This month, there was Inkhaven. A total of 41 residents published one piece of writing of at least 500 words every single day for the 30 days of November. That’s a lot of essays, blog posts, poems, short stories, and long-ass tweets. As a result we cannot claim that the few entries below are the best, or even our favorites. We have not remotely read all of them, or even as many as we would like. So all we will claim is, this is a selection:
For the psychologists in the room, we’d like to first call your attention to croissanthology’s replication of psych classic Loftus & Palmer (1974), or the “do people say that cars were going faster when they hear they ‘smashed’ into each other as opposed to hit/bumped/etc.” study. The materials were put together in just a few hours, and with (special thanks to) Aella helping to recruit participants, croissanthology soon 10x’d the original sample size (446 vs 45 in the original), and did not find any evidence for the supposed effect — in fact, it trended in the opposite direction. This study isn’t perfect, but it sure is evidence against the original claim. And if people do think the original claims were right, we’d love to see other replications.
A good software engineer interested in supporting better psychology research could probably do a lot of good work contributing features to these frameworks. PsychoPy for example seems to support all sorts of fancy things like eye tracking however you require custom code or hacks in order to set up a simple “rate this statement from 1-5” multiple choice scale
There was a Renaissance natural historian named Ole Worm who had a pet great auk and proved that lemmings didn’t appear out of thin air. (h/t Georgia Ray)
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.
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
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.
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.
…it should be evident that there is a whole army of regulatory systems in place that detect caloric flux. It is incredibly difficult if not impossible to outsmart these systems over long periods of time
Also:
The best strategy I have found is reverse-dieting. Increasing caloric intake by 100kcal per week. In my early twenties, I reverse-dieted my way from 2000kcal to 2500kcal over the course of 5 weeks. Interestingly, I have gained no to minimal amounts of fat but started to feel more vital.
I have seen something similar a number of times – individuals who had been undereating for a long time gradually increase their caloric intake over the span of a couple of weeks. And despite eating e.g., 25% more than before, they gain no to minimal amounts of fat.
It USED to be that when a scientist discovered something important, like finding the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito, thereby demonstrating that mosquitos transmit the disease, you would write a poem about it and send it to your wife:
Today I apply this insight to Western philosophy, in service of a question which I’ve been trying to answer for years on this blog: why does no one talk about cybernetics anymore?
“Last week, I had an unusually vivid dream about writing a book review for ACX. When I woke up, I remembered the review almost word-for-word. In some sense this is a best case scenario – write posts in my sleep, and spend my waking hours relaxing on the beach – but unfortunately the book I was reviewing doesn’t exist and most of what I say about it doesn’t make sense. Still, I’m posting the review here as a subscriber-only feature.” Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma (paywalled)
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.
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.
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
This blog post is ostensibly about AI, but it’s also one of the most lucid descriptions of academic incentives we’ve ever seen. Especially given how short it is. Highly recommended: Thoughts on the AI 2027 discourse
The things we are most afraid of are already happening, and will continue to get worse. It feels counter intuitive, but we’re holding tightly onto the feeling of control, and safety, and that is ITSELF what is putting us in danger & making things worse.
So on the 31st of May I ate a load of chips (steak fries US readers), two potatoes cut into thick oblongs and shallow-fried in butter.
And since then I’ve been eating such things pretty regularly, to the point where I’ve got a bit sick of them, which wasn’t a mental state I knew existed. Sometimes I have made them with yams instead.
Thrilled to see this, and kudos to Astera for having the guts to do what everyone else in their heart knows they should: Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough
When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894 I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin- an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of them unite so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes, not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.
The Church FAQ — “A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!”
Serious Music — “A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.”
> Nature paper figures out how to cook eggs evenly by duty-cycling the temperature of water between 30°C and 100°C every 2 mins, derived from a model of heat transfer between yolk and white
> @sdamico implements the paper using his stoves that can hold water steady at 30°C and 100°C
Here, we describe the unique case of a 50-year-old self-experimenting female virologist with locally recurrent muscle-invasive breast cancer who was able to proceed to simple, non-invasive tumour resection after receiving multiple intratumoural injections of research-grade virus preparations, which first included an Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine strain (MeV) and then a vesicular stomatitis virus Indiana strain (VSV), both prepared in her own laboratory.
