The for-profit system of academic journal publishing was created by Robert Maxwell, who also happens to be Ghislaine Maxwell’s dad. Along with other tidbits, the linked article does a good job highlighting the ways in which scientific publishing is a principal-agent problem:

You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. … then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.

Andrew Gelman writes, “I’m curious what your readers would think of my post on Seth and his diet which I used to believe in but no more.”

Soothing Sounds for Baby

More arguments on the FDA from Maxwell Tabarrok: Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA and Surgery Works Well Without The FDA.

Ada Palmer: Tools for Thinking About Censorship

If we believe that the purpose of the Inquisition trying Galileo was to silence Galileo, it absolutely failed, it made him much, much more famous, and they knew it would.  If you want to silence Galileo in 1600 you don’t need a trial, you just hire an assassin and you kill him, this is Renaissance Italy, the Church does this all the time.  The purpose of the Galileo trial was to scare Descartes into retracting his then-about-to-be-published synthesis, which—on hearing about the trial—he took back from the publisher and revised to be much more orthodox.  Descartes and thousands of other major thinkers of the time wrote differently, spoke differently, chose different projects, and passed different ideas on to the next century because they self-censored after the Galileo trial—an event whose burden in money and manpower for the Inquisition was minute compared to how hard it would have been for them to get at all those scientists.

How to be More Agentic

That’s some good illegalism: Activists vow to keep installing guerrilla benches at East Bay bus stops (h/t ACX)

Some potato riffs thoughts from Lee S. Pubb: Superstarch Me, Part 2

Epistemic Hell – Roger’s Bacon

Announcing the SoS Research Collective:

We (the founding gardeners Roger, Dario, and Sergey) have always conceived of Seeds of Science as a kind of research project, with the journal serving as the first of several “experiments”. You could think of our research questions as the following: 

(1) Can people outside of academia make valuable contributions if given the proper platform and support?

(2) Can we create new organizational structures that promote greater creativity and diversity of thought in science?

Nearly 2.5 years after we “planted” our first seed of science, we have some preliminary answers. 

(1) Yes.

(2) Yes.

More stove innovation: Our First Step Towards the Home of the Future

Argument: You Don’t Need Health Insurance

Claims: “The theory of natural selection was first laid out before Darwin by a shipbuilder worried that logging was selecting for scrubby and crooked trees (as apparently happened in China?)”

Potato riffs signups are STILL open! Join the fun now, or start next year — wait that’s soon! :O 

Speaking of, ExFatLoss wrote a review of the concept of riff studies, calling them “the quicksort of science”.

Another milestone in internet science: the first community trial (that we’re aware of) run by someone other than us! This is a study of the “the glass noodle diet”, a “low-fat, low-BCAA diet proposed by Brad Marshall”. Small sample size for starters but interesting results even so: 

Of the 5 people who reported their results, weight loss are, respectively, -14 lbs, -5.5 lbs, +1 lbs, -9 lbs and -9 lbs. This is actually impressive, I just wish I wasn’t the one at +1 lbs!

So if we’re discounting the people who didn’t respond from the analysis, average weight loss is 7.3 lbs, median 9 lbs, with a 80% success rate. The median of 9 lbs loss is very close to the result of the potato diet, which is an interesting “coincidence”.

A National Evil, the story of the outrageous rates of goiter in Switzerland and how they led to the discovery of iodine fortification. As usual, it rhymes with scurvy and oral rehydration therapy. This comes courtesy of @mictter, who says, “The initial trials remind me of @mold_time and of @a_m_mastroianni calls for reform in the way we are doing science now.” We think that refers to the bit where:

Hunziker… began to devise a new kind of experiment: in an early version of a dose-response trial, he prepared table salt iodised at five different concentrations to give to five families in a goitre area for five months. He worked alone, mixing close to 100 kg of salt with his snow shovel, turning it over until he was sure the potassium iodide was evenly spread. Then, loading up his mule, he set out for Grächen, a remote village even by the standards of upper Valais.

MonadGPT is a chatbot trained on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French, and Latin, and is (in theory) very scientifically literate — up to the 17th century. MetaFilter glosses this as, “O brave new world, that has such chatbots in’t”. When we asked it what causes goiter, this was its reply:

Goitre, according to Galen, proceeds from a humour that is generated in the liver, and which, being conveyed into the blood, and thence diffused over the whole body, lodges in the throat, where it occasions a swelling: And the reason why it sometimes happens, that one person has a goitre, and another not, is, because some have more humour than others: But though this opinion is generally received, yet the learned Chyrynianus, who was a physician of the greatest skill, maintains the contrary, affirming that goitres are not caused by an excess of humours, but rather by a deficiency. He relates, that he cured one man of a goitre, who had had it twenty years, and that, by giving him a sufficient quantity of food, and regulating his diet. However, it is certain, that a deficiency of the vital spirits, or animal spirits, is no less dangerous than an excess of them; for these spirits are the principal agents in the circulation of the blood, and in the nourishment of the parts.

Erika’s quick-start guide to research nonprofits — What it says on the tin. Want to do research on your own, without having to debase yourself for academia? Erika’s guide has you covered.

