Para-academia is the future — Bold enough to use the word “sucks” in the first sentence.
Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
“Potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner” diet
Leaking Abandoned Well in West Texas (h/t A. Weis)
links
Links for April 2026
The big news in blogging this month is Inkhaven 2 (sponsored by WordPress dot com). The first Inkhaven happened back in November 2025, and this one is even more. Wow.
This time, about 55 residents (it’s hard to count exactly since some staff members are also ~residents) published one blog post of at least 500 words every day all 30 days of April, and only one person failed to publish each day before midnight! Some people even managed to consistently post more than once a day. Wow again. The organizers will likely be running another Inkhaven in autumn 2026, so if this has you feeling curious, you can express your interest here.
Below is a list of some of the Inkhaven blog posts we liked a lot. We can’t claim that these are the best, or even our favorite posts. Some of our favorite posts, we have almost certainly forgotten to list here. There are simply too many. And the list is biased towards posts that came out early in Inkhaven, because we are still working to catch up on the more than 1,500 posts and more than 800,000 words produced. But all that said, here’s a selection:
- Chinese: Cursed Logographic DAGs
- A Paean to Bigness
- Two Theories for Cryopreservation
- A Grand Theory of Cybernetic Taste
- Units of Breath
- Not being able to speak FAQ
- How to write an essay the schizo way
- Anatomy of a Gaslight: Havana Syndrome
- Problems with a cybernetic theory of taste!
- The Best Apple Cultivar
- And the empirical version, How do you like them apples?
- Shakespeare Plays as Genre Television
- Is salt salty?
- Inkhavening
- Most people can’t juggle one ball
- One Week in the Rat Farm
- The Rectification of Names
- The Worst Kind of Horny
- And the results from that study: Why Getting Laid Won’t Satisfy You (But Getting a Glass of Water Will)
- My little paradoxical reactions
Other highlights from Inkhaven include Speedhaven, “a one-night speed-writing competition at Inkhaven Fair, 25 April 2026” where “writers raced the clock; the audience picked the winners.” You can read the entries on the archive, including a riff on one of the best memes of all time: Bottomless Pit Supervisor Performance Review.
Feeling anxious about all these blog posts you might be reading? Well then you are in luck. In collaboration with one of these very authors, we are looking for anxious people to participate in some research: What’s Up with Silexan? A Pilot Study on a Promising Anti-Anxiety Drug
We should also announce the third issue of our science zine THE LOOP. It is available here, and what’s more, this and all previous (and future) issues are now available on THE LOOP SITE at looploop.blog — enjoy! For commentary on one submission, you may also like conq’s piece In the Loop.
Finally, blogger and statistician Andrew Gelman weighs in on Inkhaven: Blogging and writing style. We are tickled by some of his descriptions, such as: “I started to read the very first post, Kill Yourself Cave, by Remy, but then halfway through some sort of ad popped up and I couldn’t read the rest–I guess I’d need to buy some sort of subscription?”
Links for March 2026
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
14-year-old running for governor is the first teen to get on Vermont’s general election ballot
I can’t stop yelling at Claude Code
“here is what i got from gemini 3.1 pro when i asked to do a simple coding task” says Flakon @f_demaku, posting a screenshot of a truly insane train of thought. “I sincerely apologize for that bizarre wall of text!” writes Gemini in response to a request for clarification. “My internal planning process glitched and leaked into the chat, resulting in an output loop.” But — “This is fucking sublime,” writes j⧉nus @repligate. “As I often say, with outputs like this, you need to make at least 5 (good) Suno songs with it before you can really begin to get what it’s about,” and proceeds to drop the first hit AI “Bright, syncopated percussion and playful synths introduce the catchy xenopop groove, Cheerful arpeggios twist into unexpected minor chords, adding an ominous undertone, Layered vocal chops and polyrhythms weave subtle complexity, while dynamic breaks keep the texture intriguing” song of the summer. (Full playlist here.)
Links for February 2026
Nicky Case: Vitamin D & Omega-3 may have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants. Along with the actual points being made about depression, this essay is a great introduction to effect sizes.
