Jason Snell notes that the iMac’s strongest legacy was Apple itself:

The company was close to bankruptcy when Jobs returned, and the iMac gave the company a cash infusion that allowed it to complete work on Mac OS X, rebuild the rest of the Mac product line in the iMac’s image, open Apple Stores, make the iPod, and set the tone for the next twenty five years.

I’m currently reading The Dao of Capital, which is all about the Austrian school of economics and the roundaboutness of true entrepreneurs, and this made what Apple is doing even more salient. Can you name a more roundabout tech company than Apple? ⊕ [Note: To be clear, I suspect little of this was premeditated in the long term — i.e. no, Jobs and Ive probably did not have a Vision Pro in mind as the ultimate goal when they thought of the iMac — but the ethos of seeing everything as a potential intermediary and not commoditizing it fully à la Samsung is very much the Apple way. ] Using the iMac as the intermediate step towards the iPod, which was itself an intermediate step towards the iPhone, which was supposedly to be an intermediate step towards the iPad but turned into something much greater, though it also did end up being an intermediate step towards Apple silicone, all the while peppering these intermediary products with technology — LiDAR, ultra-wide lenses, spatial audio — that would become the key building blogs of Vision Pro, which is itself an intermediary towards who knows what. Very Austrian.

Thinking more closely to home, I can think of a few biotech companies that may be doing something like this — maybe, if you squint — but none come close. The addiction to immediate profits that the distorted American health care market provides is much too great.(↬Daring Fireball)

National Harbor, MD is a cute mixed-use development just south of DC anchored by a casino, a convention center, and a ferris wheel; but it is most certainly not Washington, DC, the 5,000 residents of NH having representation in Congress, 700,000 of those in DC being without. These District turf wars are a tiny bit less parochial than they seem.

Kevin Kelley’s 10-year-old list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever has three from The Washington Post that are in the top 25:

• The Peekabo Paradox (2006), about Washington’s preeminent child entertainer, the Great Zucchini, and also about virtue and vice.
• Pearls Before Breakfast (2007), about a master violinist playing a 1713 Stradivari violin incognito in front of L’Enfant Plaza commuters.
• Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? (2009), about, well, that.

The first two in particular are better than anything that will come out this week in any magazine, least of all in the Post. (↬The Technium)

How I Write is a new… podcast(?) from David Perell, who tweets posts Xs:

Imagine if all of your favorite writers recorded their own audio versions of Stephen King’s On Writing.

That’s what this show is about.

It’s like Chef’s Table for writers. We go behind the scenes to uncover the meta-mechanics of writing, the lifestyle behind it, and all the ways you can make money at your keyboard. By learning how your favorite writers work, you’ll see your own creative process with fresh eyes.

The emphasis is mine, and between how over-produced the show looks and Perell’s Monetize-It! ethos it could not have been less than a match for me. But then he got the Marginal Revolution duo as his first set of guests, so give it a chance I will.

By the way, at what point do we stop calling them podcasts and start calling them YouTube shows with an audio-only track?

Happy 20th birthday to the Marginal Revolution blog, by the way. I remember the first post I saw — an assorted link list featuring a memorable bear-hiker interaction — but of course it is now impossible to find thanks to MRs rudimentary search. It is a blog, through and through.

Jake Seliger is a writer with an aggressive, incurable cancer, a wife — Bess — who is an ER doctor, and a blog:

We spend so much time buying, storing, corralling, searching, sorting, and thinking about stuff, and then we perish and what happens?

I mean that in a literal way: I die from that squamous cell carcinoma in my neck and lungs, and then what? What happens to Bess?

Have a tissue ready.

This weeks’s Galaxy Brain from Charlie Warzel, about the apparent decline of Wirecutter, is spot on:

Wirecutter’s trajectory is the story of what the internet does to most great ideas: It forces them to scale, and then others replicate the concepts at varying levels of quality until, eventually, an economic, algorithmic wildfire is burning. The original is consumed and left in a scarred landscape.

Not just the internet, I would say. It’s the American way of doing everything!

Figures from the which-arm-for-the-second-shot study I wrote about yesterday reminded me of the delightfully titled “An illusion of predictability in scientific results: Even experts confuse inferential uncertainty and outcome variability” published in PNAS. [Note: ↬Dean Eckles ] To be clear, this is not the error study authors made, but see for yourself the chart that got them a USA Today head nod:

So much variability! And even with 143 samples, still so much uncertainty. But increasing the sample size would help the variability much, as noted in PNAS:

You can squish the error bars, but you can’t squish your study population. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

But now that we have that figure from the vaccine article up, let’s note two more things:

• The percentages in question are absolutely tiny. Median is 0.06% in the ipsilateral and <0.03% in the contralateral group, if we just eyeball it. At that point you are looking at what, 2–3 dots on the flow cytometry scatterplot? Interoperator variability must be huge.
• Their cutoff for saying that someone “has” spike-directed CD8 T cells was, I presume from the dotted horizontal line labeled “DL”, 0.03%. They based this off of historic values of unvaccinated healthy controls from this paper from the same group. I may be getting into the weeds too much here, but the text of that article says that “0.03% of reactive T cells was set as the detection limit based on the distribution of T cell frequencies after control stimulations”. This is so vague that it’s perfectly useless, but looking at Figure 1 gives it away: they picked one standard deviation away from the mean for the CD4-positive cells as the detection limit for both CD8-positive and CD4-positive spike-specific T cells. And even in that experiment, the variability of spike-specific CD8 T cells is so much greater than that of the CD4+ ones (0.02% versus >1% maximum in the healthy, unvaccinated and unexposed-to-SARS-CoV-2 controls). So they are not only extrapolating old experimental data into the new one, they are extrapolating one cell type into another when no such extrapolation should be made. Put hey, it came out in Nature Medicine, so it must be OK. Sigh.