Garrett James Black

To find order amid the chaotic landscape, the researchers zeroed in on the water table, which is the elevation at which the ground becomes saturated with water. They noticed that no matter what plants were growing or how much debris had piled up on the peat, the water table was almost always near the bog’s surface. If the water table fell, perhaps due to water flowing out faster than rain could replenish it, some peat became exposed to air and decomposed until the bog’s surface sank to the new level. If the water table rose, as during a period of heavy rainfall, peat accumulated until it caught up.
The bog’s shape seemed to be essentially governed by the physics of the water table. The researchers found that they could mathematically model the shape of the bog by solving a widely used equation named for the 19th-century mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson that allowed them to approximate a bog’s depth given only the shape of its boundary.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/simple-equation-predicts-the-shapes-of-carbon-capturing-wetlands-20240528/?mc_cid=d4d66c8bee&mc_eid=f83944a043

Increasingly convinced mathematics is the symbologic/semiotic equivalent of music, yet music the animating physical force that permeates every plane of existence, beyond the 4-D world that mostly constraints humans.

Does this mean that the kind of politics rooted in a shared home is impossible in America? Not necessarily. But it would require a very different style of politics than the varieties of nationalism that are currently on offer. It would require attempts to revive the actual authority of local life—both state and local governments as well as civil society. That would mean a radical recommitment to federalism and limits on the regulatory power of the national government, such that people who actually do share a home can make real decisions together about how to live in it—from their schools and universities to public decency laws to economic development. When battling against rule by elites, a politics of home would not seek to raise up new national elites who stand for this or that iteration of the “national idea,” but would seek to disempower them with a revival of American local self-government.

https://www.fusionaier.org/post/our-home-sweet-home

When conversations turn a certain way, and sometimes, people do end up asking a gentle or direct question trying to figure out where I stand politically, it’s hard to capture the above, which is probably closest to my actual position. The real war is always a class war; both major political parties in the US are much more similar than they are different; weakening norms over the past few decades because all politicians slowly kept trying to outdo each other in a race to the bottom (arguably starting with JFK in his personal life, culminating in the latest iteration in Trump); our problems are closer to systemic and cultural consequences of decades of mostly good intentions… etc.

Robert Edwards, Rise’s manager, said over the last year he’s done his best to keep prices competitive. He even goes into Dollar General and the out-of-state Walmart people most frequent to check what competitors are offering. He works with a wholesaler out of Indiana that purchases in bulk for multiple independent stores, an attempt to leverage the lowest prices they can.
But there are some deals that the store just can’t afford to match. “There are things I can go to Walmart and buy cheaper than I can get from my wholesaler,” Edwards said, though supplier contracts don’t allow him to do that.
He also said some suppliers simply won’t mess with a small store. For months, Edwards watched in frustration from the parking lot as a Frito-Lay truck made deliveries at the Dollar Generals just to the north and south of Rise while it refused to stop at the co-op.

https://dailyyonder.com/the-government-spends-millions-to-open-grocery-stores-in-food-deserts-the-real-test-is-their–survival/2024/08/15/

This is the type of piece that makes one wonder why Dollar General, Walmart, etc. simply won’t add produce sections or other such investments at the bare minimum to outcompete whatever communities throw at them. It’s either that or antitrust needs to become much more powerful, which will take a reversal of roughly 40-50 years trending toward that. However, given populist anger that’s gotten us Donald freakin’ Trump, perhaps the time is ripe.

I certainly don’t know—but I imagine that our sense of what computers are for, and what their capacities are, might change and evolve. An ant colony, or a model of one, could be a computer. A tree could be a computer, its roots functionalized to measure changes in the soil and report back to us. A cluster of brain cells hooked up to sensors could be a computer. A computer could be liquid, or bacterial. If we could throw out our existing paradigms and look farther afield, we might really be surprised. Intelligence is everywhere, in different degrees and combinations. The question is finding applications that are suitable and mutually-beneficial. 

https://dark.properties/from-silicon-to-slime/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

Increasingly, as our knowledge of the world grows, we will be forced to acknowledge that nothing makes sense all together without an intertwining force holding all of the cosmos together. Physicists already have to grapple with this the most, perhaps, which is why some of them go quietly crazy, or concoct the wildest scenarios to escape the concept of a God.

This is what I’d wanted: to feel safe. To erect sturdier walls between me and animals that might kill me. To have a partner I could trust. I no longer wanted to find myself looking over my shoulder as I skied across the tundra or walked down the street, wondering who might be following me. And I no longer wanted to carry a gun when I ventured out, always ready to turn beings I met into meat. When I walk through the woods now, I no longer stalk or worry about being stalked—instead, I often clog my ears with headphones, pausing every once in a while to refresh email. The other day, when talking to a friend on the phone while wandering nearby trails, I almost stumbled on a cow moose munching on willows. The sight of her blond fur literally brought me back to my senses. Most of the time, I’m not as awake as I once was; danger, and hunger, no longer demand it. I’m grateful to feel safe, to have secure access to good food, and yet I also occasionally wonder: where has the hunter gone? 

https://longreads.com/2024/07/25/predator-or-prey-diana-saverin/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=t5-2024-07-26&utm_medium=email

Can we really live without something, or someone else, bearing a cost? I am not sure – there’s something slippery yet profound I am still thinking through with pieces like this.