The B-69s are, at least according to their bandcamp page, “the world’s best band that covers modern pop songs in the style of the B-52s.” They have covers of all your favorite hits — Hey Ya, Chop Suey!, All Star, even Mr. Brightside. It’s traumatic.

UK Potato Statistics (h/t @wighthatmike)

Scientists Pinpoint Cause of Severe Morning Sickness. The story is good news, but as always it is accompanied by horrifying stories of the way doctors treat women:

Perhaps because nausea and vomiting are so common in pregnancy, doctors often overlook hyperemesis, dismissing its severe symptoms as psychological, even though it is the leading cause of hospitalization during early pregnancy … During her second pregnancy, in 1999, Dr. Fejzo was unable to eat or drink without vomiting. She rapidly lost weight, becoming too weak to stand or walk. Her doctor was dismissive, suggesting she was exaggerating her symptoms to get attention. She was eventually hospitalized, and miscarried at 15 weeks.

This perfectly captures our working relationship. No, we will not elaborate: 

One of my mother’s earliest memories is of standing in her crib at the age of about 2, yanking on her 11-year-old brother’s hair. This brother, her only sibling, was none other than Richard Feynman, destined to become one of the greatest theoretical physicists of his generation: enfant terrible of the Manhattan Project, pioneer of quantum electrodynamics, father of nanotechnology, winner of the Nobel Prize, and so on. At the time, he was training his sister to solve simple math problems and rewarding each correct answer by letting her tug on his hair while he made faces.

Back from the brink: sand-swimming golden mole, feared extinct, rediscovered after 86 years. “The De Winton’s golden mole (Cryptochloris wintoni), previously feared extinct, lives in underground burrows and had not been seen since 1937. It gets its ‘golden’ name from oily secretions that lubricate its fur so it can ‘swim’ through sand dunes. … The mole has now been rediscovered 86 years after its last sighting, thanks to a two-year search by conservationists and a border collie dog called Jessie, who was trained to sniff out golden moles.” How did they train the dog to sniff out these moles if the moles hadn’t been seen since 1937? Also, how do we get the dog’s job? 

Potato riffs signups are still open! Join the fun now, or check again in 2024 — we’ll wait. 😉  

Speaking of potatoes, Alistair Kitchen has written a piece about the potato diet and the long conversation we had last January, check it out! In particular we would like to thank him for doing a good job communicating our sense of humor.

Speaking of weird diets, Lee S. Pubb (winner of the Mysteries Contest) has started a blog, and the inaugural post is Toward a unified theory of weird internet diets, the first “weird internet diets” literature review. We would add Krinn’s success with potassium to his list but otherwise this is a very nice review.

ex_choc_truffle_2000 review: lost 10.7lbs in 14 days — He Can’t Keep Getting Away With This!

Lucent announces a contest with large cash prizes for anyone who can successfully model his meticulously collected weight-related health data. “The massive longitudinal dataset contains dozens or hundreds of overlapping micro experiments (months of keto, weekend fasts, low protein, high fiber, potatoes, waves of monotonous meals) that taken together exceed the statistical significance of weeks spent in a lab testing individual hypotheses. … If the answer to obesity requires a complex overlap or sequence of conditions, it may be hidden within and first discovered through data mining rather than invented whole cloth by a brilliant hypothesizer. You’d be hard pressed to find more or better data to mine. … It looks more like my set point moves up or down only when some conditions are met, and I’d like to find the control system at work.” Have at!

N1.tools — “Conduct simple randomised N-of-1 studies to understand what works for you!”

www.homebrew.bio — “The Homebrew Biology Club (HBC) is an experimental, digital community that unites builders in biology. It is modeled on Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club.”

Speedrunning a curly hair journey | or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Hair — a N=1 haircare study of “a week or so of trialing everything until something sticks”. May contain important lessons for using the “trialing everything until something sticks” approach to solve other problems. Also she has the right attitude. “You can buy commercial clarifying shampoo… but I don’t want to.”

Using Anki with Babies / Toddlers — Redditor describes his success using spaced repetition to teach his kids to read, write, and do math considerably ahead of schedule. Also taught them Spanish, Hebrew, and logic. Honestly not that surprising given what we know about this historical success of aristocratic tutoring, though maybe the technology will help make it more accessible. (h/t Prigoose on twitter)

The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure (WIRED) — A great example of everyone “knowing” the cause of a problem and implementing significant programs to fight it, when the actual cause was something totally different. 

When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job — Ignore the weird title. We enjoyed this interview of Andrew Wylie, in large part because of how well he handled the interviewer. Also his personal philosophy. “I thought, well, I wonder if you can build a business based exclusively on what you want to read. That led me to understand, I think correctly, that best sellers were overvalued and works that endured forever were undervalued.”

The dimensionality of color vision in carriers of anomalous trichromacy — Claims: “Some 12% of women are carriers of the mild, X-linked forms of color vision deficiencies called ‘anomalous trichromacy.’ Owing to random X chromosome inactivation, their retinae must contain four classes of cone rather than the normal three; and it has previously been speculated that these female carriers might be tetrachromatic, capable of discriminating spectral stimuli that are indistinguishable to the normal trichromat. … Our results suggest that most carriers of color anomaly do not exhibit four-dimensional color vision, and so we believe that anomalous trichromacy is unlikely to be maintained by an advantage to the carriers in discriminating colors. However, 1 of 24 obligate carriers of deuteranomaly exhibited tetrachromatic behavior on all our tests; this participant has three well-separated cone photopigments in the long-wave spectral region in addition to her short-wave cone. We assess the likelihood that behavioral tetrachromacy exists in the human population.”

