Links
3 stars
I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America | The Atlantic
29-minute read
Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Car-Crash Conspiracy | New Yorker
30-minute read
About a decade ago, however, the city of New Orleans began experiencing accidents involving eighteen-wheelers with a frequency that was anomalous—and alarming. The sudden spike in big-rig collisions occurred in just one area: a fourteen-mile stretch of Interstate 10 that runs through a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city known as New Orleans East. Starting around 2015, scores of accidents involving tractor-trailers and passenger cars were reported in the area each year, often resulting in damage to the cars and medical care for occupants who reported injuries. In 2004, there were sixty-nine sideswipe accidents in New Orleans in which a passenger vehicle collided with a large truck. By 2017, the annual number had nearly tripled. When insurance adjusters examined the roadway where the crashes were happening, there were no obvious hazards—like faulty lighting or an especially steep grade—that could account for this newfound profusion. For truckers, that stretch of New Orleans East had become an asphalt Bermuda Triangle—a treacherous gantlet best avoided.
Another confounding feature of the crashes was that, in virtually all of them, the cars contained multiple occupants. For years, the typical number of passengers in a car wreck in Louisiana had been consistent, averaging 1.4. But, when the frequency of accidents involving large trucks started to climb in New Orleans, so, too, did the number of occupants. Suddenly, it became typical for at least three people to be in a car at the time of a collision. When Helmut Schneider, a business professor at Louisiana State University, calculated the likelihood of such a rise in accidents involving so many people taking place in such a contained geographic area, he determined that the odds of this all happening by chance were one in seven hundred and fifty trillion.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
The man who blew up a nuclear power station and disappeared | The Guardian
15-minute read
When a foil snaps, it makes a sound like a lightbulb being smashed, and then there is a blade of steel in the air that nobody is controlling, and it is moving fast. The broken tip went through Bonfil’s chest, beneath his right arm. His mouth filled with blood. He was on the floor in five seconds. Medical students were in the room but there was nothing anyone could do. He died on the way to hospital.
A Johannesburg magistrate ruled it accidental. Bonfil’s mother flew out from England and told Wilkinson she now thought of him as her son. He spent time with the family in England afterwards.
I asked Wilkinson, not long ago, how it had affected him.
“Badly,” he said. And then he stopped talking.
Eleven years after the incident, the same man, who had learned what physics does to a body, was working as a contract engineer at the Koeberg nuclear power station, 19 miles north of Cape Town. He was furious with the regime that had conscripted him, sent him to fight a war in Angola he didn’t believe in, and made his country a pariah. In an act of folly or courage, in December 1982 he walked four bombs into South Africa’s only nuclear power station, weeks before it was due to come online. On 17 December, he pulled the pins, made it out of the control room, had a farewell drink with his colleagues, and then disappeared.
Let’s talk space toilets! | Mars For The Rest of Us
7-minute read
While capsules like Soyuz and the Crew Dragon are equipped with a rudimentary toilet kit, astronauts use a mix of drugs, diet, and occult knowledge passed down the generations to keep from having to use it. It can take more than two days for a Crew Dragon capsule to reach the space station, but the crew in the cramped spacecraft is expected to save the real fireworks for the relative comfort of the space station toilet.
The longest anyone has attempted to hold it in space is Frank Borman, on Gemini 7. Stuck in a two-man capsule the size of a phone booth, Borman was determined to get through his two-week mission without releasing the hounds.
Reluctantly Influential: Inside Lenny Rachitsky’s Demandingly Chill Life | First Round
18-minute read
Lenny’s Newsletter has 1.2M subscribers. It’s the top business newsletter on Substack and is top four in publications in the US. Lenny’s Podcast has over 500K YouTube subscribers and each episode gets 100-200K downloads. The sheer volume of what’s in his orbit is impressive on its own: ~25 pieces of content per month across his newsletter, podcast, community wisdom emails and the two other podcasts now on his network, “How I AI” and “The Skip.” He curates and frequently updates a list of partners for Lenny’s Product Pass and maintains its infrastructure, has a thriving 40K-person community and has even put on a 1,200-person conference in San Francisco, Lenny and Friends Summit.
All of this didn’t just happen to him. Nothing is an accident, even if he sometimes makes it sound that way.
How to walk through walls | Escaping Flatland
7-minute read
In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one.
Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked:
“How much did it cost [to make] again?”
“$7,000.”
