☕️ Entered a recently opened shop with Counter Culture Coffee logo on the window. Turns out it was their wholesale department/training center, not a store. They apologized for the confusion and let me take a bag of freshly roasted beans. This is how you get a customer for life.
Eeast coast beach vacations in December are underrated (Virginia Beach, VA)
Finished reading: Checkpoint Charlie by Iain MacGregor 📚
Stories of the Berlin Wall, told through interviews with (mostly Westen) contemporaries, ranging from suspensful to the mundane, meant not to offend anyone, not even the Soviets. It’s an achievement of sorts, I guess.
Fascinating how people least deserving of sitting at the table are so often the ones making the most noise.
Finished reading: Genius by James Gleick 📚
The temptation for scientists' biographers is delving too deep into their work, and not their life or process. Feynman himself gave a good account of the work, and Gleick does a great job with the life. The process remains a mystery.
Some beautiful charts in this Pew Research overview of their 2022 findings. What they show is not as beautiful, but you can’t win them all.
To all trainees who are smart and lazy: no, you are not getting away with it. Sure, you can creatively avoid responsibilities on your way to graduation, but it will burn many more bridges than you realize. Your teachers aren’t stupid.
🎮 Finished playing Little Nightmares with my daughter yesterday and it is not what I expected a 5-year-old to be into but she ended up being in charge for most of it.
Survival horror: a great thing to do together as a family.
Fad of the day: Longtermism.
Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts to reduce existential risks to humanity.
This is how you reduce existenal risks to humanity: avoid ruin. The rest is gobbledygook meant to dazzle venture capitalists and other sources of funding.
Samuel G Rodriques If you were looking for his blog’s RSS feed, you won’t find one listed. Thankfully, NetNewsWire was able to dig up the url. is an inventor, entrepreneur, and author of my favorite blog post so far this year:
Serious drug developers have long since learned not to trust animal models when it comes to predicting the efficacy of a treatment for most diseases.
And also:
There is a phenomenon that all biologists will be aware of, where after working on a new idea for 2 years, you one day come across a paper from 2008 and say, “oh my god, if only I had known this two years ago.” If we want biology to move fast, we need to figure out how to eliminate this phenomenon.
And:
In biology, until recently, it seemed like everyone wanted to be a professor or start a company, i.e., that the only high status thing you could do after your PhD was to become a manager.
Not sure I agree with his prescriptions, but the diagnosis is right!