Links
4 stars
The Wrongest Bird in Movie History | Slate Magazine
17-minute read
This piece just keeps getting better and better:
You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
So, naturally, being an all-in sort of person, I embarked upon a wild-goose chase to investigate how and why this monstrosity took flight. I talked to script doctors and scoured legal statutes. I interviewed leading ornithological experts and electronically analyzed birdcalls, all to figure out who laid this giant egg. It took nearly a year. But eventually, I discovered why hundreds of people with a budget of nearly $100 million failed to accurately portray a single bird. The answer was most fowl.
3 stars
The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail | Commoncog
25-minute read
The razor is this:
Authentic demand exists for a solution when someone is put in a situation and they cannot not buy (or use) the solution.
The authors call this the ‘not not’, and may be used in a sentence like so: “the job of the founder is to find a ‘not not’.”
Why is this frame superior to the traditional method of evaluating demand?
The key lesson that Furst and Chanoff took from their Damballa experience is that evaluating demand in terms of value propositions, desires or pains is simply not predictive. Damballa had the ‘perfect’ value proposition: it had eager customers, a massive and ever-increasing pain, and existing commitments before company formation. If it was presented to you as an investor, back in 2006, you’d say “where can I invest?” … and then you’d wait 10 years and lose all your money.
Economic Lessons from the Screwtape Letters | Kyla’s Newsletter
7-minute read
In Screwtape, evil doesn’t arrive through fire and fury. It creeps in through ease, comfort, and optimization. Screwtape wants to nudge people into passivity as a way of capturing their souls. Let them scroll. Let them spend. Let them smooth away all friction until they wake up hollow and can’t remember why.
[...]
What Lewis saw, and what we’re now living through, is the spiritual cost of systems designed to make everything easier. Rejection isn’t a weird glitch in the economy, it’s the default. Convenience isn’t a consumer preference, it’s a coping mechanism. The absence of surprise isn’t just a creative choice, it’s now a byproduct of optimization. And all of it chips away at our capacity for presence, for agency, for wonder.
2 stars
The Joy Is Not Optional | Knowingless
12-minute read
In GKGW, childrearing was about parent-centered parenting, not child-centered parenting. Children are new guests to an established home, and should be expected to adjust without disruption to the house. In the secular world, parents would upheave their lives for children. We saw this as ridiculous and damaging to the child. The top priority in a family should be the relationship between a husband and wife, and the rest is secondary. After all - children are born sinners (we were Calvinists), and will try to exert defiance and control over their parents, starting even as infants. Your job as parents is to guide them into holiness.
[...]
By this point I was in even more pain, and it took even greater effort to overcome my body’s desire to flee or fight. And so again, there was a few second delay. And so he did it again.
He did again eleven times. And when he told me the twelfth time to approach, something in me completely broke. It didn’t matter that my body was now in overwhelming agony - possibly the greatest pain I’ve experienced in my life - the only way to make it stop was to abandon my will entirely, to become a mindless obedience creature that would walk straight into the fire instantly when commanded. So I did, he spanked me one last time, and then he stopped.
‘It’s Like a War Zone’: What Happened When Portland Legalized Fentanyl | Rolling Stone
17-minute read
In late 2020, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed the most liberal drug law in the country, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of hard drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine. Instead of jail time, Ballot Measure 110 aimed to expand addiction treatment services in a state that ranked last in such offerings nationwide, through hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue redirected from a cannabis tax and savings resulting from decreases in arrests and incarceration. Additional funding went to harm reduction services — naloxone distribution, needle exchanges, testing kits — that make drugs “safer” to use. Advocates hoped to follow in the footsteps of trailblazing countries like Portugal and France, where nuanced approaches that prioritize health care over punishment have curtailed overdoses and public drug use. In some respects, it was the closest any place in the U.S. had yet come to The Wire’s “Hamsterdam”: a drug zone where police permit dealers to operate as long as they don’t fight over territory and confine sales to a limited number of blocks, enabling addiction service providers to focus their efforts.
The timing could not have been worse. Months into decriminalization, Mexican drug cartels ratcheted up the flow of fentanyl across the border and up the Interstate 5 corridor, where it flooded onto city streets, plunging prices to less than a dollar a pill.
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Remarks on AI from NZ | Graphomane
6-minute read
Neal Stephenson:
Maybe a useful way to think about what it would be like to coexist in a world that includes intelligences that aren’t human is to consider the fact that we’ve been doing exactly that for long as we’ve existed, because we live among animals. Animals have intelligences of many different kinds. We’re used to thinking of them as being less intelligent than we are, and that’s usually not wrong, but it might be better to think of them as having different sorts of intelligence, because they’ve evolved to do different things. We know for example that crows and ravens are unbelievably intelligent considering how physically small their brains are compared to ours. Dragonflies have been around for hundreds of millions of years and are exquisitely highly evolved to carry out their primary function of eating other bugs. Sheepdogs can herd sheep better than any human. Bats can do something that we can’t even begin to understand, which is to see with their ears in the dark. And so on.
Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice | Asterisk
8-minute read
America’s roads are more dangerous than those of almost every country in the developed world. We know how to change that.
[...]
At its core, the Safe System approach acknowledges that human error while driving is inevitable. Thus, road designers and urban planners should engineer environments to guide safer behaviors. Smart design ensures that when human error happens, it does not lead to severe crashes by, for example, physically separating pedestrians from high speed car traffic, and by designing roads that don’t facilitate high speeds.
A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship | The Atlantic
7-minute read
In August 2023, they moved with their children from Boston into a D.C. townhouse, uprooting their lives—Charlotte had to get a new job and apply for a new professional license, and she and Raffi had to find new schools for their kids. Their friends moved from across the city into the house next door, and a third couple, the brother and sister-in-law of Raffi’s best friend, bought another home in the row. They planned for each couple to be responsible for their own children but to keep the boundaries among them porous: They could lean on one another for child-care backup, and their kids could roam among houses.
[...]
By contrast, when Americans have kids, the norm is to “isolate ourselves so profoundly,” Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Everyday Utopia, told me. Kids bring chaos—often more than parents can handle on their own. Some parents turn to family for help, but for many, that’s not an option. Their job may be far from relatives, or their familial relationships may be strained, or their relatives may be unable to care for their kids—or they simply might not want to. Building family life around friends offers an alternative that “remixes tradition,” as Raffi told me: You get the support of an extended family but through chosen connections.
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How a “We Buy Ugly Houses” Franchise Left a Trail of Financial Wreckage Across Texas | ProPublica
8-minute read
Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.
When the World Connected on Skype | Rest of World
7-minute read
Skype, the online video-calling service, is shutting down in May after more than two decades of service. For those of a certain generation, Skype changed everything.
Before it launched in 2003, making international calls 📱 was prohibitively expensive and few viable digital alternatives existed. Skype offered users a cheap and easy way to call anyone in the world, skirting the draconian landline industry. When Skype added video calls a few years later, it felt as if the future had arrived: Students used Skype to stay connected to families back home 🤙, international friendships were born 🤝, and a generation of cross-border relationships began ❤️ — or ended 💔 — over the service. By the late 2000s, Skype was so ubiquitous that its name became a verb, much like Xerox and Google. Its bouncy ringtones and audio notifications were iconic. 🎶
Shops make a city great | Noahpinion
8-minute read
Over the past two years, my thinking on what makes cities great has advanced a great deal. Although American urbanists usually think in terms of housing density — which is understandable, given the country’s failure to build enough housing — I’ve come to realize the importance of commercial density. Basically, great cities have a lot of shops everywhere.
My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’ | New York Times
11-minute read
My own happiness experiment was off to a poor start. I arrived the day before, a Sunday afternoon, in a capsule of germs — a packed plane vibrating with the sounds of coughing and phlegm-management. Monday dawned in sickness and jet lag. I dressed and left my icy little hotel room, stopping at a chain store called Normal (“completely normal goods at fixed low prices”) for a bag of the region’s signature treat: salty licorice. Helsinki wore a hat of fog; you could see roughly 30 feet in the air before all was concealed behind a pearly scrim.
After coffee with Tirronen, I went for an evening walk to the harbor, where black slicks of water twinkled between frozen floes. The stands that sold salmon soup and hot dogs during the day were closed. It was frosty and sparse; families walked together and ate in dimly lit restaurants. Helsinki’s famous esplanade was empty. In spring the central walkway becomes a riot of flowering crab apples and bare shoulders (I had been told), but now the kiosks were shuttered, the trees skeletal, the paths plowed but untrodden.
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Is the U.S. in a "high-level equilibrium trap"? | Noahpinion
9-minute read
For most of Americans’ lives, technological progress has been a major source of risk. The advent of the internet put encyclopedia salesmen and term life insurance salesmen out of a job. Hybrid cars from Japan put competitive pressure on traditional carmakers. Flip-phone makers were wiped out by smartphones. Electronic trading made many human “specialists” obsolete. And so on and so forth, throughout the economy. At the aggregate level, these innovations drove growth in living standards, but at an individual level, having the technology in your industry change was generally a source of peril.
Someone who grew up in modern China has experienced something utterly different. Over the course of their lifetime, rapid technological progress has radically transformed their lives and the lives of the people around them, allowing them to experience a level of comfort and security utterly undreamt of by their grandparents.
My Brain Finally Broke | New Yorker
7-minute read
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor.
[...]
I suspect that the opaque feeling in my head can also be traced to a craven instinct: it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real. The deadly dismantling of a global public-health infrastructure. The deportation of Venezuelan men to a hellish mega-prison in El Salvador, on the questionable suspicion of gang affiliations, based on the presence of tattoos: flowers, a soccer logo, an autism-awareness ribbon.
[...]
Fake images on the internet didn’t really bother me until I started looking at them with my kids. They often ask me to show them pictures of baby animals; at some point, Google Images started showing us A.I. creatures, ruining the whole idea, which was to marvel at the fact that these baby peacocks and baby lions actually exist. For some time, if you Googled van Gogh, the first image to pop up was an A.I.-generated version of a van Gogh self-portrait.
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How a Forgotten Bean Could Save Coffee From Extinction | Smithsonian Magazine
9-minute read
Stenophylla is a coffee plant, not a criminal, and yet it can still lay claim to its very own “Wanted” poster. In 2018, Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, was desperate to track down the rare species, which hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1954. The data he’d found in historical records suggested that stenophylla might be resistant to drought and heat—increasingly valuable traits in a warming and drying world. So he created a “Have you seen this plant?” flyer with pictures of stenophylla’s leaves, whose pointed tips resemble snake fangs. A colleague of his based in Sierra Leone, Daniel Sarmu, jumped on a motorbike and rode across the country’s rust-colored dirt roads, handing out copies to farmers. Most shook their heads: They had never seen a plant like that. This went on for days: more roads, more farms, nothing. “It was clearly not working,” Davis says. He had no choice but to start searching Sierra Leone’s forests himself.
An 80,000-year history of the tomato | The Works in Progress Newsletter
4-minute read
None of this would be possible, however, without thousands of years of plant breeding and genetic engineering. The wild ancestors of today’s tomatoes were much smaller than their modern-day counterparts and grew in sprawling patterns, making them ill-suited to large-scale agriculture. Extensive breeding programs created the first domesticated tomatoes, and subsequently shaped them into a food with largely uniform qualities that could be mass produced. In doing this, agronomists collectively made a series of choices that vastly improved tomatoes’ ability to feed humanity, though sometimes at the expense of secondary qualities like taste. In recent decades, breeders have also adopted new genetic tools to more precisely choose the traits they want, allowing them to reclaim these lost characteristics.
How to Find Ancient Assyrian Cities Using Economics | Maximum Progress
5-minute read
The idea of this paper is to use mentions of trade on Assyrian clay tablets from nearly four thousand years ago to estimate the size and location of ancient Assyrian cities, even those whose true location is unknown. They build a model that accurately recreates the location of known cities and makes predictions for the locations of lost cities that often line up with active archaeological sites, the best-guesses of historians, and sometimes favor the guesses of some historians over others.
Williams Syndrome: The People Who Are Too Friendly | BBC
5-minute read
Imagine walking down the street and feeling an overwhelming love and warmth for every single person that you met. That is a familiar experience for people with Williams Syndrome (WS), a rare genetic condition that affects approximately 1 in 7,500 individuals.
People with WS, often dubbed the 'opposite of autism', have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious. They treat everyone they meet as their new best friend, yet there is a downside to being so friendly. Individuals often struggle to retain close friendships and are prone to isolation and loneliness.
We're All Viennese Now | The Ruffian
5-minute read
I’ve been reading Frederic Morton's 1979 book, A Nervous Splendour, which sets the Mayerling incident in the context of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Certain cities, during certain periods, exert disproportionate influence on world culture: Paris in the 1920s; New York in the 1970s; Dubai in the 2020s (joke. I think). Vienna around the turn of the century might just outdo them all.
In that city, at that time, psychology was reinvented by Freud, classical music by, in turn, Mahler and Schoenberg; visual arts by Klimt and Schiele; architecture by Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos; economics by von Mises; literature by Schnitzler and Zweig; Jewish identity by Herzl. Hayek (economics), Popper, and Wittgenstein (both philosophy) were Viennese too, even if they did their revolutionary work elsewhere. I won’t go on, though I could. Vienna played a central role in the invention of modernism, and modernity itself.
The Agentic Web and Original Sin | Stratechery
10-minute read
This is where Scott’s exhortation of openness is spot on: a world of one dominant AI making business development deals with a few blessed content creators, and scraping the carcass of what remains on the web for everything else, is a far less interesting one than one driven by marketplaces, auctions, and aligned incentives.
To get there, however, means realizing that the Internet’s so-called “Original Sin” was in fact the key to realizing the human web’s potential, while the actual mistake would be in not building in payments now for the coming agentic web.
The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk | The Atlantic
8-minute read
“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was shouting at Elon Musk in the halls of the West Wing last month, loud enough for Donald Trump to hear and in a language that he could certainly understand. Bessent and Musk were fighting over which of them should choose the next IRS leader—and, implicitly, over Musk’s bureaucracy-be-damned crusade. Without securing the Treasury chief’s sign-off, Musk had pushed through his own pick for the job. Bessent was, quite obviously, not having it.
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1 star
The Enduring Joy of American Hitchhiking | The Atlantic
6-minute read
The reason I hitchhike is, in part, practical: I can’t drive. I flubbed the test the summer after high school, and since then, I’ve mostly lived in New York City, where a car would be more of a hindrance than a help. But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I’ve caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who’s spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It’s a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you’re at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you’re not alone.
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New Studies Dismiss Signs of Life on Distant Planet | New York Times
4-minute read
In the team’s second search, they again found a signature of dimethyl sulfide, this one seemingly even stronger than the first. In April, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues described their results in a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Speaking at a news conference the day before, Dr. Madhusudhan said there was only “a three-in-a-thousand chance of this being a fluke.”
[...]
For their own analysis, the scientists combined all the observations of K2-18b in both the near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths. On Monday, they reported that this combined data contained strong signals of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane, but no clear evidence of dimethyl sulfide. The critics argue that the new mid-infrared observations were much weaker than those in near-infrared. On its own, they say, the mid-infrared light could fool researchers with faint noise masquerading as a real signal of dimethyl sulfide. “I can just say straight up there is no statistically significant signal in the data that were published a month ago,” said Jacob Bean. Dr. Bean, an astronomer at the University of Chicago who discovered GJ 1214b’s atmosphere, worked with Dr. Luque on Monday’s study.
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College English majors can't read | Kitten
6-minute read
The methodology is that an interviewer sits with each student one on one and listens to them read the passages from the book aloud. As the students read, they must translate what they read into modern English, explaining what each passage means. They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms, such as “Lord Chancellor”.
The 2024 Milky Way photographer of the year | Capture the Atlas
3-minute read
Now in its 8th edition, our Milky Way Photographer of the Year brings together 25 of the most stunning night sky images captured around the world—and beyond. This year’s collection features a unique Milky Way image taken from space aboard the International Space Station, alongside captivating views from rarely photographed locations such as Chad, Northern Argentina, Socotra Island, Namibia, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
Mysteriously Perfect Sphere Spotted in Space by Astronomers | ScienceAlert
3-minute read
In data collected by a powerful radio telescope, astronomers have found what appears to be a perfectly spherical bubble. We know more or less what it is – it's the ball of expanding material ejected by an exploding star, a supernova remnant – but how it came to be is more of a puzzle.
Novel Maneuver Helps Malaria Parasite Dodge the Immune System | WCM Newsroom
2-minute read
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have discovered how a parasite that causes malaria when transmitted through a mosquito bite can hide from the body’s immune system, sometimes for years. It turns out that the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, can shut down a key set of genes, rendering itself “immunologically invisible.”
Changes in the College Mobility Pipeline Since 1900 | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Going to college has consistently conferred a large wage premium. We show that the relative premium received by lower-income Americans has halved since 1960.
Contra MR On Charity Regrants | Astral Codex Ten
3-minute read
USAID is not, itself, a charity. It is an organization that funds other charities. Cowen/Rubio’s claim that “only 12% goes [directly] to recipients” is false, because 0% goes directly to recipients, because USAID is not set up in a way where this even makes sense. All USAID money goes through other charities.
The economics of sleep | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Full-time, prime-age male workers in the top income quartile sleep around half an hour less per day than those in the lowest quartile.
At the macro level, average sleep duration decreases as a country’s GDP increases.
Higher-income individuals allocate more time to other leisure activities, such as social outings and internet usage, substituting sleep.