Author: gjb

Most 5.25″ mechanisms use a lever or handle to manually drop the floppy disk down onto the motor spindle and engage the read/write head/heads. The floppy disk cannot be removed until the mechanism is unlatched by reversing the loading operation.

Conversely, 3″ and 3.5″ mechanisms normally auto-mount onto the spindle on insertion, and are typically ejected using a mechanical push-button that unlatches the mechanism and uses spring pressure to eject the disk. A notable exception are the floppy drives used in the Apple Macintosh which removed the eject button and used a software controlled motor to operate the eject mechanism. This ensured the computer had unmounted the filesystem and flushed the disk cache before the disk actually ejected.

https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2023-08-28/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

One of the best things about the Internet are devoted nerds sharing their knowledge.

Over time, however, that variability averaged out into stasis. Even if traits wobbled off their optimal, moderate peak from one generation to the next, there was a net effect of stabilization — ultimately leading to little change over the multiple generations.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/evolution-fast-or-slow-lizards-help-resolve-a-paradox-20240102/?mc_cid=169f0a8ce7&mc_eid=f83944a043

Increasingly, I’m beginning to suspect that epigenetics, Lamarckian evolution, and the above-mentioned “wobbling” will end up proving that evolution is so much all over the map that it may seem some species didn’t evolve at all from those seafloor vents that supposedly gave birth to all life.

Many advocates would like to see Hvaldimir reunited with wild belugas or at least moved to a nature reserve. But rehabilitating a formerly captive whale is nothing like the triumphant leap to freedom in “Free Willy”; it’s more like helping a severely traumatized victim of abduction reintegrate with society. For creatures of such size and sentience, confinement to relatively tiny, sparse and lonely cells exacts a heavy physical and psychological toll. Like Hvaldimir, many captive cetaceans are in-between creatures: born to whales but raised by humans, not quite domesticated but no longer wild, suspended somewhere in the middle of instinct and compliance. Hvaldimir is a living bridge between their circumscribed existence and the nearly limitless one from which they were barred. What happens to him now — whether he becomes a rare example of successful rewilding, transitions to a more sedate life in a sanctuary or meets a tragic end like so many of his predecessors — will influence efforts to liberate the thousands of cetaceans still in confinement today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/magazine/hvaldimir-whale.html/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

What do we really owe our more intelligent yet still reliant companions on this planet? A fascinating story that explains the complicated ethics behind rehabilitation of wildlife.

Zubrin makes a strong case that nuclear plants are safe. Unlike what the fear-mongers say, nuclear reactors cannot explode like atomic bombs; it is impossible thanks to the laws of physics. Atomic explosions can only occur if large quantities of highly-enriched fissile material are pummeled with fast neutrons nearly instantaneously. A nuclear reactor contains only low-enriched fuel and cannot create fast neutrons, and thus cannot produce the devastation of an atomic weapon.

To quell radiation fears, Zubrin notes that nuclear reactors actually reduce the amount of radiation that enters the atmosphere. One 1000 MW natural gas plant releases more radiation every month than the entire Three Mile Island nuclear accident, one of the worst nuclear accidents in history.

https://quillette.com/2023/07/07/humanity-should-split-more-atoms/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

Nobody died from Three Mile Island either. The misguided (at best, insane at worst) campaign against nuclear energy remains probably the most significant cause of emissions in the 20th century.

C. S. Lewis hits on the problem in The Screwtape Letters, where he has the devil Screwtape urge his nephew Wormwood to mislead his human subject by directing his love as far away from “the real world” as possible. He urges Wormwood to push the human to love abstractions, like the far-off Germans, while treating his neighbors with disdain. This kind of “love,” which affects only our minds but does not push through to our actions, is no love at all.

Keeping our economic power at the most local level possible can allow our economic interactions to express love. That’s right: not only our gifts but even our economic exchanges at stores and coffee shops or with contractors and repairmen can be loving, if they are conducted in the context of a personal relationship at the local level.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/economic-justice/keep-your-money-close

In the complexity of the globalized economy, it is quite difficult to pull this off, but it’s worth starting somewhere. I’m comfortable with trying to keep it within at least the bounds of the country I love and am a citizen of, to some extent. Perhaps this is why sometimes there’s a bit of understated glee from some that the globalized order is tottering and consumer goods are no longer going to be cheaply made thousands of miles away… and is that such a bad thing?

When I started asking women about their experiences as mothers, I was startled by the number who sheepishly admitted, and only after being pressed, that they had pretty equitable arrangements with their partners, and even loved being moms, but were unlikely to say any of that publicly. Doing so could seem insensitive to those whose experiences were not as positive, or those in more frustrating relationships. Some also worried that betraying too much enthusiasm for child-rearing could ossify essentialist tropes or detract from larger feminist goals.

https://www.vox.com/features/23979357/millennials-motherhood-dread-parenting-birthrate-women-policy

A good piece if a bit comical at times spelling out some conclusions that if depressing have been relatively clear for a while: Turns out casting motherhood in casual, implicit, explicit, derogatory, snide, laissez-faire, etc. terms and then also pairing that decades-long trend with brutal economic realities all tend to combine to make women NOT want to be moms. I don’t fully believe in the Kingsnorth-coined the Machine’s ability to have created and coerced such trends, but have to admit that a society and workforce system that got used to doubled labor based on women’s entrance into the workforce would definitely try to keep that going with motherhood interrupting it as little as possible. With luck, and pieces like these, maybe we do realize that yes, women want careers and also they often want to have kids. Both things can occur and also be done without nearly as much trouble as it takes now.

But the Brooks Range also happens to have a lot of alkaline limestone, which makes water more basic. If the acidic water from a seep reaches an alkaline river or stream, its pH will rise, and the iron will fall out as what miners would call yellow boy. “It’s like a one-two punch,” Lyons said. “You have the shaley rocks with pyrite that source the acid and the iron, and then the limestones neutralize that acid and cause the iron to come out of solution.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-alaskas-rivers-turning-orange/

As in most things with climate change, the phenomena discussed definitely will change the current environment and species, but the confluence of minerals, salt, water and more may well also eventually have beneficial effects. We just don’t usually think about that part.

In a critical network, the connections are strong enough for many moderately sized groups of neurons to couple, yet weak enough to prevent them from all coalescing into one giant assembly. This balance leads to the largest number of stable assemblies, maximizing information storage.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-physical-theory-for-when-the-brain-performs-best-20230131/?mc_cid=3f0bc80c10&mc_eid=f83944a043

Everything in life is balance.

If this is true, then it would make sense that the collapse of the false picture painted by the age of “science and reason” — mind-body dualism, religion as evidence of superstition or stupidity, the ability of ideology or technology to create paradise on Earth — would bring about a return to the mean. And if the mean is what we might call a religious sensibility, then a resurgence of religion itself would be very much on the cards.

I think there is a good chance that, beneath all of the surface culture war battles, below the arguments about free speech and democracy, coursing below all of these necessary and inevitable cultural strains and tensions, this is already happening. It could be that Spengler’s second religiousness is already here.

https://unherd.com/2023/12/our-godless-era-is-dead/

One of the paradoxes I am debating writing a book about is that by the time most people know about it, it’s no longer true. Hence millennials still citing half of marriages end in divorce in the US (no longer true) or supposedly all of us becoming secular. I am skeptical of most survey data for a lot of reasons, but perhaps many still think of themselves as “spiritual” and not “religious”. Where it’ll end up, I don’t know, but I do know people are grasping for meaning and parts of religion are coming back in a sneaky way, from Pentecostalism that is more friendly to leftists sans gender ideologies and traditional Catholics.

The coalition released its first report earlier this month, which traces how the government spent nearly $17 billion on food in two separate years, 2019 and 2022. And it found that despite an executive order directing agencies to consider greenhouse gas emissions in procurement, another addressing consolidation, and hundreds of millions of dollars granted to small and mid-size farms and processors over the past few years, the government isn’t exactly putting its money where its mouth is.

According to the analysis, the USDA is by far the largest purchaser within the federal government, with programs for school meals, domestic hunger, and foreign aid accounting for more than half of total government food spending. In 2022, USDA spent nearly half of its food dollars with just 25 vendors, several of which represent the same multinational food companies the Biden administration has called out for exploiting American farmers.

https://civileats.com/2023/11/29/the-government-spends-billions-on-food-who-is-it-buying-it-from/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20Government%20Spends%20Billions%20on%20Food%20%20Who%20Benefits%3F&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231129

It’s simple to see how this state of affairs comes about – agencies try to spend less and simplify things by buying from the largest, most cost-effective producers. This is not due to some “bad people” doing things – it’s just what happens when you are under pressure and have to deliver. Striking the right balance between reform, diversification and resiliency will be tough, but has to be done.

