80/20 Strength Training by friend-of-the-blog Uri Bram — Whether or not you care about strength training, more things should be written like this. 

skeptical thread about honey and bloodletting

Seem like peanut allergies were once rare and now everyone has them?:

The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids. There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take.

Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy.

How Toxic Is Your Favorite Chocolate? (Ranked) from Bryan Johnson — A good start, but sadly he gives no details on the testing methodology or the breakdown of results. Bryan, please publish your methods and data! 

I fixed my lactose intolerance — by chugging ALL the lactose — A story of a successful self-experiment. 

6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery:

My working model has been that being employed kind of sucks. But this time, since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all, I figured I could try treating it like one of my projects. So instead of selling coffee, I figured out how to streamline the café and the cash register so that the volunteers who help out at the gallery felt comfortable doing my job, then I made myself a small office where I sat down to analyze the business and figure out how to improve it. You can imagine how popular this was—I had to backtrack for a few months after the board told me to get back to the café. And this was a good lesson for someone who is used to being self-employed: at an institution, you can’t just do what is best, you also have to build trust and coordinate with others so you are on the same page. This, however, doesn’t mean that you should abdicate your judgment and get in line.

Early Adopter — “conceiving time as a fourth dimension, had been broached in the 18th century, but it had first been treated seriously in a mysterious letter to Nature in 1885”.

From the annals of superstimuli: Why Are Dogs So Obsessed With Lamb Chop? (The article doesn’t really deliver an answer, but it’s a good mystery.)

A Literal Banana: A Case Against the Placebo Effect — A roundup of arguments about the existence of the placebo effect and whether or not it is “meaningful”. Some of the arguments seem to depend on the definition of what counts as a voluntary action, and we’re not sure if that distinction withstands philosophical scrutiny. We feel like there is still more clarity to be found on the topic, but this is a start.

“The Argentine ant global set of supercolonies is one of the largest cooperative societies on earth, it is also one of the most aggressive. World war ant has been raging for over a century, from Japan to South Africa. But where did it all begin?”

We are once again offering “candy and/or a potato” this Halloween, and I’m VERY pleased to report that one mom just asked her kid, “Is this the potato house you were looking for?!”

First Block: Interview with Daniela Amodei, Co-Founder & President of Anthropic (h/t @realityarb). See timestamp around 18:20, where she says: 

At one point, Claude was really convinced that the best way for you to lose weight was to go on an all-potato diet. We have no idea where this came from, it was just really stuck on this idea for a while.

Aer Lingus Flight 164 — “Downey claimed to have been a Trappist monk … He then took a job as a tour guide in central Portugal, at a shrine devoted to Our Lady of Fátima, the reported origin of the Three Secrets of Fátima. At the time of the hijacking, the third secret was known only to the Pope and other senior figures in the Catholic Church; Downey’s statement called on the Vatican to release this secret to the public.” h/t demiurgently, who comments, “‘stole plane to threaten Catholics into revealing heavenly secrets’ feels like a Dan Brown novel”.

Technology will let us taste certain forbidden joys.

When the Nazis Seized Power, This Jewish Actor Took on the Role of His Life:

As a last-gasp effort at professional survival, Reuss resolved to transform himself into an Alpine farmer. Over the spring and into the summer, Reuss grew a beard and perfected the local dialect. He bleached his body hair from head to toe. 

In the evenings, Reuss liked to play tarot cards with Kaspar Altenberger, a local farmer Straub had paid to look after the house. Reuss disclosed his plan, and Altenberger offered to help. He lent Reuss his own identity papers—his passport and baptismal certificate. Reuss had a new official persona.

Lady Baker and the source of the Nile:

Baker was very nervous about discussing the role Florence had played, with him throughout his appalling and dangerous trek across Africa. She had nearly died on more than one occasion, and had saved his life on others with bravery and skilled nursing, and yet she is seldom mentioned in the book. The truth that would have shocked his Victorian readership to the core was that Florence was not his wife at any stage in their African adventures, and they were only married on their return to London in November 1865.

Samuel had found nineteen-year-old Florence, as he called her, in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. (There is some date about her exact age: she was certainly less than half Baker’s age when he met her.) Her real name is believed to have been Barbara Maria von Sass, born in Transylvania, then part of Hungary. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising, and she had been raised from her childhood by a wealthy Armenian trader who intended to make a good profit when he sold this beautiful blonde teenager at auction. Baker saw her, bought her, and subsequently fell in love with her. The pair became inseparable, but the longer they were together, the worse Samuel’s problem became: how was he to explain this relationship to his four daughters at home, who he had left with their aunt after his first wife died?

AI prompting challenges: “New AI prompting challenge! Can you get ChatGPT via Dall-E to illustrate a wine glass that is full to the brim? Harder than it looks!” 

A systematic review and meta-analysis of environmental contaminant exposure impacts on weight loss and glucose regulation during calorie-restricted diets in preclinical studies: Persistent organic pollutants may impede glycemic control (in mice and rats)

the divine discontent:

The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.