CuoreDiVitro tries a version of the potato diet and writes about it on Lesswrong — My Effortless Weightloss Story: A Quick Runthrough:

Figure 3 is the plot of my BMI for the first 4 months or so. The rising trend at the end is the Christmas holiday season. As you can see, there are a few plateaus (circled) but generally speaking, my weight just kept decreasing almost linearly until I fell below a BMI of 25. 

This was extremely surprising for me. I had always thought that losing weight was supposed to be very difficult and require a lot of willpower and effort. This was nothing of the sort, it was the easiest thing ever. It only required me eating exactly as I used to before but replacing one meal per day with a meal of “just” potatoes (on average, I only did it when it was convenient for me, some days I took two meals of potatoes if it was convenient, others none if it didn’t fit my plans, I still ate three meals a day, the other two meals being exactly the same type of meals I used to eat before the start of this experiment) which I salted with, on average, 2 mL of KCl (I took on average 2mL of KCl per day, sometimes with potatoes, sometimes with something else, some days I took no potatoes but still had KCl some days I had potatoes but no KCl). I also allowed myself to put butter, and spices, and hot sauce, and anything else I wished to add flavour. The only thing I tried not to add to my potatoes is NaCl (normal table salt). 

In Defense of the Rat:

When it comes to rats winning your heart, let me not hold back: rats can learn to play hide-and-seek with humans. They will do so for no other reward than tickles and fun. And they will laugh.

John Cleese on playfulness

Mindblowing dissertations (h/t Krinn)

​We’ve often wondered if it’s legal for state and local governments to issue their own currency. (In part because if Jane Jacobs is right, city regions might benefit from controlling their own fiscal policy.) We still wonder, and this project may help us find out: “The Current, an alternative currency recognized by the IRS that can only be used within the Hudson Valley at member businesses. By using the Current, we ensure that our money stays local and is used to strengthen businesses in our community.” Does this work? Is it backed by something, or is this a fiat currency? Is it actually legal? We don’t know, but we’re curious to hear more. 

Every Body Goes Haywire:

Although migraine symptoms have been described since antiquity, doctors still struggle to understand their cause. For much of the early 20th century, migraine was thought to be a vascular condition, something that could be treated by restricting blood vessels. Now, most neurologists argue that migraine is a disorder of the trigeminal nerve system, where overactive cells in the face and head respond to benign input (light, sound, smell) by releasing chemicals that transmit pain. But doctors still can’t offer reliable relief.

The best treatment available is prevention, so my doctor tells me about possible triggers—stress, menstruation, sleeping too much, sleeping too little—so that I can do my best to change my behavior. Beyond that, treatment is a process of trial and error.

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student. “Casey found the pattern by staring at the segmented CT scans for hours on end. This was a major and surprising discovery.” The word is ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ (Porphyras) and means “purple”. Also see this related twitter thread.

You may have heard that Katalin Karikó won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine this month (along with Drew Weissman) for the development of mRNA technology leading to the recent COVID vaccines. There’s lots to read about her, but we particularly liked this 2021 profile from Glamour Magazine.

Gatorade is good. But there may be a secret, even better Gatorade, kept from us by the Quaker Oats Company:

Gatorade’s inventors went on to develop new sports drinks. Gatorade’s owners sued to acquire rights to these new products, but they never made them available publicly. 

First, Shires and Cade developed Go!, a drink that, unlike Gatorade, contained protein to stimulate muscular recovery. Stokley-Van Camp paid “a fee to have the exclusive rights for some period of time, but they never did develop it”.

In 1989, Dr. Cade created a new sports drink that he claimed was more effective than Gatorade. The new product was called TQ2, shorthand for Thirst Quencher 2. The patent application read:

“The invention described here is a novel fluid composition which surprisingly and advantageously maintains blood volume at levels well above those observed in the absence of fluids or even with Gatorade.”

In an experiment with cyclists, Cade found that TQ2 allowed athletes to endure for 30% longer than Gatorade.

Cade pitched the TQ2 product to Pepsi and other beverage companies. Meanwhile, Gatorade’s owner Quaker sued Cade. After years of legal proceedings, Cade was forced to sell TQ2 to Quaker in 1993. Quaker “bagged” TQ2, never releasing it to the public. Gatorade claimed that its research found that TQ2 was not an improvement over the original Gatorade formula. Cade, on the other hand, continued to stand by his product. He accused Quaker and Gatorade of stifling the publication of the research behind TQ2.

The Truth about College Costs — College sticker prices keep going up. But this analysis argues that in practice, colleges give out so many “scholarships” (not real money, just discounts) that students are paying less for college today than they did in 2004. Most private colleges “discount their published tuition by 60% or more for virtually every student.”

