2025-01-01 01:33:56
Link that made us feel the most stoned. December. Shakespearean: When people speak English but with German grammar. Watching this makes us feel stoned.
Most Scooby-Doo. November. From the annals of superstimuli: Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop? (The article doesn’t really deliver an answer, but it’s a good mystery.)
Stinkiest post. October. I can smell “the flu” : r/RandomThoughts h/t Collin Lysford
Most medieval. October. Medieval Sourcebook: The Trial of Joan of Arc
Asked if she knows she is in God’s grace, she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” She added, if she were in a state of sin, she did not think that the voice would come to her; and she wished every one could hear the voice as well as she did. She thought she was about thirteen when the voice came to her for the first time.
…
Asked if she had her sword when she was taken, she answered no; but she had one which had been taken from a Burgundian. … from Lagny to Compiègne she had worn the Burgundian’s sword, which was a good weapon for fighting, excellent for giving hard clouts and buffets (in French “de bonnes buffes et de bons torchons”).
Best parody. September. The Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs and Mice”) is a comic epic parody of the Iliad and a good source of names for your pet mice. Like Artepibulus, “he who lies in wait for bread”.
Greek etymology rabbithole also led us to troglodyte, which ultimately means, “hole, I get into”:
From Latin trōglodyta (“cave dwelling people”), from Ancient Greek τρωγλοδύτης (trōglodútēs, “one who dwells in holes”), from τρώγλη (trṓglē, “hole”) + δύω (dúō, “I get into”).
Toastiest. August. I Put a Toaster in the Dishwasher (h/t Adam Mastroianni)
These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, but they are strident in doing so because they are repeating what everybody knows. They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted. It doesn’t need to be crafted, because it is already known, established, beyond question (but demonstrably wrong).
Highest cheekbones. July. He secretly changed this freeway sign, helped millions of drivers. Top YouTube comment:
In 2001, a friend and I had gotten so tired of a massive pot hole in Seattle that we went and got some vests and bags of asphalt and fixed it ourselves. We didn’t live near it, but hung out down there almost daily and hated driving over it. People in the neighborhood asked if we were from the city, and we said no. People clapped, and one brought us iced tea. A city bus came by as we were finishing and was so happy he drove over it, backed up, and drove over it several times to pack it in. I drove by it earlier today for work, and our patch still holds.
Most Bond villain. June. A New Atlantis: “Britain should reclaim an area the size of Wales from Dogger Bank, the area of the North Sea where the sea is only 15-40m deep. We could do it for less than £100bn.”
Cutest animal. May. Sea Urchins Love Sporting Cowboy and Viking Hats. Also, see here for the original thread on reef2reef.com
Most hidden desire. May. Brine thoughts: the unspoken, instinctive need for a sweet-tangy-salty beverage in the heat, the combination of sugar, savory, and acid…the American yearns for kala khatta but they do not know it…
Most Constitutional. April. While Lucas M. Miller was serving in Congress, he proposed a Constitutional amendment to change the country’s name to “the United States of the Earth” because “it is possible for this republic to grow through the admission of new states…until every nation on earth has become part of it.”
Best coincidence. March. There is way too much serendipity — “It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.”
Most empirical. February. Friend of the blog ExFatLoss beats obesity:
Best near miss. February. AT&T gets a solid B+ on predicting the future: “You Will” Commercials (high quality) YouTube comments have it: “These are absolutely amazing. The only thing they got wrong is ‘The company to bring it to you, AT&T’.”
Most illegalist. January. That’s some good illegalism: Activists vow to keep installing guerrilla benches at East Bay bus stops (h/t ACX)
Most unethical. January. The for-profit system of academic journal publishing was created by Robert Maxwell, who also happens to be Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Along with other tidbits, the linked article does a good job highlighting the ways in which scientific publishing is a principal-agent problem:
You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. … then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.
Most unorthodox. January. Ada Palmer: Tools for Thinking About Censorship
If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox. Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.
Best album. January. Soothing Sounds for Baby
Happy New Year! Cheers to the quarter century.
2024-12-31 07:02:14
ExFatLoss goes back to basics — a great reflection on the fundamentals:
If all of the 1,000,000 chemicals introduced into the food supply since 1850 were at fault, then simply doing a potato diet or heavy cream diet wouldn’t lead people to easily lose a lot of fat.