“You pant after the garlic and melons of Egypt and have already long suffered from perverted tastes.”

“Bembo is a serif typeface created by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1928–1929 and most commonly used for body text. It is a member of the ‘old-style’ of serif fonts, with its regular or roman style based on a design cut around 1495 by Francesco Griffo for Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, sometimes generically called the ‘Aldine roman’. Bembo is named for Manutius’s first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo.”

Bop Spotter — “I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below”

Nightshade allergy thread AKA “HOW I FIXED MY BRAIN FOG. 🧠😶‍🌫”

Packy McCormick: What Do You Do With an Idea?

I’ve noticed a common refrain speaking with founders building physical things: 

“This is an old idea, actually, from the…” 

I interrupt, a shit-eating, Cheshire grin spreading across my face: “1950s or 1960s, right?” 

Right, they say, adding some specific variant like, “It’s from a 1958 paper.”  

But the paper was obscure, or Soviet, or the idea wasn’t technically possible or economically feasible with the tools of the day. So it collected dust, forgotten and waiting to be rediscovered. 

Good ideas aren’t getting harder to find. We just need to use the ones we have. 

Most meteorites traced to three space crackups

It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them

ExFatloss TEE & Macro Calculator — For all your macro triangle diagram needs:

Breathing all the Noble Gases

Visakan Veerasamy: straight outta tartarus

The genius of the game to me is that losing is part of the process. … I feel like I learned something about myself and about life from playing Hades. The game encourages you and teaches you persistence. It teaches you to cultivate equanimity in the face of failure. And it teaches you to learn from your experience. 

GRAND THEFT HAMLET

“caterpillars that change color to imitate the background (even when blindfolded)” h/t Stuart Buck

Mood Tracking Google Sheet (via nvpkp)

Eli Dourado: Cargo airships are happening

Reddit: Wife’s migraines reduced by 90% and I feel like a jackass via paularambles

First report on quality and purity evaluations of avocado oil sold in the US (h/t ExFatLoss)

Our results showed that the majority of commercial samples were oxidized before reaching the expiration date listed on the bottle. In addition, adulteration with soybean oil at levels near 100% was confirmed in two “extra virgin” and one “refined” sample.

It’s Time to Build the Exoplanet Telescope

Nehaveigur: Ice Cream for Lunch — and in case you didn’t know about earlier ice cream eating adventures, try the 2017 Man Loses 32 Pounds Eating Only Ice Cream for 100 Days

Reddit: r/obscurePDFs

“Rose Freistater … was an American schoolteacher who rose to prominence in the 1930s when she was denied a teacher’s license in New York for being overweight.” More detail here, specifically: 

in 1931, Rose stood five feet and two inches and weighed 182 pounds [BMI 33.3]. When she applied for her teaching license that year, she weighed thirty pounds more than the maximum weight allowed by the Board for her height. She was given six months to lose thirty pounds; when she lost only twenty in that time, she was rejected by the Board altogether.

Gassing Satartia: Carbon Dioxide Pipeline Linked To Mass Poisoning

I can smell “the flu” : r/RandomThoughts h/t Collin Lysford

ExFatLoss: Why I stopped Grounding. Good jokes overall but missed a chance to make a “you’re grounded” joke.

Speaking of which, while grounding as a practice may not be real, it is probably less crazy than it sounds:

Over the past decade, Robert has built a body of work that reveals the many ways insects and arachnids use and experience static. Ticks jump, spiders balloon, bees sense the negative charge of a flower recently visited by another positively charged bee. He even found that the charged relationship between air and insects goes both ways: Honeybee swarms shed so many negative charges that they alter the electrical gradient around them. Based on Robert’s estimates, the atmospheric charge resulting from a swarm of desert locusts rivals that of clouds and electrical storms.

James Bailey: Data Heroes

Organizations often do great work collecting data, but then share it in ways that are hard to access or understand, or require all users to repeat hours of cleaning to make the data usable. Sometimes a data hero comes along to share their own improved version that is cleaned and easier to access and understand. Here I share links to some of these “most-improved” datasets.

New preprint from economist Tyler Ransom: Are Vegetable Seed Oils Fueling the Obesity Epidemic?

Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass: The Martians and Their Schooling

Maxwell Tabarrok: Unions are Trusts

The only way to get stably higher union pay is through monopolization. Unions need to get most or all producers of labor in a market to act together and fix their prices at a high level. That way, the consumers of labor have no other option but to accept lower output and pay higher prices. 

This is a monopoly or trust in exactly the same way as when US Steel, Carnegie Steel, and Federal Steel all agree to set their prices high, forcing customers to pay more. If you think that goods sellers colluding to set prices is bad, then you should think that service sellers colluding to set prices is also bad.

…

Restrictions of commerce are fine when they benefit the needy and punish the greedy. Insofar as this is the case, we can do better to improve the lives of those who need it most than by supporting labor unions.

