September 12, 2023

The NIH Clinical Center used to commission artwork for some of their lectures. Here is one for “Phobias and Panic Disorder” from 1985.

Photo of a framed cartoon drawing showing  a human profile with an overlayed brain covered in pale pink and red circles connected by green dots.

📺 Season 2 of The Afterparty was uneven, with a couple of cinematic marvels wedged between a wimpy start and an oddly rushed last episode which seems to have been chopped off at the last minute from the penultimate. The Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock homages in particular were worth bearing the first 60 minutes of Aniq awkwardness.

September 11, 2023

From the Department of You Can’t Make This Up: the face of D.C. pedestrian safety was hurt in a hit-and-run. And not just a little bit:

Stephen Grasty was placed in a neck brace and taken to George Washington University Hospital, where doctors treated him for a long list of injuries, including a broken leg, foot and vertebra. His C6 vertebra was “hanging on a hair,” Shelly Grasty said.

D.C. could be one of the most pedestrian and bicycle-friendly cities in America (just look at these lanes!), but you just can’t get away from out-of-town drivers. (ᔥAxios)

In retrospect, that friend worried about an eagle flying away with his toddler as prey wasn’t completely bonkers.

From the early humans exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History.

Photo of a museum exhibit about eagle attacks on early humans.

I am reluctant to recommend long podcasts, but Joe Walker’s 3+ hour interview with Richard Rhodes, the octogenarian author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was so engrossing that I didn’t even realize it was that long until posting this very message. Between discussing the Manhattan project, nuclear energy, AI, and a sprinkling of geopolitics past and present, the conversation just flew by.

September 10, 2023

From the archive: the author presenting some preclinical work on the cell cycle at the AACR annual meeting in Washington DC, circa 2017. Little did I know that six years later I’d be living just a few blocks down the street.

More crowded than usual.

Milos standing in front of a large poster titled Tbata induces G2/M cell cycle arrest and sensitizes osteosarcoma cells to etoposide in a p53-independent manner.

Derek Lowe writes about a recent Cancer Cell paper pitting glioblastoma cells against each other in a mouse model:

A single clonal line that hit on high Myc expression could outcompete fifteen thousand others from a standing start!

As someone who’s treated patients with Burkitt lymphoma, the Myc-dependent cancer, I can absolutely believe this.

September 9, 2023

Speaking of book piles, here is one from 3 years ago, shot in November, which was to be my holiday reading. Ended up reading four out of the seven, including A Pattern Language.

The November 2020 stack.

A stack of seven books laying on a kitchen table with only spines showing. The thickest are "Black Lamb and Gray Falcon" and "A Pattern Language". Wolfram's "Fundamental Theory of Physics" is at the base.

For your (and mine, time permitting) weekend reading, listening, and/or viewing pleasure: the Tim Ferris interview with Nassim Taleb and Scott Patterson. I sure hope you are familiar with the former; the latter is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who also wrote a book about “black swan traders”, which, yes, is probably going to the pile the antilibrary. It is a 2-hour discussion rightfully described as a feast.

September 8, 2023

🏀 USA Basketball coach Steve Kerr after FIBA World Cup semifinal loss to Germany:

“This team is very worthy of winning a championship. We just didn’t get it done.”

Hic Rhodus, hic salta, if I may say so.

Also: Go, Serbia! (ᔥBen Golliver)