There is a growing movement to do just that. Central States is one of 6,533 companies that have formed an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (or ESOP) in the United States, and that number is growing by about 250 companies annually. That’s 14.7 million employees who have ownership in companies worth, collectively, $2.1 trillion. 
Every year, those employees get a percentage of their salaries in company stock. During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent. Last year, an employee earning $100,000 a year received $26,000 worth of stock in their account. As the company has grown the value of that stock has averaged 20 percent returns annually, outperforming the stock market. 
These stock accounts are in addition to traditional retirement accounts, not instead of them. Noelle Montaño, executive director for ESCA, tells me 90 percent of employees with an ESOP account also have a 401k or other retirement account, which means employees earn upside without any downside. Employees without an ESOP don’t have that kind of advantage—50 percent don’t have a retirement account at all.

https://www.elysian.press/p/employee-ownership?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=working

“Real capitalism has never been tried.” – to misquote somebody I’m too lazy to look up. However, the reality is that more tinkering like ESOPS should be occurring. Are they a panacea? Probably not, but are they better than RSUs functioning like a market-based type of bonus, or a way to dangle additional comp without shelling out more in base pay, or the endless gambling many take on early-stage stock options? Yeah, probably.

In the case that generative AI goes on some rocketship trajectory, building random chatbots will not prepare you for the future. Is that clear now? Having your team type in import openai does not mean that you are at the cutting-edge of artificial intelligence no matter how desperately you embarrass yourself on LinkedIn and at pathetic borderline-bribe award ceremonies from the malign Warp entities that sell you enterprise software⁵. Your business will be disrupted exactly as hard as it would have been if you had done nothing, and much worse than it would have been if you just got your fundamentals right. Teaching your staff that they can get ChatGPT to write emails to stakeholders is not going to allow the business to survive this. If we thread the needle between moderate impact and asteroid-wiping-out-the-dinosaurs impact, everything will be changed forever and your tepid preparations will have all the impact of an ant bracing itself very hard in the shadow of a towering tsunami.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

An amusing piece especially in the context of billions in market cap seemingly at the whim of whether there are cheaper ways to run AI queries.

(Forgot to select a quote before my paywall ran out/my Chrome extension I fiddled with finally broke, but it’s a good piece, go and read it if you got access.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobiology-microbes.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

This same process of learning and remembering lines by deep understanding enabled a septuagenarian actor to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, “Paradise Lost.” At the age of 58, John Basinger began studying this poem as a form of mental activity to accompany his physical activity at the gym, each time adding more lines to what he had already learned. Eight years later, he had committed the entire poem to memory, reciting it over three days. When I tested him at age 74, giving him randomly drawn couplets from the poem and asking him to recite the next ten lines, his recall was nearly flawless. Yet, he did not accomplish this feat through mindless repetition. In the course of studying the poem, he came to a deep understanding of Milton. 

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-actors-remember-their-lines/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

We transform our living neurons/brains by just ascribing greater meaning, in the meantime memorizing. Simply amazing.

And so, tentatively, in 2017, “without having any real plan” — although briefly having considered and discarded the more traditional option of intergenerational living with one or other set of parents — Oldfield and her husband, Chris, began to look for people who might want to join them. “We asked some people out, basically,” she laughs. “It was very much like dating.”
Just like dating, there were some false starts — a couple of lunches that didn’t go anywhere, and then some extended dating with another family who seemed perfect on paper: similar values and vision, children the same age. “And then we decided to go away together for the weekend to see how that went, and the kids squabbled solidly for 48 hours. And it was just really clear how having children exactly the same age showed up all the very small differences in our parenting approaches far too starkly.”

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/parenting/article/middle-class-commune-joint-accounts-noisy-sex-peckham-0jnhvhgmh

Life is pretty wild. Not that I’m against the above arrangement, but sometimes I do ponder how hard people seem to try to avoid multigenerational households. The nuclear family isn’t a horrible construct, but has its cons – surely there is some middle ground… maybe the above is it?

Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences have invented a new material made from modified starch that can completely decompose in nature—and do so within only two months. The material is made using natural plant material from crops and could be used for food packaging, among many other things.

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-biodegradable-barley-plastic.html?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

Hopefully this is more scalable, though the article doesn’t quite seem to spell it out in detail if it is beyond notes around the raw materials being available. Could be significant, though, over the current darkly hilarious performance theater of “recycling”.

Pacifists also are willing to sacrifice themselves, or things they love, rather than resort to violence. This means leaving arguments unanswered, not in order to avoid conflict, but in order to show that there is another way. It means being willing to look like a coward or fool, like someone who cannot compete in the arena or is too afraid to do so. It means being willing to look like a coward or a fool to both sides, the other side and your own. It means also being willing to look like a traitor to your own side, like someone who, by his silence, is helping the enemy. It means forgoing the thrill of victory, even just victory, because you do not trust yourself to handle that victory without being corrupted by it. The pacifist thinks that just war theory could only work if we were all angels. But as Hauerwas says: if we are pacifists, it is not because we are peaceful, it’s because we’re “violent sons of bitches.” The pacifist does not trust himself to argue justly; he is too tempted by the delight of victory to engage in anything like “persuasion.” He knows he will always be more interested in looking good than in serving truth.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/waging-culture-wars-justly/

Reading the fourth volume of Caro’s magisterial LBJ biography has me pondering if one of the big lies about the current state of the US, circa 2020s, is that we have never been this divided. When pro-lifers raise their cries to heaven over the approximately 60 million aborted babies since Roe v. Wade, and the bulk of Americans would prefer not to think about it, is that much more of a cultural divide than when the deep South simply ignored how their Jim Crow system seemed to the rest of the nation? I’m not sure. What I do know, especially from the historical record and evidenced by several slave rebellions pre-Civil War, when the disenfranchised try to rebel, they can’t succeed unless they get help. The issue with abortion, of course, is that the victims are the ultimate disenfranchised, who cannot even rebel. That is the fault line of the current cultural wars – and I don’t know how long it’ll take, mind by mind, person by person, to change that state of affairs. But the above is probably the only way to do it – the pacifist approach.