Venkatesh Rao: The New Systems of Survival

Collin Lysford: The Fractal Ratchet — Many interesting things in this piece, but one that’s unusual and distinctive: it’s often possible to make a strong *ordinal* argument (this thing is hotter/faster/less dangerous than the other thing) even when you can’t provide numerical measurements. This seems important because people often (mistakenly) assume that in the absence of precise numerical measurements, it’s not possible to make ordinal arguments. But in fact you need neither precision nor numbers!

You’ve probably heard this one, but apparently it’s not true. COW vs BEEF: Busting the Biggest Myth in Linguistic History.

“Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet.”

METREP: 16lbs of fat loss & 2.5 months later on the potato diet

Medieval Sourcebook: The Trial of Joan of Arc

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”).

Niko McCarty: Estimating the Size of a Single Molecule

I love this story because it shows, at least anecdotally, how deep scientific insights can emerge from the simplest of experiments. It’s a testament to the idea that you don’t always need sophisticated equipment to unlock the secrets of nature — sometimes, all it takes is a drop of oil and a bit of ingenuity.

Richard Ngo: Why I’m not a Bayesian

Where does this leave us? We’ve traded the crisp, mathematically elegant Bayesian formalism for fuzzy truth-values that, while intuitively compelling, we can’t define even in principle. But I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. Because it focuses on propositions which are each (almost entirely) true or false, Bayesianism is actively misleading in domains where reasoning well requires constructing and evaluating sophisticated models (i.e. most of them).

 Claire L. Evans: What’s a Brain?

Zen & the art of the Macintosh : discoveries on the path to computer enlightenment

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”).

Crawfish help reveal the impact of lithium pollution

The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes

You can’t send a person into space too fast, because they will turn to goo. But many other things can be sent to space fast without becoming goo. This is the premise behind Longshot Space, “​​a hypersonic launch startup” that will use big guns to send things that are not people to space. Longshot please hire us to write your marketing we promise we will use the word “goo” at least once a sentence.

Alice Maz – the xunzi as the basis of a metarational ruling ideology

Defender – Anatomy of an internet argument:

There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews. The reality I’m looking at here is that ~everyone on the internet is rational AND is arguing in good faith. If it doesn’t look that way, it’s because you’re speaking different languages.

Adam Mastroianni has announced the winners of his Blog Extravaganza, go read! We are especially fond of the first-place winner, We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon. And the second-place winner, The Best Antibiotic for Acne is Non-Prescription, “a real scientific report of a self-experiment” that “begins with a criminal confession”.

The Zombocom Problem 

Here’s a very happy replication of JD Stillwater’s 2012 “I Put a Toaster in the Dishwasher” experiment we featured in our previous links post. Click through for the results, but here are the methods:

It may be fine to put a toaster in a dishwasher, despite everyone with a shred of common sense “knowing” that’s a bad idea. I was skeptical, but I thought I’d try it since my toaster is very cheap, very old and very dirty. As I added the dishwasher tab and chose a cycle, I was praying that I wasn’t about to fall prey to a 12-year-old prank.

The Secret to Designing Mysterious Games

Many Languages, Many Colors

Henrik Karlsson – Becoming perceptive:

When Maslow showed his subjects paintings, people who struggled to self-actualize would typically label what they saw (“It is a Picasso”) whereas the self-actualized would describe the concrete details of the painting they had before them (“There is an interesting tension between the yellows and the blues here”).

NBC News – Scientists studying ‘Parkinson’s belt’ believe disease is linked to chemicals (h/t Adam Weis)

Dynomight – Nursing doubts: Is breastfeeding good?

Maxwell Tabarrok – How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction

1999 review of James Scott’s book, Seeing like a State

Unusual thread about math. Not sure of its accuracy but we’re interested in any argument based on the premise, “you’re a victim of a 2300 year old error in metaphysics”.

DefenderOfBasic: “one of the most popular tools I ever made was this thing to explain how JPEG images are created out of these mathematical patterns … made in a couple hours for a talk, didn’t even bother trying to style it/make it look good.” Despite this, it is good. Try the jpeg-sandbox here.

The “Free Choice” Dilemma

The idea of feeding minerals “free choice” to livestock came about by a need to decrease over-consumption of a liquid supplement containing phosphoric acid, protein, molasses, and other minerals. Upon investigation, it was found that the liquid supplement was being used heavily by the animal as a source of phosphorous. Consequently, we discovered if animals had access to a phosphorous source on a free choice basis, over-consumption of the liquid ceased. We then extended this concept to other vitamins and minerals: if the animal was able to select phosphorous on a free choice basis, perhaps calcium could be selected in the same manner – success!

The next item tested free choice was sodium (Na+), in the form of sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3). It was feared that salt (NaCl) was not a satisfactory source of Na+ because it is one-third Na+ and two-thirds chloride (Cl-), and chloride was already in excess in most rations. Again, we found great success in our method. In time, potassium, sulfur, silicon, magnesium, vitamins, and trace minerals were added to the list. Finally, there were 16 separate vitamins and minerals fed free choice.