… Eating potatoes does not remove any microplastics from your body. It doesn’t avoid whatever’s in the soil or water. It doesn’t replenish whatever used to be in the soil and is now missing. It doesn’t turn you into a farmer or manual laborer and it doesn’t change your genetics or epigenetics. It doesn’t remodel your (ruined?) fat cells. It doesn’t reduce air & water pollution and it doesn’t change the makeup of your kitchen & cook ware. It (presumably) doesn’t get you more sleep or reduce stress or EMF or blue light or screen time.
Unless there’s some crazy magic going on, the change is either brought about by something in the potatoes (or cream) or by cutting out something you were previously eating, and replacing it with potatoes (or cream).
Nat Friedman and his collaborators just dropped PlasticList, a project where they tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals, mostly phthalates and bisphenols. Really top-notch work here.
A reader sent us this: Los Angeles now tests for lithium, and from this report, it looks like the water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant contains 25 to 198 ng/mL lithium with an average of 92 ng/mL. That is quite a lot — the Pima had about 100 ng/mL in their water. But LA was, at least as of 2014, the #9 Leanest City in the country, though maybe things have changed since then. The reader also wanted to share this background info: She and her husband had lived in Texas for many years. When they moved to San Francisco, they both abruptly lost “1-2 pant sizes”. This was while “walking about the same amount as we were in Austin”. Then they moved to LA, and gained “+2 pant sizes” above and beyond where they had been in Texas. As before she says, “in general our diet hasn’t changed significantly, our job type hasn’t changed, we haven’t exercised more or less, etc.” This prompted her to look into the LA water quality and she found the new data in this report.
Shakespearean: When people speak English but with German grammar. Watching this makes us feel stoned.
2024-11-30 01:50:21
80/20 Strength Training by friend-of-the-blog Uri Bram — Whether or not you care about strength training, more things should be written like this.
skeptical thread about honey and bloodletting
Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?:
The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids. There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take.
Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy.
How Toxic Is Your Favorite Chocolate? (Ranked) from Bryan Johnson — A good start, but sadly he gives no details on the testing methodology or the breakdown of results. Bryan, please publish your methods and data!
I fixed my lactose intolerance — by chugging ALL the lactose — A story of a successful self-experiment.
6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery:
My working model has been that being employed kind of sucks. But this time, since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all, I figured I could try treating it like one of my projects. So instead of selling coffee, I figured out how to streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it. You can imagine how popular this was—I had to backtrack for a few months after the board told me to get back to the café. And this was a good lesson for someone who is used to being self-employed: at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your judgment and get in line.
Early Adopter — “conceiving time as a fourth dimension, had been broached in the 18th century, but it had first been treated seriously in a mysterious letter to Nature in 1885”.
From the annals of superstimuli: Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop? (The article doesn’t really deliver an answer, but it’s a good mystery.)
A Literal Banana: A Case Against the Placebo Effect — A roundup of arguments about the existence of the placebo effect and whether or not it is “meaningful”. Some of the arguments seem to depend on the definition of what counts as a voluntary action, and we’re not sure if that distinction withstands philosophical scrutiny. We feel like there is still more clarity to be found on the topic, but this is a start.
First Block: Interview with Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder & President of Anthropic (h/t @realityarb). See timestamp around 18:20, where she says:
At one point, Claude was really convinced that the best way for you to lose weight was to go on an all-potato diet. We have no idea where this came from, it was just really stuck on this idea for a while.
Aer Lingus Flight 164 — “Downey claimed to have been a Trappist monk … He then took a job as a tour guide in central Portugal, at a shrine devoted to Our Lady of Fátima, the reported origin of the Three Secrets of Fátima. At the time of the hijacking, the third secret was known only to the Pope and other senior figures in the Catholic Church; Downey’s statement called on the Vatican to release this secret to the public.” h/t demiurgently, who comments, “‘stole plane to threaten Catholics into revealing heavenly secrets’ feels like a Dan Brown novel”.
Technology will let us taste certain forbidden joys.
When the Nazis Seized Power, This Jewish Actor Took on the Role of His Life:
As a last-gasp effort at professional survival, Reuss resolved to transform himself into an Alpine farmer. Over the spring and into the summer, Reuss grew a beard and perfected the local dialect. He bleached his body hair from head to toe.
