• Adam Mastroianni: Incentives are for losers. With a reference to Dagon, a short story in which a man goes insane after seeing a weird fish. Mastroianni equates the fish to our unchecked and unquestioned assumptions which would fall apart after a bit of scrutiny but few of us are aware that it exists and even fewer dare examine it. I haven’t seen the fish as much as felt its slimy yet at the same time oddly rough scales while flailing around blindly and even that was enough to, erm, seek other opportunities.
• Bobby Derie: Pre-Code Lovecraftian Horror Comics. ⊕ [Note: ↬Bruce Sterling on Mastodon. ] in which “The Horror of the Seas” is mentioned among many others, a 1942 comic which copied generously from The Shadow over Innsmouth. This whole blog is a treasure: where else could you find a review of “Relatione del Reame di Congo”, the 1591 (sic!) account of Portuguese missionaries’ voyage to Africa which was transcribed into Italian and published by Filippo Pigafetta, then translated to German in 1597 and — here comes the Lovecraftian connection — adorned with engravings horrific enough to deserve a mention in The Picture in the House?
• Alberto Alcaraz Escarcega: The Racial Imaginaries of H. P. Lovecraft. A terrifically-sourced exhibition/essay on just how much of a racist Lovecraft was (answer: very very racist, over and above what was considered “normal” at the time) and how it affected his work (answer: they are inseparable; without it there would be no diversity horror of The Horror at Red Hook or the genetic horror of the above-mentioned shadow over Innsmouth). Lovecraft died in 1937 at 46, so he lived long enough to overlap with Hitler. This led to some incredible quotes from his many letters to friends and family, such as:

the crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it & starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by god, I like the boy!

Yikes! I do wonder what he would have made of Lovecraft Country.

• Gita Jackson: I Am Here To Defend The Noble Action Movie From The Classicist Emily Wilson. Wilson being the most recent translator of the Odyssey and also the author of this takedown of Nolan’s movie, confusingly titled The Odyssey ⊕ [Note: One of these days I should ask a native speaker of English to explain to me, if they may, like I were a five-year-old, what rhyme or reason if any these authors are following as they pepper their titles with articles both definite and not. ] . Not having seen the movie or read her translation I tend to side with Jackson here if for no other reason then to fight academic overreach.
• Ted Gioia: How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy. Making fun of effective altruists is like shooting fish in a barrel, but they do make it so easy.
• lepetitg (pseud?): ikea complexity index. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndy Baio ] How long will it take to assemble that IKEA shelf? I wish I had this three weeks ago!
• Dr. Drang (pseud): My rules for using spreadsheets. The number one rule is “Don’t!”, but then of course there are exceptions. This is one of the biggest sins of clinical trial analysis, particularly for investigator-initiated trials: a shadow database apart from any eCRFs, run exclusively in Excel, a nightmare to analyze and verify. All those trial write-ups in JCO and JAMA Oncology are, I am sure, riddled with errors.

• Venkatesh Rao: Cognitive Farmsteading. From the man who came up with premium mediocre (2017), the cozyweb (2019), and the Internet of beefs (2020) here is another tone-setting phrase. He spent the better part of this decade working on sloptraptions (guess who his co-author is there) so I lost interest, but this article is fully Rao in every sense, even if his preferences in AI use — discussed in the article — are far, far removed from my own.
• Cory Doctorow: Discernment. Doctorow’s preferences, on the other hand, match mine to a T, spell checking and all (would a regular spellchecker note the missing greater-than sign in my Hugo notation?) What I don’t yet have is my very own on-device chatbot — have you seen the RAM prices these days? — but that is coming, with or without the bubble bursting.
• Debbie Millman: If You’re Over 40, You’re Ready to Use A.I. The thesis is in the title, and it is downright stupid. Persons over a certain age — 65? 75? I don’t know for sure and there are individual differences but it is in that ballpark — have no chatbot immunity or capacity for discernment (see above) and from my experience account for 95% of slop being unintentionally shared around the Internet.
• Lila Shroff for The Atlantic: America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek. Headed towards or pushed?