Viking antibiotics rediscovered

Undetectable serum lithium concentrations after coadministration of liquid lithium citrate and apple juice: A case report

Our colleague in doing science online, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, asks: Please support this blog (with money)

Real hater behavior 

Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level”

Henrik Karlsson, Pseudonyms lets you practice agency

In his posthumously published book about pseudonyms, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard makes an interesting argument for pseudonyms. Kierkegaard says that he used pseudonyms because he wanted the reader to be uncertain about how much of what he was saying was something he believed (far from everything). He would add details that make you question the trustworthiness of the authors of his books—as in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes Silencio is talking about how to deal with despair, while, quite obviously, being in despair himself. This unreliability of the authors forces the reader to “stand alone” (staa alene) to use Kierkegaard’s phrase. As a reader, you can’t pretend that you are not responsible for what you believe—you can’t say, “Oh, but Kierkegaard said so.” Or, worse: “Everyone does that.” No. You are left alone with these strange and unreliable authors and you have to come to your own conclusions.

Listen to radio from all over the world on radio.garden

astronaut.io – “youtube videos that have never been seen before, that may never be seen again“ (h/t DefenderOfBasic)

Seeds of Science puts out The SoS Library, including a couple of pieces by your favorite slimes. 

Clearer Thinking: Can astrologers truly gain insights about people from entire astrological charts? 

I Put a Toaster in the Dishwasher (h/t Adam Mastroianni)

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).

Courts Are Beginning to Prevent the Use of Roadside Drug Tests. The exact false positive rate of drug tests remains unclear, but seems much too high, and is certainly greater than zero! 

The tests are small plastic pouches holding vials of chemicals. They’re cheap, roughly $2 apiece, and easy to use. Officers open the pouch and add the substance to be tested. The tests are designed to produce specific colors when mixed with drugs like heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine. But dozens of items, including foods and household cleaners, trigger similar reactions.

The Best Books on Personality Types

One of the first places to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator in the wider world was the Institution for Personality Research and Research (IPAR). It was housed at a fraternity house in Berkeley that had been purchased by a psychologist named Donald MacKinnon, the first person to buy the Myers Briggs Type Indicator from Isabel.

At IPAR, MacKinnon wanted to create what he called a ‘house party approach’ to testing. He’d bring people to live in this fraternity house for long weekends. He’d give them personality tests; he’d have them compete against each other in games; he’d put them in deliberately stressful situations. And he’d have psychology graduate students watching their behavior to see what they could discern about personality from this very strange, immersive testing experience. 

Speaking of personality measures: How accurate are popular personality test frameworks at predicting life outcomes? A detailed investigation

Twitter user DREW DANIEL @DDDrewDaniel “had a dream I was at a rave talking to a girl and she told me about a genre called ‘hit em’ that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds thank you dream girl”. Turns out this formula makes for pretty good tracks (and commentary, and reflections on the nature of twitter), add another entry to Wikipedia’s List of works based on dreams. Here are some favorites: 

• MAUD_IFY
• piesaac
• eckzoh
• jetskitosway2
• janeplne
• DMVUofficial
• ioansnake

Case Report: Took 500mg of Potassium and all my melancholy instantly transmuted into rage. What’s the limit on how much of this shit you can take???

Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record – You may have seen the videos where a chimp does amazingly well on a number task, suggesting that chimps have better working memory than humans. But this is probably not true. The chimp in the video does so well because he has had a huge amount of practice. When you give humans a similar amount of practice, they do about as well. A reminder to in general trust primatology findings less than you might otherwise.

Chimps can learn karate, though.

In one study of lithium in urine samples, urine lithium was positively associated with TSH, and high levels of TSH can be a sign of thyroid dysfunction. The authors conclude, “Exposure to lithium via drinking water and other environmental sources may affect thyroid function, consistent with known side effects of medical treatment with lithium.” Jandrade0112 on twitter says, 

to my eyeballing this looks like thyroid inhibiting effects don’t really kick in until urinary excretion > 5 mg/L, which is roughly 5 mg daily lithium intake

r/Biohackers claims about baking soda

He secretly changed this freeway sign, helped millions of drivers. Top YouTube comment: 

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.

Ellen Airhart ran fireproof envelopes through a charcoal grill to test how well they protect paper. Verdict: they don’t work at all. Not a single one, even though they were tested at only about 400 °F,  less than a quarter of the minimum temperature the envelopes were certified for.

How giant ‘water batteries’ could make green power reliable

China rocked by cooking oil contamination scandal (h/t RedTailTabby on twitter)

The Chinese government says it will investigate allegations that fuel tankers have been used to transport cooking oil after carrying toxic chemicals without being cleaned properly between loads. … Transporting cooking oil in contaminated fuel trucks was said to have been so widespread it was considered an “open secret” in the industry, according to one driver quoted by the newspaper.