In the evenings, Reuss liked to play tarot cards with Kaspar Altenberger, a local farmer Straub had paid to look after the house. Reuss disclosed his plan, and Altenberger offered to help. He lent Reuss his own identity papers—his passport and baptismal certificate. Reuss had a new official persona.
Lady Baker and the source of the Nile:
Baker was very nervous about discussing the role Florence had played, with him throughout his appalling and dangerous trek across Africa. She had nearly died on more than one occasion, and had saved his life on others with bravery and skilled nursing, and yet she is seldom mentioned in the book. The truth that would have shocked his Victorian readership to the core was that Florence was not his wife at any stage in their African adventures, and they were only married on their return to London in November 1865.
Samuel had found nineteen-year-old Florence, as he called her, in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. (There is some date about her exact age: she was certainly less than half Baker’s age when he met her.) Her real name is believed to have been Barbara Maria von Sass, born in Transylvania, then part of Hungary. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising, and she had been raised from her childhood by a wealthy Armenian trader who intended to make a good profit when he sold this beautiful blonde teenager at auction. Baker saw her, bought her, and subsequently fell in love with her. The pair became inseparable, but the longer they were together, the worse Samuel’s problem became: how was he to explain this relationship to his four daughters at home, who he had left with their aunt after his first wife died?
AI prompting challenges: “New AI prompting challenge! Can you get ChatGPT via Dall-E to illustrate a wine glass that is full to the brim? Harder than it looks!”
The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.
2024-11-26 00:02:41
Last time you heard from her, Krinn had just put out a tumblr post titled An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting. After losing 6 lbs in our Low-Dose Potassium Community Trial, she decided not to stop as planned but instead to keep going, and in fact go even harder. Eventually she ramped up to around 10,000 mg potassium a day, and lost even more weight.
Krinn also added an exercise habit that she described as a “naïve just-hit-the-treadmill exercise regimen”. Even with this in mind, her results still seem remarkable, because most people do not lose 50 lbs from starting a moderate treadmill habit:
We published a short review of that original post on this here blog of ours. That was in July 2023. Now, Krinn is back, and more powerful than ever, with an untitled post we’ll call A Year And Change After The Long Post About The Potassium Experiment (AYACATLPATPE).
The long and short of it is that Krinn kept taking high doses of potassium and kept losing weight, eventually reaching her goal of 200 lbs. There was a long plateau in the middle after she first brushed up against her goal, but she maintained the original weight loss and eventually lost the remaining weight:
In personal communication (see very bottom of this post), Krinn noted that:
One of the few things the graphs say really, really, really loudly is “Krinn lost 30+ pounds _and stayed that way for at least a year._” … one of the overwhelmingly common failure modes of existing interventions: people lose some weight and then gain some weight and end up fairly close to where they started. Whatever else happened in my experiment, it sure wasn’t that: I lost a significant amount of weight and then _stabilized._ That seems important.
This time we don’t have much to add, but as before we wanted to reproduce her post for posterity. And we do have a few thoughts, mainly:
This seems like more evidence that high doses of potassium cause weight loss. It suggests that potassium is probably one of the active ingredients, maybe the only active ingredient, in the weight loss caused by the potato diet. Krinn was taking about as much potassium as you would get if you were eating 2000 calories of potatoes per day, and experienced similar weight loss.
It’s good to be skeptical of single case studies, however rigorous and careful they may be, but here are a few things to keep in mind:
Remember that participants in the Low-Dose Potassium Community Trial lost a small but statistically significant amount of weight (p = .014) on a dose much lower than what Krinn was taking — only about 2,000 mg of potassium a day on average, compared to Krinn’s ~10,000 mg per day. This can’t confirm the effects of the higher dose, but it is consistent with Krinn’s results, and the final sample size was 104 people.
There’s also at least one successful replication. Inspired by Krinn’s first report, Alex Chernavsky did a shorter potassium self-experiment and lost about 4 pounds over a two-month period, otherwise keeping his diet and exercise constant. He also provided this handy table:
Finally, we know of two other people who are losing weight on high-potassium brines, at least one of them without any additional exercise. They’re both interested in publishing their results, probably in early 2025. So watch this space. :)
As before, we want to conclude by saying that Krinn is a hero and a pioneer. She is worth a hundred of the book-swallowers who can only comment and couldn’t collect a data point to save their life. If you want to do anything remotely like what Krinn did, please feel free to reach out, we’d be happy to help.
