• 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!

• Keller, Murray, Ivory & Cabreros for The NYT: The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s. A beautifully-illustrated case for America’s king-sized vehicles being the main culprit for increased pedestrian deaths. The careful reader will remember that this “Big SUV hypothesis” was also highlighted by Brian Potter a while back, though it didn’t explain all of the increase. And of course my conspiracy theory may also be true, although if there are people who said a while back “hey, these big A-pillar will lead to more pedestrian deaths” and then there are more pedestrian deaths, well, there’s a conspiracy theory for you.
• Adam Cifu: Advice for Internship. July already? Seems like my last day of residency was but a few years ago, but now, it’s been a full dozen years as of today. And I’ve given up sharing tips almost as long ago.
• Casey Handmer: In Defense of the Marginal Baby. Handmer presents the case for having more babies, with which I agree wholeheartedly. I do not share his enthusiasm for a contraption some call a “Snoo”, a preposterous subscription-based baby rocker.
• Charlie Stross: The Golden Age Of (sic!) Bond Villains. Stross shares the afterword for a reprint of his book The Jennifer Morgue, which is about a billionaire who wants to unleash a Lovecraftian horror in order to rule the world. It was written in 2009 and yes, some idiot billionaire — probably one from the Dialog crowd — must have confused it for an instruction manual. Anyway, Stross’ “Interview with the Entrepreneur”, the entrepreneur in question being Bond arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld, is a thing of beauty.
• Ian Finder: UHF X11. A beautifully pixelated window system built for visionOS and Apple Vision Pro. Due to my newfound aversion to Apple I haven’t touched my own AVP in almost a year. This has persuaded me to pick it up again, for the novelty if nothing else.

• Sara Hendren (@ablerism on micro.blog): catechesis by camera. This is the first time I have encountered the case of Jesse and Ashley Ridgway, and Hendren’s article is a wonderful perspective on one aspect of the story. All I could think of, on the other hand, is our grandmothers’ wisdom: do not share pregnancy news with the outside world for the first 90 days. Sure, there may be some superstition there, but more than anything it saves you from a messy round of sharing any unfortunate updates — which happen more often than you would think — and keeping track of who knows what. So yes, it was completely expected that learning things about the baby in real time along with your YouTube followers may turn sour. May younger generations, who have long ago stopped listening to their parents let alone grandmothers, learn from the Ridgways — and there are many lessons to learn.
• Vinay Prasad: Shingles vaccine(s) and dementia: the only medical intervention to work faster than Tums. Unsurprisingly, Prasad is more sceptical about the effect of the shingles vaccine on dementia than Eric Topol. Be that as it may, it is not a bad vaccine to get if for nothing else than to prevent shingles. In the meantime, I am sure the four observational studies which all point to the same thing will fuel at least a decade’s worth of translational and basic science research to connect herpes zoster virus to dementia. Better than wasting it on the amyloid hypothesis!
• Andy Baio: The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows. One good thing about this post is that I now know about the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, containing “made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.” The other is that I have even more reason to avoid obviously AI-slopped websites that look slick, professional, clearly have an agenda, but carry no byline, because they are not only stealing my attention from a more deserving human creator, they are also stealing that creator’s material, without attribution and with an ulterior motive.

• Andrew Gelman: Similarities and differences between stage magicians purporting to do close reading, and p-hackers purporting to do real science. An excellent post about what’s in the headline, spurred by a five-hour video which I haven’t seen. Note that this is on Gelman’s substack newsletter which purports to be merely a summary of what’s on his blog and early access to some of the articles which he plans to post there, but no, much of the original content is unique to the substack. Have we learned nothing from Twitter et al.?
• Mr. Market (pseud., clearly): What the Fuck Happened to Nerds. How we got from Jobs and Woz to Altman and Musk. His other posts are also quite good.
• Mike Masnick: And Now Basically Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Looks Sketchy. An update from last week’s Thursday link on the great LEGO heist. The more you know, the blurrier everything gets.
• Brennan Kenneth Brown: Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb. For a few days this week most posts on bubbles.town were about the great coffee controversy, spurred as these things often are by a curmudgeonly take on “Buy me a coffee” buttons. I largely agree with Brown — these requests are unobtrusive and satisfy the people’s need to help each other out.

