ExFatLoss has published five ex150 case studies this month, all of which saw some weight loss, though some saw more than others: 48 year old female loses 14.6lbs in 30 days; 26 year old male loses 5-8lbs in 26 days, mostly water weight; 38 y/o female loses 11lbs in 30 days eating 2,700kcal/day; 37 y/o female loses 9lbs in 30 days; and 60 y/o male loses 13lbs in 30 days. We look forward to the eventual summary report! 

Energy Startup Says It Has Achieved Geothermal Tech Breakthrough — Hopefully they’re right, home geothermal would be great! 

Why is everyone talking about aspartame recently? Dynomight explains in detail: WHO aspartame brouhaha

Edge interview from 1996 with Francisco Varela — “I’m perhaps best known for three different kinds of work, which seem disparate to many people but to me run as a unified theme. These are my contributions in conceiving the notion of autopoiesis — self-production — for cellular organization, the enactive view of the nervous system and cognition, and a revising of current ideas about the immune system.” Actually here’s some more: 

The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann — one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.

In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap — the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.

The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it’s a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can’t discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it’s impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.

“The causal faithfulness condition, which licenses inferences from probabilistic to causal independence, is known to be violated in dynamical systems exhibiting homeostasis. Using the example of the Watt governor, I here present a precise causal characterization of such violations, which differ from cases involving cancelling paths.”​​

Profile of Tufts biologist Michael Levin. Quotes: 

Another thing is [the slime mold] has these vibrations. It’s constantly tugging on the surface. We have this wild paper where we put one glass disc here, three glass discs back here. There’s no chemicals, there’s no food, no gradients. It’ll cogitate for about four hours, just kind of sitting here doing nothing. And then boom!—it grows out toward the three. 

What it’s doing is sensing strain in the medium. It’s pulling, and it feels the vibrations that come back. It’s ridiculously sensitive because each disc is like 10 milligrams. For whatever bizarre reason, it prefers the heavier mass. During those four hours it collects the data, decides where it’s going, and then, boom!

…

If you place a small piece of food nearby and then a much larger piece of food far away, it tends to go for the larger piece and bypasses the small one, which I thought was really weird, because why wouldn’t you grab it along the way? But it just sort of fixated on the big one and went for that. Maybe it thought it would come back later for the smaller.

Related: pea plants may be able to sense the size of a stick before touching it. (h/t @emollick) Barbara McClintock would approve. From the paper:

The mechanisms by which plants could perceive the differences between support sizes remains to be explained. Based on the evidence that plants have at their disposal a great variety of sensory modalities (Karban, 2015), we hypothesize three possible situations. First, plants may use echolocation to acquire information about the support. Recent reports showed that plants emit sonic clicks and capture the returning echoes to get information about their surroundings (Gagliano, Renton, Duvdevani, Timmins, & Mancuso, 2012). This bio sonar may provide information about the thickness of the support to the plants, which will act accordingly. Second, several studies have suggested that the leaf’s upper and subepidermis comprise cells acting as ocelli, eye-like structures allowing plants to gather visual information about their environment (Baluška & Mancuso, 2016). Support for this contention comes from studies on Boquilla trifoliolata, a climbing wood vine that modifies the appearance of its leaves according to the host plant, perfectly mimicking the colors, shapes, sizes, orientations, and petiole lengths of the leaves. Crucially, the plant leaf mimicry occurs even without a direct contact between the vine of Boquilla trifoliolata and mimicked host trees, which supports the idea that plants are capable not only of sensing but also of decoding visual inputs (Gianoli & Carrasco-Urra, 2014). Thus, climbing plants may benefit from a vision system that is able to process the proprieties of the support. Lastly, plants may acquire information about the support using chemoreception of volatiles. It is well known that plants release airborne chemicals that can convey ecologically relevant information about the stimuli they interact with (Karban, 2015; Runyon, Mescher, & De Moraes, 2006).

Emojis Are Increasingly Legally Binding. But They’re Still Open to Wide Interpretation

@ArtirKel on twitter: “TIL in kidney transplants they don’t always take out an old one and replace it. It’s not unusual to keep adding kidneys. Thus we end up with this guy that has 5 kidneys at one point:” 

RemissionBiome project covered in The Guardian: Does the microbiome hold the key to chronic fatigue syndrome?

characterdesignreferences.com — Art of the Sword in the Stone (part 1)

Alice Maz — toward a system of neo-xunism:

Xunzi starts with the Confucian core of virtue, learning, ritual, and filiality. He strips away spiritual explanations and justifies his positions on consequentialist grounds. Confucius saw morality as an emanation of Heaven, whereas Xunzi sees it as a tool crafted by man to create human flourishing. And then he borrows the rationalism of the later Mohists, the practicality of the Legalists, and the flexibility and comfort with the ineffable of the Daoists.

Astronomers solve mystery of how a mirror-like planet formed so close to its star — David Brin describes it like so: “A mirror-like planet with an albedo of 0.80 reflects so much light from its very nearby star that astronomers suggest a gas giant lost all atmosphere but vaporized glass&titanium for a mirror-like composition.”

Drew Savicki on twitter: “I have a spreadsheet tracking all politician’s favorite ninja turtle. I have received 14 answers. … No member of Congress has answered Raphael so far. Will that change?” (Here’s the sheet.)

More beaver illegalism