Here’s a reproduction of Krinn’s full report as it appears in her tumblr post:
A year and change after the long post about the potassium experiment, I reached my weight-loss goal. This is a quick, minimally-structured thought-dump about it. As before, this is part of a wider conversation that starts with A Chemical Hunger.
Methodology: I mostly kept doing what I’d been doing. Turned up the exercise dial a bit, turned down the potassium dial a bit. Both still, AIUI, quite high compared to American baseline. Some bad news — in addition to whatever confounding factors were present last time, there’s a few extra ones now from my life in general going very poorly. As before, here’s the data, Creative Commons Zero, good luck with whatever you try on it. After making it to one year of being fairly diligent, I decided to let things vary and see what happened — on the one hand, I’d gotten far enough towards my personal goal that I wasn’t too fussed about the last 10%, and on the other hand, if this works in general and even work when you’re kinda half-assing it, that too is great news.
Interpretations: There’s multiple ways this could go. Here are a few that were easy to think of.
I would prefer to believe that potassium-plus-exercise caused me to lose weight. The data I have and my experience of gathering/being that data, to some extent support that conclusion. Flipping that around, if I ask “does that data rule out this conclusion?” no it absolutely does not. But it’s important to note that the exercise-only conclusion is only slightly less-well-supported and the none-of-the-above explanation is much-less-well-supported but certainly not ruled out. I have a preferred explanation, but all three of these explanations are live.
My subjective experience of the thing was that there was an easy part and a hard part. In the easy part I lost weight at a pretty rapid and consistent pace. In the hard part, my weight changed less and went back and forth more than it went down. If you buy into SMTM’s “something is screwing up people’s lipostats” theory, this is very consistent with that theory: potassium reduced or removed the something, my weight briskly dropped back to a healthy range (the first 9 months of the graphs) and then stabilized. However, the competing theory of “Krinn was super out of shape and then she started exercising” is also supported by the graphs (not shown on the graphs: my fairly poor 2022 exercise habits — my long-term exercise habits have had some good stretches, but the plague years did not do good things for me there!). I’m not sure whether it matters that I shifted from mostly treadmill time to having a couple of walks around the neighborhood that I can do pretty much on autopilot (shout-out to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions, this show is the first time podcast as a medium has clicked for me and it’s a great show). I do think, though, that exercise is a bit more complicated than I was really grasping. That, in turn, makes me glad that I’m tracking three exercise metrics rather than just one — if I was going to track only one, it’d be exertion, but exertion, exercise minutes, and step count, together make it possible to at least take a guess at what qualities a day’s exercise had.
Regarding my own questions from the first post:
• How safe is this? When I made the first post I was antsy about “adding this much potassium to your diet is probably safe for people in generally good health” but now I’m pretty sure it’s true. Some health problems can take a long time to present themselves, but adding this much of something to your diet for two years and having it be fine, is pretty persuasive evidence that the thing is probably fine. It could still easily turn out to have negative health impacts that are important, but a huge swath of the things you’d be worried about, are vanishingly unlikely once you’ve hit the point of “I’ve been taking this for two years and I’m fine.”
• Does this replicate? Well, it’s self-consistent for me, and I don’t want to gain 50 pounds and try again. I did not like the shape of my body at +50 pounds from where I am now! So this is a question for others.
• How much do other nutrients matter? I don’t know. Mostly not equipped to rigorously check.
• Does HRT matter? I’ll let you know if I can get back on HRT. I would definitely like to investigate this.
• Does dieting matter? Probably: my diet changed involuntarily over the course of two years and that certainly matters to some extent, but one of my ground rules is that I’m focusing on controlling exercise and potassium, the things I can control. Diet is far more complex and also in my life particularly, more susceptible to unplanned, involuntary change, so I’m writing it off as a factor.
• Does this help with cannabis-induced hunger? I think I was off-base/over-optimistic with this one and it either doesn’t matter or matters a small amount.
• Is there a point where I get really hungry/tired or start accidentally starving? I did not reach such a point. I felt basically fine the whole time.
