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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pilethe 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,
[Note:
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.
