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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: COVID memorial: 1ppm, published by Gavin on April 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Julian Perry Robinson (1941–2020) Leader of the campaign against chemical weapons in the UK. A chemist, he spent the first half of his career doing forensic analysis on alleged chemical agents, including a Soviet "toxin" which proved to be bee shit instead. The second half was reports, briefings, committees, meetings. Most of his work is hard to evaluate, either because it was subsumed by committees, was sub rosa, or is just part of that great majority of good work which doesn't document itself and disappears from history. I can't find a full copy of his influential anonymous 1970 WHO report which helped birth the Biological Weapons Committee. He was apparently instrumental in the UK's strong 1996 law on chemical weapons. He was the UK arm, where Matthew Meselson was the US fist. "Of the two, Meselson is seen as the ‘lightning-speed thinker’ and Perry-Robinson‘the careful, studious one’ with exhaustive files. Yet their views often echo each other, and their collaboration has held firm for almost two decades." Together they maintained (and maintain) a complete database of all chemical weapon events since 1987. His father-in-law was the great economist Nicholas Kaldor, of Kaldor-Hicks improvement fame (far more common and important than Pareto improvements). He continued to work throughout his 70s, producing an influential timeline of chemical weapon use by Assad and an analysis of the notorious novichok family of nerve agents. An unfinished proposal, which he started pushing in the 70s, is that natural-pandemic preparedness is the best way to counter biological weapons: to make them ineffective, and so to remove all incentive to use them, and so to remove all incentive to make them. Arianna Rosenbluth (1927–2020) Physicist and computer scientist. During her work at Los Alamos on the H bomb, she wrote the first full implementation of a Markov chain Monte Carlo method, one of the most important algorithms of all time and the key to the recent ascendence of Bayesian statistics. During her PhD, which she got aged 21, Thomas Kuhn was a labmate. She was a world-class fencer, winning the Texas women's championship and a municipal men's championship. She qualified for the 1944 Olympics, which were cancelled owing to a war, and for the 1948s, which she didn't attend because no one would pay for her travel. Her favourite charity was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Gita Ramjee (1956–2020) AIDS researcher. Notable for the extremely good idea to address HIV by focussing on sex workers, and on preventions that they can actually use (microbicides). The best of these offer a 30% reduction in risk. A mere 22 years later, the European Medicines Authority endorsed this practice. In 2007 she was the target of hateful tabloid gibberish after one candidate microbicide failed and appeared to increase the risk of HIV (p=0.13). In her youth, her family was one of thousands forcibly displaced by Idi Amin in his racist campaign against Asians in Uganda. Vipul Naik tells us that the Gates Foundations has given $24m to her organisation, the Aurum Institute, which is also part of PEPFAR, one of the US's best-ever aid programmes. Li Wenliang (1986–2020) Opthalmologist and group chat user. John Horton Conway (1937–2020) As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. He worried that his introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. He would be boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would laugh at himself – that was key... In lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic so...