For nearly all of US history, American property taxes have taken a pretty standard form. Individuals pay a tax based on the assessed value of their land, buildings, and any other improvements to their property combined. If you renovate your house and make it nicer, for example, your overall property tax could go up. The proposed land-value tax in Detroit, by contrast, would effectively tax land at a higher rate than any buildings or amenities on the property.

https://www.vox.com/24025379/detroit-land-value-tax-lvt-property-tax-housing-vacant-blight

In general, although perhaps I’m ignorant, it feels like we need to tinker more at the city and state level with different regulations and taxes like this, just to overall foment the rate of changes and innovations in policies. That way we could learn at an accelerated rate.

For example, models with relatively few parameters — only a few million — could not successfully complete three-digit addition or two-digit multiplication problems, but for tens of billions of parameters, accuracy spiked in some models. Similar jumps occurred for other tasks including decoding the International Phonetic Alphabet, unscrambling a word’s letters, identifying offensive content in paragraphs of Hinglish (a combination of Hindi and English), and generating a similar English equivalent of Kiswahili proverbs.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316/?mc_cid=864527ac9f&mc_eid=f83944a043

Emergent properties are fascinating, yet, oddly enough, in my rudimentary knowledge of philosophy I think this is why I’m still so skeptical of AGI. To some degree human intelligence is derived from a staggeringly complex set of inputs and data that is embodied and then imitated as, say, infants develop. But we have not yet been able to program common sense at scale, which is literally child’s play. Emergence is typical for adults, in many ways. It’s also telling the most sophisticated and powerful programs tend to be recursive and/or reinforced learning, which again, is what human intelligence tends to be. But where AI will struggle and humans don’t is that AI relies on even better learning and inputs from humans – and we don’t even understand our own cognitive processes enough to codify them reliably. Emergence is likely self-knowledge or the ability to self-examine, and otherwise pure chance arising from what one would expect when billions of occurrences/data points are inputs. But how could we possibly arrive at passing on self-knowledge when we don’t truly know ourselves, being incapable of full self-knowledge?

Each year, Criterion selects 50 or 60 new entrants to add to its catalog, which now includes 1,650 films. Some Hollywood directors campaign relentlessly for their films — or their favorite films from the past — to make the list. For legions of film fans, Criterion is akin to the Louvre, but with “an aura of hip,” the writer and director Josh Safdie told me in an email. When Safdie’s film “Uncut Gems,” which he directed with his brother, Benny, entered the Criterion Collection with the spine No. 1101, he said they couldn’t help feeling as if they had “snuck in” to the museum that they had admired for so long. “Being a part of the collection is something that we’re both incredibly proud of,” Safdie told me. “It may sound corny but it was more meaningful than awards.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/magazine/criterion-collection.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

It’s a bit of an indulgence but have to admit and recommend the Criterion Collection streaming channel for any budding cinephile, because they truly do have the randomest and best catalog. Finally saw Blood Simple there and was amazed at how good the Coen Brothers were from the jump.

When the two black hunks of metal had cooled to a few hundred degrees, they took on an almost melancholy gloom of blue-gray, dashed with a distemper of rust, and their random-seeming warts and scars gave them the aspect of objects that had made a long and lonely journey through space, ending with a fiery entry into our world. Only the squared-off shape of these meteorites betrayed the hand of man.

Sam picked up one of the chunks with his tongs, saying, as unlikely as it seemed at that moment, “There’s a knife in there. That’s all that matters.” He also mentioned that the worst accidental burns in a forging shop occur when the metal has cooled off to black and is still at several hundred degrees. The visitor learns to touch nothing.

https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/january-2024/a-knife-forged-in-fire/?utm_medium=email

Some solid prose, and also, a great inspiration to engage with the material world with your own hands, in crafting something, anything, whether it be gardening, forging, baking, carpentry, anything. I think two great tensions that will emerge in the growth of increasingly capable VR and AR will be between those seeking to avoid screens or mediated reality and those looking to engage even more deeply.

ayard was sceptical about Hunziker’s theory, but he wanted to know what worked, and knew that, for all the talk, tiny daily doses of iodine had never been put to the test. So he 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. It had no train station and no road, and sat on a thin shelf of land, one and half hours by mule from the bottom of the valley. It was badly affected by goitre; 75 per cent of the village schoolchildren had enlarged thyroid glands. Bayard took measurements and photographs, and gave the families iodised salt. He left salt for the cows, to iodise their milk, and for the bakery, so that it would be in the bread. The experiment ran through the winter, the half of the year when children went to school. When Bayard returned in spring, not only had the five families not been poisoned, they all had slimmer necks. He had given the lowest dose – just 4 milligrams of potassium iodide per kilogram of salt – to the family of Theophil Brigger, a farmer who was raising seven children, aged six to fifteen, alone. His children were transformed.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

In the wake of the COVID public health response and policy disaster (there really is no other word for it), it’s important to study when public-health interventions worked splendidly and why. Regardless of which side you were on during COVID with regard to ever-shifting CDC recommendations or the like, you’ll also find something infuriating in this piece, namely the delay in implementation and also the stubborn resistance of bureaucrats and grifters.

My family all agreed we were going to need a replacement, and while my first instinct was to set up a group on Instagram or WhatsApp, the prospect of having our warm channel surrounded — encroached upon — by all that other garbage made me feel even sadder than the prospect of losing Tapstack.

So, instead of settling for a corporate messaging app … 

I built one just for us.

I’ll show you the screen capture again, but the point is that there’s not much to show. The app is a “magic window” that captures photos and videos and shuttles them around. Messages wait in a queue and, once viewed — always full-screen, with no distractions, no prods to comment or share — they disappear. That is literally it. The app has basically no interface. There’s a camera button and a badge in the corner, calm green, that indicates how many messages are waiting.

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

Would that we all had such skills. The tradeoff, of course, is between ease, convenience, skill, and the killer trait of network effects, wherein it’s so much harder to opt out of something when all your friends and family are using it.

Gaurab and Sean started to connect threads between their projects. Cells had evolved highly efficient molecular machines (enzymes) capable of producing massive amounts of commercially valuable chemicals. Cancer cells even produced too much of it! What if these enzymes could be combined with the metal catalysts Sean had spent years learning to control? Could this transform the process of chemical production as we know it?

https://centuryofbio.com/p/solugen

As part of my gig, seen enough innovations in bio come and go that I veer toward the skeptical, but this is truly intriguing. The basic idea is simple and mimics nature, which is often the key in successful biological applications at scale. I think I’m only a bit skeptical of the speed and true low-energy nature of the process, but they seem to counter that on their How It Works page. Worth reading (if the piece gets a little overly complimentary of the founders).

The beans inside the locust pods can be dried and roasted to make carob, a caffeine-free chocolate substitute. The next time you eat yogurt, read the label. There’s a good chance it includes locust bean gum, a thickener derived from the crushed beans. In arid lands with scant pasture, the high-protein beans have long been an important fodder for livestock.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2019/12/a-christmas-tree-you-dont-know-beans-about/

God has indeed gifted us a remarkable world.

There are untold varieties of miso. Some dark as resin and smoky. Others sunshine-yellow, smooth, and sour. Among the most common types is mellow shiro, or white miso, made from rice, barley, and soybeans and aged for just a few weeks. Aka, or red miso, has a similar makeup, but is aged for several years, the long fermentation resulting in a Maillard reaction that turns it brown. The legendary shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu had hatcho miso—made with only soybeans and fermented for almost three years until it was quite pungent. It was brought by boat to Tokyo from his hometown of Okazaki.

https://www.seriouseats.com/miso-soup-history-how-to

I don’t know if I’d go as far as “food is sacred” (a line in the piece) but I do believe there is something sacramental about preparing and communing over food with others, which is the magic Bourdain captured so well and hammered home relentlessly to show it in its manifold forms. That is perhaps one of the more insidious aspects of American culture, namely, the commodification and de-communizing of much of food, though, of course, it is possible to still commune over even the greasiest fast food. I recall late nights in high school after watching a movie with some pals and convening at a local Jack in the Box to eat its curly fries – treasured times with some good pals that I haven’t seen in years since.

Sure, I think America has had enough of the Kennedys. Armed with knowledge of that family’s many pathologies, I would hesitate to give any more power to a representative of that clan. Many of the experiences that Mr. Macker points to as giving Robert Kennedy a unique perspective are experiences he had only because he was a rich American aristocrat. Furthermore, I think the United States suffers from a pathological mixing of celebrity and politics. Let’s be honest. If his name was Robert F. Pelowski, no one would think of Mr. Kennedy as presidential material. Add to that the celebrity wife, and I think we have more a celebrity boomlet than a serious presidential candidate. And, sure, I have my policy differences with him. So, on the whole, I am not convinced.