ExFatLoss publishes a summary of the ex150 trial results. “Just like the proverbial dog chasing an automobile, I realized that I didn’t know what to do next. When I first asked for volunteers to try ex150, I was worried: what if this crazy cream diet doesn’t work for anyone else? What if it only works for me? Spoiler alert: it seems to work for nearly everybody. Young and old, men and women, obese to normal weight, very active to lazy.” We’d quibble a little: it worked for nearly everyone, but also 10 out of 10 participants had previous experience with low-carb/keto/carnivore. It’s not clear if it would work for the average person. Even so, a great start and an interesting finding. We hope to see ExFatLoss continue his research and would be interested to see others replicate this result! 

Luck based medicine: angry eldritch sugar gods edition — an n=1 self-experiment, concluding among other things that “1-2 pounds of watermelon/day kills my desire for processed desserts, but it takes several weeks to kick in.” The author also says, “metabolism is highly individual and who knows how much of this applies to anyone else.” And we agree. We will need hundreds or thousands of people doing n=1 studies like this in order to crack nutrition. You go back and look at 19th century astronomy, there were scores of astronomers tracking each new comet and asteroid. A 21st century nutrition science will rely on similarly broad participation. Nutrition may well be more confusing, and maybe more complicated, than the heavens. Fortunately it is easier to eat lots of watermelon than to set up an astronomical observatory.

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say — they also like youtube.

Cleopatra (1917) is a lost film starring early sex symbol Theda Bara, the original “vamp”. All known copies were lost in a 1937 studio fire, and only tiny fragments remained. Until this month when someone found a fragment included with a toy film projector listed on eBay, and uploaded 41 seconds of footage to YouTube.

Unclear if it’s promising or not, but it’s an exciting idea: Gene-Engineered Mouth Bacteria

The term “go ham” is an acronym. As if that’s not bad enough, “Pakistan” is also an acronym. 

The song “Frank Mills” from the musical Hair was inspired by real Lost and Found submissions to Rave Magazine in 1966, and here they are: 

Creator of comic series Fables releases the series IP to the public domain after clash with DC over video game adaptation:

I chose to give it away to everyone. If I couldn’t prevent Fables from falling into bad hands, at least this is a way I can arrange that it also falls into many good hands. Since I truly believe there are still more good people in the world than bad ones, I count it as a form of victory.

… In the past decade or so, my thoughts on how to reform the trademark and copyright laws in this country (and others, I suppose) have undergone something of a radical transformation. The current laws are a mishmash of unethical backroom deals to keep trademarks and copyrights in the hands of large corporations, who can largely afford to buy the outcomes they want.

In my template for radical reform of those laws I would like it if any IP is owned by its original creator for up to twenty years from the point of first publication, and then goes into the public domain for any and all to use. However, at any time before that twenty year span bleeds out, you the IP owner can sell it to another person or corporate entity, who can have exclusive use of it for up to a maximum of ten years. That’s it. Then it cannot be resold. It goes into the public domain. So then, at the most, any intellectual property can be kept for exclusive use for up to about thirty years, and no longer, without exception.

Of course, if I’m going to believe such radical ideas, what kind of hypocrite would I be if I didn’t practice them? Fables has been my baby for about twenty years now. It’s time to let it go. This is my first test of this process. If it works, and I see no legal reason why it won’t, look for other properties to follow in the future. Since DC, or any other corporate entity, doesn’t actually own the property, they don’t get a say in this decision.

A Meat Thread on twitter: “Let me tell you the story of this still of stephen colbert wearing meat goggles, my buddy Frank, and how I learned to distrust science journalism.” The upshot: “Frank is fine, the world barely remembered the story two months later and he went on to get a doctorate from Chicago and is doing great work. But I never again trusted a science article from a newspaper.” 

T. S. Eliot wrote the book that was the basis for the musical CATS. Also he wrote it under the pen name “Old Possum”.

Mark Twain invented the bra clasp. But he did it under his other name, Samuel Clemens: 

nematode theory of Barbie

Why I’m quitting peer review – The Academic Health Economists’ Blog

You may not think of grantmaking as jet-setting, but Stuart Buck makes it sound like being James Bond. More seriously, a fascinating look at the life and times of the most active “metascience venture capitalist”, who ”funded some of the most prominent metascience entrepreneurs of the past 11 years, and often was an active participant in their work.”

And another, from the archives (so to speak): A Report on Scientific Branch-Creation: How the Rockefeller Foundation helped bootstrap the field of molecular biology 

Our experiments consisted of inoculating exponentially growing bacteria into a given medium and following bacterial growth by measuring optical density. Samples were taken every fifteen minutes, and the technicians reported the results. They were so involved that they had identified themselves with the bacteria, or with the growth curves, and they used to say for example: “I am exponential,” or “I am slightly flattened.” Technicians and bacteria were consubstantial.

So negative experiments piled up, until after months and months of despair, it was decided to irradiate the bacteria with ultra-violet light. This was not rational at all, for ultra-violet radiations kill bacteria and bacteriophages, and on a strictly logical basis the idea still looks illogical in retrospect. Anyhow, a suspension of lysogenic bacilli was put under the UV lamp for a few seconds. 