In Silicon Valley, engineers assign their agents tasks to complete overnight, and then check the results even before their morning coffee. Some are staying up late: “The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high,” the billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on The Joe Rogan Experience last month. “If you go to sleep, you won’t be with your 20 AI coding agents.”

This Andreessen guy sounds like a grade-A asshole.

• Gillian Tett for the FT: Welcome to the era of financial candyfloss. ⊕ [Note: Gift link, if you click on time. ] It is the perfect metaphor for American finance: spinning thin and devalued real properties into mounds of tooth-decaying fluff. You know things are bad when it comes not from the Guardian but from a seasoned Financial Times columnist.
• Brett Murphy for USA Today: Rigged. ⊕ [Note: ᔥCorey Doctorow ] An exhaustively sourced, dramatically illustrated, harrowing story about truck drivers working as slave labor, from 2017. If only there were a mechanism by which the richest, most prosperous country in the world could control this and similar excesses of a greedy minority.
• Alice Fleerackers for Nautilus: When Stupid Was a Diagnosis. On the plight of people with intellectual disabilities. In some ways, the 1700s were better to most of them than even now, or rather, they were equally cruel and bad to everyone regardless of their mental prowess. Then came the oh so ironically named Enlightenment.
• David Tuller: Trial By Error: No Benefits for Multidisciplinary Rehabilitation in New ME/CFS Study. “ME/CFS” stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and it seems to be the consequence of viruses playing havoc with people’s immune systems, which leads to their autonomous nervous systems being out of whack. Many of you may not remember, but there was a big viral infection going around 5-6 years ago that left everyone exposed all at once, which led to an explosion of these cases in absolute terms, though in terms of percentages it is thankfully still a vanishingly small fraction. Sadly, you can’t rehabilitate your way out of this particular organic problem, and it puts many young and otherwise healthy people out of commission. If only there was a mechanism to fund more basic research.
• Davide Gioia: Wildlife on the Planet Furaha by Gert van Dijk. A book review. The book in question is an alternative evolutionary history, richly illustrated, from a professor of neurology at Leiden University. An instant pre-order for me, and it is coming out next week in the US!

• Craig Coben for the FT: SpaceX and the myth of independent Wall St research.

On my first encounter with Wall Street analysts I also wondered what they were for. Here is Coben’s take:

It is possible some retail investors may follow the research ratings, but in my experience the audience that matters most is the company itself. Management teams appreciate reports seeing their narrative endorsed in a report carrying the logo of a major bank. Flattery takes you a long way in finance, as it does in life.

And in turn management teams may, if the analysis reflects what they believe is the true and right way to talk about the company, prioritize that particular bank to be on the left side, or the upper right corner, or the bottom third paragraph of the second-to-last-page, of the term sheet. And if you have no idea what that last part was supposed to mean, I envy you, truly.

• Gideo Rachman, also for the FT: My journey down the rabbit hole at the Conspiracy World Cup.

One of my earliest memories of conspiratorial thinking was when I was in 7th grade and flunked a state-wide English language competition. ⊕ [Note: Worry not, I returned the following year and won 1st place, which was ultimately worth diddly squat except for bragging rights. Oh, and some family lore, for my now-wife’s best friend placed second and apparently told her stories about me. ] Upon return to school, a certain teacher who was generally decent huddled with me and asked me for “the scoop”, meaning for the shenanigans that must have went on for me not to get an awarded. The scoop was that I spent the night before playing something — from the years when it went on the most likely culprit is Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness — though of course that’s not what I told him. Which is to say, when Alfie Haaland, the father of Norway’s star centre-forward, Erling, had sarcastically congratulated the referee on England’s victory, I knew exactly where he was coming from.

• Corey Doctorow: Deranged billionaires and their syndromes.

Good to see that Tyler Cowen’s verbal tick caught Doctorow’s attention:

Today, these Renfields clutch their pearls at the “demonization” of the ultra-rich, calling it “billionaire derangement syndrome.” But the only “billionaire derangement syndrome” that matters is the syndrome that affects billionaires and convinces them that they are above any discipline or rules.