I must say, however, flaws and all, I think I’d take Mr. Kennedy over the two likely major party candidates. But it must also be said that this is an extraordinarily low bar. Being a better candidate than Donald Trump or Joe Biden is a little like being the fastest three-toed sloth.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/12/fools-drunks-and-robert-f-kennedy-jr/

With luck, 2024 marks the final gasp of the boomer-dominated political establishment of the US as it inflicts trillions of dollars of debt and misery on the rest of the nation, even if under the guise of being “MAGA” or the like. Make no mistake – Biden and Trump and their respective administrations are but two sides of the same giant, overreaching governmental ooze that ignores fiscal responsibility, states’ rights, realistic foreign policy, and pretty much everything else.

At the same time, though, Kissinger’s narrow commitment to pursuing security interests was insufficiently idealistic and unnecessarily sordid. In a bid to defuse the superpower conflict, Kissinger devised an accommodationist strategy to reconcile the Soviets to a global status quo that was favorable to Washington. Although the architect of détente had no illusions about the nature of Soviet communism or the dangers of Soviet expansionism, Kissinger judged that America was a wounded and weary titan, and so he sought to decrease the tempo of the Cold War. This worked for a time, in the form of arms control agreements and expanded East-West commerce. But it was doomed to fail because it sought to separate ideology from geopolitics in a rivalry where the antagonists had fundamentally divergent views of the world’s future.

https://quillette.com/2023/12/13/kissingers-folly/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

Kissinger was taught in my International Baccalaureate curriculum as a good example of how much of government policy is developed and thought of currently, and have to say, this critique is spot on. Kissinger types commit the fatal mistake of presuming everyone else is atheist/agnostic, realistic, non-ideological and almost Bismarckian in terms of just pursuing self-interest – these types founder and die on the realities of, say, facing Islamic fundamentalism. Geopolitics is a blend of both, as the US has learned at staggering cost in the past couple decades.

Marcelino did what he could to stay alive during his two-week stints on the 40-foot fishing boat. Like other Miskito divers, he was mostly illiterate and had no dive training, but he knew that when he was anxious or scared underwater, he used his air tank faster. So, he tried to remain calm while doing strenuous physical work and fending off sea creatures like sharks. Each tank lasted roughly a half hour, but he never knew when it would run out, endangering his life. And if he didn’t return to the fishing boat with enough lobster, the captain would berate him, or, worse, abandon divers in the water as punishment.

https://civileats.com/2023/12/06/diving-and-dying-for-red-gold-the-human-cost-of-honduran-lobster/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Diving-and%20Dying-for%20Red%20Gold%3A%20The%20Human%20Cost%20of%20Honduran%20Lobster&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231206

Capitalist-leaning segments of American Christianity often gloss over the more radical passages of the Bible that, way more frequently than some may suppose, explicitly call out the wealthy and the employers. Of course, socialist enterprises usually tend to produce even worse results in the guise of equality. Both sides are at fault in this globalized economy of ours that is too big to be held to account, and too hard to grasp in its enormity, without consequences for even something like your gourmet lobster ending up producing misery at the far end.

Certainly, it had the authority to substitute and define the obligations of abstinence. But the issue is that the 1966 pastoral statement, as noted, likely terminated the Friday abstinence obligation entirely. One would be hard-pressed to find a canonist (or bishop) who argues that American Catholics violate canon law by not practicing Friday abstinence outside of Lent (whether by abstaining from meat or by doing or not doing something else). Most would simply say that they are free to do a penance or not do a penance, but that they should do a penance (because of the spiritual benefit, etc.). Few, if any, would say they are obligated to do a penance.

But reading the canon (and Paenitemini), it is clear that the substitution is never about substituting an obligation for no obligation, but instead substitution of one type of obligation (abstinence from meat) for some other obligation (another penance). This of course follows the logic that the obligation for penance is a matter of divine law and the notion that all Fridays maintain their special character.

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/reopening-the-question-of-abstinence-from-meat-on-fridays/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=286162188&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–CKsqG1PrtbtUl0Gv6re2ZyKp0H_LrVMSrazuA2cAuhcvAlrYd3c0VZL1XnX_b5ZgZFFU96wTgZ8uC1jiI_97XeElmaTU-CqENsSqfYnrwM-dCwY4&utm_content=286162188&utm_source=hs_email

Obligations matter. Rules matter. Discipline is freedom. Given human nature, we simply need rhythmic practices of self-denial to strengthen, remind, cajole and nurture us.

That’s why DiPasquale likes taking Border Encounter groups to the old river crossing. There, he doesn’t focus on current events or political polarization. Instead he tells stories of Chinese migrants in the 1880s, of the once-vibrant Black Wall Street in the early 1900s, of El Pasoans who can trace their ancestry to Jewish refugees and Arabic-speaking migrants.

Human history recycles the same old themes, DiPasquale said. Who’s wanted and who isn’t? Who belongs and who doesn’t? “There’s something in getting a little bit of distance from the present day, where we can start self-reflecting on issues. We need a little historical distance, to see a little clearer looking back and go, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe that happened then.’ And then even, ‘Wait, you know, what are the ways I might be doing that right now?’”

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/november/sami-dipasquale-change-way-we-see-immigration-el-paso-abara.html?share=FfPdCClFTqd157YzqwKhIRDdGOaAxGRI&utm_medium=widgetsocial

In an age of remarkable secularization that is dying with a whimper, religious mediation is likely to return with a vengeance… and that is for both good and ill, as anyone who has suffered at the hands of Islamist zealots or been in a mass shooting by a Christian extremist could tell you.

When your spouse is the only person in your life you are supposed to be able to depend on, natural points of friction in a relationship go from mildly annoying to terrifying. When a fight with your spouse is a threat to your entire support system, it’s so existentially stressful that it becomes impossible to confront.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/12/15/the-load-bearing-relationship/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Most folks I know would acknowledge the above reality, yet it is sad to me how little action I see undertaken to truly maintain a community or even a decent number of friends. Life is hard, yes, but one thing I firmly believe is that you lose friends as you get older for a variety of reasons, and that as the loss rate accelerates as you age, you must keep working on being a good friend and part of your various communities as part of your duty in life.

Being Jewish was an integral part of my parent’s identity that they amputated when they moved to America, and they almost certainly suffered phantom pain in that missing limb. It also contributed to a kind of social isolation. They cut themselves off from other Jews, the people they could most easily relate to. Certainly, they made friends with non-Jews, but it was harder than it might otherwise have been because they had to pretend to be something they were not.

https://quillette.com/2023/11/22/they-told-me-so/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

Even some of my well-read pals who are very well versed in history have noted to me they think in the current conflict they are more on the side of the Palestinians than the Israelis, although what precisely they think of Hamas is hazy. What I find difficult to understand is the lack of sympathy for Jews in general – even if you presume they have become the persecutors of Palestinians, the Palestinians are not a class of people who have been historically disenfranchised worldwide, with several attempts at what could be deemed genocide in some cases and of course one infamous genocide that sought to rid the earth of them. There simply is no historical comparison for Jewish people. So what are they to do when their historical homeland is offered to them, after the worst genocide in recorded history? What are they to do when there are series of wars seeking to crush or diminish their new homeland? I’m not hand-waving away Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians – they should have brokered a smarter solution via diplomatic channels years ago. But since Hamas came into being, this type of conflagration was inevitable. And now, it could well be the beginning of World War 3.

The precise implications of the handoff from hexatic to nematic order aren’t yet clear, but the team suspects that cells may exert a degree of control over that transition. There’s even evidence that the emergence of nematic order has something to do with cell adhesion, they said. Figuring out how and why tissues manifest these two interlaced symmetries is a project for the future — although Giomi is already working on using the results to understand how cancer cells flow through the body when they metastasize. And Shaevitz noted that a tissue’s multiscale liquid crystallinity could be related to embryogenesis — the process by which embryos mold themselves into organisms.

If there’s one central idea in tissue biophysics, Giomi said, it’s that structure gives rise to forces, and forces give rise to functions. In other words, controlling multiscale symmetry could be part of how tissues add up to more than the sum of their cells.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/biophysicists-uncover-powerful-symmetries-in-living-tissue-20231025/?mc_cid=9ae6d18810&mc_eid=f83944a043

Increasingly, I suspect that symmetry across disciplines is going to be a key toward understanding the mind-boggling complexity of our world. Silos in science need to be dissolved. The challenge, of course, is acquiring expertise in a given discipline is hard enough already; forging multidisciplinary insights will be quite difficult.

