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Speaking of potatoes, Alistair Kitchen has written a piece about the potato diet and the long conversation we had last January, check it out! In particular we would like to thank him for doing a good job communicating our sense of humor.

Speaking of weird diets, Lee S. Pubb (winner of the Mysteries Contest) has started a blog, and the inaugural post is Toward a unified theory of weird internet diets, the first “weird internet diets” literature review. We would add Krinn’s success with potassium to his list but otherwise this is a very nice review.

ex_choc_truffle_2000 review: lost 10.7lbs in 14 days — He Can’t Keep Getting Away With This!

Lucent announces a contest with large cash prizes for anyone who can successfully model his meticulously collected weight-related health data. “The massive longitudinal dataset contains dozens or hundreds of overlapping micro experiments (months of keto, weekend fasts, low protein, high fiber, potatoes, waves of monotonous meals) that taken together exceed the statistical significance of weeks spent in a lab testing individual hypotheses. … If the answer to obesity requires a complex overlap or sequence of conditions, it may be hidden within and first discovered through data mining rather than invented whole cloth by a brilliant hypothesizer. You’d be hard pressed to find more or better data to mine. … It looks more like my set point moves up or down only when some conditions are met, and I’d like to find the control system at work.” Have at!

N1.tools — “Conduct simple randomised N-of-1 studies to understand what works for you!”

www.homebrew.bio — “The Homebrew Biology Club (HBC) is an experimental, digital community that unites builders in biology. It is modeled on Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club.”

Speedrunning a curly hair journey | or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Hair — a N=1 haircare study of “a week or so of trialing everything until something sticks”. May contain important lessons for using the “trialing everything until something sticks” approach to solve other problems. Also she has the right attitude. “You can buy commercial clarifying shampoo… but I don’t want to.”

Using Anki with Babies / Toddlers — Redditor describes his success using spaced repetition to teach his kids to read, write, and do math considerably ahead of schedule. Also taught them Spanish, Hebrew, and logic. Honestly not that surprising given what we know about this historical success of aristocratic tutoring, though maybe the technology will help make it more accessible. (h/t Prigoose on twitter)

The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure (WIRED) — A great example of everyone “knowing” the cause of a problem and implementing significant programs to fight it, when the actual cause was something totally different. 

When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job — Ignore the weird title. We enjoyed this interview of Andrew Wylie, in large part because of how well he handled the interviewer. Also his personal philosophy. “I thought, well, I wonder if you can build a business based exclusively on what you want to read. That led me to understand, I think correctly, that best sellers were overvalued and works that endured forever were undervalued.”

The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy — Claims: “Some 12% of women are carriers of the mild, X-linked forms of color vision deficiencies called ‘anomalous trichromacy.’ Owing to random X chromosome inactivation, their retinae must contain four classes of cone rather than the normal three; and it has previously been speculated that these female carriers might be tetrachromatic, capable of discriminating spectral stimuli that are indistinguishable to the normal trichromat. … Our results suggest that most carriers of color anomaly do not exhibit four-dimensional color vision, and so we believe that anomalous trichromacy is unlikely to be maintained by an advantage to the carriers in discriminating colors. However, 1 of 24 obligate carriers of deuteranomaly exhibited tetrachromatic behavior on all our tests; this participant has three well-separated cone photopigments in the long-wave spectral region in addition to her short-wave cone. We assess the likelihood that behavioral tetrachromacy exists in the human population.”