To state the obvious: I have been following blogs for much longer than I’ve had one. A version of what now goes under “Infinite Regress” first started in October 2010, shortly after I moved to the US. Most of it was in Serbian and now available elsewhere but in 2012 I started blogging in English and, well, here we are.

There is only a handful of blogs which I have been following from before that time. The list does not include Marginal Revolution, which I didn’t know about until around 2015, when a hematology attending at NHLBI mentioned it during rounds. ⊕ [Note: Here is the too much information part, and not particularly relevant to the topic at hand: the attending was Neal Young, who also introduced me to Edward Tufte; it was during the post-Tuesday clinic roundup of patients with aplastic anemia, which were always fun; and it was him showing a video of a bear which Tyler Cowen linked to the day before. Why I can remember those facts but not to pick up ricotta cheese at the store as instructed to by my wife is one of those small mysteries of life. I do also remember being somewhat surprised that the super-smart and erudite Young was impressed by a stupid bear video. ] Andrew Gelman’s “Statistical Modeling…” also wouldn’t make the cut: even though he started blogging in 2004, around the time I discovered Bloglines, I wouldn’t become a subscriber until some time during covid lockdowns during a brief period when I thought I had enough time to read much more than I actually could and ultimately and inevitably overcommitted. Yet I try to model their regularity (consciously) and irreverence (not as consciously, more as a permission), if not Cowen’s positions as of late.

Then there are the blogs which are now dead, defunct, or a shadow of themselves. Many of those productivity-adjacent. Stuff like Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Kevin MD. These I couldn’t say were explicit current influences in format or style, but I do still have a GTD and a medicine tag and I update both fairly frequently.

There are only three blogs I can think of that I have been following pre-blogging and still do, with some interruptions in between. Two of them should not be a surprise to even a casual recent reader: John Gruber’s Daring Fireball and Dave Winer’s Scripting News. ⊕ [Note: I fought hard against finshing the title of this post with a (the last one may surpirse you) because this is one of those cases where the clickbaity headline may actually have fit. ] The third, though, fell off my radar during the last great feed reader reshuffle as it has several more times over the last 22 or so years I have been a not-so-faithful follower: Dubious Quality by Bill Harris, which has gone from being predominantly about gaming to game developing to, well, something that is less focused than even what you are reading here so I would not exaggerate if I called DQ the ur-influence of “Infinite Regress”.

And a few decades before @jtr’s push to write more emails I was a fairly regular emailer to Harris. In fact, my very first email to him, my Gmail archive tells me, was dated August 24, 2004 and had the subject line of “RSS feed, please”. I haven’t changed much, have I?

• Greg Wilson: How We Got Here. A primer on the creation of money, monopolies, corporations and the works. Less didactic and an easier read is his more recent article, When the Model Is the Harm.
• Cory Doctorow: The world has moved on. Whereby “moved on” means left to entropy, with systems holding entropy back destroy by, well, see above. Relies heavily on Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, making Doctorow’s post the first reference to the gunslinger on this blog since 2014.
• Aidan Walker: Cuck Internet Theory. I was less interested in the meme Walker discusses — having abandoned most social media this is the first time I saw photos of “a cuck chair” in that particular context — than in the phrase he used near the end when he inevitably turned to AI: the permanent underclass. The “permanent” part never sat well with me, because it goes against the entirety of the human history which time and again has shown us that members of “the underclass” are very capable indeed of carrying pitchforks if and when the need arises.

