Links
3 stars
Course of Treatment | Stanford Magazine
Lin, who has written up thousands of social histories for other patients, freely shares his own: He is a 50-year-old man of Taiwanese heritage, from Menlo Park, married with two teenage sons, a nonsmoker “who never took a puff of anything in my life.” The co-founder and co-director of Stanford’s Center for Asian Health Research and Education is well aware of the irony that in the spring of 2024, he went from raising awareness of growing rates of lung cancer in nonsmokers of Asian descent to being a poster boy for the disease.
Lin is frequently thinking up new classes to teach, and by the fall, he had launched his newest: From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer. Students would learn about diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing research while also delving into the importance of treating the patient as a whole person, considering not only their medical but also their nutritional, spiritual, and emotional needs. After all, that’s been the cornerstone of Lin’s career: figuring out how to keep medicine centered on humans.
“Something terrible happened to me and I wanted to see if something good can come of it,” Lin says. “I thought, as both a physician and a patient, I had something to share.”
How a Deep-Cover KGB Spy Recruited His Own Son | The Guardian
Rudi explained to Peter that what he was about to tell him had to stay secret. He could not discuss it with his friends, and certainly not with Michael, his younger brother. Peter nodded, and Rudi began: “I am not who you think I am. I am not a German, and I’m not called Rudi. I am a Czech man named Dalibor Valoušek, and I work for the Soviet Union, for the KGB.” His mission as a spy was to work to bring about world peace, he said.
[...]
Rudi came to the most important part of the conversation. “Would you be willing to become an intelligence officer like me?” he asked. Peter’s head was spinning, and he didn’t know what to think or say. But he stayed outwardly calm, and nodded his assent.
Dwyane Wade’s Greatest Challenge | The Atlantic
Wade has the kind of NBA origin story that would ordinarily make him a hero in a room like that one. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, at the corner of 59th Street and South Prairie Avenue. His mother, Jolinda, struggled with drug addiction. The police raided their apartment so often that it became a familiar routine: Wade and his older sister Tragil Wade would escape through a back door and scale an outdoor stairway to their grandmother’s back porch, on the top floor of the same building, where they could hide. Other times, Jolinda wouldn’t come home. Wade could never sleep well when she was in the street, so even as a kid, he would sit outside late at night, waiting for her.
He was too young to understand why chaos reigned in his home and community, but Wade found early on that basketball was the perfect way to disappear, to get lost in something that demanded all of his body and mind. At first, he was too little to play on the South Side courts for real, so he would go with his dad to the playground and use anything he could as a hoop. He scored on baby swings, between the rungs of monkey bars, on milk crates.
That’s how it started. Now Wade has seen the highest reaches of American athletic success: All-Star, All-Star MVP, scoring champion, NBA champion, Finals MVP, Olympic gold medalist. Yet as intense as he may have been on the basketball court, in the six years since his retirement, he has presented a different face to the world—one that doesn’t fit with a certain narrow way of thinking about how a Black man should carry himself.
Wade and his wife, the actor Gabrielle Union, talk about their marriage as an equal partnership. For a long time, they insisted on splitting their finances 50–50. (Once, during an argument, Wade reminded Union that they were in “my house that I paid for.” She looked at her husband and replied, “You will never say that to me again.”) In 2020, Wade’s daughter Zaya came out as transgender, and he has very publicly supported her; last year, he won a Daytime Emmy as an executive producer on a short documentary about the fathers of trans kids. And those massive hands, which once authored ferocious dunks, are now immaculately manicured, the nails often painted. When Power said Wade had changed, this is what he meant.
How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery | Wall Street Journal
In the spring of 2023, a London banker-turned-bookmaker reached out to a few contacts with an audacious request: Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?
Bernard Marantelli had a plan in mind. He and his partners would buy nearly every possible number in a coming drawing. There were 25.8 million potential number combinations. The tickets were $1 apiece. The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million.
[...]
The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win. That, in turn, spilled their activities into public view and sparked a Texas-size uproar about whether other lotto players—and indeed the entire state—had been hoodwinked.
On Jagged AGI: o3, Gemini 2.5, and everything after | One Useful Thing
So, it should come as little surprise that one of the most important milestones in AI development, Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, is badly defined and much debated. Everyone agrees that it has something to do with the ability of AIs to perform human-level tasks, though no one agrees whether this means expert or average human performance, or how many tasks and which kinds an AI would need to master to qualify.
[...]
What's clear is that we continue to be in uncharted territory. The latest models represent something qualitatively different from what came before, whether or not we call it AGI. Their agentic properties, combined with their jagged capabilities, create a genuinely novel situation with few clear analogues.
