4 stars
A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It? | New Yorker
Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the Prime Minister condemned her. But, in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence were ignored.
3 stars
The Lunacy of Artemis | Idle Words
A little over 51 years ago, a rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying three astronauts and a space car. After a three day journey to the moon, two of the astronauts climbed into a spindly lander and made the short trip down to the surface, where for another three days they collected rocks and did donuts in the space car. Then they climbed back into the lander, rejoined their colleague in orbit, and departed for Earth. Their capsule splashed down in the South Pacific on December 19, 1972. This mission, Apollo 17, would be the last time human beings ventured beyond low Earth orbit.
If you believe NASA, late in 2026 Americans will walk on the moon again. That proposed mission is called Artemis 3, and its lunar segment looks a lot like Apollo 17 without the space car. Two astronauts will land on the moon, collect rocks, take selfies, and about a week after landing rejoin their orbiting colleagues to go back to Earth.
But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3 billion (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure (one veteran of NASA budgeting estimates it at $7-10 billion). The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission's scientific return—a small box of rocks—is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven't been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to wonder what’s going on here. If we can put a man on the moon, then why can't we just go do it again? The moon hasn’t changed since the 1960’s, while every technology we used to get there has seen staggering advances. It took NASA eight years to go from nothing to a moon landing at the dawn of the Space Age. But today, twenty years and $93 billion after the space agency announced our return to the moon, the goal seems as far out of reach as ever.
It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional | Asterisk Magazine
In the early 20th century, the United States diverted and dammed nearly every major river that runs through the West, ushering in an era of unparalleled dominion over water. Today, California once again struggles with water scarcity — but solar energy could change all that.
How Sierra Was Captured, Then Killed, by a Massive Accounting Fraud | Vice
Sierra was one of the biggest game publishers of the 90s. Then they got an offer that was way too good to be true, but too good to decline.
Secret in the walls: Hidden letters reveal love, lust, scandal in 1920s Baltimore society | The Baltimore Banner
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 into a 1910 house in Roland Park, she tried to picture all the residents who had come before her. How many hands had turned the old brass doorknobs? What mysteries might they have left behind?
Then, one day, a bathroom renovation opened a window into a long-forgotten world.
Her contractor removed a wall and found something hidden amid the plumbing. He wiped off the dust — a little black box made of tin and painted with gold stripes. The lock was broken.
Later, Meade eased back the lid. Stacked inside and bound with twine were old letters. The browned paper was as delicate as onionskin. Every letter was addressed to a woman, “Mrs. R.A. Spaeth.”
2 stars
Introducing GPT-4o | OpenAI [YouTube]
You’ve probably seen this by now; if not, it’s worth watching:
Introducing GPT-4o, updates to ChatGPT, and more.
Book Review: The Others Within Us | Astral Codex Ten
Internal Family Systems, the hot new psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS. […]
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
Sea Peoples, Heraclids, and Ass Men | Glunker Stew
Attempting to demystify the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Profile: The Far Out Initiative | Astral Codex Ten
Our physical differences are easy to notice. Everyone knows that some people are black, some white, some Asian or Hispanic. Everyone knows that some babies are born with one arm, or three eyes, or webbed fingers. But nobody knows how many mental mutants walk among us. Here’s a Reddit post by a guy who says spicy food has no effect on him, complete with a video of him eating Carolina Reaper peppers and looking kind of bored. Here are some pictures by a woman who can see 100x more colors than normal.
People talk a lot about “neurodiversity”, but they mostly just mean that some people are autistic or whatever. The true extent of neurodiversity - like 99% of the colors that one woman can see - remains invisible to most of us.
My other disagreement with neurodiversity advocates is that they insist no neurotype is better than any other. This is, as they say, a postmodernist lie. The best neurotype belongs to a 76 year old Scottish woman named Jo Cameron.
What Does It Take to Actually Cook Like a Tradwife? | Eater
You’veYou’ve seen the videos: A woman, apron tied around her waist, plunges her hands into a bowl of soft, bubbly dough. She speaks in dulcet tones — or perhaps not at all — as she details the two-day process of mixing, proofing, and baking a loaf of sourdough. She makes cheese from scratch for the homemade macaroni and cheese that she lovingly serves to her children. She presents it as a meal, yes, but also as an opportunity to avoid the “toxic” dyes and other chemicals lurking within the blue Kraft box. This woman isn’t just a mother, or a wife, but a tradwife. […]
At best, it’s a veiled attempt to reinforce regressive views about the role of women, and in doing so, walk back decades of feminist progress. Some argue that the tradwife “movement” is also intrinsically rooted in white supremacy.
And yet I cannot stop watching. […]
And so I decided to spend the only free time I do have — the weekend — eating, and cooking, like a tradwife. I established some simple rules for the ensuing 48 hours. Everything I consumed — at least three meals a day — must be made from scratch, including as many ingredients as I could make myself. I would bake bread and stretch cheese and churn my own butter. That said, I also cheated: To make my entry into tradwifery at least a little bit easier, I dropped $143 on a “weekly special box” from Ballerina Farm, the Utah-based lifestyle brand helmed by Hannah Neeleman, the biggest star in the tradwife realm.
The Axes of Agency | Regan’s Substack
Being an agent implies that you can be held responsible for your actions. It also means that you can, for the most part, freely choose to make decisions according to your particular desires and preferences. Of course, you will surely make many decisions that you regret, either because they didn’t lead to your expected outcome or because you later came to realize that the outcome you thought you wanted was actually bad for you. But, especially assuming you’re able to incorporate that information and respond to it by changing your behavior in the future, you’re unlikely to conclude that you ought to give up your agency in general in response to this regret.
