3 stars
The Case of the Fake Sherlock | New York Magazine
Richard Walter was hailed as a genius criminal profiler. How did he get away with his fraud for so long?
The Gambler Who Beat Roulette | Bloomberg Businessweek
For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.
Highway Star | n+1
I met Jess through REAL Women in Trucking, an advocacy group focused on labor rights, particularly for women drivers. I was curious about her life on the road, and we’d spent months trying to arrange for me to join her on a route. She was usually difficult to pin down; her routes shifted frequently through the Midwest and the South and she could be gone for weeks at a time, with little advanced notice. But I knew to find her in Lithonia, Georgia, on a certain afternoon in June 2021 because she had a dentist appointment and had to be in town. Lithonia was where her company, GTO Trucking, was based. It was a small company, four drivers total, and Jess was an independent contractor; she owned the Black Widow but operated under GTO’s permits and registration. The truck was her home in the literal sense. She didn’t rent or own any property in Georgia, so even during her days off she often slept in the cab and showered in nearby hotels. Belongings that didn’t dwell within her truck were either in a nearby storage unit or in Michigan, at her sister’s house.
Robert Trivers, Stalin, and the Dark Side of Idealism | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
Given that one must be selective, if one is interested in history and how it can inform the social sciences, how do you go about deciding which works are worth reading?
Allow me to make the case for understanding the life of Joseph Stalin. It is difficult to think of many people who lived lives more interesting than that of the Soviet dictator. The son of a cobbler and seamstress living from the outskirts of the Russian empire, he would grow up to be at the center of three once-in-a-lifetime type geopolitical events: the Russian Revolution, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War. Stalin was also the preeminent force behind the drive to build the first communist great power in world history. This included the 1936–1938 purge of the country’s leadership that was perhaps unlike anything documented history had seen before or since. Twenty years after the Russian Revolution, Stalin would wipe out the vast majority of its more prominent figures still alive, in addition to much of the country’s military and intelligence leadership.
How was one man able to pull this off?
Book Review: From Oversight To Overkill | Astral Codex Ten
His IRB - ie Institutional Review Board, the committee charged with keeping experiments ethical - disagreed. They worried the study would give patients AIDS. Dr. Knight tried to explain that you can’t get AIDS from skin contact. The IRB refused to listen. Finally Dr. Knight found some kind of diversity coordinator person who offered to explain that claiming you can get AIDS from skin contact is offensive. The IRB backed down, and Dr. Knight completed his study successfully.
Just kidding! The IRB demanded that he give his patients consent forms warning that they could get smallpox. Dr. Knight tried to explain that smallpox had been extinct in the wild since the 1970s, the only remaining samples in US and Russian biosecurity labs. Here there was no diversity coordinator to swoop in and save him, although after months of delay and argument he did eventually get his study approved.
Most IRB experiences aren’t this bad, right? […]
Low confidence estimate, but somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 Americans probably die each year from IRB-related research delays.
So the cost-benefit calculation looks like - save a tiny handful of people per year, while killing 10,000 to 100,000 more, for a price tag of $1.6 billion. If this were a medication, I would not prescribe it.
The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism | New York Times
Ezra Klein:
But what makes Tahanan notable isn’t its aesthetic. It’s the way it was built. Tahanan went up in three years, for less than $400,000 per unit. Affordable housing projects in the Bay Area routinely take twice as long and cost almost twice as much. […]
So how did Tahanan do it? The answer, for liberals, is a bit depressing: It got around the government. […]
You might assume that when faced with a problem of overriding public importance, government would use its awesome might to sweep away the obstacles that stand in its way. But too often, it does the opposite. It adds goals — many of them laudable — and in doing so, adds obstacles, expenses and delays. If it can get it all done, then it has done much more. But sometimes it tries to accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all.
The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023 | Vimeo
Already out of date, yet still entertaining / engrossing / important:
This video is from a presentation at a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model AIs. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4.
2 stars
Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire | ProPublica
You’ve heard about this piece, of course. It is very good. It also doesn’t reveal that much more than was reported by the New York Times over a decade ago. I’m not convinced much will come of it, though I hope to be wrong:
For over 20 years, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been treated to luxury vacations by billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow.
He goes on cruises in far-flung locales on Crow’s yacht, flies on his private jet and keeps company with Crow’s powerful friends at the billionaire’s private resort.
The extent of Crow’s largesse has never been revealed. Until now. […]
These trips appeared nowhere on Thomas’ financial disclosures. His failure to report the flights appears to violate a law passed after Watergate that requires justices, judges, members of Congress and federal officials to disclose most gifts, two ethics law experts said. He also should have disclosed his trips on the yacht, these experts said.