I was cooking with this though:
If you tell someone you want to lose weight and would like their advice, it is overwhelmingly likely that the advice will involve exercising more. Everyone has heard this advice. And yet, as Michael Hobbes observes in a searing piece for Highline, “many ‘failed’ obesity interventions are successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions” that simply didn’t result in weight loss. Even if we as a society choose to believe “more exercise always leads to weight loss, most people just fuck up at it,” that immediately confronts us with the important question, why do they fuck up at it? and its equally urgent sibling, what can we learn from those who succeed at it to give a hand up to those who have not yet succeeded?
Conclusion: I’m gonna keep writing things down in my spreadsheet for the same reasons as last time. I’m not sure what exactly I’m going to do as far as twiddling the factors, because now my main goal is somewhere between “don’t gain weight again” and “see what happens,” but I do know that writing down what happens is Good Actually, so I’m going to keep doing that.
Slightly after publication, Krinn sent us these comments, which she agreed we could publish:
Dangit now I’m having the first draft effect: writing the first draft and sleeping on it tells me things I should have written. In this case, I think there’s a plausible reading that my experience supports the “potassium does something good at a high enough effect size to care about” line of argument because while the peaks of how much effort I put in were fairly high — the periods of combined high exercise and high potassium intake — the most noticeable effect was when I was ramping up on both of those in the first 9 months, and when I was in just-bumbling-through-like-an-average-human mode, the effect didn’t reverse itself. There were plateau periods and there were slow-reversion periods, but there was definitely no “you slacked off and now there’s rapid weight gain mirroring the rapid weight loss” effect. I think that’s positive? I think it’s plausible to read it as “once I got the majority of the weight loss effect, locking in that benefit was easy.”
In any case one of the questions I was interested in was “if this works, does it work well enough that an average person can successfully implement it?” and I am now convinced that that’s a clear “Yes”.
I wouldn’t say there’s any part of this experiment that I’m actively unhappy about, but I do find it a little frustrating that this is basically just another piece of evidence on the pile of “here’s something that is consistent with the lithium/potassium hypothesis, but that is also consistent with some other stuff, and my main observation is that Something Happened” — intellectually I feel sure that much solid science is built by assembling big enough piles of such evidence and then distilling it into “now we know Why Something Happened,” but putting one single bit of evidence on the pile is still something where I need to make my own satisfaction about it rather than having a well-established cultural narrative rushing to bring me “yes! you did the thing! Woohoo!”
Also thinking more about the potassium experiment I’m having one of those “hold on a minute, this should have been obvious to me” moments — one of the few things the graphs say really, really, really loudly is “Krinn lost 30+ pounds and stayed that way for at least a year.” That’s one of the crucial parts of the whole obesity thing, that second half, right? That’s one of the overwhelmingly common failure modes of existing intervention: people lose some weight and then gain some weight and end up fairly close to where they started. Whatever else happened in my experiment, it sure wasn’t that: I lost a significant amount of weight and then stabilized. That seems important.
Yessssss I get the smug clever-kitty feeling, this is exactly why I have that “ratchet” column in the spreadsheet: the last ratchet-tick day from more than a year ago (i.e. it’s locked in) was July 10th 2023, on which day my week-average weight was 212.4lbs, down 33.6lbs from the start of the year.
So that early period of dramatic weight loss is noteworthy because we can be confident that whatever the cause was — potassium, exercise, or something else — it caused durable weight loss, which is exactly the thing we are looking for.
This is a conclusion we couldn’t have reached in July 2023, with the major writeup I did, because at that point “something else happens and Krinn gains the weight back” was very possible, was one of the likely answers to “what comes next?”
2024-10-29 01:16:21
“Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the ‘old-style’ of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the ‘Aldine roman’. Bembo is named for Manutius’s first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo.”
Bop Spotter — “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below”
Nightshade allergy thread AKA “HOW I FIXED MY BRAIN FOG. 
”
Packy McCormick: What Do You Do With an Idea?
I’ve noticed a common refrain speaking with founders building physical things:
“This is an old idea, actually, from the…”
I interrupt, a shit-eating, Cheshire grin spreading across my face: “1950s or 1960s, right?”
Right, they say, adding some specific variant like, “It’s from a 1958 paper.”
But the paper was obscure, or Soviet, or the idea wasn’t technically possible or economically feasible with the tools of the day. So it collected dust, forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered.