… 

It was a very hot summer day and the thermometer was unusually high. After irradiation, I collapsed in an armchair, in sweat, despair, and hope. Fifteen minutes later, Evelyne Ritz, my technician, entered the room and said: “Sir, I am growing normally.”

Willow maybe-illegalism

When You Give a Tree an Email Address:

Being a Lizard — a response to Adam Mastroianni’s invitation to a secret society. The author describes the process of setting up a DIY biology lab, including thoughts on location and instructions on how to spend cents on the dollar for your own lab equipment. We only wish there were more detail, maybe even a complete guide to help others set up their own labs, but maybe that will come in a future post.

One biohacker in particular I got in touch with told me to aim to spend 1-2 cents on the dollar against new pricing on the equipment I needed. At first I thought he was being hyperbolic, but then I started looking in some of the places he told me to, and before I knew it, I was finding and buying thousands of dollars worth of equipment for literally hundreds, making the initial cost barrier I’d perceived negligible. 

You’re probably wondering why this is the case. Well, because the people that are liquidating these items see it as junk that is taking up rentable space, especially large items like biosafety cabinets and CO2 incubators. If you’re patient, these items can literally be acquired for free. Just last week I bid for a $9,000 incubator for < $50 and a 4 hour drive to Iowa State University.

So why isn’t there more demand for this equipment in the open market? According to the NIH, the average research project grant size is over a half a million dollars. You can spend up to $25,000 on a single piece of equipment under a grant budget without even needing to ask for approval. Academic labs and companies with funding have every incentive to buy the coolest new piece of equipment on the market to do their research, and are under time constraints that don’t warrant cutting costs by searching the secondary market. 

Independent biohackers on the other hand are working under the opposite set of constraints. We may have a surplus of time to answer our research question outside of other commitments, but are constrained by resources and expertise to do so.

“Wernicke‐Korsakoff syndrome is the partial destruction of the brain resulting from a lack of thiamine (vitamin B‐1).” This sometimes comes to pass as a result of malnutrition, but it’s more stereotypically associated with severe and long-term alcoholism. Fortunately, treatment and prevention are quite simple — just give people thiamine. So in the 1930s and 1940s, people started to experiment with adding thiamine directly to alcoholic beverages, and found that it was stable in several favorites, including beer, wine, and whiskey. This seems like the ideal public health measure — vitamin fortification in a product that will go directly to people at risk of a terrible disease resulting from a lack of that very vitamin. However, in 1940 this idea ran afoul of our arcane legal system. In Irish mythology, there are magically binding vows called geasa, and the doom of heroes often comes from having multiple geasa that come into conflict. For example, Cú Chulainn has a geas never to eat dog meat, and he has another geas always to eat any food offered to him by a woman. When an old crone offers him dog meat, he’s trapped. Federal rulings have the same problem (modulo dog meat). You have to list all food additives on the label. But you also aren’t allowed to list the vitamin content of alcoholic beverages — that might imply that drinking alcohol is healthy. So we really dropped the ball in 1940 and we should really consider a return to the idea of adding thiamine to alcohol… reports this New York Times article from 1979. Maybe there were good reasons we didn’t, or maybe this is several millions of dollars in public health savings just lying on the sidewalk. You decide! Here’s a 1978 N Engl J Med article on the same idea if you want to learn more. 

ExFatLoss has published five ex150 case studies this month, all of which saw some weight loss, though some saw more than others: 48 year old female loses 14.6lbs in 30 days; 26 year old male loses 5-8lbs in 26 days, mostly water weight; 38 y/o female loses 11lbs in 30 days eating 2,700kcal/day; 37 y/o female loses 9lbs in 30 days; and 60 y/o male loses 13lbs in 30 days. We look forward to the eventual summary report! 

Energy Startup Says It Has Achieved Geothermal Tech Breakthrough — Hopefully they’re right, home geothermal would be great! 

Why is everyone talking about aspartame recently? Dynomight explains in detail: WHO aspartame brouhaha

Edge interview from 1996 with Francisco Varela — “I’m perhaps best known for three different kinds of work, which seem disparate to many people but to me run as a unified theme. These are my contributions in conceiving the notion of autopoiesis — self-production — for cellular organization, the enactive view of the nervous system and cognition, and a revising of current ideas about the immune system.” Actually here’s some more: 

The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann — one that would be made popular by the artificial-life people. Cellular automata are simple units that receive inputs from immediate neighbors and communicate their internal state to the same immediate neighbors.

In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap — the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such ideas part of complexity theory.

The more recent wave of work in complexity illuminates my bootstrap idea, in that it’s a nice way of talking about this funny, screwy logic where the snake bites its own tail and you can’t discern a beginning. Forget the idea of a black box with inputs and outputs. Think in terms of loops. My early work on self-reference and autopoiesis followed from ideas developed by cyberneticists such as Warren McCulloch and Norbert Wiener, who were the first scientists to think in those terms. But early cybernetics is essentially concerned with feedback circuits, and the early cyberneticists fell short of recognizing the importance of circularity in the constitution of an identity. Their loops are still inside an input/output box. In several contemporary complex systems, the inputs and outputs are completely dependent on interactions within the system, and their richness comes from their internal connectedness. Give up the boxes, and work with the entire loopiness of the thing. For instance, it’s impossible to build a nervous system that has very clear inputs and outputs.

