After a nearly two-year hiatus, Wondermark is back. But will there be a calendar?

Here is an obvious analogy for you: the physical world — meatspace, if you will — as “meat” of an actual body, both skeletal (muscles, ligaments, tendons and such), and visceral (entrails, the liver, vital organs); the internet as nerve impulses connecting the various parts both sensorially (how are the navels of the world doing these days?) and in effect (from Facebook groups to GoFundMe pages bringing actual change).

You know how X and other social networks made everything feel connected to everything else? Well, there is an organic counterpart to this phenomenon, and it’s called a generalized tonic-clonic — or grand mal — seizure, manifesting, in the clonic phase, in widespread convulsions of the body.

The reason why our bodies are usually not convulsing is that the nerve impulse pathways are tightly controlled in space: there are separate nerves, differentiated brain areas for different roles, and let’s not forget the biggest separation of them all: two semi-independent brain hemispheres connected only by the corpus callosum which, imagine this, is sometimes cut completely for treatment of refractory seizures. There is also chemical separation: many of the pathways are inhibitory, and the most abundant neurotransmitter in the body is not dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine or others you’ve heard of because they go haywire, but glycin, a modest amino acid which people don’t hear about because it is so good at its job of tamping down bad impulses.

The world’s ongoing convulsions started — after an initial tonic phase — right after we have all become interconnected: Hezbollah, Hamas, and your neighborhood association all hooked up to the same firehose. There is a feeling at the edge of my consciousness that the answer to solving them is in ourselves, and not in a new age self-fulfilment way but in pragmatic steps we can take to extrapolate from this most obvious analogy.

Dave Winer (@dave) is right, except for one thing: X should have enabled inline links to go alongside the walls of text. I never did care for Twitter cards, but how can you have an interNET without links? Mastodon and Threads, inexplicably, have the same problem.

By the way, if you — like me — have been wondering why the Brain Pickings RSS feed has gone silent, well wonder no more: two years ago it had a rebrand and is now The Marginalian. Being otherwise preocupied at the time I must have missed it.

And if you’ve never heard of Brain Pickings before, well, you’re in for a treat. ↬Tedium.

While responding to a tweet I realized that an essential emoji was missing from the ever-expanding collection: one for RSS feeds. Come on, people, it’s not difficult.

True wealth as described by Nassim Taleb, on Twitter:

• Worriless sleeping
• Clear conscience
• Reciprocal gratitude
• Absence of envy
• Foamy coffee
• Crusty bread
• Inexperienced enemies
• Frequent laughs
• No meals alone
• No gym classes
• Gravel bicycling
• Good digestive functions
• No Zoom meetings
• Periodic surprises
• Nothing to hide: financial and fiscal tranquility
• Muscular strength & endurance
• Ability to nap
• Access to a hammock

“No meals alone” alone would cure America’s obesity epidemic. Not sure about that hammock, though.

Logged in to Twitter for the first time in a while to respond to a few DMs — PSA: please don’t message me there if you are hoping for a quick response — and the algorithm served me an insightful thread on work productivity that only reminded me of how much I hated threads.

Having deleted my Facebook account nearly a decade ago, and last having logged in to Instagram back in 2012, I had no expectations of Threads. With quick onboarding and a pleasant enough first impression, those expectations were exceeded.

I won’t be coming back, but if they enable ActivityPub and make the “official” accounts — medical societies and NBA teams for me, please — accessible from micro.blog, it will be a win for everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

I have always admired prolific writers like Matthew Yglesias and Scott Alexander — both now on Substack, and not by accident — for their ability to produce tens of thousands of words daily, ⊕ My admiration being tampered somewhat by ChatGPT and other LLMs, which are about as intellectually and factually rigorous as Alexander, and slightly less so than Yglesias; some sacrifices do have to be made in the name of productivity. on top of the random bite-sized thoughts posted on social media. There are only so many words I can read and write in a day, and for the better part of the last year, my language IO has been preoccupied by helping clean, analyze, interpret, and write up the results of a single clinical trial, which are now finally out in The Lancet Neurology. ⊕ Yes, my highest impact factor paper to date is in a neurology journal. Go figure.

The paper is about our clinical trial which used the body’s own immune system to treat autoimmune disease — and a particular one at that, myasthenia gravis — via technology that up until now has only been used against cancer (CAR T cells). It has made a decent impact since it came out less than two days ago. It got a write-up in The Economist, for one. Endpoints News as well. Evaluate Vantage got the best quote — it is at the very end of the article. And there is a whole bunch of press releases: from National Institutes of Health, University of North Carolina, Oregon Health and Sciences University, and of course Cartesian Therapeutics.

What went on yesterday reminded me that Twitter is not going anywhere any time soon: all of the above releases were to be found only there, not on a Mastodon instance, the journal’s own media metrics do not — and can not, at least not easily — trawl the Fediverse for hits, and I can’t just type in “Descartes–08”, “myasthenia gravis CAR-T”, or “Cartesian” into a Mastodon search box and get anything of relevance. ⊕ One could, of course, argue that you wouldn’t get anything of relevance on Twitter either, most of the discussion consisting of people who have barely read the tweet, let alone the article. And one would be correct. And while most of the non-Web3/crypto tech world has moved out, it looks like people in most other fields, from medicine to biotechnology to the NBA commentariat, are maintaining substantial Twitter presence.

This will, of course, have no impact on my commitment to staying out of the conversation to the extent possible while maintaining a semi-regular schedule of 500-character posts, which may now, IO bandwidth having opened up, become a tiny bit longer. Thank you for reading!

At $5 per month for a cozy social network and a static blog hosting service, micro.blog was already quite the bargain. This summer, $4 will get you four full months — an absolute steal.

With $10/month you also get podcast hosting, bookmark archives, and a newsletter, if you are so inclined. So you have to ask what exactly $8 per month give you at that other service. The freedom to see fewer adds, I suppose.