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Pharma Ads: They don’t make for great dinner conversation
My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get…
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Kári Stefánsson: Cantankerous and inspiring
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…
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Wrangel Island Mammoths: The last ones died 4,000 years ago
For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the…
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Disappearing Polymorphs: Highly contagious crystals
Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing…
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New Mexico: Both more and less interesting than I expected
Santa Fe was less interesting than I had thought. The place has a lot of history but it doesn’t feel alive. Too many art galleries…
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Politics Won’t Fix It: Something that makes me optimistic despite political dysfunction
For a long time now, Americans have felt that the country is moving in the wrong direction without anyone clearly articulating what the right direction…
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Lack of Desperation: I don’t write as well as Sam Kriss but I think I’m also happier
I recently discovered Sam Kriss’ Substack, Numb at the Lodge. I wish I could write like that. At the same time, I don’t envy Kriss.…
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Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity: It’s innovation
How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over.…
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Corporate Email: Mostly but not always dreary
Here are two emails from my workplace, normally notable for its lack of quirkiness. Good morning Hope you are all well. Just in case you…
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Viscerality: Do we live too abstractly?
First: The modern world is in fact very pleasant. We have a thousand labor-saving devices. We are thoroughly accustomed to instant heat, cold, transportation, water,…
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One Argument is Better than Two: The case for honest arguments
People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and…
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Ambivert: Not too many people please, but also not too few
I’ve never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp…
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Wolf: A novel about being lost
Wolf by Jim Harrison is a novel about being outdoors and about traveling. It’s Harrison’s first novel, published in 1971. There is a lot in…
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Temptation Avoided, Character Unproven: No virtue without struggle
Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline Dwight Eisenhower Temptation is democratic, and it’s elitist. It’s democratic in that everyone experiences it: We…
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A Tame Society: Why is everyone behaving so well and is that a good thing?
Drinking, drugs, crime and cult membership are all down compared to a generation ago. Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History argues that this decline in deviance…
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Modern Cave Art: If we still painted the inside of caves
I’m wondering why we have stopped making cave art and I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. This is a painting by the…
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No Book? Big Whoop
Asterisk Magazine’s current issue is about books. Here’s what the magazine editors have to say about those fiber and ink bundles: Books are sources of…
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Jane Austen Wrecked My Life: A very French rom com
I had seen posters advertising the movie Jane Austen Wrecked My Life earlier this year while traveling in Europe. The name was funny enough that…
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The Evolution of Everything: Creation is overrated
The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme…
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Death by AI: If anyone builds It, everyone dies
The most likely cause of death today is AI. It’s a reasonable statement. The most common cause of death right now is ischemic heart disease,…
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The Funny Side of Cancer: JBS Haldane’s poem on colorectal cancer
He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind…
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The Rational Optimist: Matt Ridley’s ode to freedom
Reading and thinking about Birds, Sex & Beauty by Matt Ridely reminded me of his other books I’ve read over the years. He’s a wonderful…
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Life Without Clocks or Mirrors: What would it be like?
I’ve always been immoderatly clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs…
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Getting Started With AI: A good starting point
If you haven’t yet used AI, or if you’re thinking about paying for a premium AI, this is a good guide. I find paying for…
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Wood Swirl: Found art
A piece of wood that reminded me of van Gogh’s Starry Night. Nature imitating art, once again.
