated political rhetoric.