Kamala Holding Vinyls

Disappearing polymorph 

The original medication was manufactured in the form of semisolid gel capsules, based on the only known crystal form of the drug (“Form I”). In 1998, however, a second crystal form (“Form Il”) was unexpectedly discovered. It had significantly lower solubility and was not medically effective. 

Form Il was of sufficiently lower energy that it became impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form Il was introduced, even indirectly. Scientists who had been exposed to Form Il in the past seemingly contaminated entire manufacturing plants by their presence, probably because they carried over microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph.

KineStop is an app that draws an artificial horizon on your phone or tablet to keep you from getting motion sick while reading in the car. Zed (@zmkzmkz) on twitter says, “it looks silly but trust me it’s magic”

Amateur Mathematicians Find Fifth ‘Busy Beaver’ Turing Machine

I burn 4,600kcal/day being sedentary – ExFatLoss finds weird results using doubly-labeled water. Definitely keep this one in mind when you see other claims based on methods using doubly-labeled water (e.g. this one that has been going around recently).

Doubly-labeled water is allegedly the Gold Standard ™ test for energy expenditure. It’s what Herman Pontzer and John Speakman have built careers on. It’s apparently so precise it’s used to calibrate all the other tests, basically gospel. So what gives?

Real Chaos, Today!

The first, obvious issue [with RCTs] is that external validity is weak: there’s no real way to verify whether a study generalizes besides its application. This comes from a series of issues, primarily that transporting the results is mostly done based on “faith”. Also, the internal validity of the study is usually in question too: basically, the results for the population are too heterogenous to be both precise (i.e. capturing properly the value of the effect) without being unbiased (affected by “noise”, so to say). And even when the average effect of a treatment is correctly identified, it is never guaranteed that the average effect is the most relevant statistic.

We enjoy Matt Reynolds’ writing (especially this piece on ORS), so it was very nice to receive a shout-out in his new piece for WIRED: Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable—but You’re Eating Them Wrong

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.” 

Everyone please welcome Matt Quinn to the online science effort to cure obesity. See for example his response to a response to A Chemical Hunger and his Potassium Maxxing – the results. 

10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years: “Technological progress is not a mystical force that delivers the most important [technologies] first. Some problems are hard to solve, and won’t make you much money even if you succeed, and don’t get talked about on the news. What people choose to work on determines what new technologies are made. The 10 technologies above are worth working on.” We really love this one!

Jalapeños really are getting less spicy

Thermobolic on twitter reports “total failure” on a Personal Fat Loss / Coconut Oil Maxxing Experiment. We’re glad to see this report, null results are also important!

Friend-of-the-blog Uri Bram writes for the Atlantic: The Cure for Hiccups Exists. Among other things, it’s an interesting account of the interplay between reddit research and mainstream medical science.

Moctezuma III on twitter: “i love wikipedia, because you can have a random thought like ‘when was pocky invented’ and then learn that the companies president was kidnapped in 1984 by a criminal that called themselves ‘The Monster with 21 Faces’ and who was never caught.”

Streamer Perrikaryal claims to be able to play (and win) games using a non-invasive brain-computer interface (plus eyetracking), with a recent claim of beating the first Shadow of the Erdtree boss without touching a controller. (See also: “a clip of what mental controls I use and how I get around”). Big if true but unfortunately, easily faked by having someone else holding the controller off-camera, or any number of other methods. On the other hand, you could certainly try to replicate it at home. 

Even better new prosthetics?

Empirical tubetti: A Better Way To Cook Pasta? Doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of “see how many pasta rules we can break”, but it’s a nice start. 

The Time magazine article, “Science: Fudging Data for Fun and Profit” gives an interesting look at the state of science fraud and institutional confidence back in December 1981.

A recent paper, Bilateral gene therapy in children with autosomal recessive deafness, reports using gene therapy to treat hereditary deafness in five children. According to the paper, gene therapy worked: 

All patients had bilateral hearing restoration. The average auditory brainstem response threshold in the right (left) ear was >95 dB (>95 dB) in all patients at baseline, and the average auditory brainstem response threshold in the right (left) ear was restored to 58 dB (58 dB) in patient 1, 75 dB (85 dB) in patient 2, 55 dB (50 dB) in patient 3 at 26 weeks, and 75 dB (78 dB) in patient 4 and 63 dB (63 dB) in patient 5 at 13 weeks. The speech perception and the capability of sound source localization were restored in all five patients.

The Whitworth Three Plates Method

Origins of the Lab Mouse — the author says, “My new essay for Asimov Press is ostensibly about the unlikely origin story of the lab mouse. But it’s actually about the role of chance in scientific discovery, and how random contingencies can lead to technological lock-in.” For example, “In one case, a gene that appeared to be toxic to the liver when using one substrain of black 6 as a control seemed to instead protect liver function when a different substrain was used.” If this is true, how can we possibly expect any mouse research to generalize to humans? In fact, how can we expect something true for some humans to be true for any other humans? To be honest, a more likely explanation is that the described result is simply not true, and is actually the result of p-hacking or other research malpractice. In general this is a good background piece on specifically why not to take mouse research too seriously.

