“Blogs have shaped our philosophical worldviews, found us careers and friends, and changed our lives.” Write Carol and Austin Chen. “But many great bloggers have stopped blogging. … So we’re launching the Blog Revival Project, to crowdfund $1,000+ bounties for good bloggers.” We plug ADS who they already have on the list and would consider pledging towards Troof and Max Goodbird. 

People on twitter have discovered a compact, visual way of representing recipes as a small card-sized image. The source, unsurprisingly, seems to be cookingforengineers.com, but already people are innovating — see for example this project and this project.

a theory of invention; or why you’re an inventor too

“Potatoes and corn for dinner” diet — “Last time, I tried the ‘potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner’ diet, and I lost 1.10lb per week for six weeks. This time, I thought it’d be fun to try a ‘potatoes and corn for dinner’ diet, and I’ve lost weight at the same rate: 1.10lb per week!” Perhaps surprisingly, he was eating American-grown corn. One strike against the idea that corn is somehow to blame for obesity. Also not to bury the lede, Panda Express for lunch every day? 

NeutraOat Pilot:

If you’ve worked with AFFF firefighting foam, or you live somewhere with PFAS in the water, there’s a good chance your levels are high even if you’ve never been tested. Grain Laboratories is enrolling fifteen adults with elevated serum PFOS for a twelve-week NeutraOat pilot. You’ll get two PFAS panels and two wellness panels, one set before dosing and one after. You keep your own results, and the combined results tell us whether NeutraOat is worth a larger study.

NeutraOat is a modified oat fiber that’s designed to selectively bind PFAS and certain other environmental toxicants in the gut, preventing them from being reabsorbed and reducing their levels in the blood. Following successful in-vitro tests in a simulated digestive system, we are now running a 12 week, at-home pilot in individuals with high PFAS levels, especially people with exposure to firefighting foams. For those who qualify, the pilot is completely free, and comes with before-and-after PFAS tests and vitamin/blood panels.

The Scientific Literature is Poisonous to LLMs:

In 2024 a research team spanning MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Google, and OpenAI examined the effects of removing different text corpora from the training data on the performance of an LLM after training (holding the LLM’s structure constant). They found that removing ArXiv, PhilPapers, and NIH ExPorter from the training corpus improved the LLM’s performance at answering academic questions and its average performance across all benchmarks while also making the model less likely to generate toxic output. 

Technology in 1776

Mental Health (for Humans):

Diagnosis drives treatment. Treatment is what matters. That’s the whole relationship.

Patients almost universally have this backwards, because the system delivers diagnosis backwards. You sit in a room, and a professional pronounces a noun over you, and the noun arrives with the gravity of a verdict. Patients receive a diagnosis the way defendants receive a sentence: as a statement about who they are and what their life will now be. They go home and google the noun and read the prognosis statistics and the disability rates and the mortality numbers, and they begin, quietly, to become the label.

But that is not what a diagnosis is. A diagnosis is a routing function. It exists to answer exactly one question: given this cluster of symptoms, which treatments are most likely to help? That’s it. That is its entire job. It is a lookup key into treatment space. It is the means; the treatment is the end.

Vesuvius Challenge: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets:

People make a lot of claims about digestion, nutrition, and diet on the internet. … It is helpful, then, to have a heuristic to tell the iconoclastic geniuses apart from the grifters and bullshitters. 

I end up with a pretty similar strategy to what I do when I see or hear random claims about finance (e.g. on Twitter.) I keep some questions in my head that test basic understanding, then either ask the person or, if I feel like I have enough data, imagine how they would answer. …

Some of these questions have objectively correct answers, others are more of an opportunity to say something stupid that hopefully, the person you’re talking to will pass up. “I don’t know” is a wonderful answer.

SovietRxiv — Translating forgotten Soviet research papers into English.

“Kevin Smith dropped a wild story on Joe Rogan: After his heart attack, he tried the extreme ‘just potatoes’ diet for two weeks, nothing but plain baked potatoes, no butter, no salt, no nothing. He lost 19 pounds (8.6 kg) in 14 days” – h/t @JamesMcDaniel

The Independent Science Society:

The Independent Science Society is testing if good science can be done the ol’ fashioned way — at home and in your free time.

Doing science means hypothesising and testing the natural world. This requires a lot less than people think. Most scientists in history worked independently. They worked outside of formal institutions, and often part-time. We think more people should be doing this.

​​Draft: Amos and the Alphabet Society

Deadlock in the Parliament of the Self

GitHub repo with data of 156 countries’ obesity rates measured from household surveys as often as it’s comparably available. You may ask, “why does this repo exist? I was unsatisfied with existing obesity-rate data. For example, the data at  @OurWorldInData uses outputs from a model, so it’s *predictions* instead of real data.”

We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides

“Since time immemorial, man has sought to destroy Florida. But people may not realize how close the United States once came to severing that cursed peninsula from the mainland and liberating us all.” Visualizing the Past (Part Four)

Wikipedia:Deleted_articles_with_freaky_titles

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)

Age of Invention: Why Scotland Succeeded

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?”

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

“Imagine being a typical person living in England from 1520 to 2020 (500 years) but experiencing time 100x slower than everyone else”

“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.)

Handbook of Nature-Study

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)

A Journalist is a Lawyer

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.

I sell onions on the Internet

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.

Who was the Historical Jesus?

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.

Knowledge is Power

(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.

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)

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

Is Polyamory a Luxury Belief?

not quite analogue

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

Things I learnt at replication club #2 – power analysis and preregistration are fiddly and not many people document how they do it

---

Ok that’s the fairly random Inkhaven selection. We return to regular links:

In case you missed it: THE LOOP Issue 2

Where Do the Children Play

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

Rats filmed snatching bats from the air for first time

Metformin as cognitive enhancer?

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.