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1933 and 2025: Weimar Germany doesn’t help us understand the current situation
To the degree it is possible for any one born in the 1980s, I have a sense for what occurred in Germany in the run-up…
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Democracy, the Fortunate: The right choice in multiple ways
It’s fortunate that liberal democracy, the only acceptable sort of governance (because it’s the only one that respects the dignity and rights of the individual)…
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Greatness Can’t Be Planned: Grand strategies may be futile
No plan survives first contact with the enemy Helmuth von Moltke The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything Dwight Eisenhower I haven’t seen…
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Rome Was Different: Why America isn’t a New Rome
In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and…
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Things Don’t Happen for a Reason: This is hard to accept
We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in,…
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Playing With the Sun As With a Little Brook: Girl Lithe and Tawny
Girl lithe and tawny, the sun forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes…
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Shamanism: A universal practice
There are those who travel spirit worlds. They may know that those worlds only exist in their minds, or they may believe that those worlds…
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Tom McGuane’s Cameo: He probably made an appearance in a Jimmy Buffett music video
I’m 80% sure that writer Thomas McGuane makes a cameo appearance in the music video for Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 song Come Monday. 70 seconds in,…
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Ordinary Beauty: An extraordinary video
You may not think [Victorian design] is beautiful, but I don’t think it was supposed to be beautiful. It was just supposed to be pretty.…
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Birds, Sex & Beauty: Matt Ridley’s new book on sexual selection
We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine…
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Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry
It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other…
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The Algernon Argument
If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument.…
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In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin’s most well-known work is In Patagonia. It’s a mix of travel writing, history and a fiction. It was first published in 1977. Below…
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Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem…
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Selective Breeding for Longevity: A long-term experiment on the genetics of lifespan
In his science fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. Later in the…
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Free Energy
The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring…
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The Soviet Space Shuttle
The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was…
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Rejecting Authenticity
It doesn’t matter much if it’s authentic. What matters is if it’s good. Good and inauthentic is better than bad and authentic. This is true…
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McDonald’s Innocence
McDonald’s, according to journalist Chris Arnade, often is the only place for the very poor to meet and relax. It’s open to all in a…
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Relax About the Population Collapse
There’s widespread agreement that a declining population is equivalent to declining fortunes, be it for cities, for countries or for the whole world. That fertility…
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The Things We Don’t Have to Do
It’s the things we don’t have to do that make live worth living: Art, humor, play. Fleeting grace. Beauty. When that fight to save humanity…
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Helmets
The idea behind the helmet law is to preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor it does not even try to stop the cracking…
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Three Days by the Lake
For three days, I went to a small lake in the Sierras. There was a dirt track that went in for 30 minutes. The lake…
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Personality Transplants
A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to…
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Human Footprint
Here is an interactive world map that quantifies the human footprint based on population density, infrastructure and other metrics. The truly wild places are in…
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Consider the Fish
Fishing is a bit cruel but also makes me feel closer to nature. Jon Ontario talks about this conundrum here. It’s the same tension David…
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Preparation Charter Houses: Better than university?
The two most interesting ideas on what could replace college I’ve come across are charter houses and The Preparation. Charter houses, proposed by Slime Mold…
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Where the Mountains are Nameless
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And…
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The US Democracy Threat Index
Metaculus has introduced a US Democracy Threat Index. Here is their description: [It] combines 39 concrete forecast questions into a single metric tracking institutional resilience.…
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Font Indifference: What’s Helvetica again?