The compound bow combines two ancient inventions, the bow and the pulley. But it wasn’t until 1967, “after six years of development in the garage of its inventor in Missouri, a strange looking device, described as a ‘compound’ bow was born.” ZyMazza on twitter expounds, “A brilliant innovation hidden to humanity for like 4000ish years. What two things are waiting to be combined today?” 

DefenderOfBasic on twitter, “sick & tired of not being able to share links to my articles on twitter. having to share a screenshot and say ‘link in bio’ like a goddamn porn bot” decided “enough is enough” and “made a little tool to circumvent this stupid censorship”. May be helpful for those of you on both twitter and substack. 

Sensitivity to visual features in inattentional blindness:

Naïve observers fail to report clearly visible stimuli when their attention is otherwise engaged—famously even missing a gorilla parading before their eyes (Simons & Chabris, 1999). This phenomenon and the research programs it has motivated carry tremendous theoretical significance … However, these and other implications critically rest on a notoriously biased measure: asking participants whether they noticed anything unusual (and interpreting negative answers as reflecting a complete lack of visual awareness). Here, in the largest ever set of IB studies, we show that inattentionally blind participants can successfully report the location, color and shape of the stimuli they deny noticing.

Best summation of how we feel about semaglutide:

Adam Mastroianni announces The Summer 2024 Blog Post Competition, Extravaganza, and Jamboree, complete with cash prizes:

I want to prime the pump, discover some new writers, and hopefully help them reach more people. It can be a grueling slog when you’re just a lil weirdo starting out. Good stuff does tend to spread on the internet, but it has to reach a certain critical mass of attention first. I got a couple key boosts early on that helped me keep going, so I’d like to do the same for the next generation.

Sea Urchins Love Sporting Cowboy and Viking Hats. Also, see here for the original thread on reef2reef.com

Game Boy Camera Gallery: Mystery Show by Scratching Post Studio

Predictions for 2050 are already coming in! First off, our prediction “Assistive Technology Meets in the Middle” is already partially fulfilled by This Next-Gen Hiking Tech. It’s even available for purchase, assuming the Kickstarter goes through. And our prediction “Everything Will be on Video” is once more fulfilled by the recent and stunning meteor in Portugal (video compilation, dashcam video, awesome selfie video).

Baryonic Musings: It’s Potato Time Again! – Interesting account of a potato diet case study. The author saw a lot of previous success with the potato diet, saying, “I last tried the potato diet in September 2022 and it worked great, losing ~23 pounds in 21 days. Here I go again.” But this attempt had to be stopped early. Despite losing 0.9 lbs/day, the author had to stop after only 8 days. “Well, it was working, but something’s a bit different this time. I’m constantly hungry.” Post includes some speculation as to why.

How 3M Execs Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe

Exposure of U.S. adults to microplastics from commonly-consumed proteins — We’re still skeptical of microplastics causing obesity, but here is this paper just in case. (h/t Krinn)

My hour of memoryless lucidity, and the sequel Some Experiments I’d Like Someone To Try With An Amnestic, all from LessWrong.

‘Shut up and calculate’: how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality

Clearer Thinking’s Astrology Challenge:

A scientific test of astrological skill that any astrologer in the world can take. We developed it by working closely with astrologers who generously volunteered their time to help. It consists of 12 multiple-choice questions. For each, you’ll presented with tons of information about a real person, as well as 5 astrological charts, and your goal is to say which of the 5 natal charts is that person’s real chart (the other 4 charts are random and have nothing to do with that person). If you’re the first to get at least 11 out of 12 multiple choice questions correct (among the first 200 challengers), then you win a $1000 prize! Participation is completely secret, so nobody will know you participated unless you choose to announce it. After the challenge closes, we’ll tell you how many questions you got right on the test, as well as whether you won.

…

We previously ran a test of sun sign astrology (i.e., the idea that whether you’re a Pisces, Aries, etc., impacts your life) and found that sun signs were not able to predict any of the 37 life outcomes that we tested. Although sun sign astrology is extremely popular (about 1 in 3 Americans at least somewhat believe in it), astrologers rightly pointed out that the study was not a test of astrology as most astrologers practice it since they use much more complex methods involving full astrological charts. This inspired the development of this test, which is based on whole charts.

… If astrology works, then that calls for a revolution in our scientific understanding of how the universe operates since modern physics provides no mechanism that could explain astrology. In such an instance, it would also teach us something important about scientific bias and what scientists miss. On the other hand, if astrology doesn’t work at all, I also think that is very important because astrology is extremely widely believed. Literally millions of people use it to guide their understanding of their lives, character, and future. If it doesn’t work, they’d be better off seeking other sources of understanding and insight.