“The causal faithfulness condition, which licenses inferences from probabilistic to causal independence, is known to be violated in dynamical systems exhibiting homeostasis. Using the example of the Watt governor, I here present a precise causal characterization of such violations, which differ from cases involving cancelling paths.”​​

Profile of Tufts biologist Michael Levin. Quotes: 

Another thing is [the slime mold] has these vibrations. It’s constantly tugging on the surface. We have this wild paper where we put one glass disc here, three glass discs back here. There’s no chemicals, there’s no food, no gradients. It’ll cogitate for about four hours, just kind of sitting here doing nothing. And then boom!—it grows out toward the three. 

What it’s doing is sensing strain in the medium. It’s pulling, and it feels the vibrations that come back. It’s ridiculously sensitive because each disc is like 10 milligrams. For whatever bizarre reason, it prefers the heavier mass. During those four hours it collects the data, decides where it’s going, and then, boom!

…

If you place a small piece of food nearby and then a much larger piece of food far away, it tends to go for the larger piece and bypasses the small one, which I thought was really weird, because why wouldn’t you grab it along the way? But it just sort of fixated on the big one and went for that. Maybe it thought it would come back later for the smaller.

Related: pea plants may be able to sense the size of a stick before touching it. (h/t @emollick) Barbara McClintock would approve. From the paper:

The mechanisms by which plants could perceive the differences between support sizes remains to be explained. Based on the evidence that plants have at their disposal a great variety of sensory modalities (Karban, 2015), we hypothesize three possible situations. First, plants may use echolocation to acquire information about the support. Recent reports showed that plants emit sonic clicks and capture the returning echoes to get information about their surroundings (Gagliano, Renton, Duvdevani, Timmins, & Mancuso, 2012). This bio sonar may provide information about the thickness of the support to the plants, which will act accordingly. Second, several studies have suggested that the leaf’s upper and subepidermis comprise cells acting as ocelli, eye-like structures allowing plants to gather visual information about their environment (Baluška & Mancuso, 2016). Support for this contention comes from studies on Boquilla trifoliolata, a climbing wood vine that modifies the appearance of its leaves according to the host plant, perfectly mimicking the colors, shapes, sizes, orientations, and petiole lengths of the leaves. Crucially, the plant leaf mimicry occurs even without a direct contact between the vine of Boquilla trifoliolata and mimicked host trees, which supports the idea that plants are capable not only of sensing but also of decoding visual inputs (Gianoli & Carrasco-Urra, 2014). Thus, climbing plants may benefit from a vision system that is able to process the proprieties of the support. Lastly, plants may acquire information about the support using chemoreception of volatiles. It is well known that plants release airborne chemicals that can convey ecologically relevant information about the stimuli they interact with (Karban, 2015; Runyon, Mescher, & De Moraes, 2006).

Emojis Are Increasingly Legally Binding. But They’re Still Open to Wide Interpretation

@ArtirKel on twitter: “TIL in kidney transplants they don’t always take out an old one and replace it. It’s not unusual to keep adding kidneys. Thus we end up with this guy that has 5 kidneys at one point:” 

RemissionBiome project covered in The Guardian: Does the microbiome hold the key to chronic fatigue syndrome?

characterdesignreferences.com — Art of the Sword in the Stone (part 1)

Alice Maz — toward a system of neo-xunism:

Xunzi starts with the Confucian core of virtue, learning, ritual, and filiality. He strips away spiritual explanations and justifies his positions on consequentialist grounds. Confucius saw morality as an emanation of Heaven, whereas Xunzi sees it as a tool crafted by man to create human flourishing. And then he borrows the rationalism of the later Mohists, the practicality of the Legalists, and the flexibility and comfort with the ineffable of the Daoists.

Astronomers solve mystery of how a mirror-like planet formed so close to its star — David Brin describes it like so: “A mirror-like planet with an albedo of 0.80 reflects so much light from its very nearby star that astronomers suggest a gas giant lost all atmosphere but vaporized glass&titanium for a mirror-like composition.”

Drew Savicki on twitter: “I have a spreadsheet tracking all politician’s favorite ninja turtle. I have received 14 answers. … No member of Congress has answered Raphael so far. Will that change?” (Here’s the sheet.)

More beaver illegalism

Submissions to the SMTM Mysteries Contest close July 1st! We’ll take a few weeks to look over all entries and share them with the judges, and will start putting out finalists after that. 

N of 2: Identical Twins Hugo and Ross Turner did the same workout for three months, but one worked out for 20 minutes and the other worked out for 40 minutes. There was almost no difference in their results.   

Disentangling the Dark and Bright Side of Constructs with a Bright and Dark Side — a somewhat in-the-weeds post about factor analysis, but relevant if you’re interested in issues of representation and ontology.

The US is getting its first new nuclear reactor in 40 years

In some cases, symptoms “clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia” are actually caused by lupus. Probably a good example of how diseases with identical symptoms may not have identical causes / etiologies.