Good ideas aren’t getting harder to find. We just need to use the ones we have.
Most meteorites traced to three space crackups
It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them
ExFatloss TEE & Macro Calculator — For all your macro triangle diagram needs:
Visakan Veerasamy: straight outta tartarus
The genius of the game to me is that losing is part of the process. … I feel like I learned something about myself and about life from playing Hades. The game encourages you and teaches you persistence. It teaches you to cultivate equanimity in the face of failure. And it teaches you to learn from your experience.
“caterpillars that change color to imitate the background (even when blindfolded)” h/t Stuart Buck
Mood Tracking Google Sheet (via nvpkp)
Eli Dourado: Cargo airships are happening
Reddit: Wife’s migraines reduced by 90% and I feel like a jackass via paularambles
First report on quality and purity evaluations of avocado oil sold in the US (h/t ExFatLoss)
Our results showed that the majority of commercial samples were oxidized before reaching the expiration date listed on the bottle. In addition, adulteration with soybean oil at levels near 100% was confirmed in two “extra virgin” and one “refined” sample.
It’s Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope
Nehaveigur: Ice Cream for Lunch — and in case you didn’t know about earlier ice cream eating adventures, try the 2017 Man Loses 32 Pounds Eating Only Ice Cream for 100 Days
Reddit: r/obscurePDFs
“Rose Freistater … was an American schoolteacher who rose to prominence in the 1930s when she was denied a teacher’s license in New York for being overweight.” More detail here, specifically:
in 1931, Rose stood five feet and two inches and weighed 182 pounds [BMI 33.3]. When she applied for her teaching license that year, she weighed thirty pounds more than the maximum weight allowed by the Board for her height. She was given six months to lose thirty pounds; when she lost only twenty in that time, she was rejected by the Board altogether.
Gassing Satartia: Carbon Dioxide Pipeline Linked To Mass Poisoning
I can smell “the flu” : r/RandomThoughts h/t Collin Lysford
ExFatLoss: Why I stopped Grounding. Good jokes overall but missed a chance to make a “you’re grounded” joke.
Speaking of which, while grounding as a practice may not be real, it is probably less crazy than it sounds:
Over the past decade, Robert has built a body of work that reveals the many ways insects and arachnids use and experience static. Ticks jump, spiders balloon, bees sense the negative charge of a flower recently visited by another positively charged bee. He even found that the charged relationship between air and insects goes both ways: Honeybee swarms shed so many negative charges that they alter the electrical gradient around them. Based on Robert’s estimates, the atmospheric charge resulting from a swarm of desert locusts rivals that of clouds and electrical storms.
James Bailey: Data Heroes
Organizations often do great work collecting data, but then share it in ways that are hard to access or understand, or require all users to repeat hours of cleaning to make the data usable. Sometimes a data hero comes along to share their own improved version that is cleaned and easier to access and understand. Here I share links to some of these “most-improved” datasets.
New preprint from economist Tyler Ransom: Are Vegetable Seed Oils Fueling the Obesity Epidemic?
Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass: The Martians and Their Schooling
Maxwell Tabarrok: Unions are Trusts
The only way to get stably higher union pay is through monopolization. Unions need to get most or all producers of labor in a market to act together and fix their prices at a high level. That way, the consumers of labor have no other option but to accept lower output and pay higher prices.
This is a monopoly or trust in exactly the same way as when US Steel, Carnegie Steel, and Federal Steel all agree to set their prices high, forcing customers to pay more. If you think that goods sellers colluding to set prices is bad, then you should think that service sellers colluding to set prices is also bad.
…
Restrictions of commerce are fine when they benefit the needy and punish the greedy. Insofar as this is the case, we can do better to improve the lives of those who need it most than by supporting labor unions.
Venkatesh Rao: The New Systems of Survival
Collin Lysford: The Fractal Ratchet — Many interesting things in this piece, but one that’s unusual and distinctive: it’s often possible to make a strong *ordinal* argument (this thing is hotter/faster/less dangerous than the other thing) even when you can’t provide numerical measurements. This seems important because people often (mistakenly) assume that in the absence of precise numerical measurements, it’s not possible to make ordinal arguments. But in fact you need neither precision nor numbers!
You’ve probably heard this one, but apparently it’s not true. COW vs BEEF: Busting the Biggest Myth in Linguistic History.