2 stars
How Hyman Rickover Built the Nuclear Navy | Rough Drafts
There is a common misconception that the United States stopped building nuclear reactors after the 1970s. But that is not the full story: the US Navy has consistently built at least one small nuclear reactor every year since the 1950s. The fact that the Navy has managed to safely design, build, and operate nuclear reactors for decades, despite the stagnation of the civilian nuclear sector, is due in large part to the institutional legacy of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy”.
Rickover was the longest serving naval officer in US history and created an organization within the US government, now known as Naval Reactors, that had the technical competence and authority to oversee the pioneering development of nuclear technology, including building the world’s first nuclear powered submarine. He brought intense program management to bear on the companies and shipyards he worked with and in many cases, developed their technical roadmaps. Rickover also leveraged his lifelong experience in the navy to navigate the bureaucracy and was able to build an institutional structure for developing and managing the world’s most powerful energy source that endures today.
The Return of the Dire Wolf | TIME
Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers, brought Romulus, Remus, and their sister, 2‑month‑old Khaleesi, into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de‑extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished. TIME met the males (Khaleesi was not present due to her young age) at a fenced field in a U.S. wildlife facility on March 24, on the condition that their location remain a secret to protect the animals from prying eyes.
[...]
If all this seems to smack of P.T. Barnum, the company has a reply. Colossal claims that the same techniques it uses to summon back species from the dead could prevent existing but endangered animals from slipping into extinction themselves. What they learn restoring the mammoth, they say, could help them engineer more robust elephants that can better survive the climatic ravages of a warming world. Bring back the thylacine and you might help preserve the related marsupial known as the quoll. Techniques learned restoring the dire wolf can similarly be used to support the endangered red wolf.
“We are an evolutionary force at this point,” says Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, speaking of humanity as a whole. “We are deciding what the future of these species will be."
Polaroid Death Machine | The Georgia Review
The date on that photo was early in what would become for her a grueling bout with dementia. Soon she’d lose weight and become frail. Then she’d lose her sense of narrative and become frightened, obscured within her own life. But on that day she was only losing her relationship with time. Holding her Polaroids years later, it was clear: she’d taken them to repair it. The photos were flashcards, her own doomed Leonard Shelby experiment to steady the frightening mystery of each new day. For a while, I thought she took the Polaroids to remember who we were. But now I think she took them to remember herself, or who she was to the family she’d apparently built, all of us sudden, obnoxious strangers to her, rummaging around her life, knowing more about it than she did.
[...]
But in truth I started shooting Polaroids because I thought I was going to die. My reasons were no more different or interesting than anyone else’s (comorbidities related to my chronic illness). I lived in New York City during the shutdowns, like a lot of people, without the means to leave, like a lot of people, and I spent those early days and months fixated on death without pause. I’d take a walk, turn a corner, and see a block lined with refrigerated morgue trucks to handle the overflow from the hospitals nearby. The sound of another siren would invade my apartment walls and I’d envision myself in the ambulance of its origin, screaming through the empty streets.
Astronomers claim strongest evidence of alien life yet | New Scientist
Astronomers claim to have seen the strongest evidence so far for life on another planet. But other researchers have urged caution until the findings can be verified by other groups and alternative, non-biological explanations can be ruled out.
“These are the first hints we are seeing of an alien world that is possibly inhabited,” Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge told a press conference on 15 April.
Telling the Bees | Emergence Magazine
Watching him, I am suddenly hit with a pummeling sorrow. Sorrow for my country, which cannot imagine its way out of its brokenness; for a warming climate where so much life is being catastrophically destroyed. Sorrow for the lives of so many families suffering from endless war; for scientists who faced unspeakable racism, and the ones who struggle with mental health; for the mourning tenant with their altar of bouquets and burning candles; for the bees who give so much even as they continue to be decimated; for the searing pain of my own losses, thrumming in my bones like a living bruise, an ache for a daughter who will never return. But then the bees are buzzing around Khaled, thousands of them, like golden stars in hallowed autumn light.
“They are healthy, these bees,” Khaled is saying, a soft smile on his face. I start to smile too. I realize then that it doesn’t matter if the bees’ generosity and resilience is a response to or consequence of grief, or just inherent traits whose significance is amplified in the face of rapid planetary loss. For Khaled, it is all the same. They are alive! In their daily travels along Earth’s magnetic fields, in the ways they scream to protect each other, in the ways they adapt and persist in the face of loss—of land, of clean air, of familiar flowers—they show us what it means to survive. In the tenacity and grace of their daily lives, they survive.
What would a real anti-China trade strategy look like? | Noahpinion
The nations Bessent said he’s looking to — Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and India — happen to be neighbors of China. They are countries with which the US could work to isolate China, something that’s been called a “grand encirclement” strategy.
This is actually a very realistic goal. Every day that Trump’s tariff chaos makes the U.S. look like a chaotic clown car makes it a less realistic goal, but as of right now, I still think that it would be possible for the U.S. to radically pivot its trade and industrial policies in order to create a coalition of nations that could economically balance, compete with, and even isolate China. And it’s not too hard to imagine what that strategy would look like.