• You win a war against America when fentanyl pours across our borders, manufactured by an adversary that still remembers the Opium Wars, and delivered by cartels that have no respect for human life. One hundred thousand of our countrymen and women are dead every year in a silent epidemic that’s being met with a collective shrug.
• You win a war against America with toys like TikTok that give our adversaries direct access to the anxious minds of teenagers. You win a war against America when you invest billions of dollars in the CCP’s tech ecosystem and pretend that’s just the way business works.

https://www.thefp.com/p/defense-tech-values-fight-for-america-boyle

It’s tough sometimes to not be a tetch cynical about pieces such as this, but on the whole, sometimes you have to take things at face value. I’ve worked with clients that tout all of these values… but they ultimately fessed up to pushing just the interests of extant big tech companies because those were who paid the bills, though it is hard to see what Apple, Google or Facebook have done that is truly innovative in quite a while. That said, the sentiments may be compromised but they are correct: the US continuing to foster technological innovation and trade so as to spread its wealth is currently the best shot to cut down on wars breaking out, nurture human flourishing, improve wealth worldwide, etc. If you subscribe to the line of thought that the US is the real warmonger of the past several decades, I would encourage you to look at global conflict rates and casualties prior to the US hegemony. Hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty in the past 30 years because we exported US jobs and the US consumer became globally dominant. We can do better, however.

She first called on the woodsman during a power outage, a regular occurrence in upstate New York, two winters ago. An older couple had burned through their “last stick of wood”. Within hours, the woodsman came to the rescue. “They said they and their spouse were huddled under the blankets upstairs, the fire long gone out, freezing cold, when they saw headlights in their drive and the soul-warming sound of wood being thrown on to the gravel. He got them through until the power was restored.”

The woodsman considers his volunteerism a cheap form of therapy. “I’m sort of a quiet guy,” he said. Giving away wood “does draw me out, pushes me out. When you interact with people, and I listen a lot, you do you learn their stories. And I’m moved by every one of them.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/new-york-winter-helping-neighbors-stay-warm-wood-burning

I need to do a better job contributing to my community beyond fostering some networks of friends, and boy, this is such a simple, powerful example of someone doing so.

Legend has it that the idea for the moka pot came from a laundry boiler, though that’s not confirmed. What is known is that the La Pavoni device was very trendy, and there was also a precedent for a smaller coffee machine: the napoletana. The napoletana is a small metal device with three sections: a chamber of water, a small puck of coffee in the middle, and a chamber on the other end for brewed coffee. Water is heated up with the water chamber on the bottom, and then the entire device is flipped upside-down, allowing the hot water to drip through the coffee beans and gather as coffee in the previously empty chamber. No pressure is involved.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/make-coffee-moka-pot?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=design

The best design is the simple and brilliant that you may not have ever even thought of – even though I own a few different methods of making coffee and primarily do a pour over in the AM, we still own a moka pot simply for its beauty and utility.

“Comparisons between different TinyStories models don’t suffer from the same confounding factors. Eldan and Li observed hints that networks with fewer layers but more neurons per layer were better at answering questions that required factual knowledge; conversely, networks with more layers and fewer neurons per layer were better at keeping track of characters and plot points from earlier in the story. Bhagavatula found this result especially intriguing. If it can be replicated in larger models, he said, “that would be a really cool result that could stem out of this work.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/tiny-language-models-thrive-with-gpt-4-as-a-teacher-20231005/?mc_cid=9201f43448&mc_eid=f83944a043

In a way we should have seen the quality and quantity issues with training data for AI models coming – after all, the jokes about unread Silicon Valley types who are just reinventing tired tropes as they never bothered to read a novel or history book all ring true for a reason.

“The ceremony tapped the same idealistic part of me that led me to quit my job and join the Army in the first place. I’m enough of a realist to know that this little assembly in an elementary school outside Pittsburgh doesn’t fix anything. Our recent wars were tragically misguided, and we remain a painfully divided country. Veterans will continue to struggle with myriad problems, and some will sadly choose to end pain that feels insurmountable.

Yes, I was inspired by the sense of unity, however transient, as the attendees gathered in a politically divided school district in a “battleground” state and yet all came together in a spirit of fraternity and appreciation.”

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/guest-columns/2023/11/19/bardenwerper-veterans-iraq-afghanistan-army/stories/202311190011

It doesn’t seem like there will be swift rapprochement between the fringes of the US anytime soon (or really, any other nation, we’re all kinda stuck in this awkward phase into the 21st century). And, as alluring as the Fourth Turning and other theories are, I’m not sure that millennials will finally somehow resolve a fair number of our current challenges, although, it is possible that the last generation raised pre-internet may be best positioned to do so. But maybe, I’m wrong – maybe those millennials that have kids will finally forge sufficient compromises, for their kids’ sake.

“Ray reassured me that I was not crazy. Google results today do feel different from how they felt just five or six years ago for two major reasons. The first was Google’s response to the disinformation panic around the 2016 election, which involved questioning the notion that the most reliable information could be chosen by a form of popularity, meaning how many links a site received from other sites. As a result, the algorithm seemed to change its approach to links, especially when it came to news and sites offering legal, financial, or health advice, and instead paid more attention to what Google came to call E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”

https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

Don’t think the internet is going to totally collapse but I do think it is going to evolve into walled gardens, which will be a bit amusing as then it seems to resemble 19th century newspapers that espoused much more nationalist views than the faux-cosmpolitan vibe the likes of the NYT sought to give off.

“According to this brilliant conversation between Beth & Shawn Dougherty and Marc Barnes of New Polity, this is precisely the wrong way to look at it. For them, ontological waste does not, and in God’s world indeed cannot, exist; things are only waste in relation to goals, but never in and of themselves. Beth in a profound moment says about so-called food waste, “It’s not not there. When I devalue it, I unmake it. I deny its existence.” Even for the non-religious this must have the ring of truth. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy, in which all material reality subsists, cannot be created or destroyed, only changed into different forms.

Gardening failures due to circumstances, which are enormously disappointing, and failures due to my weakness, which are even more so, land this now-dying or -dead organic material into the pile next to my house. When failure occurs, a quick snip and a toss later these leaves and plants and fruits find themselves, not in the trash can, but in the compost heap instead. I reflect on what caused this in the first place. As a result, I become a better gardener and my failure becomes earth.”

https://thebluescholar.substack.com/p/lessons-from-the-compost-heap

The resurgence of gardening should incur a tax break, somewhere, somehow. It just seems like one of the few win-win scenarios for pretty much every participant, including scavenging birds.

“With fewer insects, “we’d have less food,” said ecologist Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex. “We’d see yields dropping of all of these crops.”

And in nature, about 80% of wild plants rely on insects for pollination. “If insects continue to decline,” Goulson said, “expect some pretty dire consequences for ecosystems generally — and for people.”

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/GLOBAL-ENVIRONMENT/INSECT-APOCALYPSE/egpbykdxjvq/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

I don’t worry about a lot of climate change aspects or effects – this, ocean pollution/warming, depleting aquifers and a few others are ones that should be more alarming than really hot summers. Also, beautiful visuals in this one.

“We will likely have to accustom ourselves to a lower energy situation. If we’re manufacturing things and selling them to each other, maybe urbanization is viable [if we are manufacturing food in cities], but I don’t think it’s a long-term, sustainable solution. We’re looking at deurbanization unless there’s some miraculous ecomodernist energy transition. I’d like to think there’s still a place for towns and cities and a mixed landscape of geographic levels. I’m not massively into big cities because, in terms of consumption, they [draw on a great deal of resources from the developing world]. We need to relocalize urbanism so that towns have a real economic and ecological relationship with the hinterland.”

https://civileats.com/2023/11/15/re-localizing-the-food-system-to-fight-a-farm-free-future/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Could%20Dry-Farming%20Wheat%20in%20San%20Diego%20Seed%20a%20Local%20Grain%20Economy%3F&utm_campaign=CE%20Weekly%2020231115

Lab-grown meats scream Tower of Babel to me – not that it they are impossible, but I find it very difficult to believe that there are not unintended consequences, and, oh, by the way, such processes are actually more overall intensive than rearing a pig on a smallholding. We can all agree factory farming is immoral and unhealthy at best, and much reform must occur, but vats of pseudo-protein are not the solution. Soylent Green, anyone?