What convinced some typesetters that it’s okay to add a paragraph on the font they chose for a book on the last page? Why not…
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The Smile Brace
One of my ancestors was a medical doctor who was responsible for accompanying the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his final resting place after…
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Life on Mars
In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained…
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Shakespeare: I’d like to like him
There are things we like the idea of, but if we’re honest, we don’t want to do them. Contributing to a tight-knit community, going to…
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Travel Tools
This is a small bag I keep in my car’s glove compartment. I’ve used the tools and repair materials it contains often enough that I…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their…
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Easily Amused
I used to have laughing fits that lasted for several minutes. I want just that I couldn’t stop laughing, but I couldn’t even remain upright.…
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The Jerk Funnel
James Steinberg has come up with an interesting concept: There are behaviors and processes that unintentionally result in being surrounded by assholes. Unfortunately, he has…
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Edible Plants in the Sierra Nevada: A visual guide
While backpacking, I frequently wonder if I could eat the berries I encounter. I know I can eat the blackberries but I’m unsure about everything…
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Questions about Philanthropy
Americans, on the whole, are generous when it comes to charitable giving, especially compared with Europeans. Part of the reason may be that there’s less…
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Your Photos Have Already Been Taken
Taking photos on vacation is pointless. For any tourist attraction, you’ll find pictures that are better than you’ll ever be able to take yourself online. Any…
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By Myself
I’m lucky to have friends I can talk to about weighty concepts such as grace without feeling silly. It takes a few beers to get…
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Effective Mess
Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized Terry Pratchett A few weeks ago, I shared a pointer to a podcast about the internal…
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Give Me My Task and Let Me Do It Right
Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh Grave, where is thy victory? Oh Life, you are a shining path And hope springs eternal Just over…
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Shrunken Heads: Small mementos of murder
This is from Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. Heyerdahl and his friend Herman Watzinger talk with Jorge, a Peruvian acquaintance, over dinner. I laid my fork carefully…
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Personnel as Policy
Despite all the research done on management best practices, all the articles and reports and books that have been written, despite all the experience accumulated…
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People Are Better Than Dogs
Two days ago, I was in my neighborhood bar run by the American Legion. There was live music and general good cheer. People like to…
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More on Assembly Theory
I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes…
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Amber Inclusions
Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in…
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In Tech America, AI Fact-Check You
This happens to scientists fairly often: You remember some finding you came across a few weeks ago. You don’t remember where you read it, but…
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A Beautiful Epoch
Movies and musicals are often set during the Belle Epoque, probably because the dresses and houses are so pretty. Even science fiction is sometimes set…
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Assembly Theory: A new way to think about evolutionary history
Assembly Theory (AT) is a way to think about evolution and complexity. It applies to organisms but can also be used to think about artifacts,…
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Outdoor Books
This is a good list of nature, travel and adventure books compiled by Ken Ilgunas. His personal preferences align more with my own than the…
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Hitchhiking
After hiking through the desert for a week, I was standing on the American side of the Mexican border. I was dusty, tired, needed a…
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Country Club Work
I am lucky: I can treat work like a country club. I can go there when I like to. It’s a ten minute drive. I…
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Two Notes
Two notes, one passive aggressive, the other one just aggressive. The passive aggressive I found on a vandalized hiking and mountain biking trail in Tahoe…
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We Are Meant To Be Many Things
Singular focus is not a human trait. It is a machine trait. Human life is fragmented on purpose. We are meant to be many things:…
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Fractured Entanglement
The most interesting perspectives on AI can be encountered on the Jim Rutt Show, which I have previously referenced with regards to AI risk. In…
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Building Communities
We’re far from having imagined all the different ways in which society may evolve. One recurring complaint about America is its atomization. Have we taken…
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Electric Network Frequency Analysis
Given an audio or video file, it’s possible to determine where and when it was recorded based on the electrical power grid’s hum in the…
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Animal Trick
The animal trick by magician Seth Raphael is mind-blowing, and what’s more, you can try it yourself here. If you have 5 minutes, do yourself…
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Not People: Don’t psychoanalyze AIs
With ChatGPT-5 just having come out, Adam Mastroianni has posted a timely reminder on Experimental History: Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of…
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The Last Picture Show
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurthy is set in a small Texas town in the 1950s. McMurthy didn’t idolize the time or the place,…
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Scientists are Weird
Derek Lowe on his blog, In the Pipeline, on the scientific worldview: [It] is not a mindset that most people naturally find comfortable. Or comforting.…
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Eccentrics
The body shop where I was picking up my car is on the wrong side of the highway. The neighborhood is nondescript in the worst…
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The Million Yen Melon
A friend returning from a trip to Japan told me about his experience with the fruit equivalent of Wagyu beef: the Yubari melon, grown on…
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Air or Earth
A gentle reminder that, now more than ever, flying is our punishment for daring to defy gravity. Nein Quarterly (Eric Jarosinski) Air travel is the…
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