In 2009, Grimes “load[ed] a homemade houseboat with chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes and (briefly) sail[ed] it down the Mississippi while being tailed by Minneapolis park police” (via @caseydarnell_)

@granawkins on twitter recently hacked together long-time dream project eloeverything.co, a site where you compare two things over and over and pick your favorite, so that all things can be given an ELO rating (the ranking algorithm from chess). There have been more than 500k votes as of this writing. The leaderboard is especially fun. 

Simon Sarris: Do children today have useful childhoods?

One month left in the mysteries contest! Get your submissions in by July 1st. Good luck! 🙂 

ExFatLoss: The Slightly Complicated Theory of Obesity 

In a sense, nutrition science has maneuvered itself into a corner here. Due to the religious insistence on randomized controlled trials and using a large number of people for studies, it’s pretty much impossible to find any solutions unless they apply to everybody.

If we insisted on the same methods [for] car mechanics, we would have to declare that there is no solution for cars stranded on the side of the road.

After all, we did a large study: we took a sample of 10,000 cars stranded on the side of the road, and we attempted all popular ways of fixing them. We put gas into them, we pumped up their tires, we topped off the oil, and we checked for any engine errors.

Yet not a single one of these repairs made more than 15% of the cars run again!

Clearly, cars cannot be repaired. That’s just science. Gasoline in, gasoline out!

Also from ExFatLoss: Looking for ex150 trial volunteers. ExFatLoss is trying to expand his self-experiment into an n of small study. We encourage you to consider signing up, especially if you tried some version of the potato diet and that didn’t work for you — the potato diet also didn’t work for ExFatLoss, so maybe there’s a common factor.

Old but good piece from The Atlantic: Roller Coasters Could Help People Pass Kidney Stones, though apparently only some rollercoasters work. Specifically, Big Thunder Mountain works pretty well but Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster don’t work at all. As usual, tumblr provides excellent commentary:

Land Ownership Makes No Sense — new WIRED piece on Georgism / land value tax, by friend of the blog Uri Bram. “Under Georgism, you would pay the same tax for your home as for an equivalent vacant lot in the same location.” Very nice framing!

A Simple Exercise to Strengthen the Lower Esophageal Sphincter and Eliminate Gastroesophageal Reflux: An Autobiographical Case Report (h/t Andrew Quist on twitter). This guy was struggling with gastroesophageal reflux and, after trying and becoming dissatisfied with some traditional treatments (“even after several refinements, the bed wedge remained intolerable”), came up with a form of resistance training for his lower esophageal sphincter, i.e. tried eating with his head below his stomach. It took several months but this intervention seems like it worked for him: “A 24-hour pH and manometry test was done, which yielded completely normal results. I then discontinued the use of the bed wedge and now have no symptoms that I can attribute to gastroesophageal reflux.” Not something we are going to focus on in the near future, but this seems like a good candidate for an n of small study, or even a full community trial. In particular, it’s nice because the intervention is very low-risk. Eating with your head below your stomach should be pretty harmless. If you have GERD or are otherwise plugged into the GERD community, you should consider running a study, we’d be happy to advise! 

A Cartography of Encounters:

Let me ask you again to draw your life but now with a slight shift in perspective. Do not draw a line. Draw a map of the encounters you have had with animals, insects, birds, weather systems, microbes that have metamorphically rearranged your matter. Draw a constellation of these encounters. What shape does your life take on when it is no longer articulated by the grammar of human progress?

Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images

Strong opening salvo in this year’s ACX book review contest: Your Book Review: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations/The Question Of Separatism. Touches on a number of our interests, viz. Jane Jacobs, Quebecois separatism, balkanization, and cybernetics. Highly recommended! Here’s an excerpt:

Our breathing rate is regulated through a feedback mechanism. Too much carbon dioxide in the blood, or too little oxygen, and the brain stem commands the diaphragm to accelerate breathing. Once the levels are back to normal, the brain stem receives this feedback and slows breathing down again.

Now, Jacobs asks, imagine an impossible creature: ten people, all doing their own thing, but whose breathing is somehow regulated by a single brain stem. The feedback the brain stem receives is a consolidated average of everyone’s carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, and the breathing rate the stem decides on is applied to all ten people, regardless of whether they’re sleeping or playing tennis. 

This, to put it mildly, wouldn’t work.

“Porphyrios (Greek: Πορφύριος) was a large whale that harassed and sank ships in the waters near Constantinople in the sixth century. Active over a period of over fifty years, Porphyrios caused great concern for Byzantine seafarers. Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) made it an important matter to capture it, though he could not come up with a way to do so. Porphyrios eventually met its end when it beached itself near the mouth of the Black Sea and was attacked and cut into pieces by a mob of locals.”

Relatedly: Whales are huge. So why don’t they get a ton of cancers? (h/t @JSheltzer)

Some research on how microplastics may impact digestion (h/t @ellegist; we think this is the original paper), though the design is not exactly the most realistic: “The team added nanoplastics to a slurry that contained proportions of protein, fat, carbohydrates, sugar and fibre comparable to the average US diet. The researchers then added heavy cream to boost the fat content. To simulate digestion, they passed this solution through three other liquids containing enzymes and molecules present in the mouth, stomach and small intestine.” Also of interest might be this similar paper, from one of the same authors, on the impact of titanium dioxide on lipid digestion. The in vitro methods are pretty whatever, but sharing these just in case.

