Tons of great stuff this week. Enjoy!
4 stars
Airfoil | Bartosz Ciechanowski
This website is amazing; once I get around to reading Bartosz’s other pages, I’ll likely include them as more 4-star links. This one uses a ton of interactive animations, starting with the basics, to explain how planes fly.
In this article we’ll investigate what makes airplanes fly by looking at the forces generated by the flow of air around the aircraft’s wings. More specifically, we’ll focus on the cross section of those wings to reveal the shape of an airfoil […]
We’ll find out how the shape and the orientation of the airfoil helps airplanes remain airborne. We’ll also learn about the behavior and properties of air and other flowing matter.
3 stars
Priscila, Queen of the Rideshare Mafia | WIRED
She came to the US with a dream. Using platforms like Uber, Instacart, and DoorDash, she built a business empire up from nothing. There was just one problem.
Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones | The Scholar’s Stage
Fascinating, with superb explanatory power:
The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. The two big political news items of this week—the happenings of the Republican National Convention and the desperate attempts of many Democrats to replace their candidate before their own convention next month—reflect these asymmetries. Nevertheless, many discussions of American politics assume that that the structures and operational norms of the two parties are the same. […]
For Freeman the most important fact about the Democratic Party is that its representative constituent groups exist in an organized form independent of the party apparatus proper. This means that the position (and to a lesser extent the power) of the men and women who lead these constituencies is not dependent on the favor of party leaders. To the contrary, Democratic Party leaders tend to think of their personal power as being dependent on the support of the constituencies the activist leaders represent. […]
This is because the Republican party is fundamentally a leader oriented political organization. Power flows from the top down. Convention battles were not contests between constituencies, but contests between patronage networks.
Lifeboat Games And Backscratchers Clubs | Astral Codex Ten
This piece is brilliant, and the following excerpt doesn’t do it justice:
Ten people are stuck on a lifeboat after their ship sank. It will be weeks before anyone finds them, and they’re out of food.
They’ve heard this story before, so they decide to turn to cannibalism sooner rather than later. They agree to draw lots to determine the victim. Just as the first person is reaching for the lots, Albert shouts out “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT BOB!”
They agree to do this instead of drawing lots. This is obvious, right? For nine out of ten people, it’s a better deal. For nine out of ten people, it brings their chance of death from 1/10 to 0. Bob’s against it, of course, but he’s outvoted. The nine others overpower Bob and eat him.
Something about this surprises me. It’s weird that there’s another solution which is more stable than the fair one of drawing lots. It’s strange that by shouting an obvious suggestion - one that adds no more information - Albert can save his own life with certainty. Still, that’s how it goes.
More weeks go by. They still aren’t rescued. They need another victim. Once again the lots come out. This time, just before the first lot is drawn, nine castaways all simultaneously shout “WAIT LET’S KILL AND EAT ______”, with a different name in the blank for all of them.
This is obvious, right? By being the proposer last time, Albert got 100% chance of avoiding death. Everyone else had post facto 100% chance of avoiding death, since Bob’s name was called instead of theirs. But before Albert called out the name, letting Albert call a name gives you a 1/9 chance of dying (since we know Albert won’t call out his own name). Letting Albert call out the name makes your chances worse, since you’re going from a 1/10 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone) to a 1/9 chance (randomly chosen one out of everyone except Albert). So the “one person calls out a name” solution beats drawing lots post facto for everyone except the callee, but it’s worse ex ante unless you’re the caller. So everyone tries to be the caller. Since everyone calls out a different random name, nobody can coordinate, and nothing happens.
The castaways agree to take a day to think things over, and try again the next morning.
The next morning, the lots come out. Before anything happens, eight out of nine people call “WAIT LET’S ALL KILL AND EAT CHARLOTTE”.
Charlotte, you see, is blonde. And everyone else in the raft is dark-haired. Just luck of the draw (hah!) - it so happened that eight dark-haired people and one blonde were stuck on the same lifeboat. There’s no racism or genuine bad feeling between the darks and blondes. Nobody actually cares about hair color. It was just the simplest Schelling point.
Where's the Synthetic Blood? | Asimov Press
The creation of synthetic blood is one of the holy grails of biomedical research as it would alleviate such shortages and overcome current barriers to obtaining and storing blood products. There are a handful of efforts underway, but two overarching approaches to making synthetic blood products stand out: what I call the biologists’ approach and the chemists’ approach.