This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction — Since the boundaries between species aren’t objective, zoologists can say that a small subpopulation of an animal is a “new species”, which then requires conservation because it only lives in one stream/valley/etc.
NikoMcCarty: “The weight of giant pumpkins has increased 20-fold in half a century. Humans are ridiculously good at breeding fruits. Data from the ‘Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off.’”
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”).
Best parody. September.The Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs and Mice”) is a comic epic parody of the Iliad and a good source of names for your pet mice. Like Artepibulus, “he who lies in wait for bread”.
Greek etymology rabbithole also led us to troglodyte, which ultimately means, “hole, I get into”:
From Latin trōglodyta (“cave dwelling people”), from Ancient Greek τρωγλοδύτης (trōglodútēs, “one who dwells in holes”), from τρώγλη (trṓglē, “hole”) + δύω (dúō, “I get into”).
These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, but they are strident in doing so because they are repeating what everybody knows. They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted. It doesn’t need to be crafted, because it is already known, established, beyond question (but demonstrably wrong).
In 2001, a friend and I had gotten so tired of a massive pot hole in Seattle that we went and got some vests and bags of asphalt and fixed it ourselves. We didn’t live near it, but hung out down there almost daily and hated driving over it. People in the neighborhood asked if we were from the city, and we said no. People clapped, and one brought us iced tea. A city bus came by as we were finishing and was so happy he drove over it, backed up, and drove over it several times to pack it in. I drove by it earlier today for work, and our patch still holds.
Most Bond villain. June.A New Atlantis: “Britain should reclaim an area the size of Wales from Dogger Bank, the area of the North Sea where the sea is only 15-40m deep. We could do it for less than £100bn.”
Most Constitutional.April. While Lucas M. Miller was serving in Congress, he proposed a Constitutional amendment to change the country’s name to “the United States of the Earth” because “it is possible for this republic to grow through the admission of new states…until every nation on earth has become part of it.”
Best coincidence. March.There is way too much serendipity — “It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.”
Most empirical. February.Friend of the blog ExFatLoss beats obesity:
Now that’s science
Best near miss.February. AT&T gets a solid B+ on predicting the future: “You Will” Commercials (high quality) YouTube comments have it: “These are absolutely amazing. The only thing they got wrong is ‘The company to bring it to you, AT&T’.”
Most unethical. January. The for-profit system of academic journal publishing was created by Robert Maxwell, who also happens to be Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Along with other tidbits, the linked article does a good job highlighting the ways in which scientific publishing is a principal-agent problem:
You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. … then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.
If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would. If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time. The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox. Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.
If all of the 1,000,000 chemicals introduced into the food supply since 1850 were at fault, then simply doing a potato diet or heavy cream diet wouldn’t lead people to easily lose a lot of fat.
… Eating potatoes does not remove any microplastics from your body. It doesn’t avoid whatever’s in the soil or water. It doesn’t replenish whatever used to be in the soil and is now missing. It doesn’t turn you into a farmer or manual laborer and it doesn’t change your genetics or epigenetics. It doesn’t remodel your (ruined?) fat cells. It doesn’t reduce air & water pollution and it doesn’t change the makeup of your kitchen & cook ware. It (presumably) doesn’t get you more sleep or reduce stress or EMF or blue light or screen time.
Unless there’s some crazy magic going on, the change is either brought about by something in the potatoes (or cream) or by cutting out something you were previously eating, and replacing it with potatoes (or cream).
Nat Friedman and his collaborators just dropped PlasticList, a project where they tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals, mostly phthalates and bisphenols. Really top-notch work here.
A reader sent us this: Los Angeles now tests for lithium, and from this report, it looks like the water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant contains 25 to 198 ng/mL lithium with an average of 92 ng/mL. That is quite a lot — the Pima had about 100 ng/mL in their water. But LA was, at least as of 2014, the #9 Leanest City in the country, though maybe things have changed since then. The reader also wanted to share this background info: She and her husband had lived in Texas for many years. When they moved to San Francisco, they both abruptly lost “1-2 pant sizes”. This was while “walking about the same amount as we were in Austin”. Then they moved to LA, and gained “+2 pant sizes” above and beyond where they had been in Texas. As before she says, “in general our diet hasn’t changed significantly, our job type hasn’t changed, we haven’t exercised more or less, etc.” This prompted her to look into the LA water quality and she found the new data in this report.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 