Oh snap.

• Matt Webb: Frozen 2 should be rated R.

On how movie stakes have become too high. I agree! Where are this generation’s Harold & Kumar?

• Ernie Smith: The Terminus.

On the beginnings and endings of interstate highways. This has been on my mind recently, as I drive up I-25 past the exits to I-70, thinking that, hey, I know exactly where I-70 starts (or ends?): right on the I-695 Baltimore beltway. And to think it goes straight this far out west… Well, except for that little infamous break in Pennsylvania.

• Aidan Walker: vultures feeding their young.

“If you literally educate children, care for patients, clean up the environment, or do something like that, you aren’t a looter — but your boss probably is, your boss’s boss definitely is, and you’re part of a dying breed.” No notes there.

• Quico Toro: Natural experiments prove phytoplankton carbon removal works.

Going straight to the quote:

In reality, any program to intentionally add nutrients to nutrient-deprived oceans would be considerably less dangerous than any of these natural analogs. Fires, volcanoes, icebergs and vents just dump crap into the ocean willy-nilly, with no plan, no environmental monitoring, no environmental impact assessment, nothing. Nature does this in precisely the kind of blind, reckless, unthinking way that skeptics fear in people, and even then there’s no evidence of harm.

Let spotting the cognitive error here be an exercise for the Reader.

• Simon Park: Reviving a 15-year-old netbook with Arch Linux.

Hey, I had that exact model back in 2008 and the little guy traveled the world with me back then, from Barcelona and Naples to Bangkok and Kho Samui. Not proud of the fact, but that 1024x600 pixel WSVGA screen is where I first saw Season 4 of The Wire. I even took it with me to the US, so it’s been on as many continents as I have. And wouldn’t you know it, I kept it through all these years, hoping for a good opportunity to resuscitate it. Which is to say: I know what I’m doing this weekend!

• Vinay Prasad: The Future of Medicine. Extrapolating the modern tendencies of removing humans from the equation, Prasad (unintentionally?) presents a bleak scenario indeed. For a reality check, here is Cory Doctorow.
• The anonymous Slime Mold Time Mold author: You Can Discover the Drives. An interesting analogy between human drives — from the basics like thirst and hunger to the more complex ones like the need for recognition — and chemical elements.
• Chris Good: Not your keys, not your songs. Remember web3, which tried to be the asbestos we are putting into our technology until “AI” came along? Here is the aftermath of some well-meaning people trying to dabble in it. It did not end well.
• Brett & Kate McKay: How to Recognize and Deal With High-Conflict People. Recognition is important; dealing with them is usually straightforward: flee. And for the times that you can’t — these people need doctors too! — there is some good advice at the bottom.

• David C. Krakauer for Nautilus: What Makes Humans Stupid. The answer: misapplied intelligence. “A person who does not know the answer to a question is merely ignorant. A person who constructs an ingenious hundred-page argument for the wrong answer is stupid.” Who said DOGE?
• Anna Louie Sussman for The NYT: Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth?. It shouldn’t be. But the ultra-wealthy rubbing it in to people who would may want to have more kids but think they can’t afford it is not helping the situation below.
• Andy Hall: AI is the Democratic Party’s Next Villain. The title should have started with “AI and billionaires are…” but that is not as snappy. Tyler Cowen flippantly called it billionaire derangement syndrome. How they got their billions aside, why would it be deranged to feel threatened by the increasing coupling of money with political power? We have seen this story many times and it ultimately doesn’t end well for the few greedy ones who covet both wealth and power.
• Tess Joosse for Science Adviser: How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery. An A+ headline and a fascinating photo of a wombat poop cube.
• Josephine Riesman on Bluesky: John Oliver’s three-day stint/stunt as a corporate villain on legendary soap opera “General Hospital” appears to be going… fucking brilliantly??. No notes.

