Why Everyone Loves Japan — “Even more astonishing than my interview with Kodansha is the fact that to this day, I have not met a single Japanese person who has heard of the word ‘weeb’.”

The Next Renaissance is Coming

Vogue on Instagram: “Did @tchalamet study giraffes to prepare for his role in “Marty Supreme”? Yes, yes he did.

Epicycles All The Way Down. Not really sure what this means but, food for thought.

We simply do not know what a human being who has read a billion books looks like, if it is even feasible, so an immortal who has read a billion books feels about as smart as a human who has read a few dozen.

How To Find Time To Do Science

Strategy means sticking to what matters the most. On the science front, that’s getting results and writing about them. And so I try to spend most of my science time on this. These are the only things that matter. And so if I’m not doing either, I question why. … To reiterate – doing science means learning about the world, then communicating the results. That’s the ultimate end point, so it’s the thing I try to spend the most time on.

Statistics is a Scientific Instrument 

We don’t often think about statistics as being in the same category as a microscope. But if you think about it, it’s a tool (built with math rather than physical engineering) that enables us to observe phenomena in the world that are invisible with the naked eye. … Statistics is a powerful instrument, but like any instrument, it provides evidence that then needs interpretation to infer what’s going on with the underlying phenomena – it doesn’t generate truth directly. Look at the X-ray crystallography image of DNA: it’s nowhere near obvious that you’re looking at a double helix. Statistics is the same. The problem is that many people – both practitioners using the tool and people listening to them – treat it as some kind of oracle.

Book Week 2025, Day 6: The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling, by John Muir Laws

Fix Your Gut Health Forever by Thinking About Ice Cream

The first time I had the sense that I really needed a green vegetable, it shocked me. It was a new feeling. I’d had cravings before—the standard kind, for carbs and sweets and salty crunchy junk—and this was similar, but it was also distinct. There was a subtlety to it, a strength without the familiar urgency of carb addiction. Make no mistake: I’d always enjoyed green vegetables. But even in the deepest depths of my finals week burrito marathons, I’d never once craved them. 

On the same theme: Self Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants: An Experimental Study

Blind Spot Light vs Rear View Camera

In a hostile information environment, you want surface, NOT solve.

…

If the blind spot light stops working, you might think it was safe to turn.

If your fact checker made an error, you might update your world model with the error.

Reliance on these kinds of signals I think is worse than not having a signal at all. If I know that I do not know (whether there is a car there), I am forced to manually turn my head, or be more careful as I turn.

Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost? “The admissions in private that Oliver Sacks’ stories were too good to be true were less equivocal than what he hinted at in the preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” (literalbanana)