Brine thoughts: ​​the unspoken, instinctive need for a sweet-tangy-salty beverage in the heat, the combination of sugar, savory, and acid…the American yearns for kala khatta but they do not know it…

Wounded orangutan seen using plant as medicine – The coverage is dumb but the observation is fascinating if true.

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907):

Visitors — and their pets — could get alligator carriage rides or watch them rocket down slides; toddlers could have their picture taken with a crowd of hatchlings and even bring one home at the end of the day. 

…

The lack of regulations for the safety of captive animals, staff, or visitors allowed for a level of casual proximity with adult alligators that would be unthinkable today. One photo shows a group of young women enjoying a half-submerged picnic in a park enclosure complete with what the caption claims to be a birthday cake for one of the reptiles. A keeper stands to one side, club in hand, to make sure nothing goes awry. 

@AndyJScott “Was wondering if the whole ‘sugar causes cavities’ thing has good data behind it and guess what”

“I would like to thank the Idaho Potato Commission for assembling a categorized database of 1,700 potato recipes from around the world. I consult it frequently and it has become my favorite potato resource.” And here it is.

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.”

In 1995 New Mexico’s state senate proposed an amendment that would have required psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony on a defendant’s competency. Our friend Tim says, “They were cowards to not adopt it.”

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.

@sonikudzu on twitter goes after the claim that most of the nutrition in a potato is in its skin.

In the context of horse racing, a milkshake is a combination administered to a horse, pre-race, intended to cause metabolic alkalosis of the blood. In theory this is a performance enhancer. Claims:

Nobel Laureate in Medicine Barry Marshall, who showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers, had this experience early in his career:  

In 1982 Marshall and Warren obtained funding for one year of research. The first 30 out of 100 samples showed no support for their hypothesis. However, it was discovered that the lab technicians had been throwing out the cultures after two days. This was standard practice for throat swabs where other organisms in the mouth rendered cultures unusable after two days. Due to other hospital work, the lab technicians did not have time to immediately throw out the 31st test on the second day, and so it stayed from Thursday through to the following Monday. In that sample, they discovered the presence of H. pylori. They later found out that H. pylori grows more slowly than the conventional two days required by other mucosal bacteria, and that stomach cultures were not contaminated by other organisms.

In 1983 they submitted their findings thus far to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, but the reviewers turned their paper down, rating it in the bottom 10% of those they received that year.

Friend of the blog Dynomight writes a review of the theory that seed oils are the root cause of obesity and/or other western diseases. He concludes: 

A weak version of seed oil theory is that seed oils are highly processed, so why not use cold-pressed olive oil instead? If that’s the theory, fine. In fact, this is mostly what I do myself. I figure it might be useless, but it’s unlikely to be harmful, and olive oil is delicious.

…

But seed oil theorists mostly seem to push a much stronger theory: We know that seed oils are the cause of Western disease.

I’ll just be honest. I think this view is completely indefensible. I feel embarrassed when I see people promoting it. You’re sure? How? I don’t see any way to get to this conclusion other than heavily filtering the evidence—ignoring the flaws in everything that supports a predetermined view while scrambling to find flaws in everything that contradicts it.

potassium-weight-loss.org — Alex Chernavsky conducts a N=1 study of potassium supplementation taking ~8000 mg of potassium a day for two months, loses about 4.2 lbs: 

We Used To Eat A Lot More Without Becoming Obese by ​​Sven Schnieders:

The mainstream theory regarding the obesity crisis is that people consume excessive calories and move insufficiently – “calories in, calories out.” Alternative nutritional perspectives, such as Keto and Veganism, challenge this narrative only to some extent. Keto proponents attribute obesity primarily to excessive carbohydrate intake, while vegan advocates point to excessive meat consumption. Despite divergences on the impact of specific food groups, there is a near-universal consensus on the overconsumption of sugar in modern diets.

A problem with all of these theories is that historically we used to eat a lot more – including a lot more carbs or sugar.

Unraveling the Mystery of San Francisco 7-Eleven Stores Selling Onigiri With the Mayor’s Face on Them. This was not a real program by the city of San Francisco — in fact, it was a project by Danielle Baskin to manifest 7-11 onigiri in America. Excellent scheme, we hope it works.

Victorians loved redwood trees and decided to plant them all over the UK. In fact, they planted so many that there are now more redwoods in the UK than in America. “The Victorians were so impressed that they brought seeds and seedlings from the US in such large numbers that there are now approximately 500,000 in Britain … [while] California has about 80,000.” Like most trees, redwoods start out small. But they do not end up small. At their full potential they would be about three times taller than any other species in the UK, and they have recently started to outgrow the surrounding native trees. 

Seeds of Science — Doing the Science Ourselves

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

There is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

…

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. 

