Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — Compare this to our predictions for 2050 (see the section labeled “Elective Chemistry”).

Goodbye, for now from Max Goodbird / Superb Owl. A SAD DAY FOR THE BLOGOSPHERE. Gladly this should be temporary.

But as always, there is also new life. A new blog from SMTM reader and occasional correspondent Neoncube, starting with a post on potato diet comparisons.

London’s Forgotten Banana Nuisance:

Nutritious, cheap and self-packaged, the banana was a practical foodstuff for the busy worker. Just one problem, though. Edwardian London did not have many bins. The inedible peel was usually thrown onto the floor. While it awaited the attention of the street sleeper, the peel became a hazard to pedestrians and horses. 

“There is no escape from the banana pest for rich or poor,” agonised the Leominster News that year. “…there is hardly a family which has not a member who at some time has not suffered from the ‘banana fall’.“ Slips by this time were so common that ‘banana fall’ became a widely recognised colloquialism.

Minnesota Department of Health website claims that “drinking water with low levels of arsenic over a long time is associated with diabetes“. Who knew about this?

J.K. Rowling’s $150 million yacht is named Samsara. Yes, really. 

Infrasound: What You Can’t Hear CAN Hurt You — A good research direction, especially for those of us who have ever experienced mystery illnesses, ever stayed in a house where you mysteriously couldn’t sleep or felt sick all the time, etc. The vibes might literally be bad.

Montaigne’s Self-Fashioning — Giving style to one’s character.

Consumer Reports: Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead. From the author on twitter:

For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.

“It’s concerning that these results are even worse than the last time we tested,” said Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led the testing project. This time, in addition to the average level of lead being higher than what we found 15 years ago, there were also fewer products with undetectable amounts of it. The outliers also packed a heavier punch. Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer powder, the product with the highest lead levels, had nearly twice as much lead per serving as the worst product we analyzed in 2010.

That said, we’ve always been curious about these kinds of studies, so we were interested to see this pretty convincing counterpoint: Huel is Fine

Overcoming Our Politics of War

Reinvent Science: Science Vocational School — Cannot endorse this enough. In fact, we are ready to run it if we have students and/or funding.

Reinvent Science: Use Humor

Reinvent Science: Publish Incomplete Reports!

The moon’s biggest impact crater made a radioactive splash

Peak Youth:

MTV was the central node for music in culture for roughly three decades. Arguably, it popularized both reality television and adult animation. Indisputably, it popularized music videos as a cultural form. MTV was simultaneously an arbiter of cool, a gatekeeper of mainstream relevance, and it had enough money and power that it could afford to be experimental.

It’s the ability to be experimental that feels like it is missing in contemporary culture. Recently, I’ve been thinking about how we have not had a new cultural form in quite a while. Maybe that’s because the material of culture: sounds, screens, physical forms have been fully explored.

One person’s list of Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments that Failed to Replicate. Some of the usual suspects, as well as a few surprises. Not an endorsement, but it’s good to compare notes.

Agentic Fragments. If you have even a little of this sense, then you are truly amazed at how little there is in the modern world: 

They had both grown up on small farms, in the days before electricity, and began working as children. They farmed, slaughtered, built houses and roads, sewed the clothes for their four children, wired the electricity. Their way of appropriating the world was fundamentally different from mine: everything around them was something they could take apart and put back together. If they didn’t like how the light fell in their living room, they moved the windows. If they needed a lathe, they disassembled a hammer drill and turned it into a lathe. Their world was filled with affordances that I didn’t see. Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.