Where the Sidewalk Ends | Lux
Meet the rednecks running a mutual aid auto repair shop in Alabama
How to survive a superpower split | The Economist
Caught between America, China and Russia, many countries are determined not to pick sides. As the American-led order in place since 1945 fragments and economic decoupling accelerates, they seek deals across divides. This transactional approach is reshaping geopolitics.
Do the Kids Think They’re Alright? | After Babel
A common criticism I have received since 2015 is that I am misunderstanding the younger generation; I’m just another in a long line of older people lamenting the behavior of “kids these days.” As a social psychologist long active in the field of cultural psychology, I know that this could be true. Even more than previous generations, Gen Z has created an online culture that us older folk can’t even see, let alone understand. So I have been on the lookout for writings by members of Gen Z explaining their generation to outsiders, and I would especially like to find criticisms of The Coddling of the American Mind, or of my more recent writings about social media.
So far, I have found almost none. When I speak to high school and college audiences, I usually ask those who think I got the story wrong to raise their hands and then come forward and ask the first questions. I rarely get a hand raised or a critical question. I therefore asked my two research assistants, Zach Rausch and Eli George, for help finding voices of Gen Z.
Inside Greenland’s Misunderstood Winter Delicacy | Atlas Obscura
Kiviaq, a mainstay on many “weird foods” lists, is an incredible feat of fermentation and cultural touchstone. […]
For many in northwest Greenland, the iconic flavor of winter is that of fermented meat, perhaps most iconically kiviaq, a dish made by packing 300 to 500 whole dovekies—beaks, feathers, and all—into the hollowed-out carcass of a seal, snitching it up and sealing it with fat, then burying it under rocks for a few months to ferment. Once it’s dug up and opened, people skin and eat the birds one at a time.
Striking. | News Items
Superb explainer:
After four months depressingly bereft of productive talk about Social Security, it’s a good time to consider what the unrest in France may tell us about the risks of waiting too long.
Many countries (and U.S. states) have some version of a pension problem. At almost any given time, somewhere in the world, you can find elected leaders trying to shore up a weak pension system, whether by raising the retirement age, or calling in more contributions, or offering bonuses to those who defer retirement—or maybe they’re rolling back previous “reforms” that didn’t work out.
What you don’t often see are the residents of an advanced industrial society thronging the streets, torching city halls, smashing bank facades, hurling dead rats, belting out La Marseillaise, even scaring away the king of England, all because they don’t want to work until they’re 64.
In the United States, we’ve been hearing for years that it will be easier to fix Social Security if we start early. Now the French are showing what that means.
Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result | The Atlantic
Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.
How the Right Turned Radical and the Left Became Depressed | New York Times
Ross Douthat:
Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.
Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. […]
Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.
Europe is not ready to be a "third superpower" | Noahpinion
For that, it would need to act as a unified entity, defend itself against Russia, and embrace new technology.
A strange streak of young stars is evidence of a runaway supermassive black hole, study finds | Phys Org
Astronomers have spotted a candidate supermassive black hole running away from its home galaxy, hurtling through space at a velocity of about 4 million miles per hour for the past 39 million years.
A Yale University-led team using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi discovered an unusual, very thin, almost straight streak of young stars and shocked gas—possibly the trail the black hole left behind as it escaped.
Nobody knows how many jobs will "be automated" | Noahpinion
One thing I’ve learned in my years of writing about the economics of AI is that it’s pretty much impossible to get people to think about this issue in terms of anything except job loss. The “folk model” of automation is that it throws humans out of work — today you had a job performing some sort of valuable work, and tomorrow you’re on the welfare rolls. This is not how things have worked out in the past — we’ve been deploying automation technology for centuries, and as of 2023, pretty much every human who wants a job has a job. But there’s basically no way to get people to believe that this next wave of automation will be the one that finally sends humans into obsolescence.
How to Be an Intellectual | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
At least no one will accuse Hanania of groupthink…
People often ask if I have any tips on how to be a successful writer. Of course! Just do the following, and you can follow my path:
Write about how wokeness is a cancer. Then, when you’ve built an audience of right-wing anti-wokes and MAGAs, make sure to release a series of articles about how conservatives are immoral and have low IQs, liberals are completely right about January 6, and the media is honest and good.
Have a vicious hatred of masking. But when that gives you fans that are anti-vaxx too, constantly tell them they’re stupid, you hate them, and they’re the reason we can’t have nice things.
Write a report about how China is going to become the strongest country in the world, and an essay arguing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will usher in a new era of multipolarity. Stick to this view throughout February 2022, and defend Putin’s position in the face of all of Twitter having erupted in moral outrage at what he has done. Become known for that. Later that year, declare you hate Putin, that China and Russia both suck, and America will lead the world indefinitely. Keep talking about Asians and their love of masking, explaining how this represents a great moral and spiritual defect and tying it into your geopolitical analysis.