But first, we should think about why we would want to economically pressure China, and what we might hope to accomplish. After all, in an ideal world, countries simply trade with each other and get rich, instead of fighting. And China has plenty of good stuff to offer the world — cool cars, cheap solar panels and batteries, and lots more. Why should we take an adversarial approach to trade with China?
Quantum Physics Is ‘Nonsense,’ Says Breakthrough Prize Winner Gerard ’t Hooft | Scientific American
In the pantheon of modern physics, few figures can match the quiet authority of Gerard ’t Hooft. The Dutch theoretical physicist, now a professor emeritus at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, has spent much of the past half-century reshaping our understanding of the fundamental forces that knit together reality. But ’t Hooft’s unassuming, soft-spoken manner belies his towering scientific stature, which is better revealed by the mathematical rigor and deep physical insights that define his work—and by the prodigious numbers of prestigious prizes he has accrued, which include a Nobel Prize, a Wolf Prize, a Franklin Medal, and many more.
His latest accolade, announced on April 5, is the most lucrative in all of science: a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million, in recognition of ’t Hooft’s myriad contributions to physics across his long career.
[...]
In a conversation with Scientific American, ’t Hooft spoke about his Breakthrough Prize, his optimism for the future of particle physics, his dissatisfaction with quantum mechanics, and the scientific and cultural effects that have arisen from some of his most provocative ideas.
50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics | Construction Physics
I’ve been writing Construction Physics since September of 2020. Over the past four and a half years I’ve written 186 essays, totalling around 600,000 words. The newsletter was originally focused on understanding the problems of construction productivity (though it’s never been entirely about that), but I have branched out to write more about a variety of topics, including energy, transportation, and scientific and technological progress. Because the scope of what I write about has gotten so broad, and the backlog has gotten so large, I thought it would be useful to condense a list of some of the major things I’ve learned writing the newsletter. It’s not a summary of every newsletter I’ve written, but a collection of what I think are some of the major high-level takeaways, interesting or surprising facts, and things that gave a major update to my worldview.
[...]
My main takeaway from this list of takeaways, and from writing the newsletter more generally, is that there’s almost always more to the story. Things that seem like recent developments often have key predecessors going back decades or even centuries. What seem like historical inevitabilities are often highly contingent products of chance and circumstance. Intuitive explanations for phenomena are often wrong, and even when they’re right, the full story is often much deeper and more interesting. Causes are often complex, and what seem like simple problems often tenaciously resist solutions.
The authoritarian takeover attempt is here | Noahpinion
Even as tariffs begin to send the U.S. economy down the tubes, the Trump administration is doing some other things that are not as flamboyantly stupid, but which could have even longer-reaching and darker consequences. The other day, the Trump administration arrested an innocent Salvadoran man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia and sent him to a prison in El Salvador with no trial or even any accusation of a crime. The administration later admitted that his arrest had been an error — Garcia had been granted court protection against deportation, but Trump’s people grabbed him anyway.
[...]
In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return — ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we’re on foreign soil it’s the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason.
“Not Too Sweet” or Too Sweet to Fail? | TASTE
I used to visit Tim Ho Wan every time I went home to Hong Kong, specifically for those crackly pork buns. They were well-made, and, most important, the char siu filling was generous and not too sweet. The same buns at Tim Ho Wan in New York are far sweeter, presumably adjusted for the local palate. But in recent years, those pork buns in Hong Kong have been tasting more like dessert than a midafternoon snack. In other words, they’re sweeter than ever. I reached out to the restaurant to see if their recipe had been streamlined, but they didn’t respond to my request. So I turned to the next logical source: Reddit. There I stumbled upon a rumbling, albeit wholly anecdotal, murmur that certain beloved East Asian dishes—General Tso’s chicken, Korean tteokbokki—are now resoundingly sweeter than they used to be.
[...]
In the realm of savory cooking, sugar and other sweeteners are treated like a spice—one of many ingredients used to make food taste delicious. In Cantonese cuisine, for example, “sugar is used as a tool to achieve balance, mostly to deepen savoriness,” says cookbook author Hetty Lui McKinnon. Sugar is so integral to the cuisine that chef Calvin Eng of the Cantonese American restaurant Bonnie’s in Brooklyn recently published a cookbook titled Salt Sugar MSG. “It’s one of the most important trifectas of flavors in Cantonese cooking,” he notes.
Across Asia, a touch of sweetness is essential for the ability to shift and shape other flavors, but sugar is, in theory, not an ingredient that should stand out on its own. It is merely there to reign in a pungent fish sauce in Thai and Vietnamese sauces or to tamp down the spice of a Sichuan stir-fry.