“One recent study found that farms up to 10ha in size are currently producing 55 per cent of the food supply calorically on 40 per cent of the agricultural land, consistent with the well-established ‘inverse productivity’ relationship with farm size. The underlying complexities are numerous, but it’s not true on the face of it that small-scale local farming can’t feed the world.”

https://theecologist.org/2023/nov/13/peasant-food-web

This is one of the truly fascinating things I have been tempted to dive into – can we avoid famine if we reform the food system?

“Second, attempts to single out one ethnic group for a national holiday may fall foul of the spirit—if not the letter—of the constitutional principle mandating equal treatment of all groups. Even if this is not the case, an Indigenous People’s Day seems almost guaranteed to foster divisiveness, rather than unity, because of the same tribal impulses that caused the ethnic strife in the first place. It is far better to encourage universal civic nationalism than to highlight differences between population groups. The recent addition of the Juneteenth holiday (celebrated on 19 June) to the national calendar is an excellent example of how to do this. Although the holiday is important to many black Americans, it’s not merely a “black” holiday. It marks the elimination of slavery—something all Americans can and should celebrate.”

https://quillette.com/2023/10/09/columbus-day-a-fraught-celebration/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

It is an interesting what-if scenario if the Columbian exchange had never happened. However, the onus of proof that it was a good thing ultimately really is borne out by the state of life wherever such things did not occur, e.g., Central Asia, parts of China and Africa. Celebrating any historical figure is dubious – even saints had their issues – so perhaps if you really wanted to stress a more time-tested approach, never make a single holiday for a single person. They’ll inevitably let you down (unless you’re the Catholic Church, but then again, history doesn’t usually go in for trying to celebrate only saints).

“That last point is essential, because the social engineering mindset that has damaged our communities so deeply says, “I know what’s best for you. I’ll rescue you. You must be poor because you’re incapable of doing anything to help yourself, so I won’t even bother asking for your input.” I was struck by something in Lucas Rouggly’s When the Sirens Stop: A True Story of Restoration in North St. Louis, a moving memoir about Lucas’ neighbors on Enright Boulevard. A younger, very sincere, but perhaps less wise Lucas organized a block party. He insisted that everything be provided for free so that no one had to buy or contribute food. But he was stopped in his tracks by the neighborhood matriarch, Miss Sharon, who rebuked him: “Don’t you dare take away their chance to help own the block.” Lucas observed that Miss Sharon “knew the hearts of her neighbors, and she knew that they had something to offer.” He changed gears, recruiting various neighbors to bring side dishes and drinks, direct traffic, and set up a basketball hoop. A few neighbors formed a blues band and provided the entertainment! Others discreetly handed Lucas a little cash to cover hot dog costs and, having listened to Miss Sharon’s wisdom, he happily took it.”

https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-33-number-4/saving-st-louis-one-block-time

The most frustrating thing about current partisan discourse in US politics, and, well, elsewhere, is the bipolar swing between subtly racist tinges of “they can’t help themselves” when it comes to poor people of color, to the insane individualism of libertarians. We all benefit from some aspects of social cohesion and coordination. In many rich nations, both or multiple political parties do not care for fiscal balance and are fine milking the taxpayer base for as long as they can take it, blaming the other side to cloak their own part. We must not get distracted with the inanities of federal level anymore – we have to start with our own city blocks, and that’s how we’ll fix this state of affairs.

“Astronomers took these oddball stars as evidence of a titanic collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The merger, which probably happened between 8 billion and 11 billion years ago, would have catastrophically disrupted the young Milky Way, ripped the other galaxy to shreds, and sparked a firestorm of new star formation.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-the-milky-ways-stars-a-history-of-violence-20230928/?mc_cid=70650062a4&mc_eid=f83944a043

The cosmos is somehow always more awesome than we think it is.

“Although the sense of the black legend arose in earlier times, the actual term black legend has a rather contemporary origin, having been coined by Julián Juderías in the early twentieth century, but in a relatively short time, less than fifty years, the term seems to have become widely understood and well accepted. It was Rómulo Carbia in his Historia de la leyenda negra hispano-americana who seems to have made Las Casas the focal point of the term black legend. Carbia calls Las Casas’s reports of Spanish abuses of the indigenous peoples of the Americas into question by citing testimonies from other early European settlers. He proceeds, then, to accuse Las Casas not only of bias but also of bad faith in his accounts of Spanish activity in the Americas.”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-new-black-legend-of-bartolome-de-las-casas/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=278666684&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–W-JVZLnUYz0pbSyUxZ6g4dJV9QbIC_4DyCTmwhSphyDdgJaJ6Kbc6l1WeTa0iPSYbZeBzJPLrQ6gXAHxx8oVfQzcm1D-cjGNf6sM_XCCKXxI1i1w&utm_content=278666684&utm_source=hs_email

It’s so easy and alluring to judge anyone, that judging someone against the context of current times and mores is even easier, especially since they usually tend to be dead if they’re historical figures. Such actions present unusual problems with somehow even simpler solutions – if that past hero was a horrible human being in actuality judged by today’s standards, then can we admire any historical figures? What about ourselves, against whatever mores exist in 100 years? Will we be judged harshly for having ever consumed factory-farmed meat, for example? But if we all end up being so flawed, then how could we ever trust any human system or institution that much? And thence, the pathway toward divinities’ or Divinity’s existence.

“In light of these successes, is it reasonable to dream that we might one day really repair American society one zip code at a time using Kaplan’s sideways approach? Conversions to the localist creed are certainly possible. Within a couple years of being unable to identify our mayor, I was knocking doors for his opponent during a primary challenge. (Flag distribution having proven a poor proxy for good governance.) But an intense focus on place is very much swimming against the cultural tide. In describing his own close-knit neighborhood, Kaplan notes the role played by Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. For one day each week, Kaplan and his neighbors turn off their devices, avoid cars and public transportation, and refrain from activities like cooking and shopping. Instead, they pack the local parks and pay each other long social calls. In the words of a visiting friend, it is as if the community has temporarily returned to “a time before automobiles, television, and apps dominated daily life.” As Kaplan acknowledges, this method of community bonding is unlikely to be widely replicated anytime soon. Indeed, most of society seems headed in the exact opposite direction, with daily lives steadily more dominated by work, by overscheduled child-rearing, and by technology.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/10/the-smallest-of-seeds-a-review-of-fragile-neighborhoods/

In my more optimistic moments, it is possible to think that the increasing economic pressures that are converging across most people will potentially render such small neighborhoods and/or towns in vogue. But then I realize that that will only happen when, uh, bad things happen. Under the twin pressures of deglobalization and crushing debt in developed nations after the orgy of spending conducted by the last flurries of politically powerful baby boomers to maintain power and also defend their benefits, we will be forced to live simpler lives within our own neighborhoods.

“That clock synchronizes our bodies to the light-dark cycle of the planet by controlling the expression of more than 40% of our genome. Genes for immune signals, brain messengers and liver enzymes, to name just a few, are all transcribed to make proteins when the clock says it’s time.

That means you are not, biochemically, the same person at 10 p.m. that you are at 10 a.m. It means that evenings are a more dangerous time to take large doses of the painkiller acetaminophen: Liver enzymes that protect against overdose become scarce then. It means that vaccines given in the morning and evening work differently, and that night-shift workers, who chronically disobey their clocks, have higher rates of heart disease and diabetes. People whose clocks run fast or slow are trapped in a hideous state of perpetual jet lag.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-our-cellular-clocks-shes-found-a-lifetime-of-discoveries-20231010/?mc_cid=cc4eb576af&mc_eid=f83944a043

The universe is a never-ending layering of countless systems, and we have barely begun to tap the surface of what even our own physical systems conduct every day.

“This is why I find the endless barbs about nostalgia, turning the clock back, bucolic idylls and what have you so much chaff. Whatever the downsides of premodern societies, they generally knew how to make a local livelihood, and they handed on a liveable world to their descendants. Present generations don’t seem to be doing a brilliant job on those fronts. Is it too much to ask that we get over ourselves just a bit and imagine we might be able to learn something from peoples who’ve figured out how to live low energy local lives?”

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-10-23/new-worlds-to-build/

Although it’s only the “nice” parts of indigenous peoples’ ways of life that tend to get focused on, e.g., the Pacific Northwest tribes’ tending to salmon runs, berry-picking, etc. as opposed to their tendency to brutally slaughter up and down the US West Coast, I do think it is a good thing that we learn from their agricultural and sociocultural practices that inevitably were shaped by the land and climate in which they lived. Yes, this is a precursor to my constant plug for us in northern latitudes to better adapt to short winter days and just agree to all sleep 12 hours a day and only work for about four.