• Sasha Gusev: Thoughts on AI in academia. They are good ones. Extra points for leading me to an article from Sam Kriss in Harper’s Magazine about some magnificently agentic stupid people spending away their youth in San Francisco.
• Ruxandra Teslo: Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy. The FDA wants companies to make at least two batches of product at the highest standard of manufacturing before approving it for commercial use. You should know this before starting your clinical program, especially if you have manufacturing that’s expensive, so maybe make two small batches instead of a big one? Just a thought. Separately, none of this would be an issue if there was momentum towards considering cell & gene therapy more of a blood bank/cell processing thing than a commercial drug. But then you couldn’t charge as much, could you?
• Regan Penaluna for Nautilus: Lessons in Chemistry, 19th-Century Style. Frustratingly, it takes Penaluna four paragraphs to mention the full name of Jane Marcet, the woman whose book “Conversations on Chemistry” inspired Michael Faraday — first paragraph mention! — to pursue science. The headline is also too broad: this was 1806, pre-Victorian times and barely 19th century. An extraordinary woman. Also: I want that book.
• Kristen French, also for Nautilus: Solving Feynman’s Formula for Eating Well, Parking Your Car, and Finding a Mate. How Feynman’s scribbles in a Thai restaurant lead to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with mathematical proof of a common-sense inkling: more possible choices and more time should lead to more experimentation in order to discover “the best” of anything.
• Adam Mastroianni: Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. One of Mastroianni’s best, hinged on one key insight: Americans used to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. High fortune now being so out of reach for many that it is simply unimaginable, they now see themselves as temporarily anonymous celebrities instead, which is why we have become more tolerant of celebrities hawking Oreos and less tolerant of billionaires. Also, good confirmation that I did not imagine the period when artists were trying very hard not to be labeled as sellouts.

• Tim Bradshaw and Cristina Criddle for the FT: ‘Close to the Terminator narrative’: the dawn of self-improving AI. On one hand I want to pat myself on the back for writing that this would happen more than 3 years ago — be vague enough and give it some time and you too may become a futurologist — on the other, how much of the narrative is bubble self-inflation?
• Jason at mybricklog: Bricks & Minifigs Corporate Stole a Man’s $200,000 LEGO Collection and Told Him to Get Bent. I saw a “Brick & Minifigs case” being referenced in several places without knowing what that meant. This is the best description of the case I could find, and it is quite the saga.
• Jordan Michelman for Taste: I Want to Live Like Costco People. ⊕ [Note: ᔥPaul Williams ] I, too, love Costco and appreciate anyone willing to share their own enthusiasm for that shining beacon on the liberal capitalism hill. Still, isn’t it weird seeing what other people buy there? Trays of cocktail shrimp? Turkey and Swiss cheese pinwheels? Why, I never…
• Daniel Frank: the Bill Frisell problem: why we fail to recognize things we ought to love. Because the love is messily intertwined with signaling? But never mind me, I am being too cynical.
• Greg Wilson: Late Merge. Mathematical proof for what should be obvious: in the case of a disappearing lane, zipper merge is superior to getting into the opposite lane early. Note that this does not apply when one of the lanes have a big honking YIELD sign on it, something many DMV area drivers do not appreciate.

The power of the Internet is that, under an innocuous title such as Sdcv-quick Update, on a mostly technical blog dedicated to Emacs, one can find a most delightful essay by James Somers — from way back in 2014, the days of still-capitalized Internet — about the power of the old Webster’s Dictionary, how it outshines its modern successors, and how, wonder of wonders, you can download and install Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828) onto your computing device of choice. [Note: But not Emacs. That’s where quick-sdcv.el comes in! ]

Somers does not quite reach the heights of David Foster Wallace’s Authority and American Usage but then he also takes only about a fifth of the space to make his point. ⊕ [Note: If these two weren’t enough, “Draft No.4” by John McPhee will do nicely to meet your dictionary essay needs. ] His whole blog makes for great reading, most of it having been written pre-LLMs. This is important: Somers is a professional writer whose most recent articles in The New Yorker and The Atlantic keep glazing AI. If you think I am exaggerating, here are some of the more recent titles: “The Coming Software Apocalypse”, “The Scientific Paper is Obsolete”, “How Will A.I. Learn Next?”, “A Revolution in How Robots Learn”, “The Case That A.I. Is Thinking”… With this kind of coverage, who needs a marketing department?