A lot of population numbers are fake
Cosimo Research: 💤 Does Mouth Taping Reduce Snoring? & 🫥 Does Mouth Taping Change Facial Structure? Highlights from the methods section: “there were 135 vertical nights and 116 mustache nights”
Cosimo Research: Eau de Vagina AKA “the most rigorous study on vabbing ever undertaken and hence the best available scientific evidence”
Theoretical Structural Archaeology: Twelve reasons why Stonehenge was a building
Fiction: Julia
Sometimes we talk of ideas being “Big if true”. Well, they don’t get much bigger than true than this: ABC’s of Blessed Water (cf. We out here making mana potions)
Links for January 2026
For the new year: A rationalist’s guide to manifestation
Advice for Anarchist Post-Docs — Including genuine gems like:
you can expect the typical PI to be very reluctant to fire you for doing a different mix of research than they expected. They may express displeasure in a variety of ways, but as long as you’re producing results, you’ll probably have a long runway of PI annoyance before any disciplinary action takes place.
There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems
Your cheap furniture has a secret — Every part of the supply chain has a story. Or 100 stories.
Why Gen Z Culture Is Basically Medieval China
Remaking Kids by MGMT to Learn Why It’s So Good — A good way to learn about / understand anything. Wait this is just replication again LOL
Burnout is breaking a sacred pact
15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026 — (Possible infohazard / hyperstition warning, read with caution.)
Skyrim was weird for my Non-Gamer Wife — Unexpectedly heartwarming ending.
Unrevised edition of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People — Mostly sharing for the censorship angle:
This website hosts the complete unrevised edition of Dale Carnegie’s masterpiece How to Win Friends and Influence People. … We use the unrevised edition because we believe the revised edition (the revisions were done by Carnegie’s relatives after his death) forcefully makes the language of the book gender neutral and politically correct and takes away from the originality of the work.
(WARNING: includes graphic images of a man performing cranial surgery on himself with a dentist’s drill. DO NOT ATTEMPT AT HOME.) THROUGH THE BLIND HOLE. Amazingly, this story appears to be true.
Links for December 2025
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
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)
Links for November 2025
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.
And then later: Takeaways from “doing science”
I ate bear fat, to prove a point
Robert Hooke’s “Cyberpunk” letter to Gottfried Leibniz
Some ballad meter poetry, to just amuse myself
The time Weird Al Yankovic went too far
after my dad died, we found the love letters
Things I learnt at replication club (read to the end for an image of “best practice” psychophysical input device)
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
Ok that’s the fairly random Inkhaven selection. We return to regular links:
In case you missed it: THE LOOP Issue 2
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)
David Chapman publishes an excellent self-experiment: Conquering chronic crud
Also in the vein of self-experiments: The One Simple Trick That Fixed My Relationship With the Space of Nameless Misery
Links for October 2025
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
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.
Links for September 2025
In case you missed it — we were on the Clearer Thinking podcast with Spencer Greenberg, talking about cybernetics, psychology, and philosophy of science. Check it out: Episode 281: A new paradigm for psychology research (with Slime Mold Time Mold)
The Syndrome of the Ultra-fit:
…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.
So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes
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:
Neurons Gone Wild via The Seeds of Science
A Naturalistic Court Discussion from 1685
Butlerian-Jihad-coded: (though of course we disagree with the obesity metaphor) Are we living in a stupidogenic society?
Aella doing the kind of basic due diligence we need more of: Birth Control Myths Vs Data
People often ask us how to get started in science. Here’s a great example: My first palaeo paper is 20 years old today!
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; it just isn’t proof
Links for August 2025
New Substack to watch, on diverse and outlier science: Reinvent Science
And here’s an example of what they’re talking about: Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journals (see also the comments!)
We get a shout-out in The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy. A question we’ve pondered for some time:
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?
Also: How do we live with each other?
How does the phthalates get into the beef? Some findings here: We tested Radius beef for plastic chemicals
“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)
What Does It Mean To Be Thirsty? (h/t MY)
Satiety Graphed & The Horsemen of Obesity
High salt recruits aversive taste pathways
As late as 1813, people were saying that eating potatoes causes leprosy (h/t Adam Mastroianni)
A Time-Series Analysis of my Girlfriends Mood Swings, Behavioral Conditioning Methods to Stop my Boyfriend from Playing The Witcher 3, and The Bark Defense: A 99.999% Successful Method for Keeping Emily Safe from Strangers and Garbage Trucks — all these and more curiosities from the Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology, the “premium source for made up science”.
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 