• Tristan Manalac for Biospace: Amgen’s Tavneos troubles continue as NEJM retracts pivotal publication. First came FDA questions about data integrity. Now the academic authors are confirming the data tampering, though per the now retracted study they did “vouch for the completeness and accuracy of the data, the complete reporting of adverse events, and the adherence of the trial to the protocol. All the authors participated with the sponsor in the design of the trial, the analysis of the data, and the writing of the manuscript.” I wonder if people who sold this rotten pile of garbage to Amgen will offer a refund. So it goes…
• Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez for The NYT: This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade. “Dr. Adamala named her creation SpudCell, after its potato-like appearance. Rather than patent it, she and Dr. Endy are organizing a community of scientists to focus on making SpudCells more fully alive and adapting them to new kinds of experiments.” Bravo! Maybe science isn’t a complete lost cause.
• M Auerbach, MY Lim, GM Rodgers, and T DeLoughery for Sensible Medicine: When Normal Isn’t Normal: Non-anemic Iron Deficiency. A very academic group of authors makes a very good case for treating low iron levels in the absence of overt anemia. This is in response to an earlier text which poo-pooed the practice as “overmedicalizing normality”. Adam Cifu from Sensible Medicine proposes randomized controlled trials, though if symptoms of low iron are as diverse as restless leg syndrome, “brain fog” and craving for ice it would be a challenging endpoint to establish. Boy, isn’t medicine hard.
• Titotal (pseud): The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman ] Mathematical demonstration of why effective altruists are, at the end of the day, a bunch of bozos. And not just them: America is the land of hyperoptimizers and if Taleb’s Incerto wasn’t a convincing enough case for why that doesn’t end up well in the long run, well, here is a much shorter Substack post that shows one facet of the problem.
• Ed Conway: The Apple-Banana Paradox. On the incredible flattening of banana prices in the last 25 years, and the incoming threat of another fungal infection that could wipe out the current Cavendish banana monoculture. On the other, could this be an opening for a Honeycrisp of bananas? One can hope.

• Max Kozlov for Nature: Inside the new political screening that’s stalling NIH grants. The plot to murder American science in the style of Rasputin (poisoned, shot, shot again) is well under way, and this is the slow-release poison. Choke off funding, dissuade people from thinking about federal funding, see the number of scientists drop for years to come.
• Vinay Prasad: Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jose Baselga. To be clear, there are many things wrong with American science and Prasad in his review of the book How To Rule the World presents some good examples, but you don’t treat a serious diagnosis by killing the patient.
• Andrew Gelman: Bayesian Workflow exists as a physical book! An example of what’s right in science. I will be ordering a copy.
• Ann Lee for the Guardian: ‘David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history. ⊕ [Note: ᔥBill Harris ] An oral history done the right way, about a genius person in a genius movie.
• Catherine Ruth Pakaluk for The NYT: Life Is Better With Siblings. Sure is — just ask Jennifer Connelly from The Labyrinth! Joking aside, this is a serious case for large families and one with which I largely agree, though the double-digit census of children in some of the families mentioned gave me pause. [Note: The old George Carlin bit about idiots and maniacs applies. ] Regardless, for most people the right number is greater than two, and for almost everyone it is certainly greater than zero.

• Aidan Walker: Kilroy Was Here. About one of the oldest of memes, perhaps the first? Although wasn’t the first true meme — a captioned photo — Hang in there, Baby as noted in the Omnibus podcast some time ago.
• Dynomight (pseud): The worthlessness of vitamin D is mildly exaggerated. From the same person who wrote persuasively about the relative benefits of acetaminophen over ibuprofen. For what its worth, I take around 5,000 units of vitamin D3 daily and barely get to the midrange of normal so the outlines studies were massively underdosing it.
• Ben Frumin for The Wirecutter: The $17 Duck Lamp That Won Over Wirecutter. Hey, this duck has won over our family as well — we’ve given it away as presents and have a few scattered around the house. The potato also looks good!
• xkcd: Sports Commentary. Sprts commentators haven’t just discovered p-hacking, they invented it!