If you’ve got any right-wing fans left, make sure they know you have positions on abortion and euthanasia that would be too much even for most liberal Democrats. As everyone is flipping out about the Canadian MAID program, write about how it doesn’t go far enough and killing yourself is actually masculine and honorable, and you are repulsed by any moral system that holds otherwise, which is for the weak.
For good measure, throw in some takes about how it doesn’t matter if female teachers have sex with underage male students, and argue that Harvey Weinstein is a political prisoner.
Do all this, and you will become an extremely popular writer beloved by the world.
Or maybe not. What I hope is clear is that there really wasn’t a plan here.
The Impressionish Painter | Kottke
I have to admit that as much as I love Evan Puschak’s Nerdwriter videos, I did not have high hopes for his latest video on John Singer Sargent, a painter I didn’t know a lot about and assumed, mostly based on his name (ugh, I know), that he was some fusty 19th-century painter who was not as interesting as the Impressionists. What a pleasant surprise to discover, right from Puschak’s expertly concise show-don’t-tell opening, that I am Sargent’s newest fan.
1 star
Word of the week: Indict | Fritinancy
I am, however, going to muse about why we pronounce indict the way we do—rhyming with delight and extradite—and not the way we pronounce its etymological cousins predict, edict, verdict, and contradict. After all, they share a -dict. […]
We pronounce indict that way because for 300 years it was spelled endite.
My Dating App Method May Be Unorthodox, but Good Lord Does It Work | Slate
I had to take a week off work and make a freakishly detailed spreadsheet, but it was worth it.
Ingenious Banana Bruise Artworks | Kottke
As it ripens, banana skin oxidizes and turns black. Bruising the skin speeds up the process, a fact that Anna Chojnicka exploits to create these bruised banana artworks
If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why. | New York Times
The new study, published online this week, confirmed the results: The targeted ads shown to another set of nearly 500 participants were pitching more expensive products from lower-quality vendors than identical products that showed up in a simple web search.
Why Lego Won | Kottke
Lego did not invent the stacking, interlocking plastic brick — Kiddiecraft did. So why did Lego’s version win? As Phil Edwards explains in this entertaining video, the answer can be boiled down to two words: innovation and marketing.
Donald Trump Probably Should Not Have Been Charged With (This) Felony | Slate
These legal problems raise the political issues with bringing these claims against Trump as a felony based on proving “other crimes” that might not be proven and which rely on complex legal theories.
It is said that if you go after the king, you should not miss. In this vein, it is very easy to see this case tossed for legal insufficiency or tied up in the courts well past the 2024 election before it might ever go to trial. It will be a circus that will embolden Trump, especially if he walks.
In-N-Out Burger Secret Menu Guide | Serious Eats
J Kenji Lopez-Alt:
Our order arrived a few minutes later, produced exactly as requested. Shocking! At my local McDonald's, the cashier has trouble even getting a single cheeseburger right, never mind special requests!
After documenting the goods, I went back for me second order.
"Hey—you're back. Still hungry?"
"Yep. I'm going to order a few more weird things."
"So, are you just trying to order everything on the menu?"
Sh*t, I thought to myself. The gig is up.
"Yeah...," I said sheepishly.
"Awesome! I've been waiting for this day ever since I started working here!"
The Sizes of Flying Creatures, Compared | Kottke
Using 3D models, this video compares the sizes of various flying creatures (insects, bats, birds, dinosaurs) past and present, from the microscopic fairyfly (which is dwarfed by a mosquito) to the albatross (with its 12-foot wingspan) to the immense Quetzalcoatlus, which stood 20 feet tall and had a wingspan in the neighborhood of 33 feet. For reference, that’s about the size of a Cessna 172 airplane. Just image those flying around all casual-like.
Strong and Weak Link Problems and the Value of Peer Review | Marginal Revolution
Adam Mastroianni’s has an excellent post on strong-link vs weak-link problems in science. He writes:
Weak-link problems are problems where the overall quality depends on how good the worst stuff is. You fix weak-link problems by making the weakest links stronger, or by eliminating them entirely.
Food safety is a weak-link problem, bank or computer security is a weak-link problem, many production processes are weak-link, also called O-ring problems.
[But] some problems are strong-link problems: overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is, and the bad stuff barely matters….Venture capital is a strong-link problem: it’s fine to invest in a bunch of startups that go bust as long as one of them goes to a billion.
….Here’s the crazy thing: most people treat science like it’s a weak-link problem.