Look, I get it. Aspartame is a weird synthetic molecule that’s 200 times sweeter than sucrose. It’s normal to have a prior that aspartame might be bad for you. The thing is, the alternative to aspartame often isn’t no aspartame but rather sugar or corn syrup or even perhaps even alcohol.
More links
- How Robins Got Their Name
- Telomeres: everything you always wanted to know
- Overview - experimental fat loss substack
- Strictly speaking CICO is a tautology
- and: Running a series of experiments to arrive at a "magical" fat loss diet
- Can we burn metal for heat, instead of fossil fuels?
- The world's infrastructure was built for a climate that no longer exists
- ‘Climate Optimism’ Is Dangerous and Irrational
- How Many Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered?
- How T-shirts donated to charity are causing pollution in Ghana
- When Nate Johnson — a former Grist journalist — felt his passion for writing start to wane, he found a new direction. Now, instead of writing about the need to electrify everything, Nate is doing that work himself.
- The wild boars of Bavaria are too dangerous to eat. They are radioactive.
- The world’s largest and smelliest flower teeters on extinction.
- Fiberglass revolutionized boating, but decades later, discarded and degraded vessels are adding to marine pollution [Hakai Magazine]
- Bishop Tutai Pere said in a speech at the seabed exploration license award ceremony that it would be a sin to leave the nodules on the seabed.
- Make carbon-free electricity cheaper, by any means necessary. When it comes to industrial heat, which is so complicated — where CCS may be the best short-term expedient — it still remains true that falling clean power costs make everything easier in the long term.
- Fungi are weird. One of the more interesting theories about fungi are that they ended the carboniferous period.
- Fossil Fuel Power Plants Kill 35x More Birds Than Wind Turbines - One of the most effective ways to protect birds is to transition away from fossil fuels
Meta in Myanmar (full series): Erin Kissane did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. These are what emerged from that work.
More links
- iSIM vs eSIM vs SIM: The constantly shrinking ways carriers ID your phone
- The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small (the way Instagram promotes reels, and reposted tweets and TikToks.)
- Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible? By Ted Chiang
- Can ActivityPub save the internet?
- Our communities are defined by the worst things that we permit to happen. What we allow tells the world who we are. Eight Myths about Online Abuse by Anil Dash
- We need to stop normalising credulity when people with power and money and fancy titles say extraordinary things. When I went to Hinton’s Q&A, he spoke with ease and expertise about neural nets, but admitted he knows little about politics or regulation or people beyond computer labs. These last points garnered several laughs from the audience, but they weren’t really funny.
- Thought experiment in the National Library of Thailand
- Everything Must Be Paid for Twice. The first price is usually paid in dollars. The second price is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits.
- Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t by Erin Kissane
- The affordance loop by Erin Kissane
- What would the internet of people look like now? by Elizabeth Lopatto
- Goodnight Phone
- Neeva: The little search engine that couldn’t
- Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.
- These days, I don’t travel much to sacred wells in distant places. Instead, I spend a lot of time online. Too much time. It’s a place profoundly unquiet, a pummeling noise and a rush of information that leaves me feeling both hyped up and melancholy. I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to, but it’s a place that is hard to stop visiting.
- When the pandemic erupted, the world shifted to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service, although that probably wasn’t necessary as they were generally able to cope with the surge caused by teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix). That’s because most of their networks were overprovisioned, with more capacity than they usually need. But is overprovisioning the only way to ensure resilience? -- Why the Internet needs the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). Building on the principles of peer-to-peer networking and content-based addressing, IPFS allows for a decentralized and distributed network for data storage and delivery.
- Exploring the Decentralized Web - DWeb webinar
- Behind the painstaking process of creating Chinese computer fonts
- What Has the Internet Done to Media? by Aleks Jakulin
- The End of the Googleverse
- Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed by Ploum
- The Night Migrations - Louise Glück
- Carl Phillips: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/about
- What I see is the light falling all around us by Carl Phillips. Also at NYT
To have understood some small piece of the world
more deeply doesn't have to mean we're not as lost
as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees
stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here
and there stirring differently somehow, more like
resisting stillness...Should it come to winnowing
my addictions, I'd hold on hardest, I'm pretty sure,
to mystery
- Among the Trees by Carl Phillips
WHAT HAPPENED BACK there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over. And the end feels—to you, at least—both like the end of a long pilgrimage and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage: don’t both depend on stamina and faith, in the right proportions? Wasn’t the point, at the end, persuasion?