What’s the real harm in using the words “server” and “cache” ? The user who doesn’t care about understanding isn’t going to get much out of it either way, I can concede that. But those that do can and will google those terms, and maybe they will learn something. And you can be sure there WILL in fact be users who understand it who will absolutely appreciate it.
I think this is very much Feynman’s point: he didn’t have flowery unrealistic expectations of the average person. He just said, look, there’s a LOT of variance in the skill & interest of people. Why are we not even giving people a chance?

https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/feynmans-razor?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=cutting_room_floor

Few things are more ironic than the number of people who will tell you to give up trying to appeal to people’s intelligence because the average person is so dumb.

As I reentered the conference floor, I was still thinking about the tension between declared outcomes and actual implementations. All around me, the booths posed a collective thesis on the future. This was a future without busywork or buttons, a future of bespoke experiences, a future where the internet was an ambient thing we’d call upon with our voices — not a service we would use but a place where we would live. Beneath this promised future, however, was a shadow future, one that suggested itself at every turn. This was a future of screens in every establishment and no way to get help, a future in which extractive algorithms yielded relentless advertising, a future of a crapified internet, too diluted with sponcon and hallucinated facts to be of any use. In this future, if you wanted to use a product you would have to download an app and pay a monthly fee. It was a future of ultra-sophisticated scams and government surveillance, a future where anyone’s face could be spliced into porn. Our arrival in this future would be a gradual surrender, achieved through a slow creep of terms and conditions, and the capitulations had already begun.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

It’s hard to juxtapose the banal horror of the above scenario with how flawed and non-digital so much of the world still is. Sometimes I’m not sure the dystopian fears are warranted, because so many things still break both in the digital to physical and vice versa. On the other hand, surveillance states like London and Chinese cities exist.

Intercepting plastic in highly-polluting rivers is the fastest and most cost-effective way to clean the oceans and is the focus of our Rivers program, as we look to stop plastics from reaching the ocean. Our network of Interceptors is maturing around the world: our first prototype Interceptor 001 recently celebrated 5 years since deployment in Indonesia. We have also recently announced the arrival of Interceptor 019 in Bangkok, Thailand and a new partnership in India, starting in Mumbai.
With over 9 million kilograms of trash extracted from rivers globally to date, alongside our recent return to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, we continue to advance our mission in both oceans and rivers. We are encouraged by this positive start to 2024 and expect to see our catch total increase dramatically this year.

https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/the-ocean-cleanup-makes-biggest-ever-river-catch-in-guatemala/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=cutting_room_floor

There are good people doing good things pretty much everywhere, if you choose to look.

Inside are multitudes of everything: the rainbow of four hundred frame samples on the walls, those upside-down V’s we all recognize; a long side counter covered with tape guns, staple guns, spray bottles, glass gloves, art gloves, rolls of brown kraft paper and plastic bags and hanging wire, labeled and unlabeled drawers of hardware, hangers, screws, tools—and everywhere, littered about the store like ballpoint pens on every surface: razor blades. (In fact, we frequently run out of ballpoint pens, but we never run out of razor blades.) Soon I am grabbing blades casually, as all framers do, to pop a speck out of a mat, shave off excess paper or tape. Soon I have Band-Aids on all my fingers.

https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-124-spring-2024/don-t-bleed-on-the-artwork-notes-from-the-afterlife?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

Esoteric crafts and trades are also everywhere, if we only stop and think and realize – I discover a new one every year, on average.

Global leaders are seeking what they consider to be undeveloped land to meet a stated goal of conserving 30 percent of the planet’s surface by 2030. Corporations want undisturbed forests in order to offset pollution. Western conservation groups, which refer to the Maasai as “stakeholders” on their own land, exert great influence, as does a booming safari industry that sells an old and destructive myth—casting the Serengeti as some primordial wilderness, with the Maasai as cultural relics obstructing a perfect view.
The reality is that the Maasai have been stewards, integral to creating that very ecosystem. The same can be said of Indigenous groups around the world, to whom conservation often feels like a land grab. In the past two decades, more than a quarter million Indigenous people have been evicted to make way for ecotourism, carbon-offset schemes, and other activities that fall under the banner of conservation. That figure is expected to soar.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/maasai-tribe-tanzania-forced-land-evictions-serengeti/677835/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

Increasingly, I think there is no realistic conservation without stewardship. Moreover, I think that the world is actually intended to be more of a garden than anything else, not some yin/yang, walled-off enclaves of urban density like Manhattan versus the complete wilderness of the Olympic National Park. What happens to the Serengeti when it is no longer semi-managed by the Masai cattle? It’s quite a shame when it is not commonly known or taught that the vast American prairies and famous Midwestern topsoil also primarily occurred due to millennia of Native American controlled burns and management to maximize buffalo grazing potential. Our human rapacity will not allow token conservation to truly offset anything, moreover, we need the resources. We simply must be stewards.