Your Book Review: The Family That Couldn’t Sleep | Astral Codex Ten
About prion diseases:
Accordingly, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep is beneath all else a “character-driven narrative”. It first introduces us to, of all poetic things, a fallen noble-blooded Venetian family. The money ran out, you see – not because of profligate spendthrifts or revolutionary uprisings, but because of whispers, taunts, that its members were cursed to go mad. In midlife, it seemed, a strangely high fraction of them were struck by a specific sort of insanity. It started with a fever that never quite let down, even after any supposed illness should have ran its course. A little trouble sleeping – but is that so unusual, for someone feverish in the languid Italian summers?
How To Price A Data Asset | Pivotal
Not something I expected to be this interesting:
Data is the new oil, they say; data is the new gold. Very well, then: oil costs eighty dollars a barrel, and gold is twenty three hundred dollars an ounce. How much does data cost?
It’s a meaningless question.
The factors driving oil prices may be complex, but there’s a well-established consensus on transaction criteria: volume, location, grade, and date. There are exchanges which specify delivery rules for benchmark contracts like WTI, Brent and Dubai. When you buy a barrel of crude, you know what you’re getting.
Data ... is not like that. Data is inherently heterogeneous. Dataset A and Dataset B may both be bits on a drive somewhere, but often have absolutely nothing in common beyond that. Different fields, schemas, specs; different themes, coverages, informational content; different consumers, use cases, and value. Every barrel of WTI crude is identical; no two datasets are identical.
Does this mean that data pricing is all art, no science? Not quite. Data’s innate heterogeneity means that no criteria can be absolute; there’s no single formula you can apply. But there are definite principles that generalize across a wide range of data assets.
I was the co-founder and chief data officer of Quandl, a successful data marketplace (now owned by Nasdaq). In that role, I evaluated thousands of data assets and priced hundreds of data products. I can say, with some confidence, that I’ve priced more — and more varied — data products than almost anyone in the world.
In this essay, I’ll share a few of the things I’ve learned. I’ll start with some basic axioms of data value; then I’ll lay out the implications of those axioms.
Your Book Review: How Language Began | Astral Codex Ten
How Chomsky attained this stranglehold on linguistics is an interesting sociological question, but not our main concern in the present work. […]
All of this is context for understanding the ideas of a certain bomb-throwing terrorist blight on the face of linguistics: Daniel Everett. How Language Began is a book he wrote about, well, what language is and how it began. Everett is the anti-Chomsky.
The E.U. Goes Too Far | Stratechery
In short, the E.U. either has or is about to cross a critical line in terms of overplaying its hand: yes, most of tech may have been annoyed by their regulations, but the economic value of having one code base for the entire world meant that everyone put up with it (including users outside of the E.U.); once that code base splits, though — as it recently did for Apple — the calculations of whether or not to even serve E.U. users becomes that much closer; dramatically increasing potential fines far beyond what the region is worth only exacerbates the issue.
Consciousness As Recursive Reflections | Astral Codex Ten
Another ACX entry by someone other than Scott. Maybe this post solves the problem of consciousness. But if it does, I wasn’t clever enough to understand it. What I did understand was pretty interesting though…
Nobody knows for sure how subjective experiences relate to objective physics. That is the main reason why there are serious claims that not everything is physics. It has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences”, “the last frontier of brain science”, and “as important as anything that can possibly exist” as well as “core to” all value and ethics.
So, let’s solve that in a blog post.
There's not that much wealth in the world | Noahpinion
Most economic debates are about income, not wealth. When we talk about income taxes, or welfare benefits, or labor’s share of national income, we’re talking about the amount of goods and services that get created every year, and how those goods and services get allocated among the various people in a society. But in the 2010s, we saw a lot of debate about wealth instead — wealth taxes, wealth inequality, and so on.
I always felt that these debates were a bit of a distraction. That’s partly because — for reasons I’ll explain in a bit — I think income is a lot more important than wealth. It’s also because from a policy perspective, dealing with income is a lot easier than dealing with wealth. But the biggest reason is that I think that wealth is a lot harder for regular people to understand than income.