“Matthew Fisher, a prominent condensed matter physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had been wondering whether entanglement between molecules in the brain might play a role in how we think. In the model he and his collaborators were developing, certain molecules occasionally bind together in a way that acts like a measurement and kills entanglement. Then the bound molecules change shape in a way that could create entanglement. Fisher needed to know whether entanglement could thrive under the pressure of intermittent measurements — the same question Nahum had been considering.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-observe-unobservable-quantum-phase-transition-20230911/?mc_cid=2cff2948f5&mc_eid=f83944a043

Absolutely fascinating how much we are learning about quantum systems. The potential is enormous and in very odd and weird ways – if we could ever preserve the arrow of time between entangled states, or figure out how to apply the measurement destroying informational states into cryptography, that’d be huge in terms of energy extraction and deployment.

“The tightening of intellectual property laws on farms throughout the African Union would represent a major victory for the global economic forces that have spent the past three decades in a campaign to undermine farmer-managed seed economies and oversee their forced integration into the “value chains” of global agribusiness. These changes threaten the livelihoods of Africa’s small farmers and their collective biogenetic heritage, including a number of staple grains, legumes, and other crops their ancestors have been developing and safeguarding since the dawn of agriculture.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/new-colonialist-food-economy/

It’s much more en vogue to get angry about colonialism in other places right now, but this is maybe a less complicated, naked cash grab that should deeply infuriate you. At best, a really dumb move by businesses that should know better than to try to recreate evolution’s products in a lab, because we definitely can predict everything that can happen.

“Until recently walking away from academia, I worked as a professor of History and Classics for fifteen years, teaching undergraduate and graduate students. Repeatedly, some of the best students I have taught have been homeschooled. What set them apart was precisely the spirit of bold curiosity that I see in my own kids: that bright light in their eyes, an interest in asking questions and in pursuing rabbit trails independently.

Public school curricula, with their strictly set state standards and increased emphasis on standardized testing, simply cannot allow this sort of flexibility. As a result, no matter how amazing the teachers are (and, believe me, many are truly amazing!), students do not get the opportunity to cultivate curiosity, wonder, and a genuine love of learning. More control and oversight is not helping American public schools, and it certainly would not help homeschoolers.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/09/homeschooling-and -red-herrings/

As a product of homeschooling, I’m doubtless biased. That said, I don’t think it works for everyone for a lot of reasons, some of which are pretty controversial (let’s just say that it’s a GOOD thing some people should never go to college and can just read what they want), but would work for many more than currently do homeschool.

“Unlike benzodiazepines, NBACs have a low addiction profile, according to Dr. Bachu. They are non-euphoric, meaning patients don’t feel “high” while on them. Patients also don’t build up a tolerance to these drugs. That is, it doesn’t take larger and larger doses to achieve the same effect. When they work, NBACs simply relieve symptoms and make patients feel normal. Sleep, appetite, mood—all return to normal. The only difference is patients often attain a complete indifference to alcohol, leading to long-term sobriety without effort.

Science is not completely sure how NBACs alleviate symptoms while avoiding the pitfalls of addiction, tolerance, and intoxication, but it’s theorized that they impact brain chemistry in uniquely subtle ways. For example, benzodiazepines target GABA type A receptors, which produce a quick and pleasurable surge of dopamine to the brain. This receptor plays a central role in dangerously addictive drugs like heroin. NBACs, on the other hand, tend to target GABA type B receptors, which produce slower, more prolonged inhibitory signals. Some NBACs sidestep GABA receptors altogether, acting instead on voltage-gated calcium or sodium channels.”

https://quillette.com/2023/08/28/medications-can-help-keep-alcoholics-sober-why-are-they-being-ignored/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

If possible I do think we should be even warier of our tendency to try to prescribe our problems away, but that said, I believe we were gifted human ingenuity to try and help our less fortunate brethren, and if this could represent a non-opioid/benzo future, that is a very good thing.

“Learning to identify such species not only gives us pleasure in a deeper understanding of the natural world but can also help us evaluate the health of a grassland and, therefore, its value to biodiversity and wildlife. A predominance of aggressive or coarse grasses, such as Yorkshire-fog, cock’s-foot, tall fescue, or perennial ryegrass, accompanied by nettles, docks, and thistles, signal that the land has been “improved” with fertilizer. An abundance of nonaggressive grasses, on the other hand – common bent, sweet vernal grass, meadow foxtail, crested dog’s-tail, and the various fine-bladed fescues – provide the best matrix for wildflowers to flourish and are natural indicators of an unimproved grassland. In these environments, a typical quadrant of four square meters can reveal a diverse grass population, usually between eight to fourteen species, whereas in an improved pasture or ley you’d be lucky to find four.”

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/environment/learning-to-love-grass

It’s an interesting thought to contemplate the appeal of a lawn’s uniformity, etc. versus a truly diverse natural meadow, and why we are drawn to parts of one versus the other.

“Our responsibility is not to despair, but to work and to enjoy with hope. For Christians, there is a basis for this hope that does not see the world as doomed and disposable and mostly a thing to be escaped. Maximus the Confessor, the Greek theologian of the 6th century, emphasized that, because God had united himself with human nature in the person of Christ, he had united his divinity with the whole of creation: “The unspeakable and prodigious fire hidden in the essence of things, as in the bush, is the fire of divine love and the dazzling brilliance of His beauty inside every thing. . . a shining forth, an epiphany, of the mysterious depths of being.”  The world, Maximus thought, was destined to be like the burning bush, on fire with love and yet not consumed—united to God, perfect, divinized, and yet still itself. “Earth’s crammed with heaven,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, echoing Maximus, “and every common bush is afire with God.”

https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/blog/2023/a-burning-stomach-a-fickle-globe

Little more remains to be said, otherwise than it is the season for good cheer and hope for a Savior has come.

“Today’s new cables use 16 pairs of fibers, but a new cable that NTT is building between the US and Japan employs 20 fiber pairs to reach 350Gbps. Another Japanese tech giant, NEC, is using 24 fiber pairs to reach speeds on its transatlantic cable to 500Tbps, or a half petabit per second.

“Especially after the pandemic, we observed a capacity shortage everywhere. We urgently need to construct new cables,” Sumimoto said. “The situation is a bit crazy. If we construct a cable, the capacity is immediately sold out.”

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/features/the-secret-life-of-the-500-cables-that-run-the-internet/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The complexity of modern infrastructure is nearly impossible to keep track of, which is why I’m always a bit dubious of our ability to manage increasingly complex systems without failures popping up more frequently.

“However, there are things you can do to slow the death of fun. For one, don’t accelerate it. Most startups needlessly accelerate their corporatization by copying the processes of larger companies, usually by poaching managers from large companies who bring their playbooks with them. For example, many startups use Jira because large companies use Jira. Don’t use Jira. Y Combinator has helped the world realize that inspiration should go the other way–large companies should try to operate more like startups.”

https://blog.johnqian.com/startup-spark?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

Have seen this firsthand, both via study and work. That said, I think it’s more about choice of tools and philosophies can be surprisingly more applicable in various areas than may be suspected.

“The lengthiest essay in A Dream Deferred is titled, “The Loneliness of the Black Conservative,” and it is here that Steele first considered how he came to accept that unfamiliar label: “I realized, finally, that I was a black conservative when I found myself standing on stages being publicly shamed,” he wrote. His previous book had argued that racism was no longer the major issue for black people in America, and that America’s obsession with uncovering white persecution of blacks resembled an extension of the country’s stormy racial history, not a break from it. This view was considered heresy in many quarters.”

https://quillette.com/2023/08/22/a-dream-deferred-revisited/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

Pretty unpopular, but also, it is inevitable that political lines begin transcending racial boundaries over the next few decades. Blacks used to be more Republican, until the great flip in the 1960s. That was 60 years ago – it is now reversing yet again.

“I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).”

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-central-banking-101-by-joseph?ref=thediff.co

It’s difficult to square this circle but on the one hand I’m someone who has Tom Nichols’ Death of Expertise on my bookshelf and on the other I spend a fair amount of time wondering how we have made it this far as a civilization when incompetence is rife. The issue is that this doesn’t mean we have to wholesale dismiss the entire system, but we must rather figure out how to return to decentralization, and also, trust in even the ordinary people we want to run our affairs, but avoid any semblance of worship. This is another reason I despise both Obama- and Trump-worship: They’re not special, they may be smarter in some ways than you (probably/definitely not Trump) but they make up for that with commensurate flaws. In the words of AWOLNATION: kill your heroes.