One advantage of encoding information in the states of individual atoms is that their coherence times are typically far longer. Moreover, unlike superconducting circuits, atoms of a given type are all identical, so bespoke control systems aren’t needed to input and manipulate subtly different quantum states.
And whereas the wiring used to link up superconducting qubits into quantum circuits can become horribly complicated — more so as the system scales up — no wiring is needed in the case of atoms. All the entangling is done using laser light.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-best-qubits-for-quantum-computing-might-just-be-atoms-20240325/?mc_cid=daab7c2b1c&mc_eid=f83944a043

Increasingly, a good rule of thumb is that the tools and designs for our improving understanding of the world are also already imprinted within it, like layered fractals of instructions, realizations, etc. Quantum computing with atoms as the flip-state blocks could be a game-changer. Now of course we just have to also figure out what it’s good for – though I think some very specifically defined computations will be useful for figuring out some challenging, mass-variable problems in the future with significant ripple effects.

That ability of feathers to twist in just the right way is what enabled slotting, which makes the wing much more efficient at low flight speeds. In essence, a slotted wing behaves as if it is longer and narrower than it is anatomically. Slotting also makes the wing tip very resistant to stall, whereby the airflow separates from the wing, causing a precipitous loss of the lift that keeps the bird in the air. It’s a vital adaptation that underpins an array of aerial acrobatics.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-feathers-are-one-of-evolutions-cleverest-inventions/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=learn

As a result, the major defense companies known as the “primes”—there are only five of them (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman) and together they account for more than 80% of the industry’s revenue—have no ability to build weapons systems with low-cost, high-performance software half as good as what’s been available on the commercial market for over a decade, let alone cutting-edge AI to power drone swarms, networked weapons systems, or instantaneous situational awareness generated by sensor fusion. In lieu of R&D spending (the primes devote about 1%-4% to it, compared to the 60%-70% a tech startup typically spends), they fling extraordinary resources at legions of lawyers and lobbyists—often recently retired military officers and congressional staffers—in order to shape requirements in line with the company’s existing, fossilizing capabilities.

https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril

(H/t to my brother Taylor for sharing this one.)

The thing that kills me about the JFK administration is that it reminds me sometimes of the Obama administration – a bunch of intellectuals who’d only really known the Ivy Leagues (well to give JFK his due, he’d actually been in combat, which is what helped him counter many of them) coming in and arrogantly destroying so many things they did not see the larger point of, in a great example of Chesterton’s Fence. Or, sometimes worse, doing some things right but touting them as the ultimate panacea.

This means I can’t tell you what order in which things happened: whether I felt Kadin collide with my boat or whether I was still unconscious when he dragged me to the surface. I just know I opened my eyes to the blue sky studded with clouds I thought I’d never see again, and that I felt the spring air whipping against my face. He told me I made a noise, a choking moan that sounded like a dying animal. He thought: she still might not make it. 

https://longreads.com/2024/04/02/i-nearly-died-drowning-maggie-slepian/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=t5-2024-04-05&utm_medium=email

We heat our house and our water and our food with natural gas, and in many ways it’s a much cleaner source of energy than the readily available alternatives. It’s not like coal is a great option, and even on the rosy projections of industry boosters, it will be quite some time before we have reliable power generated by renewable energy. Even these technologies have their costs. Noah Toly is, unfortunately, right about the unavoidably tragic nature of our environmental choices. I’d willingly pay more for our natural gas if that meant responsible regulations would ensure the industry dealt with its waste responsibly, and there are some promising signs that Pennsylvania state lawmakers may place more restrictions on this waste. Still, it’s hard to imagine an effective regulatory regime reining in oil producers’ careless pollution when our country remains addicted to cheap energy.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/04/is-a-radioactive-trash-mountain-coming-to-town/

Part of the human condition is coming to terms with the fact we are inherently limited. Even if we somehow achieve something like a mini-sun, I’m sure we will have other problems. Right now, every choice we make has a cost. But it is undeniable some have fewer than others.

This tactic of being “in, but not of” the world of mainstream business has seen the Basque-based movement face charges of double standards. In particular, critics highlight its outsourcing of some of its production to low-wage countries with weaker labour standards, such as China and Mexico. Mondragón argues that it has checks and balances in place to ensure that its foreign business partners uphold workers’ rights, and that keeping costs low is part and parcel of staying competitive. “For us, workers will always come before capital. But capital is still important because without it we cannot fulfil our mission of social transformation,” says Javier Marcos, Mondragón’s director of communications.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/apr/24/in-the-us-they-think-were-communists-the-70000-workers-showing-the-world-another-way-to-earn-a-living

More innovation is needed in our forms of governance and organization, both corporate and civil/political. Capital is a fantastic human invention – real capitalism is a pretty good system. Ironically, much like those who say “real ____ism” has never been tried, the reality is that no pure application of any “ism” has been tried, because humans are simply unable to conceive of a fully functioning system that can’t be perverted almost immediately into some janky, hopefully still mostly operational version of the pure concept.

