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.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 