As promised, today’s update to Microbe — a micro.blog client for Emacs now at version 2.0 — includes draft syncing. There were also some minor updates to Inkling. Both are available on GitHub though I think I’ll just drop that and just host them here. Something to think about for next week…

Well, folks, I did it: I have hit FeedLand’s feed creation limit. Any chance this can be increased, @dave? I’ve just discovered a new blog I’d like to add.

• Virginia Postrel for Works in Progress: Engineering the disposable diaper. I, for one, am grateful that there is no more need for “the knife method” of diaper washing — one guess as to what the knife was used for. The article doesn’t mention that the technology which made baby diapers ever so thinner and easier to transport has also helped microscopy. Knowledge begets knowledge.
• Dynomight (pseud): You’re probably taking the wrong painkiller. On the benefits of acetaminophen, the blind alley of pain medicines.
• Brennan Kenneth Brown: Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics. Just a few week ago my wife and I were talking about the mind-bending difference in magnitude between a googol and a googolplex, and the notations described in this article would have come in handy. More to the point, even farming games not mentioned here like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing do wonders to teach children math.
• Ted Gioia: Socrates vs. the Venture Capitalists. Look, when FT’s Janan Ganesh praised the unexamined life I don’t think he meant going about it like an amoeba. Est modus in rebus.
• Jake Currie for Nautilus: Birds Are More Afraid of Women Than of Men. Submitted without further comment.

Topic of the essay aside — and it’s a good one — NYT editors didn’t use to let this kind of grammatical malfeasance fly.

The essay is five years old yet I have discovered it just now because the author is also the person behind Denote, a marvelous note-taking tool for Emacs. The tone is not as dry as a scholastic text ⊕ [Note: For a Substack version of a similar message I encourage you to check out Experimental History. The most recent post, for example, is a case study of one particular aspect of scientism — zombie ideas. ] but not as entertaining as something one would find on Substack. The message is unambiguous, and rather than rehash it let me quote one paragraph out of many:

Science as a career choice rather than a disposition towards learning, and an attitude of living in accordance with the principles than (sic!) enable such learning, contributes to the distancing from philosophy and to the degradation of the moral character of those involved. The practitioner who has not been in the least exposed to the rigours of a virtuous modus vivendi is likely to prioritise superficialities that obscure their own intellectual insecurities, such as social status, a growing collection of titles and certificates that are supposed to support one’s appeal to intellectuality, or the emptiness of being celebrated as a force for so-called “progress” and “rationality” among those who are believed to be unfortunate enough not to be scientists. The latter is one of those non-scientific beliefs amplified by the oligopoly of mass media that helps the philosophically deprived science stake its claim as the tutelary figure of the contemporary world, while blithely disregarding its instrumentalisation as both the apologist and militant activist of the power apparatus that enables it.

The author, who chose to drop his surname and go just by Protesilaos thereby making me break the house rule of using last names only when referring to folks, lives in a hut he built himself ⊕ [Note: A hut which brought to mind this recent essay from Joan Westenberg about people retreating from their true calling for years in order to recharge. ] in the mountains of Cyprus. Fascinating stuff, all with a large back catalogue I will be perusing in the months to come.

The last few years have been particularly tricky to tread for people who recognize the difference between science and scientism. If the entire board of the National Science Foundation is fired in one day, is it an attack on science or an attempt to curb scientism? [Note: ¿Por qué no los dos? ] When one of the “Abundance” guys — yes, that book is still on the pile — proposes an unbaked not-even-embryonic scheme for reform, is the rebuke from a seasoned scientist legitimate or just circling the wagons? [Note: Vide supra ] So yes, a retreat to the mountains does sound appealing.

Thank you, Hacker News, for promoting — if only briefly — this marvel of an article from Physics World (or is it physicsworld?) about the more scientific aspects of the final and most important step of making coffee. Funnily enough, it focused on the two methods I’ve settled on after a couple of decades of tinkering: espresso and pour-over.

Refreshingly, it is not a “well-actually” article that would use theoretical physics and/or laboratory experiments to prove coffee experts wrong. In fact, much e-ink is spent confirming practices that baristas have settled on, including the coffee-to-water ratio, steeping time, pressure used. There were, however, two things that could make me change how I’m doing things.

For espresso, theory says that using less coffee with a coarser grind would — to me, paradoxically — result in equal extraction and coffee tasting the same despite not using as many beans. With the price of coffee rising, this could be a big deal so I will check it out. Although, to me the benefit of a proper espresso is that it allows you to get a tasty liquid out of sub-par solids, so I would never go with the most expensive beans to begin with (ahem). No, the $2/oz bag is reserved for the queen of brewing, which is the pour-over.

And for the pour-over, there is but a single thing I should change: the height from which I pour, which should apparently be far higher than I’m doing now. A pretty diagram shows the reasons why 20cm is the right height from which the stream of hot — 96°C, thank you very much, so you’d better have a temperature-controlled kettle — water onto a coarsely ground pile of dreams. And there is no safe way to do it from that high up without a gooseneck kettle, so add that to your kettle requirements. Sadly, they don’t go into the quality of the filter and the differences between plain paper, Chemex and metal meshes. I am sure there is much physics involved.

Now before you start commenting that good ol’ Folgers in a hotel room drip machine will do for you, thank you very much, let me suggest a few decidedly unfussy methods of coffee making that are infinitely better than drip coffee out of a plastic tub:

• Aeropress, which used to be the main way I made coffee but abandoned as the family and the number of coffee-drinkers in the house expanded (we are currently at three; five with grandparents visiting).
• Nescafe Gold, which is probably the best instant coffee you can get and it doesn’t get any less fussy than pouring hot-ish water into a mug.
• Turkish coffee, with strong preference for Mehmet Efendi which, if not in Istanbul, you can easily get online.
• Boiling raw beans in DC tap water for about 30 minutes.

Okay, maybe not that last one.

I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?

So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.

Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:

Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”

Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.

But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. ⊕ [Note: This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. ] Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.

Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.

• Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
• Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
• Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. ] This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
• Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.