The US’s biggest infrastructure project—bigger than the New Deal–era dams and the Erie Canal—was the highway system, which destroyed the American city and, arguably but I think not that arguably, American society itself. The country’s midcentury racist spatial self-destruction is a crime that will never be sufficiently atoned for. Whenever a child walking along a four-lane exurban road is killed by a driver who swerves into the shoulder, whenever someone is simply able to drive 98 miles per hour in a 55 zone, whenever a family of seven in an ostensibly safe minivan is killed despite the self-evident technological ability to limit speeds, redesign roads, and enforce existing regulations, it seems reasonable to infer that what car culture is really about aren’t sexy concept cars or futuristic taillights. What car culture is really about is death.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/auto-show-dispatch/?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

A lot of interesting points, though as usual often sandwiched in the usual canards of leftist buzzphrases circa mid-2020s: genocide of Palestinians, etc. The highway system destroyed a lot of American neighborhoods (though mostly poor white people were displaced in many cities, not necessarily poor people of color, contrary to what you may have been told), but not the cities necessarily themselves, though I concur it is killing some slowly, others fast. The benefits of highways are glossed over – the ills of massive car culture (Hummers for example) are spelled out very well. The roads don’t kill people – in fact they enable a lot of commerce – but they may expedite the horrible failings of human nature. The biggest problem as always with socialism is that human nature simultaneously is never the cause of our ills but also is somehow the solution as a centralized bureaucracy run by humans will save us all. Car culture is more about freedom than death. But of course, to socialists, those two concepts are often the same.

Florida as an intensified microcosm of patterns that are unfolding all over the United States and other western countries presses upon us fundamental questions: What does the Florida-fication of the world do to human culture and community? Can people make common cause and find a common home in an environment so manufactured and imposed on the natural world? Florida’s rapid one-hundred year transformation—from raw, rugged, and expansive wilderness, into a largely artificial concrete jungle aimed at fulfilling the perpetual human appetites for quick, easy, and transient pleasures—is an experiment that offers some answers to these questions.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/06/against-the-florida-fication-of-the-world/

It’s gonna be fascinating to juxtapose demographic decline against the rewilding of much sprawl as suburbs both wax and wane depending on the health of the given state (California seems determined to try to whittle its population down, for example). But I don’t really know how the conveniences of urban life, with its sanitized, dirt-free existence can be reconciled easily with what we now know is true ecological health.

Finally, why are there so many vacant lots even in economically healthy cities? Grabar tells us that Los Angeles is full of unbuildable lots because the parking requirements are impossible to meet, financially or in terms of space, something that is true for most American cities overall. Parking requirements have rendered existing traditional cities unusable as raw material for development rather than only as blank slates; they’ve broken the continuity of the physical and geographical history of these places, disregarded the reasons for how and why they were built in the first place. A radically different pattern is now required, one that is at odds with these places as they exist. “Los Angeles banned itself,” says a tour guide in old downtown LA.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/huge-effect-of-parking-policy-on-how-we-live

Once you see the effects of making sufficient car space in a town, it’s impossible to unsee. I’m not rabidly anti-car – in fact, I love a good road trip with motor hotels and diners as much as anyone. But since people spend millions every year to marvel at the dense, picturesque, highly communal places built prior to cars, it is worth asking: What’s the happy medium between our auto-centric urban planning and the density that seems to encourage more community, especially in a time of growing loneliness?

In Mario Kart 8, choosing your driver, kart’s body, tires, and glider isn’t just about style — it’s as crucial as your racing skills to win a race. Ever wondered how to truly find the best ones?

https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

The Internet remains undefeated.

The Arkansas Delta is a landscape continually in flux, made and remade, often violently, by earthly and human forces. What was, for millennia, an expansive forest of cypress, tupelo, pine, oak, and persimmon, and a complex system of rivers, swamps, and upland prairies, is today a largely rationalized landscape of rice and cotton fields, dewatered through a 5,000-mile network of drainage ditches and canals, and harvested by massive, chaff-spewing machines. ¹ Dotted with towns still often (informally) segregated by race, where historic buildings succumb to planned demolitions to avoid the liabilities of unplanned ones, the region embodies, and in many ways magnifies, the paradoxes of a century of American “progress.”

https://placesjournal.org/article/the-sunk-country-arkansas-delta/

There are still so many mysterious places, particularly in the Deep South, to my PNW-raised historical recall, and I think it’s about time we had a US-centric Bourdain-style series to really explore how wonderful the US is in so many ways, particularly for our endless bickering about how fragmented we are (I write this a day after someone tried to shoot Trump).

The majority of people that unironically call themselves leaders seem to be fighting a constantly losing rearguard action around what their area of competence actually is. Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality. I am assured that while they can’t program, they know a lot about running I.T projects. Then all our projects run late, but I am assured they actually know a lot about finance. Then we are unprofitable, but I am assured they know a lot about retaining staff. Then the staff leave, and I have most recently been assured that they are working hard on increasing salaries – that must be the reason everyone is leaving because it couldn’t be that they’ve lost faith in leadership.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/leadership-is-a-hell-of-a-drug/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=working

A hilarious if oft-scathing read on the strange phenomenon of modern corporate leadership/management. Having been through the brunt of rising the ranks to people management myself, I sympathize with the poor put-upon middle managers of the world in an era where the pandemic, the latest trends in virtue signaling amid quicksand social mores, and now the rife incompetence of universities combined to produce a perfect storm of BS. But yeah, a lot of people somehow also buy into and celebrate such oddities, or worse, try to exercise their power in self-serious ways.

