Adam Mastroianni is out with another long essay about science and how statistics are not the be-all and end-all of finding the truth, because:

… the whole ritual of “run study, apply statistical test, report significance” is only about 100 years old, and the people who invented it were probably drunk.

So a bunch of drunks built modern statistics on the foundations of probability theory created by a bunch of gamblers. Sweet.

📺 Continuing my write-about-it-before-you’re-done-watching series, I would like to turn everyone’s attention to Scavengers Reign. Six of 12 episodes in, and it’s the best thing on TV so far this year. Between that and Across the Spider-Verse, 2023 has been stellar for animation.

Last year we showed that “better” cancer drugs don’t necessarily cost more. In a follow-up analysis just out in JAMA Network Open, it looks like novelty doesn’t have much to do with the price either. Then what does? To paraphrase № 46: drugs cost whatever the market will bear.

📺 Three episodes in, the third season of Slow Horses is the best one yet, and also the best live-action series I’ve seen this year (with a nod to Only Murders…). Fun fact: that theme song which sounds awfully lot like it was sung by Mick Jagger was sung by — Mick Jagger!

For Malaysia Airlines, 2014 was a devastating year. I remember flight MH17, which was shot down on July 17 while flying over eastern Ukraine. But months before, another flight — MH370 — disappeared from the radar never to be seen again (well, not intact). A friend directed me to this video, and the story is as engrossing as anything you’ll see on the big screen, only done with flight simulator software and stock footage. Make sure you can spare the full hour before you start watching!

Side note: it’s a good documentary, but Good lord how I hate YouTube’s aesthetics of catchy titles and eye-grabbing thumbnail videos. At least they’ve fixed the comments.

If you’ve haven’t heard of Big Biology until today, well, welcome to the club. It’s a podcast, and it describes itself thusly:

Scientists talking to scientists, but accessible to anyone. We are living in a golden age of biology research. Big Biology is a podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology.

Right up my alley! I started with the latest episode, on invasive species, and the intro seems a bit too scripted, but the focus is on the interviews, and those delivered. It’s already on my Overcast list of regulars. (ᔥRobin Sloan)

While writing about Facebook, Ernie Smith of Tedium repeats what many — most? — people who use it despite knowing better tell themselves:

To be clear, I knew Facebook was a really undesirable thing to have in my life (it’s pissed me off plenty in the past), but it’s a necessary evil, because it captures people in your life that you would lose contact with entirely if you did not have a presence there. But it’s really troublesome to me how much of that stuff is getting flooded out by literally dozens of pieces of unrelated junk.

I haven’t had a Facebook account for 10+ years, yet I have kept (intermittent, once-every-few-years) touch with elementary and high school friends and distant family members. Sure, I don’t know where everyone’s been for their summer vacation, whether my nieces and nephews twice-removed have new pets or which new schools they are going to, and I certainly don’t know whether someone I barely knew at high school has a new job (though there is always LinkedIn for that one). If “losing contact” means not knowing all of that, well, so be it. But keeping track of the ins and outs of people’s lives is not a prerequisite for asking them for help and advice if and when needed, nor helping out when asked.

So what, exactly, is the tradeoff here?

The original World of Goo was one of the first games in my ever-expanding Steam library. I can’t wait to play the sequel on the Apple Vision Pro! (ᔥWaxy.org)