I’ve written about sexual consent and the importance of recognizing women as full agents in this domain. And I’ve been somewhat dismissive of arguments made by Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, Walt Bismarck and others, that average sex differences across the Big 5 personality traits, are particularly relevant here. It’s not so much that I find it implausible that higher average agreeableness means more women than men have sex “out of politeness”, it’s just that I think that’s their problem, and only their problem, to deal with.
Louise Perry may be right that many young women would be better off if they followed a self-imposed rule to not sleep with men until they’ve demonstrated a sufficient level of commitment. But if they break their own rule that’s still on them. This doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t judge any potential tactics used by the men they interact with as unethical, but we can also judge the woman for failing to live up to her own principles and values. And of course, using a self-imposed rule as a heuristic to improve your outcomes doesn’t imply any loss of agency.
Four Singularities for Research | One Useful Thing
I think AI is about to bring on many more crises in scientific research… well, not crises - singularities. I don’t mean The Singularity, the hypothetical moment that humans build a machine smarter than themselves and life changes forever, but rather a narrower version. A narrow singularity is a future point in human affairs where AI has so altered a field or industry that we cannot fully imagine what the world on the other side of that singularity looks like. I think academic research is facing at least four of these narrow singularities. Each has the potential to so alter the nature of academic research that it could either restart the slowing engine of innovation or else create a crisis to derail it further. The early signs are already here, we just need to decide what we will do on the other side.
Emotional and physical therapy | Overthinking Everything
Do you ever have those moments where in a flash of insight you realise something so incredibly blindingly obvious that you don’t understand how it wasn’t already obvious to everyone? A value of “everyone” that of course includes all previous versions of you for the past [mumble] years. And yet… it seems like it’s somewhere between novel to you and a niche opinion that some people hold but that has failed to achieve mainstream acceptance. […]
Anyway, I figured out recently that we’ve mostly been doing therapy all wrong.
Short version: I think the primary starting goal for therapy should, in most non-crisis cases, be that of improving your physical health, and of getting you to move more and to “exercise” in the broadest possible sense.
A Theoretical "Case Against Education" | Astral Codex Ten
So it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills. The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every specific thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; ie they keep some sort of overall concept of learning. This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate. […]
This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway. […]
Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business | MIT Technology Review
People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away.
Your friends are not a representative sample of public opinion | Silver Bulletin
A lot of people who follow politics today could stand to have more of Kael’s humility. I think there’s honor in being willing to defend an unpopular position. And I don’t think public intellectuals ought to behave like political strategists. But if they’re going to make claims about public opinion, they ought to at least be able to locate their views somewhere on the Cartesian plane of the broader American electorate. And you do that by looking at polls, election results, and other data, and maybe by doing some first-hand reporting in communities that are unlike the one you inhabit — and not by relying on the opinions of your friends.
Scientists Calculated the Energy Needed to Carry a Baby. Shocker: It’s a Lot. | New York Times
In humans, the energetic cost of pregnancy is about 50,000 dietary calories — far higher than previously believed, a new study found. […]
But Dustin Marshall, an evolutionary biologist at Monash University, and his students have discovered that the energy stored in a human baby’s tissues accounts for only about 4 percent of the total energy costs of pregnancy. The other 96 percent is extra fuel required by a woman’s own body.
1 star
Slow Publishing With Arion Press | Kottke
San Francisco’s Arion Press still uses decades-old machines to make beautiful books by hand. They’re one of the few remaining presses in the world that do everything from start to finish — they even cast their own type.
The Cicada’s Love Affair With Prime Numbers | New Yorker
Now, imagine an animal that emerges every twelve years, like a cicada. According to the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, in his essay “Of Bamboo, Cicadas, and the Economy of Adam Smith,” these kind of boom-and-bust population cycles can be devastating to creatures with a long development phase. Since most predators have a two-to-ten-year population cycle, the twelve-year cicadas would be a feast for any predator with a two-, three-, four-, or six-year cycle. By this reasoning, any cicada with a development span that is easily divisible by the smaller numbers of a predator’s population cycle is vulnerable.
Prime numbers, however, can only be divided by themselves and one; they cannot be evenly divided into smaller integers. Cicadas that emerge at prime-numbered year intervals, like the seventeen-year Brood II set to swarm the East Coast, would find themselves relatively immune to predator population cycles, since it is mathematically unlikely for a short-cycled predator to exist on the same cycle.
An economist’s rule for making tough life decisions | Quartz
“The data from my experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting,” Levitt said in a press release. “A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.”
The true story behind the kid who went 1940s viral for his week at the cinemas in San Francisco | Gazetteer
With $20 in his pocket, Richard Allen had a wild week of movies, comic books, and hot dogs. But the tale belies a harsher home life that he wanted to escape, his daughter says
Mystery of where Mona Lisa was painted has been solved, geologist claims | The Guardian
Ann Pizzorusso says she has tracked down the background landscape of the world’s most famous painting
The Mysteries of Inca Pre-Columbian Architecture: The Corn Connection | Archaeology Aesthetic [Medium]
The design of many Inca structures, including temples, palaces, and agricultural terraces, incorporated elements inspired by the shape and symbolism of corn kernels. From the rounded corners of buildings resembling corn grains to the strategic alignment of structures with celestial events linked to agricultural cycles, the influence of corn is pervasive in Inca architecture.