The problem for our young people is that this kind of condescending, talking-down-to is nearly universal in our present civilization, and the White House isn’t helping.  Marketers, entertainers, politicians both red and blue, many churches, and schools alike are in the habit of communicating with the public this way, and the result is inevitable: the continuous downward leveling of our capacity for discourse.  As everyone gets used to being talked to in this way, everyone also gets more and more comfortable talking in this stunted, juvenile manner.  We become less capable of understanding, let alone thinking, thoughts like “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground,” and find instead that “What these dead guys did here was pretty cool.  We’re super-excited to be here at Gettysburg!” is more natural and meaningful to us.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/12/liberal-arts-educational-technology-language/

In my work, I frequently receive feedback that my research/writing is too complex or wordy. Or, even, aimed at an overly sophisticated audience and thus not friendly to the broader public. I’ve grown somewhat resigned to this, and always take it seriously because often it is good editors that point out that I simply wrote poorly and could be more concise. But at times when it is not valid beyond a concern for this mysterious, semi-educated audience, I do get a little sad. Words are powerful, primarily because a multitude of them are necessary to convey nuanced ideas. We are losing nuance, like McLuhan and Postman foresaw, and I don’t think that loss of such nuance is unrelated to not only the death of bipartisanship but also our inability to fix basic things, like aging infrastructure. We are losing the capacity to describe complicated things.

“It was the biggest mansion I had ever been to,” says a 22-year-old who went to one of the early parties. Security at the gate was charging $1,500 for a table upstairs, he says, and $500 downstairs. Buying a table came with bottle service. If you brought girls, you got in free. Vincent, who escorted the 22-year-old and his girlfriends to their table, told him he was the owner, which he believed until on a later visit he met Gargiulo, who said no, he was the owner. The parties were nearly as wild as the neighbors imagined. “I’ve never been to a party like that,” says the 22-year-old. “I’d get there at, like, 8 p.m. and wouldn’t leave until 4 p.m. the next day.” He saw “people sucking the air out of balloons.” (The housemates describe the admission charges as “suggested donations” and say they’re not responsible for what other people did at the house.)

https://www.curbed.com/article/squatters-rights-california-beverly-hills-los-angeles.html?src=longreads&utm_medium=email

No words, and not much sympathy for the rich neighbors either, but something wild enough you simply gotta read it.

A growing number of farmers are looking to rebuild the microbial ecosystem by adding beneficial microbes into the soil. These microbes can be grown using specific composting systems, such as vermicomposting, and then extracted into a liquid form that can be applied in furrow with the seed at planting or used as a seed coating, soil drench, or foliar spray. This approach can accelerate the transition toward healthier soils while providing a low cost, environmentally friendly alternative to chemical applications. While adoption of this practice is still in its infancy, with only a fraction of American farmland being actively improved though regenerative methods, the results so far have been exceptionally promising.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/sustainable-living/saving-the-soil-saving-the-farm

I don’t know when, but at a certain point, the industrial approach to farming has to be reformed – we can’t fix our healthcare without fixing our food system, for example.

There are secrets within the old houses of Baltimore. The secrets are stashed away in attics and hidden under floorboards and buried in privies.

When Joanna Meade’s family moved intoa1910 house in Roland Park, she tried to picture all the residents who hadcome before her. How many hands had turned…

https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/culture/lifestyle/spaeth-underhill-love-letters-baltimore-WCNUBB6QEVEJDGRUXVHKF7JAGI/

It’s amazing how much of the past we can forget or can be lost, relatively swiftly. As the birth of my first kid approaches, I think more and more often of legacy. To quote Hamilton: Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? (And yes, I still love Hamilton, like a proud unrepentant millennial.)

In obsessing over who controls Westminster, Washington, D.C., or other power centres, while hoping that green growth techno-fixes will enable them to spread the love from the centre of the nation-state, this kind of traditional leftwing politics has become scarcely distinguishable from the self-justifications of advanced capitalism. It creates opportunities for populisms of one kind and another to organise around the numerous local resistances arising from the economic globalisation that parties of both the mainstream left and right are unwilling to confront.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/03/doppelganger-me-and-george-monbiot-in-the-mirror-world/

This is a really interesting piece that only takes as a foundation the feud between two intellectuals focused on agriculture, food, etc. to expand further upon the ideological structures that are implied by some of the technocratic optimism that is slowly but bitterly ebbing in the fact of growing rejection by people worldwide. The primary fear is that in rejecting the evils of globalization and erosion of the beautiful, necessary varieties of human cultures, rooted in tradition and a key moral foundation, we also end up blowing up our truly beneficial technological achievements. I sense we will muddle through after a sufficiently painful period, e.g., as the CCP slowly grinds its nation down into a demographic disaster and flails into a war that it likely can’t win, enough economic pain will ripple across the world that the isolationist fringe will realize we are now interconnected, for better or worse, while the leftist coalition (if it hasn’t imploded by then) will be forced to confront the fact that flawed as it may be, the US system isn’t that bad. The hypocrisy of much of the fringes of both the US right and left is almost hilarious at this point: Ah yes, the evil imperialist patriarchal gender-conformist implicitly racist structure of the US is so repressive that you can freely make a living as an academic critiquing such things, while the neo-loony far right clearly is correct to reject medicines, academic research, diversity, etc. as they definitely don’t provide benefits.

Propp found a fresh perspective in the early 2000s, when he and his colleagues discovered that the numbers in the Somos-4 sequence are actually counting something. The terms in the sequence correspond to structures found in certain graphs. For some graphs, it’s possible to pair up vertices (dots) with edges (lines) so that every vertex is connected to exactly one other vertex — there are no unpaired vertices, and no vertex connected to more than one edge. The terms in the Somos-4 sequence count the number of different perfect matchings for a particular sequence of graphs​.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-astonishing-behavior-of-recursive-sequences-20231116/?mc_cid=6c5aee96fa&mc_eid=f83944a043

The astonishing degree to which unexpected patterns end up applying elsewhere really does suggest to me God’s sense of humor, like setting up a not-too-hard maze or scavenger hunt for little kids.

