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

Finished reading: Wanting by Luke Burgis 📚, which I wish had existed for me to read back in my early 20s, but maybe I would have thought it trite back then? Probably not: ever since The Dude’s parroting of pop culture was mistaken for profundity I knew how powerful mimesis was and how blind people were to it. The contents of Wanting would have brought into sharp focus that we are not only copying other people’s words and actions, but also — most of all, perhaps — desires.

Like The Dao of Capital it is overflowing with new-to-me mental models, One day, I should write a list of all these models and how I use them. Alas, not today. or at least with words to describe what may have tickled me already: calculating versus meditative thought, thin desire versus thick, and — in a nod to Taleb — Celebristan versus Freshmenistan. At the very least it clarified too me why Taleb himself was a model worth emulating.

And if you think it too of-the-time, with its SEO subtitle and quoting of some questionable philosophers and contemporaneous books, well, there is a René Girard reading list provided in the appendix and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is now on the pile.

The wild blue yonder, as seen from a submarine off the coast of Lahaina (2019). So it goes…

A blurry photo of the ocean bottom with many tropical fish swiming around a shipwreck. Everything is blue.

🏀 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)

September 7, 2023

Haleakalā sunrise, from 4 years ago. A panorama shot would have shown the huge parking lot up top, which I wanted to avoid.

Photo of a sunrise over clouds and a barren volcanic landscape

Solvitur ambulando is my new favorite Latin phrase, for now. (ᔥRobin Sloan)

Miyazaki has a new movie coming out, “The Boy and the Heron”, and the teaser trailer looks like “Spirited Away” mixed with “Grave of the Fireflies”. I’m sold!

This would, of course, be Miyazaki’s third last film ever to date. Here’s hoping for many more. (ᔥwaxy.org)

Update 9/8/23: Well, that didn’t take long!