METREP: 16lbs of fat loss & 2.5 months later on the potato diet
Medieval Sourcebook: The Trial of Joan of Arc
Asked if she knows she is in God’s grace, she answered: “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” She added, if she were in a state of sin, she did not think that the voice would come to her; and she wished every one could hear the voice as well as she did. She thought she was about thirteen when the voice came to her for the first time.
…
Asked if she had her sword when she was taken, she answered no; but she had one which had been taken from a Burgundian. … from Lagny to Compiègne she had worn the Burgundian’s sword, which was a good weapon for fighting, excellent for giving hard clouts and buffets (in French “de bonnes buffes et de bons torchons”).
Niko McCarty: Estimating the Size of a Single Molecule
I love this story because it shows, at least anecdotally, how deep scientific insights can emerge from the simplest of experiments. It’s a testament to the idea that you don’t always need sophisticated equipment to unlock the secrets of nature — sometimes, all it takes is a drop of oil and a bit of ingenuity.
Richard Ngo: Why I’m not a Bayesian
Where does this leave us? We’ve traded the crisp, mathematically elegant Bayesian formalism for fuzzy truth-values that, while intuitively compelling, we can’t define even in principle. But I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. Because it focuses on propositions which are each (almost entirely) true or false, Bayesianism is actively misleading in domains where reasoning well requires constructing and evaluating sophisticated models (i.e. most of them).
Claire L. Evans: What’s a Brain?
Zen & the art of the Macintosh : discoveries on the path to computer enlightenment
2024-10-25 03:06:11
Do you remember the opening line of 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko? That’s right, it’s “I’m voting for Dukakis.”
Donnie Darko is set on the eve of the presidential election of 1988, where Texas Republican George H. W. Bush faced off against Massachusetts Democrat Michael Dukakis, eventually winning in a landslide.
The movie opens on the morning of October 1st, 1988. The first mention of the election is during the dinner scene that night, when Elizabeth Darko drops the opening line.
That night, Donnie’s father is watching a rerun of the presidential debate. This must be the debate that happened on Sunday, September 25, 1988, because the other presidential debate wouldn’t happen until October 13th. Father Darko is not impressed. “Dukakis,” he mutters, “son of a bitch.”
Around midnight, so now October 2nd, Donnie gets up and wanders downstairs. His father has fallen asleep in the living room. The national anthem is playing through extreme static as Donnie goes outside.
When Donnie closes the tangent universe and accepts his death, in the main universe the TV is still set on static, but it is not playing the national anthem.
(If you want the movie to make sense, we strongly recommend the Director’s Cut.)
The next mention of the election comes when Father is driving Donnie to his therapist. Under the Milky Way by The Church is playing on the radio. Donnie’s father turns it to a news station that’s talking about the election. “What people don’t understand about this upcoming election,” says a man on the air, “is that Michael Dukakis does not have the financial infrastructure in place to defe—” Donnie changes it back.
However, whatever ChatGPT may tell you, there is no Dukakis bumper sticker in this movie. Don’t believe its lies.
The last explicit mention of Dukakis is when his name appears on the kitchen whiteboard, during a scene where Donnie and the boys are watching a football game. This happens just before Donnie acquires the gun.
There’s a guy in a Ronald Reagan mask at the Halloween party. He bounces on the trampoline. And H. W. Bush appears briefly in Donnie’s eyes as he leaves the party.
Also, Actress Drew Barrymore, who plays English teacher Karen Pomeroy (and also financed the film), personally met President Ronald Reagan in October, 1984. Here’s a photo of the two of them together:
Around midnight on October 2nd, Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. This may be a reference to the sidereal month, which is 27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes, and 11.6 seconds, each value off by exactly one.
This puts the time for the end of the world at around 7 AM on October 30th.
This does not coincide with two interesting events. First of all, it does not coincide with Halloween, which is on October 31st. The fact that the Darko kids hold a Halloween party confuses many people, but this was probably held on Saturday the 29th. The 31st wouldn’t have worked because it was a Monday, and everyone would have had school.
Second, it does not coincide with the presidential election. Election day in 1988 was on November 8th. Donnie’s universe ends 9 days before this.
Still, it’s hard not to conclude that the events of the film spiritually coincide with both events.
