“You pant after the garlic and melons of Egypt and have already long suffered from perverted tastes.”

“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:

Breathing all the Noble Gases

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. 

GRAND THEFT HAMLET

“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.

“Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet.”

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