It is now firmly established that per square footage, both solar and wind resources require much more space than petroleum, and certainly much more than nuclear, to produce the same amount of energy. (I leave aside the fact that turbines and solar panels are ecologically costly to construct, and they cannot be recycled.) Climate change fighters often risk forgetting that the ultimate crisis facing the earth is not carbon emissions but eco-cide: the destruction of life, of the place and space of life. And for the sake of combatting the former, many fighters are willing to accept, or at least ignore, the utter desolation of the latter. I am not the only one to imagine the logical conclusion of that strategy: keep increasing in consumption, keep needing energy, and keep building solar panels and wind turbines until the whole earth is covered by them. That future seems all too plausible.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/petroleum-and-me/

A beautiful if melancholy reflection. I think that the future of climate change and energy is both far worse and better than we think – far worse because the backlash to what we currently think of as sustainable that turns out to be far from it, e.g., subjecting even the American West to rolling blackouts because we blow up our grid with too much electricity demand without acquiring new sources, and far better because we have the solutions to our energy problems – they’re just expensive and hard, and likely not any of the current options that are popular (cough, nuclear is the only feasible that we know of).

Rust was a big concern. Any exposed patches had to be brushed smooth, removing the surface oxidation before a layer of acrylic resin could be applied. And we aren’t talking about a few bits: there was rust in the interior of the bus, inside and outside the barrel stove, on the hood, and across the entire undercarriage. Compared with the graffiti preservation, Howard says, “removing corrosion underneath the bus was not delicate work, but it had to be very thorough.” The underside was coated with layers of mud dating back to the 1950s, and all that caked-on earth held moisture. Howard’s team spent ten days lying on their backs, clearing away dirt and rust with wire brushes before rolling the resin on.

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/chris-mccandless-into-the-wild-bus-142-alaska/?scope=anon

There are layers of good stories in pretty much every place you look, or even little objects that cough up an interesting nuance. This one about a bus where Chris McCandless died, and its own backstory, is definitely worth a read to see how strange the last straggling bits of frontiers we have can be.

Our current estimate for the size of YouTube is 13.325 billion videos – we are now updating this number every few weeks at tubestats.org.

Once you’re collecting these random videos, other statistics are easy to calculate. We can look at how old our random videos are and calculate how fast YouTube is growing: we estimate that over 4 billion videos were posted to YouTube just in 2023. We can calculate the mean and median views per video, and show just how long the “long tail” is – videos with 10,000 or more views are roughly 4% of our data set, though they represent the lion’s share of views of the YouTube platform.

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

It’s arguable that we already produce far more content than even the 8 billion-plus people on the planet can consume (especially given many of those can’t even access such content). I find it more telling that we have to use the term “content”. Something in the term content conveys how little so much of what we’ve produced may matter at all – heck, digital may be far more ephemeral than paper at some point.

Over the next few months, as Esther Kutter, a graduate student studying with Nieder, analyzed the resulting data, she saw a clear pattern emerge — right around the number 4.

The data, which comprised 801 recordings of single neurons firing, showed two distinct neural signatures: one for small numbers and one for large. Above the number 4, the neurons’ firing for their preferred number grew progressively less precise, and they erroneously fired for numbers close to the preferred one. But for 4 and below, the neurons fired precisely — with the same small amount of error whether firing for one, two, three or four objects. The misfiring in response to other numbers was largely absent.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-human-brain-perceives-small-numbers-better-20231109/?mc_cid=095969a35a&mc_eid=f83944a043

Chunking and association are key components to keeping a ton of material memorized. I find it a bit facetious when people think memorization is pointless – the lag in grabbing your phone to research is always a bit more meaningful than people think plus we aren’t too far away from much info sources being suspect (if not there already).

What’s a critic to do when his subject has a billion in the bank, a servile fanbase, and an airtight preemption (“Haters gonna hate”)? I don’t know, but I cannot ignore the two shadows, one economic and the other aesthetic, which darken my admittedly limited experience with Taylor Swift. Artists have always needed money to do what they do; artists have always needed patrons. But modern production brings something more dishonest into play. In popular music culture, signaling often occurs at a superficial level—the lyrics, chord structures, rhythms, poses, glances, costumes, even the conventional address to the fans (“I love you guys!”). Convenience renders the product hypersalable and therefore remunerative; it’s far easier to buy industrial baloney than the true mortadella. When it seems that every song, every choreographed move, every gesture, every coy expression leveled at the jumbotron camera is literally calculated for a return, I begin to feel put upon, the enchantment cracks, and I’m less willing to allow the performance to affect me. My emotional defenses are raised; the “human” moments, and there were a few, run into the wall of my incredulity and I even start to question the reality of the music. The Eras Tour™ represents the pinnacle of a corporate-artistic complex. The product is synthetic inspiration.

https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/swift-going

The tired endlessly repetitive arcs of famous people going from the latest thing to tired to reinvention to the villain are about as predictable as sports leagues’ latest scrappy underdogs finally becoming the villains, e.g., the Chiefs from 2018 to their most recent Super Bowl win. I feel very old-mannish when I admit I don’t get the level of dislike or even adulation Taylor Swift gets, however, her talent/savvy is undeniable, so for that, kudos.