“The average American—branded, for the first time, as “The Consumer”—was now confronted with easy money from lots of institutions, some new and some old. State-of-the-art personal finance companies and old neighborhood banks, the newly developed stock market and the long-trusted retailer all offered new ways to purchase, even without substantial wages or savings. Middle-class buying and borrowing habits changed drastically. American households’ consumer debt more than doubled over the course of the decade, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of household income. It went from $3.3 billion in 1920 to $7.6 billion in 1929, and, after hovering between 4–6% in the first two decades of the 20th century, it jumped to 10% in the third. After declining from 1900 to 1916, real debt per household nearly doubled in the 1920s. Urban mortgage loans to homeowners and businesses also doubled over the course of the decade.”

https://americancompass.org/flapper-economics/

The converse to these points about consumerism, the morality of thrift versus debt, etc. is that such decentralized ownership is the mechanism whereby massive projects can actually be accomplished, e.g., skyscrapers, interstate highways, significant research, dams, etc. Now, are all those worthwhile? You could argue maybe not, but some you have to concede are incredible contributions. The answer lies, as always, in the balance. Could we be stockholders without succumbing to consumerism? Of course – the wealthy among us use credit primarily as a tool.

“But it was only in 2020 that the risks became truly evident. Jack Ma—the founder of Alibaba, China’s richest man, and a role model to younger entrepreneurs—criticized the Party’s handling of financial reform, and then disappeared for months. Regulators postponed the I.P.O. for Ant Group, another of Ma’s companies, and fined Alibaba a record $2.8 billion for antitrust violations. Similar disappearances and penalties swept through one industry after another: education, real estate, health care. The Party explained that it was targeting inequality, monopoly, and excessive financial risks, but some of the arrests seemed personal. Ren Zhiqiang, a real-estate tycoon, received an unusually harsh sentence of eighteen years on corruption charges, after someone leaked an essay in which he mocked Xi as a “clown stripped naked who still insisted on being emperor.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/chinas-age-of-malaise?ref=thediff.co

The big question of the 2020s geopolitically probably is what will become of China, and the signs aren’t looking great. Developed nations are too intertwined for a violent break to work, while its tottering economy requires loyalism and exports.

“Belloc advocated various methods to combat economic centralization, such as different tax structures to disincentivize what we’d now call chain stores. The larger one’s operation becomes, the higher tax one pays. There is effectively a penalty on bigness. Belloc wishes to turn our attention from thinking in terms of consumption (“what can I buy?”), which is the attitude of the “wage slave,” to liberty (“am I economically independent?”). Economic liberty is only achieved by ownership of productive property. Belloc would likely look at modern economies and conclude, despite our vast wealth and access to truly stupendous consumer goods, that we are not really free since most of us are wage earners, not entrepreneurs or proprietors. Belloc is constantly attentive to the problems of centralization. Note in our day, as in Belloc’s, the ability of wealth to use its power to curry favor with government, secure regulatory capture, and set up barriers to entry that discourage competition.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/07/the-liberty-to-value-common-goods-a-review-of-the-political-economy-of-distributism/

As the world encounters massive demographic crises in a few short decades, it’s not unreasonable to think employee-owned enterprises will become much more popular as a way to outcompete for immigrants or really any labor.

“When we relate to the world through an LLM, we treat reality as a standing reserve from which we expect to frictionlessly receive answers to any question that comes to mind. We don’t have to study. We don’t have to endure frustration. We don’t have to weigh opposing perspectives. We don’t have to imagine alternative ways of seeking answers. We don’t even have to “torture” nature in a Baconian sense. We just type in a query and hit enter. Questions that cannot be answered in this fashion become less interesting and imaginable.”

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/technology/what-problem-does-chatgpt-solve

Chatbots may not end the world, but LLMs will probably make us dumber. That’s my crude contribution here, but really, you should read the beautiful piece above by my long-ago acquaintance Jeff Bilbro.

“Recent studies have highlighted the connection between our diet, use of antibiotics and our gut bacteria in the development of allergies. A 2019 study led by Nagler showed that the gut of healthy infants harbored a specific class of allergy-protective bacteria not found in infants with cow’s milk allergy. This was followed by a study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital that found that five or six specific strains of gut bacteria in infants seem to be protective of developing food allergies. A lead researcher on that study, Dr. Lynn Bry, surmised that our lifestyles are, for better or for worse, capable of “resetting the immune system.”

https://www.noemamag.com/modernity-has-made-us-allergic/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

An interesting little thought re modern life I’ve had, especially in the context of “safe spaces” due to “triggering” is that as much as we try, we simply can’t protect ourselves from everything. Moreover, it’s bad for us.

“He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.”

https://www.drcathicks.com/post/on-craft?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

The unintended consequence of consumerism, diminishing populations and inexorable growth in pursuit of the next quarter’s earnings all have produced a world of junk we don’t know how to fix. Yet, geopolitical trends may start taking matters into their own hands and forcing us to respect craft and repairs again.

“We think of the past like it’s a physical fact – like it’s real. But the past is what we call our memory and stories about it. Imperfect memories, and stories built on one interpretation of incomplete information. That’s “the past”.”

https://sive.rs/pnt?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

Eyewitnesses aren’t always reliable. Much of our life narrative that we’ve unconsciously or consciously constructed for ourselves can be transformed. I think the ubiquity of therapy can be a mixed bag in outcomes but one great nuance it can introduce is recognition of the underlying stories that have held power over you for some time.

“Thick travel has made me realise how much chaos we have here in the US, at a spiritual level, compared with the rest of the world. We are becoming a thin culture, obsessed with the surface, more and more in denial about the importance of what is beneath. We have forgotten that we need webs of meaning, eroding so many of them.”

https://unherd.com/2023/08/why-you-should-be-a-thick-traveller/

This may well be true but I’ve rarely seen more craving – both spoken and unspoken – for deeper connections in my entire life, ranging from people actually engaging in witchcraft after astrology doesn’t suffice to rejecting materialism and deliberately choosing less lucrative but more meaningful careers.

“In 2017, along with Pierre Delplace and Venaille, both physicists at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, Marston observed that the Coriolis force swirls fluids on Earth the way the magnetic field spins von Klitzing’s electrons. In the planetary version of a topological insulator, equatorial Kelvin waves are like the current flowing at a quantum material’s edge. These immense waves propagate around the equator because it is the boundary between two insulators, the hemispheres. And they flow east because in the northern hemisphere, Earth’s rotation swirls fluids clockwise, and in the southern hemisphere, the ocean swirls in the other direction.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-quantum-physics-describes-earths-weather-patterns-20230718/?mc_cid=86d8e0e089&mc_eid=f83944a043

A growing theory I have is that the entire universe is fractal. The topological swirls in quantum electronics are copied by the weather waves spanning the globe; maybe the universe’s black holes more closely mirror cellular decay than we think?

“In no way do I pine nostalgically for the seventeenth century and its coal fires, outdoor latrines, rats, lice, fleas, biannual baths, and so-called dentistry. But gross jobs are still part of life. We’ve just divvied up roles such that we can mostly hire someone else to do the dirty work.”

https://comment.org/dirty-work/

The physicality of our existence means it’s essential, in my view, to learn how and why things work. I’m still trying to get better at this. Oh, and it’s critical for especially teenagers to get exposed to ‘dirty jobs’.

“And, like a good localist, Swift saw what needed doing: taking care of the soil, avoiding abstraction, especially in ownership but also in leadership, providing for ourselves, and solving problems with solutions suited to individual places—that is, seeking local wisdom.”

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2023/07/jonathan-swifts-street-cred/

If WFH truly becomes the prevailing mode, it is possible that a localist revival could occur, but that seems pretty far off/hard to imagine, given the sheer mass of cultural change that’ll need to occur.

“Yet, opines Deneen, it is custom and authoritative cultural institutions that protect the average person against the rapaciousness of the elite. In Deneen’s view, the emphasis on the autonomous self to the detriment of custom and communal authority has left people adrift. Without these authoritative cultural transmitters of meaning and custom, the common person becomes a pawn to a “power elite” that promises to manage people’s lives for them.”

https://currentpub.com/2023/07/12/review-the-regimes-they-are-a-changin/

It’s important to note these are usually local, not national institutions, e.g., your neighbors that look out for your car as thieves try to make off with it (happened just this weekend to an acquaintance of mine).

“Wood’s team showed that a computer powered by a GPU and running Unity, a software package for producing video games, could generate the necessary pictures — including detailed reflections of digital images wrapped around the curved, wet human eyeball. It took the GPU system just 23 milliseconds to generate each photo. (In fact, each image actually took only 3.6 milliseconds to produce; the rest of the time was spent storing the image.)”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-networks-need-data-to-learn-even-if-its-fake-20230616?mc_cid=63b0f660b7&mc_eid=f83944a043

How much data will AI systems really need? Data poisoning is likely to become a much bigger problem sooner rather than later, while the rarity and quality of datasets are going to become a distinct pipeline of IP.