- If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You
- Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer
4. Sexuality, LGBTQIA+
Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella
More links
- In 2023, it seems that the Muslim boogeyman in the America of my adolescence and young adulthood has been replaced with the queer/trans boogeyman
- Trans Subtext Can Be Powerful. Trans Characters Are Even Better by Charlie Jane Anders
- Heartstopper's Alice Oseman on asexuality, young fame and surviving social media
- The Ultimate Reading List for Bisexual Awareness Week 2023 by Zachary Zane
- Interview with Dr. Pallotta-Chiarolli about Women in Relationships with Bisexual Men
- 9 Men Share What Helped Them Come Out as Bisexual
- I Had a Complete Stranger Pick Me up From the Airport. To Thank Him, I Fucked His Brains Out.
- How to Support Bisexual Youth - The Trevor Project
- hankschannel Apr 19, 2013
- Black writers on bisexuality and fluid sexuality
- Geraldo outed me on national television by Jim Berg
- Pride is the rare holiday where how you’re supposed to feel about it is right there in the name. This time of year, we are supposed to be proud: proud of our LGBTQ+ identities, proud of our history of protest and progress, proud of our diverse and paradigm-shifting contributions to culture and the arts. But this year, I’m having trouble getting into the spirit of the season. Not Quite Pride
- Bisexual Married Men Oral History Project
- Queer Books Database - bisexual
- Hinge Not-so_FAQ: Queer dating advice
5. International
Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes. Because they knew it was important. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers. They had perspective. They had wisdom.
More links
- Notes on The Gambia
- In a salon, I chatted about life in Riyadh with a hairdresser in her early 30s for three hours. She told me, “It’s our New York.”
- In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer.
- Subway Miracle: New York
- Memory and Migration, Guatemala and the US
- Visiting Nikkō
- A 2,800-mile Greyhound bus ride from Detroit to LA by Joanna Pocock
- Clive Thompson cycled 4,150 miles from Brooklyn to Oregon for his book on 'micromobility'
- David Rumsey maps collection
- Bangladesh 2022 Census GIS Data
- Where is home?
- 40 years after Jerry Rawlings, Ghana is considered the “success story” of Africa. Is it really? In some regards – stability, political order, even economically to a small degree – yes, but it still has a long way to go before it becomes a success story by non-West African standards.
- List of war crimes and crimes qualifying as genocide committed by Israel in Gaza since 7th October 2023 by Yanis Varouvakis
- From university disciplinary hearings to death threats, supporters of Palestinian rights are facing a wave of reprisals by Alex Kane [Jewish Currents]
- Have We Learned Nothing? In the current discursive climate, it seems mandatory to dwell on these horrors before I say anything else, to establish that I’m a decent human being who neither endorses nor averts my eyes from Hamas’s depravities.. Regardless, now I could pivot to talking about how two million Palestinian civilians are trapped in Gaza.
- The dread Israelis are feeling after today's assault, myself included, has been the daily experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long.
- No to Collective Punishment Against Gaza
- Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close.
- Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Election Could Be the Last Battle of the Titans
- When I was 21 years old, I found myself working at one of America’s most notorious jails. I was interning for McKinsey by Garrison
- We Can End Poverty Now. Do We Want To?
- Homeless in the City Where He Was Once Mayor
- The Drug-Fueled Protest in Dianne Feinstein’s Office You Haven’t Heard About
- Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison
6. Economics and causal inference
More links
- Literature on Recent Advances in Applied Micro Methods by Christine Cai
- Claudia Goldin: Nobel by Alice Evans; by A Fine Theorem
- Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier of AI and Work by Ethan Mollick
- Declare Design by Graeme Blair, Alexander Coppock, Macartan Humphreys
- https://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il
- Jobeffekter.dk is a knowledge bank gathering and disseminating relevant research results on the labour market
- Multiply by 37: A Surprisingly Accurate Rule of Thumb for Converting Effect Sizes from Standard Deviations to Percentile Points
- https://github.com/Mixtape-Sessions/Shift-Share
- Causal inference without graphs - Judea Pearl
- A User’s Guide to Statistical Inference and Regression by Matthew Blackwell. This is a set of notes for Quantitative Social Science Methods II at Harvard--intended for 1st year PhD in poli sci.
- Poor countries aren't catching up as fast as we'd like, but they're catching up faster than before.
- Decolonising Economics syllabus at KCL
7. Writing
Get your work recognized: write a brag document
More links
- If you, a writer, report to a talker, but you insist on communicating primarily through documents, you are—and I say this with affection, because lo, I have been there—fucked.
- A writing culture is a reading culture and a feedback-giving culture, which requires time to think, process, and respond. Writing isn't the end goal: thinking and improving is the goal.
- Some tactics for writing in public
- How does one write from one’s own intimate experience while respecting (or protecting) others who share that experience, and who necessarily figure in any account of it?