Localists don’t have to be nostalgic conservatives, but they often are, for the simple reason mentioned above. That people in the past lived more locally seems pretty indisputable, at least as a generalization. But we ought to think in more detail about whether and in what ways those more local lives were also better lives. Wendell Berry frequently insists on “a full accounting.” Most “progress,” he points out, seems like progress only when we leave out the costs. Surely the same must be true of the past. The past will always look better than the present to a critic of progress, because the past is where the latest costs of progress haven’t yet been felt. Well, the past needs a full accounting too. Localists, who rightly look to the past because it was more local, need not and should not look past the bad parts of those more local lives in order to show that smaller is better. If we cut the past up and use the parts we keep to win arguments, we end up with arguments full of holes. We either hold the past together, or our politics falls apart.

https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/01/localism-without-nostalgia/

The past is important – remembering it is even more critical. Repeating it is rarely good. You ideally want to preserve what was worth preserving, but sadly, due to human nature and our relatively small scope of intelligence, we truly find it difficult to dissociate the good from the bad and thus end up creating entirely new problems when we ditch both.

In many mammals, large areas of the cerebellum are devoted to processing sensory and motor information for parts of the body that are particularly dexterous and used in exploration: the snout in rodents, the hands in primates, the tip of the tail in arboreal monkeys.

Across animals, the cerebellum seems to be involved in both motion and sensory perception, and intriguingly, seems to be particularly enlarged in animals that use echolocation or electrosensing in the water, for spatial awareness of object locations in all directions.

This is suggestive of something like “spatial world modeling” going on in the cerebellum, and is consistent with the theory that the cerebellum’s job is anticipation and preparation.

https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/what-does-the-cerebellum-do-anyway?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

In another example of our tendency toward oversimplification and struggle to balance many concepts, an increasingly safe rule of thumb is that few body parts are for limited uses – multiple uses/optionality seems to be the primary guiding goal of all evolutionary processes.

There was no place for the bison in the vision of shared life that many of the settlers brought to the plains. To the strains of the trademark Ken Burns fiddles, a percipient buffalo hunter’s voiceover speaks from the past, justifying the foreseen extinction with a vision of what would arise in its place: towns, schools, beef cattle. It is a vision to stir the heart. But the long, grim catalogue of treachery and starvation did not only despoil this country’s native peoples. It robbed each and every American now living of the America that could have been, now almost impossible to see even through conjecture. Instead of the uneasy and largely separate status quo between a dominant majority and the marginal survivors of a thoroughly lawless expansionism, which compelled its targets by hook and crook to take up smaller and smaller territories while mounting sustained assaults on their languages, traditions, families, pieties, and food systems, imagine an America that was the organic product of different peoples—communities with truly different ways of life—learning from each other, negotiating with and accommodating each other, doubtless clashing violently with each other at times, but also integrating with and building around each other in unpredictable ways over the span of an enormous continent.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/where-the-buffalo-roamed

Bring back the bison, especially as the world rewilds and the coming demographic crisis means the wild things are going to come back anyway.

The key takeaway from the success of this approach is that safety improvements are best achieved when an honest mistake is treated as such, regardless of the consequences. This principle underpins what is known in several advanced industries as the “just culture” concept. A just organizational culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made. 

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/why-you-ve-never-been-in-a-plane-crash?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

We want to divide things into good/bad. It is extremely tempting these days given the state of our governance and elected leaders to also want to blame and shame and, for example, send all the people that inflicted the idiocy of lockdowns on us, condemning millions to misery and poverty and lonely deaths to jail or worse, ideally. But as the Supreme Court is currently debating, how do we separate the role and the person from the consequences if they are not clearly spelled out? How do we account for human fallibility? We cannot punish indiscriminately, for otherwise, no one would take any type of leadership job.

We must give sensuality and erotic desire up to holiness. But if we do, it is returned to us whole and entire, reflected in the light of divine Beauty who calls us ecstatically out of ourselves towards the transcendent (and, thus, however, counter-intuitively) more toward the essence of who we truly are. Perhaps we ought to be more like Alyosha, the young monk from The Brothers Karamazov, who gazes upon the sky, “full of quiet, shining stars” in the “fresh and quiet” night of a “luxuriant autumn,” and throws himself upon the dirt of the earth in an act of profound gratitude. “He did not know why he was embracing it,” Dostoevsky writes, “he did not try to understand why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss all of it, but he was kissing it, weeping, sobbing, and watering it with his tears, and he vowed ecstatically to love it, to love it unto ages of ages.”

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/desiring-beauty-the-st-margaret-of-scotland-annual-lecture/?utm_campaign=CLJ_Weekly%20Subscriber%20Email_19-0507&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=285271023&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8AmeEiFORjIgxaZSmgHTxPpkTeiyaxGNaz7KWLuCoPHPl1OyUfmYeTjKIiv6R1lAN2yCuDHdHxBs-iQcBuNVJJL2uy0kySPZb7Xd2L1q3HZtWp3N8&utm_content=285271023&utm_source=hs_email

We thirst for beauty in an age of mass production and safety in dullness; we will likely break many things in rebelling against the wrong things before we realize we are breaking too much.

I think Ello’s pretty neat, and I want them to succeed.

Like I said in my post, more experimentation with online communities is a very good thing. We’ll only break away from the dominant players by trying new crazy shit, and I think it should be applauded. (And, yes, I even like the design.)

But I think taking VC was a bad idea that works against their ethos, and will inevitably lead to a much larger Series A by year’s end.

I think the intentions of the team are pure, and they genuinely believe in what they’re building. But I’m not sure intentions matter unless they can wean themselves off outside funding.

I really, really hope their revenue plan works out, and quickly.

https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=fav

We are still figuring out how to align incentives with scalability with preservation of certain desirable traits like open-source, lack of ads, etc.

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.