“And so, what do we find when we read Zuckerberg’s letter against the background of Yeats’s poem? We find that Zuckerberg’s imaginative vocabulary is suffocatingly limited. In fact, the metaphors we hear, almost exclusively (perhaps, not surprisingly), are drawn from the practical application of mathematical functions, sketched out into order to find vertex coordinates; that is, those graphable points that represent maxima and minima for market opportunities.”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/microcosm-or-the-machine-william-butler-yeatss-meta/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&hsmi=267655816&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--5CQiDNOjgJH8cBOpajTg5liEpZhMyQWfH6Qn2wQ2naV7_KJrhAfWXp5cObeZwPT42au4ge9MR5E1yWXxHIMQCSFZOLoVseGmNx-sIxKGaWETDro&utm_content=267655816&utm_source=hs_email

Many tech CEOs are far smarter than I am – still, maybe they could have spared some time to read some literature. The glorification of the quantifiable and the coder in the 2010s is dying, thankfully.

“Well, indeed, and if so we might have bigger problems than middle-class employment, but is that close? You can spend weeks of your life watching three hour YouTube videos of computer scientists arguing about this, and conclude only that they don’t really know either. You might also suggest that the idea this one magic piece of software will change everything, and override all the complexity of real people, real companies and the real economy, and can now be deployed in weeks instead of years, sounds like classic tech solutionism, but turned from utopia to dystopia.”

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/7/2/working-with-ai?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

AI is like any other tool, not so much good or bad itself as opposed to what it’s used for. But I do think that we are underselling how many BS jobs are going to be automated away, and there surely will be some adjustment pain, but it will be for the best.

“Stanisława spoke little about her experience in the camp, only sharing her report on the conditions years after the war because she felt she owed it to the women to tell the world what they had endured. But she kept her own memories to herself. Her family could only see glimpses, as when her grandson once began playing “Silent Night” on the piano. Stanisława froze in place before asking him to play something else; this song, it seems, had been sung by the soldiers at the camp and Stanisława could not bear the memories it dredged up.”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/servant-of-god-stanisawa-leszczynska-the-midwife-of-auschwitz-who-delivered-thousands-of-babies-and-saved-thousands-of-lives/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=264125530&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_6YPuFLZQDd4A1GD7piIFQ3tesCJGvtBTa-Uq8sBdKZmWGfK8gtcoKRHZKG12cpu9_UyZOFHiM3mxWRrv3BriQRD4-veDPw0JfBBvVThLKl749OLg&utm_content=264125530&utm_source=hs_email

A staggeringly beautiful story of human perseverance.

“By tweaking which connections they cut, the researchers could move the deformations. They made two pairs of non-abelian defects, and by sliding them around a five-by-five-qubit chessboard, they just barely eked out a braid. The researchers declined to comment on their experiment, which is being prepared for publication, but other experts praised the achievement.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-elusive-particles-that-remember-their-pasts-20230509/?mc_cid=bbc6d126b1&mc_eid=f83944a043

I don’t pretend to truly grasp all of the implications in this article, but it basically seems to be that as we improve our manipulation of exotic forms of matter, we are getting closer to supercharging our computational possibilities. If we can compute anything, we can likely solve energy.

“Fundamentalism, Kundera knew, was incompatible with humour—the latter an alternative reality with rules of its own, which trivialised the earnestness of ideologues and laughed them away to nothing. Humour wasn’t just a series of jokes, it was a philosophical system that “shone its light over everything,” and for this very reason, its practitioners had to be taken down. Offenders routinely got 10-year sentences under Stalin and in the process an entire redemptive area of life was denied existence. Yet this, Kundera felt, was just when the trait shone most brilliantly—a “wager,” a genuine risk, and a sign of character. In a 1980 interview with Philip Roth, Kundera said that he could always recognise a “non-Stalinist, a person I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humour was a trustworthy sign of recognition. Ever since, I have been terrified by a world that is losing its sense of humour.”

https://quillette.com/2023/07/11/milan-kundera-the-nobel-prize-for-literature-winner-we-never-had/?ref=quillette-weekly-newsletter

It didn’t take long for comedians to rebel against cancel culture because nothing is funny in cancel culture, wherein one could conceivably be canceled for anything, because every single thing could be deemed offensive given a certain point of view. As long as human nature exists, we will have evils and flaws, and one of the most powerful things we can do is laugh at them. I forget who originated this, but the line that all you need to do to see who is in power in a society is figure out who or what you cannot joke about, and then that is the true power. Remarkably accurate.

“There have been hard conversations and tears along the way. Early on, trying to make sense of her family’s relationship with the people they enslaved, Marshall shared her family’s narrative about Hester: that she was so close with the Marshall family that she opted to stay with them after the Civil War. But the Mosleys reframed the story for Marshall: As a penniless Black woman, where else could she have gone?”

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/july-august/racial-reconciliation-georgia-farm-hester-documentary.html?share=6kWMCHfIYJG06TvOyvLSsjBmFV3Mqq%2bk&utm_medium=widgetsocial

A powerful, painful article. The wounds caused by the immense sin of slavery and attempts to cast people as subhuman take generations to heal – and we are still within living memory of outright segregation (not the much subtler kind that occurs still today). But, there is always hope.

“Such a result, even if only in monkeys, might lead regulators to decide that human embryo models deserve to be treated like embryos, with all the attendant restrictions. Some researchers feel that we urgently need a new definition of an embryo to offer clarity and keep pace with the scientific advances. If there is good reason to suppose an embryo model has the potential to generate viable offspring, we will need to either accept the regulatory implications or find ways to nullify that potential.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/embryo-models-challenge-legal-ethical-and-biological-concepts-20230613/?mc_cid=63b0f660b7&mc_eid=f83944a043

More than ever, we are grappling with the slippery concept of a soul, and are losing our way steadily without any clear definition of a person. However, to do so, will require brutal recalculation of what we’ve allowed to occur for decades, e.g., turning the other way when it’s clear our profitable trading partners are casually committing genocide, modern slavery in the Middle East, abortion.

“I can’t think of many scenes that are flourishing right now, which may account for the shortage of geniuses. Scenes are the soil in which geniuses sprout and flourish. Of course, some geniuses really are solitary; Isaac Newton did not go down to the alehouse to quaff beers and talk celestial mechanics. But more often, genius is a social phenomenon. Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to describe an ecology of artists, entrepreneurs and thinkers from which brilliant individuals are spawned.

I’m interested in what makes a particular place and moment susceptible to scenius. It might be a random efflorescence; an accident of time, people, and place. It might have deep-rooted economic causes. Athens became more intellectually advanced than Sparta or anywhere else partly because trade made it richer and busier; Florentine artists benefited from the surplus of the banking industry. It might be a rebellion of the artists against the culture’s gatekeepers: Parisian Impressionism emerged when young painters, dissatisfied with the strictures of the Academy, hooked up with a network of gallery-owners, dealers, and critics outside of the official system.”

https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-infrastructure-of-genius?r=9d6a&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Turns out that any innovation in fields is often best based on or informed by a firm foundation in classical principles, much like any physical structure.

“Who is really affected by “Affirmative Action”? From how it’s discussed, you would think “Affirmative Action” affects a wide swathe of the black and Hispanic public. But you’d be wrong. 

By Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade’s estimate, in any given year, only 1 percent of black and Hispanic 18-year olds get into a college as a result of racial preferences. The other 99 percent either don’t go to college at all or don’t go to colleges selective enough to “need” racial preferences. Schools with acceptance rates over 50% generally don’t use affirmative action.”

https://colemanhughes.substack.com/p/10-notes-on-the-end-of-affirmative?utm_medium=web&utm_source=substack

Never honestly had much of an axe to grind with affirmative action beyond its potential inefficiency. MLK’s plan for a “GI Bill” for the poor cited in this article (h/t to my pal Teddy Kim for this one, btw) made far more sense. However, now it is on its way out, a good reflection on its pros and cons.

“Before plants arrived, some researchers think, crusts of microbes could have helped prepare the land by transforming bare rock into fertilized soil. A biocrust well adapted to extreme conditions could take hold of a suitable substrate that held nutrients and was regularly moistened with fog. By gradually weathering the rocks and stabilizing the sediment as soil, it could alter the environment in a way that promoted the development of higher organisms.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-fierce-desert-microbe-crusts-show-how-life-tamed-the-land-20230712/?mc_cid=dfe98bb370&mc_eid=f83944a043

The more we learn about the intricacies of nature, it is clear that life is astoundingly resilient, it is everywhere and supremely capable of adaptation… but that doesn’t mean there aren’t losses along the way.