“Really? That’s pretty good . . . most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”
“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”
In nine months, he had written, directed, and sold a 90-minute action film that cost a third of what a film trailer would. How was that possible? At the time, the cost of film stock alone would normally run into several hundred thousand dollars for an action film like El Mariachi.
[...]
Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.
The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet | Asterisk
10-minute read
Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, often sold as Tylenol or Panadol). In the U.S., it’s estimated to cause 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths per year. Acetaminophen has a scarily narrow therapeutic window. The instructions on the package say it’s okay to take up to four grams per day. If you take eight grams, your liver could fail and you could die.
Meanwhile, it seems to be really hard to kill yourself by overdosing on ibuprofen (Advil, Nurofen, Motrin, Brufen). In 2006, Wood et al. searched the medical literature and found 10 documented cases in history. Nine of those cases involved complicating factors, and in the 10th, a woman took the equivalent of more than 500 standard (200mg) pills.
[...]
But guess what? My logic was wrong and what I was doing was stupid. I’m now convinced that for most people in most circumstances, acetaminophen is safer than ibuprofen, provided you use it as directed. I think most doctors agree with this. In fact, I think many doctors think it’s obvious.
The Tragedy of Mrs. Dr. Seuss | Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade
8-minute read
Unless you are very deep into children’s books, you’ve probably never thought much about Helen Palmer. I hadn’t either, until I bought inscribed copies of two of her books. Then I fell into the quicksand of research that so many antiquarian booksellers get sucked into.
I thought you might also be interested in the story of the woman behind Dr. Seuss and everything she did so that millions of us could delight in The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham.
Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion | The Guardian
7-minute read
Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”
Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.
Amazon’s Durability | Stratechery
9-minute read
Now, ten years later, we are here, with the official unveiling of Amazon Supply Chain Services, and I think the time frame is an important one: Amazon, more than any other company, actually operates with decade-long timeframes, consistently making real-world investments at massive scale that (1) convert their marginal costs into capital costs and (2) gain leverage on those capital costs by selling them to other businesses.
This is, by the way, still a story about AI.
Gamer’s Dilemma | LRB Blog
4-minute read
Donald Trump and his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, both former television personalities, have demonstrated that you can launch a full-scale war with all the fun of a game. In early March, the White House and Pentagon circulated official hype videos of Operation Epic Fury. Footage of strikes on Iran was interlaid with clips from the games Call of Duty, Wii Sports and Grand Theft Auto and the movies Top Gun, Braveheart and Gladiator, punctuated by comic book onomatopoeia. In the run up to the attacks, the US Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering boasted in manosphere-speak: ‘Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.’
Emmanuel Macron has chided Trump for being too flippant in his press conferences and online ravings: ‘When you want to be serious you don’t say every day the opposite of what you said the day before … And maybe you shouldn’t be speaking every day.’
Rogue States | News Items
4-minute read
The U.S. went to war with Iran because the Trump administration decided a rogue state that regularly threatens the U.S. can’t be allowed to have a nuclear weapon alongside a missile program capable of delivering that weapon to American soil.
Most people seem to have forgotten, though, that there already is a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads and counting, as well as a missile program on its way to being able to deliver one of those warheads to the American homeland.
That rogue state is North Korea, and it is getting little attention for the nuclear threat it already poses while time, attention and billions of dollars are focused on the nuclear threat Iran might pose, someday. Don’t take my word for it; President Trump’s own national defense strategy, released early this year, is pretty blunt about the danger from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea: “The DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.”
How an unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables | Works in Progress
4-minute read
Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or shorter stems – gradually turning wild plants into improved yet recognizable versions of their originals. The rare exception is Brassica oleracea, wild cabbage: the origin of cabbage, bok choy, collard greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and much else.
1 star
The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life | Smithsonian Magazine
3-minute read
Modern archeologists, excavating ancient Egyptian tombs, have often found something unexpected amongst the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old, and yet still preserved. Through millennia, the archeologists discover, the food remains unspoiled, an unmistakable testament to the eternal shelf-life of honey.
New Kind of CRISPR Could Treat Viral Infection and Cancer by Shredding Sick Cells’ DNA | University of Utah Health
4-minute read
A new kind of CRISPR that destroys cells rather than gene editing them has shown potential for killing sick cells while leaving healthy cells untouched.
Will AI kill the research paper? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work. The meta-paper also would allow the reader to add new data, to run additional robustness checks, and to do whatever else you might think of. Once again, the canonical version of the paper evolves away.