2 stars
What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs? | Construction Physics
To students of technological progress, Bell Labs is a giant. […]
Bell Labs is most famous for being the birthplace of the transistor, but that’s just one of dozens of major inventions and discoveries that originated there. Bell Labs also spawned: the silicon solar PV cell, the first active and passive communications satellites, the first videophone, the first cellular telephone system, the first fiber optic telephone cable, the quartz clock, Information Theory, Statistical Process Control, the UNIX computer operating system, and the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. Many of Bell Labs' less famous inventions were among its most important: the discovery of compounds that could protect polyethylene from decomposing in sunlight isn’t typically mentioned on lists of Bell Labs’ most impressive achievements, but the patents for them were the most valuable that AT&T ever produced. Among Bell Labs’ awards are 10 Nobel Prizes, 5 Turing Awards (the highest honor in computing), and 5 Draper Prizes (the highest honor in engineering).
The Right Kind of Stubborn | Paul Graham
Successful people tend to be persistent. New ideas often don't work at first, but they're not deterred. They keep trying and eventually find something that does.
Mere obstinacy, on the other hand, is a recipe for failure. Obstinate people are so annoying. They won't listen. They beat their heads against a wall and get nowhere.
But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not? […]
Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns out to have a fairly complicated internal structure.
I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool alpha male | SFGATE
I got to drive a Tesla Cybertruck for a day this spring. You jealous? You should be, because Elon Musk’s Boy Scout project is the kind of virile, powerful spacetruck that should be owned and driven only by our largest, wealthiest, whitest men. The kind of men who use speakerphone on airplanes. The kind of men who talk big about colonizing Mars as if it’s a realistic scenario. The kind of men who are training artificial intelligence to not only take your job but also steal your wife. Real can-do American men.
I am one such man. That’s why SFGATE asked me, someone who knows precious little about how cars actually work, to test-drive a Cybertruck. I fit the customer profile for one to a T. I am tall. I am white. I am loud. I don’t really have many friends where I live. Most important, I desperately want people to think I’m cool.
Professional Poker Players Know the Optimal Strategy but Don’t Always Use It | Scientific American
Poker players can now employ AI to find the optimal playing strategy, but they often don’t use it. Here’s why
We’re So Back | Slate
Today, Lichtenwalner, who goes by “Coachbennydating” on TikTok, has over 280,000 followers. He offers free advice on his page, where he distills general-use relationship axioms into bite-size, social media–friendly clips. In one recent video, Lichtenwalner—recording shirtless from a white-sand beach—outlines the “No. 1 one skill” needed to reattract an ex: The “emotional discipline” to refrain from overindulgences like double texting. But for a more curated experience, Lichtenwalner offers one-on-one coaching sessions, via a 45-minute Zoom call, at $350 a pop, where he promises to craft a more personalized recovery plan for a client’s romantic disaster. If those clients desire even more access to Coach Benny, patrons can shell out $499 for his personal phone number, allowing them to send two “500-character inquiries” about the current status of their breakup per day. This approach has been lucrative. Lichtenwalner claims to be making “multiple six figures” from his coaching.
Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business | WIRED
If humans are to return to the moon, space agencies and governments need to figure out the legal, ethical, and practical dimensions of extraterrestrial waste management.
I was wrong about Biden | Slow Boring
Matt Yglesias:
The campaign itself is now characterizing it as “a bad debate,” which it was. But they’re missing that the bad debate calls into question the entire interpretation of the previous months’ events offered by Biden’s side — by my side. I was wrong, and I feel awful for having been wrong. I take my job seriously and try to provide accurate information and insights on the issues I cover. I’ve felt sick to my stomach since the debate, and I get why key decision-makers don’t want to admit they were also wrong. It’s a lot more fun to feel embattled than embarrassed by your own errors.
And yet, here we are.
Details That You Should Include In Your Article On How We Should Do Something About Mentally Ill Homeless People | Astral Codex Ten
I’m a psychiatrist, and I’ve been involved in the involuntary commitment process. So when people say “we should do something about mentally ill homeless people”, I naturally tend towards thinking this is meaningless unless you specify what you want to do - something most of these people never get to. […]
Nobody thinks the current system is perfect. I respect people who want to change it. But you’ve got to propose a specific change! Don’t just write yet another article saying “the damn liberals are soft on the mentally ill”.
The damn liberals are soft because some of them are the people who have to develop an alternative plan, and they can’t think of a good one.