The Problematic Myth of Florence Nightingale:

…like most lone-hero narratives, this one is not entirely true: For one thing, Nightingale herself trained with a group of German deaconess nurses, something she could hardly have done if she invented nursing. She did become famous for advocating for nursing as a trained profession, but as she did so, she shrank nursing into a restrictive, exclusionary Victorian corset, constructing a version of nursing that conformed to rigid social mores, one divided by class, race, and gender—a reimagining of nursing palatable to British colonialism.

Tempus Nectit Knitting Clock — “Wilhelmsen’s clock was designed as an art project that showed the passage of time by knitting a stitch every half hour, a row every day. At the end of a year the machine would drop a 365-row scarf from the bottom.”

More evidence of possible meteor deaths from the premodern era: 1490 Ch’ing-yang event

​​Merriam-Webster: “Hey ding-dongs, let’s have a chit-chat about Ablaut reduplication.” We’re happy to report that the dictionary continues to be one of the best poasters [sic] on twitter.

One of our first posts to break containment was a very long essay titled, Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs. If you read this piece, you’ll be familiar with Vin Mariani, a popular “tonic wine” of the late 19th century, and by “tonic wine” we mean a man named Angelo Mariani put cocaine in wine and then sold it to the feverishly twitching masses. Well, we’re happy to report that Babco Europe brought back Vin Mariani in 2017, and it appears to be still available, though we see that it is “fortified with de-cocainised Peruvian Coca leaf”. Disappointing but not surprising. 

Queen of Pigs

This is the two-months-left reminder for entries to our MYSTERY CONTEST. There are already two entries, and you still have two months to write and submit yours! 

Speaking of mysteries: Jeff Wood’s story of diagnosing his ME/CFS as a mechanical problem with the craniocervical junction, the place where your skull connects to the first two vertebrae (h/t JG in the comments on N=1: Symptom vs. Syndrome). He found a treatment that worked for him, and as far as we’ve heard, he is still in remission. Most interesting for the simple, obvious diagnostic test; if you have ME/CFS symptoms, try wearing a neck brace or just pull up on your head and see if your symptoms get better. See also the CCI + Tethered cord series from Jennifer Brea. 

Still speaking of mysteries: “Paranasal sinuses are a group of four paired air-filled spaces that surround the nasal cavity… Their role is disputed and no function has been confirmed.” Also, why do they (reportedly) generate nitric oxide? The Wikipedia talk page on this one is also amusing. “more details of structure please. they are just empty pockets of air? how does the air get there? are they lined with tissue or Moo Hog are they just bone? hoopenings does each have? how do they becom e ‘pressurized’? etc etc-” writes User:Omegatron in 2005. Maybe the sinuses are well-understood by experts, but in that case, the Wikipedia page itself is a mystery. 

No longer speaking of mysteries: We made a tumblr, in case the bird site dies or becomes unusable. 

Adam Mastroianni argues that science is a strong-link problem. See also this excellent elaboration on the point, A Model of Quality Control in Strong Link Science, from Maxwell Tabarrok.

Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children. Like the story of scurvy, a clear example that eventual cures may look no more than vaguely promising at first, before we figure out the details of how to make them work reliably. Also, a lesson on following up on leads, even if they look weird or dumb or inconsistent at first. It doesn’t have to take 140 years!

The Ineluctable Smell of Beer — Part 1 in a fascinating series about the rise of healthcare costs (h/t Krinn). Really about the costs and reasons for “coordinative communication”. Kind of argues that bureaucracy is a symptom of bad things rather than the cause of them? You normally look at a dysfunctional, bureaucratic system and assume, “the bureaucracy caused the dysfunction”. But: “maybe it should take us aback that our health care system incurs such extreme coordinative communications costs, that paying all those people to handle it is actually more cost effective than not.”

The Atlantic: Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You? (or here to avoid the paywall). “The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect. Eager to learn more, I reached out to Ardisson Korat for an interview—I emailed him four times—but never heard back. … Inevitably, my curiosity took on a different shade: Why wouldn’t a young scientist want to talk with me about his research? Just how much deeper could this bizarre ice-cream thing go?” lol

Tyler Ransom did a N=1, T=1166 self-experiment where he lost 15 lbs in four months. 

A School of Strength and Character:

The institution builders of the Civil War embodied a type of excellence that foreign observers of their era described as characteristically American. … But less than a century after the Civil War, American life did become dominated by centralized and professionally managed bureaucracies. The two world wars only served to entrench this way of life in business and politics. The population, in response, became increasingly conditioned to lobbying for centralized decisions instead of self-organizing. Those who introduced managerial bureaucracy to American life understood the “great strength” bureaucratic tools would grant them. But these tools destroyed the conditions that made them so adept at institution building in the first place. The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “how do I get management to take my side?” 

Someone tracked down the original take of the Wilhelm Scream.

Weinersmith on political hobbyism. 

AI and the American Smile: How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression

On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch: 

The great Milk Diet experiment results are in (h/t anon). Compare for sure to ExFatLoss’s +80% cream diet. Do be careful of excessive calcium intake, drinking this much milk may not be good long-term (though ExFatLoss seems to be doing ok?).