🍿 Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) is a better sign of Pixar’s fall from relevancy than their box office bomb that wasn’t (and which, NB, we haven’t seen yet). Ruby…, you see, is one of many recent animated movies influenced by Spider-Verse… for style and The Mitchells… for substance. I would rather have watched either of those for the umpteenth time than Ruby… this once, but it was set under water so the kids liked it.

I’ve been down on D.C. recently so I’d like to make one thing clear: it is a great city to live in, work in, and visit, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise (you know who they are).

1. It wasn’t the movie I wanted to see. The best, most dramatic parts, the ones that people (where by “people” I mean myself) actually cared for were in Los Alamos and centered around the atomic bomb. So Nolan chose the wrong book to make into a movie: it is all about the bomb, not the man.
2. Or, if you are to be so anthropocentric, why make it about only one man? The Manhattan project featured so many colorful, smart, obnoxious characters that it would have been the perfect ensemble movie. Have Wes Anderson do it (although, yes, he kind of did). Have Aaron Sorkin do it! Because Nolan will inevitably turn everything he touches into a puzzle box, and…
3. this time, his puzzle is pretty puny. There is a moment near the end of the second act which felt like a parody of an M. Night Shyamalan twist. “I knew it, it was X all along”, she screams and throws her glass on the floor in a culmination of… nothing much, actually. Because what is revealed was obvious, and there is nothing leading up to that moment that would make you think anyone was even paying attention to some milquetoast backdoor machinations. It felt like a piece of film got lost on the cutting room floor. Maybe that’s the twist?
4. Hans Zimmer was not involved in the making of the score, though you could have fooled me. Having a movie set in the 1930s through the 1960s feature only the migraine-inducing synthetic throb of Gotham’s best instead of some period music, even during the (many) party scenes, was a choice for choice’s sake and a stupid one at that.
5. To be clear, the cinematography is wonderful, the casting of Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer perfect, and dear oh dear wasn’t that scene with Gary Oldman just marvelous? They deserve all the praise and awards they will likely get, if the juries still remember them by the time the awards season comes because there are at least two more potentially great movies to watch out for. What a great time for cinema.

I vaguely remember learning about The Curator’s Code from Marco Arment’s blog and sharing his lack of enthusiasm: I still don’t quite grasp the difference between “via” (ᔥ per the Code) and “hat tip” (↬). But 10 years later, why not give it a shot? ↬Tedium.

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.

Economists are prone to making hypotheses about other fields that make perfect sense to them and others outside of the field, but that can be easily refuted to anyone with an iota of relevant field-specific knowledge. [Note: And not just economists. This very sentence is, in fact, one such hypothesis. ]

But to get to the point: Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution wrote a post titled Left Digit Bias in Medicine which excerpted his WSJ review of Random Acts of Medicine which is a book about “The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health”, which is, believe it or not, part of the title. ⊕ [Note: I hate, hate, hate what book titles have become. This is the literary equivalent of the Amazon product name trash recently discussed on ATP. SEO for books as an externality of Amazon’s dominance — who would have guessed? ]

Now, I haven’t read the book yet, and the WSJ is behind a paywall, so I only have the excerpt to go by, but it is long and it is sufficient. I won’t quote from it — 4th level of abstraction would be too much — but I will copy the figure and make a few comments. You should read the blog post itself, it is good.

1. This is the biggest and the most obvious regression discontinuity I have seen, and it has a reasonable explanation. Kudos.
2. Age is plotted as a continuous variable. This is not how doctors see the patient’s age in their medical record. It is shown as an integer, not a fraction, so someone who is a day shy of their 40th birthday will look just the same as someone who just turned 39. And if the guidelines say you should do something for a 40-year-old but not for a 39-year-old, that’s what most doctors — let’s hope — will do.
3. This is therefore not left-digit bias.
4. While the date of birth is also part of the medical record, it is rarely if ever looked at by MDs — except just prior to an invasive procedure that requires a timeout. It is often checked by nurses prior to administering medications, and they are often the ones who will note that an inpatient’s birthday is coming up.
5. Tabarrok has buried the lead in his blog post. Regardless of the cause, the discontinuity is there and can be used as pseudo-rendomization for a natural experiment of the effect of “testing for heart attacks” (I will guess by that the others meant an ECG and troponin levels) on outcomes. The entire last paragraph of the excerpt is about that, and I 100% endorse the idea.

Chris Arnade wrote a delightful little story from Japan after a few not so great experiences, and it’s great, you should read it, but what really got me nodding was when at the end he meets a young couple at the airport and they start telling him about the cool places they’ll see in Tokyo, and

I wanted to tell them though, slow down, stop trying to maximize your experience by checking off a list and maximize your experience by letting stuff happen naturally, and connecting with people.

It may be a matter of age because a few decades ago I was that young couple, solo edition, but, as the solo became a 2+3, slowed down by necessity, and lo and behold the best experiences on trips were not the ones we planned but the ones we got while looking for a restroom in Richmond for a just-out-of-diapers toddler, let’s say.

So yes, it’s a cliche. Slow down. Take it all in. Don’t overthink and overplan. ⊕ [Note: But do think and plan. Everything in moderation: another good cliche. ] But you know what? It’s true! Even more so when the young’uns are under pressure to deliver that perfect shareable shot.

An update on room-temperature superconductivity from Derek Lowe:

I am guardedly optimistic at this point. […] This is by far the most believable shot at room-temperature-and-pressure superconductivity the world has seen so far, and the coming days and weeks are going to be extremely damned interesting.

Hurray for interesting times.