In case you missed it — we were on a podcast, spreading the good word about cybernetics! Check it out here: Two Psychologists Four Beers Episode 121: A New Paradigm for Psychology?

Also making waves this month in our piece for Asimov Press: What Makes a Mature Science

Relatedly, see this piece of video game journalism for more examples of good mechanical thinking.

New in self-experiments: Microdosing Willpower

Also new in self-experiments: My 9-week unprocessed food self-experiment

Stories of spontaneously-combusting scissors shared on on r/chemistry (h/t JasonKPargin)

From friend-of-the-blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Did journal articles survive the last ten years?

A PNG image of a bird can be reproduced by an adult Starling: I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Contiguous USA Graph

I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)! Another one from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. Can’t resist quoting the main points in full:

Cards on the table, I find it very hard to believe that twenty-four people all made substantial contributions to this paper — substantial enough to be listed as authors.

So what are they all doing there? I can only surmise that the four or five legitimate authors all invited their friends along for the ride, on the basis that “he needs a Nature paper for his postdoc applications”.

And the tragedy of it is, they’re not wrong.

Many universities — most? Maybe even all? — do indeed recruit people to postdocs and permanent positions in part on whether they have a paper in Nature or Science. Even if their role is as seventeenth or eighteenth of twenty-four, and they actually did little or nothing towards the science. I have been told flatly by people in positions of influence that candidates without the Nature or Science stamp are likely to be filtered out of the recruitment process at Step Zero, and never even have their papers read, let alone make it to interview.

And for as long as that is true, it would be negligent of lab leaders not to slip their own grad-students, and any other students they know and like, into the authorship of such a paper if it happens to come their way.

What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.

Can we all agree that this is idiotic?

How did it all get this way? Part of the puzzle from Asterisk: The Origin of the Research University

James Heathers has finally gotten funding for his work on scientific error detection. See his Substack post about it or check out this piece in Nature.

You can link to any text on any page. (h/t dynomight)

ExFatLoss does an ex_kempner review: CICO and FO. Most interesting part to us: 

Coming back to the rice diet was very easy for her. Despite only weighing 115lbs total to my ~230-240lbs, she lasted much longer on the diet than me. In fact, I spoke to her today and she is STILL on the diet (I’m 6 days into the next experiment.)

This is so bizarre to me. I have about 80lbs just of body fat on me, which is 70% of Coconut’s entire body weight. How come that I can’t seem to access this body fat and am getting starvation psychosis on day 6, when a skinny lady half my size can subsist on this extreme level of caloric restriction for weeks?

We also liked this one for its micronutrient skepticism, and for the discussion of hunger drives: Book review: The End of Craving