- An Essay about Watching Brad Pitt Eat That Is Really about My Own Shit by Lucas Mann
- How to give advice on the internet without being an utter menace
- How to Officiate a Wedding
- Artists And Craftsmen In Science Writing by Ashutosh Jogalekar
8. Miscellanea I
- Ever since I left that remote Prairie home and chose the city, I have had the sense that my “real life,” the place where I belong and where there is no loneliness, is somewhere else out there in the world, although I can’t name or find it. I’m eighty now and I live alone.
- “Loneliness is made as well as given, and at a very early age. Deprive us of the attention of a loving, reliable parent, and, if nothing happens to make up for that lack, we’ll tend toward loneliness for the rest of our lives."
- I have heard old people say, in a puzzled, sad way, something like, “I have outlived my life.” I suddenly remembered a teaching from many years ago, when I was wandering alone on the prairie one day, immensely sad, full of self-pity, and trying to understand where my dismal feelings came from. There really was no one thing that I could pinpoint: I was sad because I was alive and did not have every single thing I had ever wanted, did not even know all the things I wanted, and I believe now that it was the latter that made me saddest. I was alive and I was a human being and wanting is the condition of the human.
- “I feel anxious,” I recite dutifully at the start of each anger management class session, wondering whether “anxious” truly encapsulates the heady mix of shame, hope, dread, and fear that taking such a course produces in me. Shame because enrolling in an anger management course isn’t a high point in anyone’s life, and hope because I thought, in retrospect naively, that taking such a step really could be the beginning of something life-changing.
- Here’s what anger management classes get wrong about the world: The course focuses on taming a ubiquitous emotion. But what about addressing its root causes?
- There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
- Mistakes Will Be Made by Heather Havrilesky
- An idea [to reduce loneliness] is to encourage synchrony. Lonely people struggle to synchronize with others, and that this discordance causes the regions of their brain responsible for observing actions to go into overdrive. This synchrony between individuals can be as simple as reciprocating a smile or mirroring body language during conversation, or as elaborate as singing in a choir or being part of a rowing team.
9. Miscellanea II
Kieran Egan says that there are three potential jobs we can give to schools: Socialization, Academics, Development. Alone, each of these jobs is terrible; together, they’re worse. And what we’ve done is given schools all three jobs.
More links
- The average atheist is about 65% more politically engaged than the average American.
- Sirik ke Atas, Jijik ke Bawah: Sudah Saatnya Kita Merubuhkan Mitos Meritokrasi oleh Ann Putri
- Once you’ve made your challenge smaller, you can apply a couple of Lazy Genius principles to that problem, and for something like taking care of yourself as the world opens up, I think there are two heavy hitters to use. The first is Decide Once. Another principle you can apply is to go in the right order. For general life things, there is a right order that can help almost any situation. That is 1) name what matters, 2) calm the crazy, and 3) trust yourself with what comes next.
- The global CTX mosaic is a 5.7 trillion pixel image of the surface of Mars, rendered at 5.0 m/px.
- Good News! Our Steel is No Longer Radioactive!
- https://buynothingproject.org/find-a-group/
- The 'Barbie' Movie Is Ending Relationships Left And Right
- Standards: a ratchet of progress
- An explanation of why most “cognitive biases,” and any field with “behavioral” in its name are not real
- Ads Don't Work That Way by Kevin Simler
- “Kansas man upset he can’t buy mini Toyotas ‘like the Taliban and ISIS.’” How did we get here??
- Energy makes time by Mandy Brown
- You are a morale-driven machine by Alexey Guzey
- Why (High) Fantasy Avoids Gunpowder
- ‘At first I tried to be polite, not to hurt his feelings’: how a regular ‘liker’ on social media became my stalker
- Perjuangan Pak Thé mengarungi masa sulit Observatorium Bosscha
- Free vintage images from the Public Domain
- Jared Diamond: A reply to his critics by Davis Kedrosky
- Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!
- A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Devereaux
- Dumb Cuneiform: You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet.
- It is likely that the number of followers of the Ea-nāṣir subreddit (31,000+) is higher than the combined enrollment of every university class on ancient Sumeria... ever.
- Consisting of 25 million pages, the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) offer a unique view on the 18th-19th centuries. The Globalise project.
- It is very easy to be unkind, you just look away one time and do it again. And again, until the necktie of guilt loosens, until it becomes second nature.
- There’s a theory I like that suggests why the nineteenth century is so rich in ghost stories and hauntings. Carbon monoxide poisoning from gas lamps.
- The reductive seduction of other people’s problems. If you’re young, privileged, and interested in creating a life of meaning, of course you’d be attracted to solving problems that seem urgent and readily solvable. Of course you’d want to apply for prestigious fellowships that mark you as an ambitious altruist among your peers. Of course you’d want to fly on planes to exotic locations with, importantly, exotic problems.
- The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge: Why is this bridge here?
- The Crane Wife By CJ Hauser
- Philanthropy’s equivalent of “All Lives Matter”
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