Why does Athens look so quirky? | BBC
From elegant Neoclassical paradise to muddled concrete sprawl – how did the Greek capital come to look the way it does?
A New Way to Read Gatsby | The Atlantic
Thompson himself said, after delivering the paper that inspired The Tragic Black Buck, that his students weren’t all prompt converts to his view, and in the end, I couldn’t, and still can’t, endorse his confident assertion that Jay Gatsby is Black. What I do claim is that Jay Gatsby is unraced. And that seems to me more important, because it opens the door wider than stark revisionism does. The ambiguity of Gatsby’s race and ethnicity shatters the Black-and-white framework we reflexively impose on so many classic texts.
This reading of Gatsby, I went on to discover when I scratched my initial lesson plan and started over, certainly gave my diverse class a way in. Gatsby’s American identity is so ambiguous that the students could layer on top of it any ethnic or racial identity they brought to the novel. When they did, the text was freshly lit. This was the fall of 2012, and the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, with a score produced by Jay-Z, had not yet been released. But the trailer was available, and I projected it onto my whiteboard. The students, immediately recognizing Jay-Z and Kanye West’s song “No Church in the Wild,” sat up. When Gatsby finally appeared, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, I paused it.
“Why is Gatsby white?” I asked them.
“Because that’s what the book says,” they answered, in near unison.
“Does it?” I asked, pretending to be confused.
#74. Toddlers Want to Help and We Should Let Them | Play Makes Us Human
We, in the United States and many other Western nations, more often think of children as sources of extra work than as sources of help. We often think that trying to get our children to help at home or elsewhere would be more effort than it would be worth. We also tend to think that the only way to get children to help is to pressure them, through punishment or bribery, which, for good reasons, we may be loath to do. We ourselves generally think of work as something that people naturally don’t want to do, and we pass that view on to our children, who then pass it on to their children.
[...]
In a classic research study, conducted more than 40 years ago, Harriet Rheingold (1982) observed children, ages 18, 24, and 30 months, interacting with their parent (mother in some cases, father in others) as the parent went about doing routine housework, such as folding laundry, dusting, sweeping the floor, clearing dishes off the table, and putting away items scattered on the floor. For the sake of the study, each parent was asked to work relatively slowly and allow their child to help if the child wanted, but not to ask the child to help or direct the child’s help through verbal instructions.
[...]
This helping behavior is not done for some expected reward. In fact, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello (2008) found that giving a reward for helping reduces subsequent helping.
1 star
Why It’s Impossible for Most Small Businesses to Manufacture in the US | WIRED
American companies that make everything from keychains to mattresses say Chinese manufacturing is superior, and tariffs won’t be enough to shift production to the United States.
Hue New? Scientists Claim to Have Found Colour No One Has Seen Before | The Guardian
After walking the Earth for a few hundred thousand years, humans might think they have seen it all. But not according to a team of scientists who claim to have experienced a colour no one has seen before.
[...]
“We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented colour signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it,” said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated.”
[...]
The result, published in Science Advances, is a patch of colour in the field of vision about twice the size of a full moon. The colour is beyond the natural range of the naked eye because the M cones are stimulated almost exclusively, a state natural light cannot achieve. The name olo comes from the binary 010, indicating that of the L, M and S cones, only the M cones are switched on.
Scientists find evidence that overturns theories of the origin of water on Earth | ScienceDaily
University of Oxford researchers have helped overturn the popular theory that water on Earth originated from asteroids bombarding its surface. Instead, the material which built our planet was far richer in hydrogen than previously thought. The findings have been published today in the journal Icarus.
Bite-sized chunks of chicken with the texture of whole meat can be grown in the lab | Phys.org
A bioreactor that mimics a circulatory system can deliver nutrients and oxygen to artificial tissue, enabling the production of over 10 grams of chicken muscle for cultured meat applications.
What's Really Wrong With Standardized Tests | Bet On It
What would a top-notch standardized test look like? The kind of test you would use if you were determined to find the best of the best? First and foremost: Perfect scores should be vanishingly rare. Instead of clumping the best candidates together, you should be able to clearly distinguish the 99th percentile from the 99.9th, 99.99th, and so on.
Why Easter is called Easter, and other little-known facts about the holiday | The Conversation
The naming of the celebration as “Easter” seems to go back to the name of a pre-Christian goddess in England, Eostre, who was celebrated at beginning of spring.
Escaping Poverty | Bet On It
Lant Pritchett’s new working paper, “Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth” should be required reading for every Effective Altruist. Bottom line: Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration – not redistribution or philanthropy.
The roots of gun violence | Marginal Revolution
An estimated 80 percent [of U.S. gun shootings] seem to instead be crimes of passion — including rage. They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t, then end in tragedy because someone has a gun. Most violent crimes are the result of human behavior gone temporarily haywire, not premeditated acts for financial benefit.