Treating Childhood Anxiety with a Mega-Dose of Independence | After Babel
Jon and Zach (and Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and others) claim that the decline of a play-based childhood with ample independence caused children born in the late 1990s and later (Gen Z, and Gen Alpha) to become progressively more anxious. This dynamic prompted Camilo Ortiz, a professor of psychology at Long Island University and a clinical therapist, to wonder if the problem could be addressed by reversing the process: Could increasing childhood independence decrease childhood anxiety?
Camilo took this simple idea and developed a new therapeutic intervention, “Independence Therapy,” that has just been published in The Journal of Anxiety Disorders. Camilo has found remarkable success with his patients and hopes that many more psychologists will adopt this new intervention as an approach to addressing the rising tide of anxious children (and parents).
A history of… toilet paper | Histories
As with shampoo, toilet paper is something that began to be used in the western world long after it had been developed in the east. So I’ll begin by looking at how people cleaned their bottoms before paper became commonplace. Some of you may know that at their communal latrines the ancient Romans had a device that was a sponge on a stick, called a xylospongium or tersorium, that was deployed for the purposes of anal hygiene. The sponges were washed in a mixture of water and vinegar between usages and were within easy reach of the people doing their business. Except that might not be true at all. We actually don’t know for sure what the sticks were used for, and some historians believe that they were instead used for clearing blocked pipes.
Your worst office romance was never this bad | Quartz
Over the course of the next year, Kazzelbach would exact a wicked revenge on his ex-girlfriend, manipulating the criminal justice system to force her into an alternate reality of his own design. The gaslighting to which Kazzelbach subjected JK was extraordinary in its deviousness, and it was nearly impossible to defend against.
The surreal details were eventually laid bare in a lengthy criminal complaint that, in sum, illustrates just how breathtakingly bad a breakup can get in today’s technology-enabled world. Kazzelbach, who court records say is now married, is not a professional hacker. Yet he serves as an example of how a few bits of information—and some well-placed lies—can be used in new and malicious ways that often confound local police departments.
Nice problems to have | Overthinking Everything
Thus the defining characteristic about nice problems to have is not that they are nice, but that you will be afforded no sympathy for having them. Nice problems to have are the opposite of nice: They isolate you from the ability to complain about them, which removes a major bonding activity with people who have not been successful in the same way as you, and also causes you to feel worse about the problems with those who do not share your burden.
Ranking the most difficult championship runs | kenpom’s thoughts
Who had the most difficult path to a championship [in NCAA men’s basketball]? It’s the subject of endless debate. But here, we don’t embrace debate, we end it.
It turns out we can pretty easily quantify this.
1 star
The changes in vibes — why did they happen? | Marginal Revolution
Another way to put it is that Trump was a highly vulnerable, defeated President, facing numerous legal charges and indeed an actual felony conviction. Yet he now stands as a clear favorite in the next election. In conceptual terms, how exactly did that happen? […]
For instance, I used to read people arguing “Trump is popular because of racism,” but now that view is pretty clearly refuted, even if you think (as I do) that racism has some marginal impact on his support. […]
In any case, thought I should start this process by offering my answers.
Clinging to Power | Bet On It
Businesspeople are driven by greed, and politicians by power-hunger. While those are rarely their sole motivations, they are, roughly speaking, their defining motivations. Almost all businesspeople deeply desire to make money, and almost all politicians deeply desire to wield power.
When I speak this way about businesspeople, critics rarely challenge me. But when I speak this way about politicians, I get ample pushback. “Power-hunger?! Politicians seek only the power required to defend their people.” You might think that critics would at least admit that the politicians they don’t like are driven by power-hunger. There too, however, critics are strangely eager to insist that even the politicians they despise are driven by the sincere desire to make the world a better place… from their own twisted point of view.
Disappearing polymorphs | Marginal Revolution
The drug ritonavir originally used for AIDS (and also a component of the COVID medication Paxlovid), for example, was created in 1996 but in 1998 it couldn’t be produced any longer. Despite the best efforts of the manufacturer, Abbott, every time they tried to create the old ritonavir a new crystalized version (form II) was produced which was not medically effective. The problem was that once form II exists it’s almost impossible to get rid of it and microscopic particles of form II ritonavir seeded any attempt to create form I.
This Crystal Fragment Turns Everything You See Into 8-Bit Pixel Art | Yanko Design