When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

(Warning: Spiders) @abcdentminded: “Found this guy on youtube who intentionally gets bitten by black widows and brown recluses to prove that spiders are innocent and all necrotic wounds are just misdiagnoses or infections. He holds them against his skin to get several-second bites that deliver >x3 the normal venom load. I honestly believe him at this point.” Wild if true; obvious alternative explanations include 1) he’s built up some kind of an immunity, or 2) people’s bodies are different enough that some people can shrug off venomous spider bites and other people fucking die. The channel is Jack’s World of Wildlife, and is obviously not for the faint of heart.

Why are Americans getting shorter? Very strange, and holds true even among native born white Americans who are not seniors. Also notable, this is yet another thing that seems to influence women more than men:

Blogger @anabology starts longestlevers.com, a collection of “static protocols for dynamic lives”. See for example the page on the honey diet.

I wanted a diet where I could eat as much as I possibly could, as a fairly lean individual already, and still lose weight. This is my attempt at that. It seemed to work — eating 1 lb of honey + 1/2 pound of dates a day, I lost 10 lbs in a month or so, and my bloodwork just got better.

Benefits I experienced: – I ate as much as I could and still lost weight. – My cortisol and estrogen both went down. My DHEA went up. Blood biomarkers generally looked better. – Never had so few migraines. – Good constant energy and mental clarity. 

Drawbacks: – Honey was not very tasty. If I did it again, I’d diversify with more simple sugary fruits. – Near the end, I was committed on the “1 lb of honey a day” thing, and some days I had a lower appetite due to lack of sleep from work. I still forced myself to eat all the honey, but if I did it again, I would never force myself to eat when I’m not hungry. Just not worth it from the insulin perspective.

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.”

Ars Technica — Surprising link found between niacin and risk of heart attack and stroke

Object permanence in newborn chicks is robust against opposing evidence:

Newborn animals have advanced perceptual skills at birth, but the nature of this initial knowledge is unknown. Is initial knowledge flexible, continuously adapting to the statistics of experience? Or can initial knowledge be rigid and robust to change, even in the face of opposing evidence? We address this question through controlled-rearing experiments on newborn chicks. First, we reared chicks in an impoverished virtual world, where objects never occluded one another, and found that chicks still succeed on object permanence tasks. Second, we reared chicks in a virtual world in which objects teleported from one location to another while out of view: an unnatural event that violates the continuity of object motion. Despite seeing thousands of these violations of object permanence, and not a single non-violation, the chicks behaved as if object permanence were true, exhibiting the same behavior as chicks reared with natural object permanence events. We conclude that object permanence develops prenatally and is robust to change from opposing evidence.

Friend of the blog ExFatLoss beats obesity:

In honor of this accomplishment, we present the Wikimedia chart of milk products and production relationships, including butter. Beware, the mark of the British is present: “soured cream”.

Adam Mastroianni: Declining trust in Zeus is a technology

To us, coin flips are random (“Heads: I go first. Tails: you go first.”). But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all—they reveal the will of the gods (“Heads: Zeus wants me to go first. Tails: Zeus wants you to go first”). In the Bible, for instance, people are always casting lots to figure out what God wants them to do: which goat to kill, who should get each tract of land, when to start a genocide, etc. 

This is, of course, a big problem for running RCTs. If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you can’t use it to produce two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. You can only run a ZCT—a Zeus controlled trial.

Also Adam Mastroianni: “I’m running a prototype Science House this summer! It’s a great opportunity for anyone looking to do research outside academia. No application, just do some science, post it on the internet, and send me the link.” Full details for the science house can be found here.

Redditor u/ParadoxicallySweet asks r/NoStupidQuestions, “Why do my husband and I experience severe flatulence after visiting his parents?” Theories quickly settle on the idea that there might be something in the in-laws’ water. Most recent update is that their water is unusually high pH and unusually hard. Keep an eye on this one!

you need to see this one to understand it

Malcolm Ocean: ​​Towardsness & Awayness Motivation are fundamentally asymmetric. Psychology used to make a big deal about the difference between “approach” and “avoid”, this kind of calls back to that idea.

Hyperstimuli are Understimulating 

​​“It’s hilarious that one of the first things the allies did with the Nuremberg defendants was give them IQ tests. Herr Goering, please rotate this rhombus on its diagonal axis.” Claimed scores and other documentation are here.

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’.”

“State of nuclear disarmament today: it is actually likely that the easiest path is to build a 1,000 km circumference accelerator with the power requirements of Great Britain that shoots neutrino beams through the earth to make nuclear bombs lightly explode, making them useless.” Paper is here. On the one hand this seems good in terms of preventing nuclear annihilation. On the other hand, no mutually assured destruction might mean a return to the bad old days of lots of regional wars and occasional wars between the superpowers.  

Lies, Damned Lies, and Manometer Readings

Niko McCarty: “Every Sunday, I am going to try and post a short ‘screenshot essay.’ These are short essays that present ideas. They are meant to be engaging and opinionated. I hope that you will read them. I hope they will trigger more healthy discussions.” We like this. Aside from memes, we feel that images are vastly underrated. Here’s the first one: