This year’s Astral Codex Ten book review contest seems to have attracted unusually strong submissions…
3 stars
Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head | Astral Codex Ten
In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.
He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.
The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.
On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.
In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.
Writing under the pseudonym Clayton Atreus, he lays out in excruciating detail how awful it is to be paralyzed, and how his new life is but a shadow of what it once was. He concludes that his life is no longer worth living, and proceeds to end it.
Along the way, he addresses the obstacles that society has put in his way of dying on his own terms—the biggest of which is the fact that physician-assisted suicide for his condition is illegal at the time.
But there are other factors. Smaller, more insidious roadblocks. Our society doesn't just condemn suicide; we do a great disservice to newly disabled patients in refusing to let them voice their misery and grief about being disabled. The book is a scathing indictment of how our society enables the lifelong disabled at the expense of the newly disabled and terminally ill.
Looking back from ~15 years in the future, when we have a patchwork of states and countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, Clayton's story stands as a cautionary tale for why it must become—and stay—legal.
Your Book Review: Real Raw News | Astral Codex Ten
Some people write fanfics about Harry Potter. Some people write fanfics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And then, well, some people write fanfics about Donald Trump.
Spewing forth from a single WordPress site that doesn’t even display properly in mobile, Real Raw News presents itself as the lone bastion telling the real story of what is going on in America, for everyone who isn’t fooled by the fake news of all the other media outlets.
The articles of RRN are all the work of one Michael Baxter, and after enough time spent reading the site, one realizes that Baxter is no crank – he is instead a creative genius, the Michelangelo of fake news. Just as Michelangelo took four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Baxter has spent three and a half building his own elaborate world of plots, counterplots, and bloody, implacable justice.
At Real Raw News, Donald Trump is still president – just a temporarily embarrassed one, who has had to abandon the public-facing side of his job in order to lure the “Deep State” out of hiding into its own annihilation.
In the world of Real Raw News, at least, it’s working. In this corner of the World Wide Web, America is going through a revolutionary purge rivaled only by the worst excesses of Joseph Stalin’s government – with the important difference that this time, the perpetrators thankfully all deserve it. […]
You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. Really popular. It got more than 2 million page visits in January. It’s a lot more popular than this blog and even outdraws some established publications like The Nation.
“Okay, views are views, but does anyone really believe this?” you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do.
The New Gods of Weather Can Make Rain on Demand—or So They Want You to Believe | WIRED
In a gold-trimmed command center on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, scientists are seeking to wring moisture from desert skies. But will all their extravagant cloud-seeding tech—planes that sprinkle nanomaterials, lasers that scramble the atmosphere—really work at scale?
2 stars
Why Levittown Didn't Revolutionize Homebuilding | Construction Physics
For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars. While no one has succeeded, arguably the man that came closest to becoming “the Henry Ford of homebuilding” was William Levitt, with his company Levitt and Sons. Levitt is most famous for building “Levittowns,” developments of thousands of homes built rapidly in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. By optimizing the construction process with improvements like standardized products and reverse assembly line techniques, Levitt and Sons was able to complete dozens of homes a day at what it claimed was a far lower cost than its competitors. William Levitt styled his company as the General Motors of housing, and both he and it became famous. Levitt graced the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and Levittowns became a household name.
For a time, it appeared that Levitt might actually sweep away the old way of building and become the Henry Ford of housing through modern mass production techniques. Levitt boasted that he could build more cheaply than anyone else, and for decades Levitt and Sons was the largest homebuilder in the U.S., and probably the world. But Levitt’s success unraveled. By the late 1970s, Levitt and Sons had barely escaped bankruptcy, and it emerged as a small, conventional homebuilder, which it would remain until it went out of business for good in 2018. Levitt himself would leave Levitt and Sons in the early 1970s, lose his fortune after a series of failed development projects in the U.S. and abroad, and die penniless in 1994.
Crashes and Competition | Stratechery
I’ve long maintained that if the powers-that-be understood what the Internet’s impact would be, they would have never allowed it to be created. It’s hard to accuse said shadowy figures of negligence, however, given how clueless technologists were as well; look no further than an operating system like Windows.
Building Lego Machines to Destroy Tall Lego Towers | Kottke
Brick Technology’s new video features increasingly powerful Lego machines designed to topple ever stronger towers. I love their iterative engineering videos.
Complex life on Earth may be much older than thought | BBC
A group of scientists say they have found new evidence to back up their theory that complex life on Earth may have begun 1.5 billion years earlier than thought.
The team, working in Gabon, say they discovered evidence deep within rocks showing environmental conditions for animal life 2.1 billion years ago.
The new progressive economics: some constructive criticism | Noahpinion
I should note that the people involved here are, largely speaking, my friends. I know many of them, and talk with them semi-regularly, and go to some of their events. I like them personally, and I think that their hearts are in the right place. But that said, I have my share of criticisms of the paradigm that they’re putting out, and I think it helps to write these down.
I’ve been trying to collate my various quibbles into a simple form, and I think I’ve basically hit on what I feel is a central flaw in the new progressive paradigm. I think it’s a program designed for an economy that has a demand deficiency — basically, a depression, or a long period of macroeconomic weakness. In fact, America is now facing something different — a world of supply constraints, in which demand stimulus and job provision programs can easily stoke inflation while also failing to build many of the things progressives want to create. The focus on providing jobs, jobs, jobs — a legacy of the New Deal, but also of the Great Recession of the early 2010s — just isn’t ideal in the current macroeconomic environment.
Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean | BBC
Scientists have discovered “dark oxygen” being produced in the deep ocean, apparently by lumps of metal on the seafloor.
About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. But, before this discovery, it was understood that it was made by marine plants photosynthesising - something that requires sunlight.
Here, at depths of 5km, where no sunlight can penetrate, the oxygen appears to be produced by naturally occurring metallic “nodules” which split seawater - H2O - into hydrogen and oxygen.
1 star
Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing | WIRED
For a 12-year-old in the pre-internet era? This was electrifying. I had typed a couple of commands—ones that seemed easily understandable—and the machine had obeyed. I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.
How decline of Indian vultures led to 500,000 human deaths | BBC
Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India.
The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs.
But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows.
VILLA IN USA | Youri Tielemans bodycam vs Newcastle United | Kottke
Bodycam footage of Aston Villa midfielder Youri Tielemans shows how quick and demanding Premier League football is, even in the preseason.
The employment effects of a guaranteed income | Marginal Revolution
This is the largest and most extensive RCT of its kind on this issue, and the results are not extremely positive.
Why Lifestyle Creep is Mostly a Myth | Of Dollars and Data
But is lifestyle creep a real concern for most people? Or has this problem been grossly exaggerated based on a small number of super-spenders?
For most of my writing career, I couldn’t tell you the answer with any certainty. But, now I can. I got my hands on a data source that records the income and spending of the same set of households over time. So instead of looking at income/spending snapshots at one point in time, I can see how households change their income/spending over time. I can see how much U.S. households increase (or decrease) their spending after an increase in income.
And what I found surprised me. Let’s dig in.
Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth, scientists find | The Guardian
Reptile’s teeth found to have covering that helps keep serrated edges razor sharp and resistant to wear