🗃️ Chris Aldrich’s advice on zettelkasten for course work applies to anyone who is just getting introduced to a new field:

A zettelkasten practice like that of Niklas Luhmann is more useful when one already has a strong lay of the land and they’re attempting to do the work of expanding on the boundaries of new areas of knowledge.

…

If you’re attempting to create 30 permanent notes a day and interlink them all, then you’re going to find yourself overworked and overwhelmed within just a few days.

This is why slip boxes get abandoned: not because they’re empty, but because they are full on unintelligible gunk. And doing it digital — looking at you, Obsidian and Roam — just makes it worse for those without discipline.

🏀 You know it’s bad when they have to send the mascot out to the nosebleed seats to animate the crowd. A 13-point differential at the end was too generous to the Wizards.

I am not a fan of legalese, but this case of typographic mischief was right up my alley. Just read the judge’s closing paragraph:

The Court further notes that the last thing any party needs is more words on a page. The length of an argument is no guarantee of its success, and indeed could result in more confusion, not clarity. Moving forward, the Parties are encouraged to spend their valuable time focusing on the merits of this case, and certainly not figuring out how many sometimes-useless words will fit on a page.

Words to live by! (ᔥMatthew Butterick, who was — no suprise there — involved in the case)

So, who wants to dismantle the FDA, you ask? Some patient advocacy groups, among others, aided by a few senators:

We need the FDA to be more insulated from these forces. Instead, every few years, legislators offer bills that amount to death by a thousand cuts for the agency. The latest is the Promising Pathways Act, which offers “conditional approval” of new drugs, without even the need for the preliminary evidence that accelerated approval requires (i.e., some indication that biomarkers associated with real outcomes like disease progression or survival are moving in the right direction in early drug studies).

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This bill is being pushed by powerful patient groups and has the support of Democratic senators like Kristin Gillibrand and Raphael Warnock, who should know better.

The bill would codify using “real-world data” and unvalidated surrogate endpoints for something called “provisional approval”, a level below the already tenuous accelerated approval.

I can see how it may appeal to patients: you may get a promising new drug for your life-threatening, debilitating disease sooner via this pathway. On the other hand, there are already mechanisms in place that enable access to these: a clinical trial, for one. Or expanded access (a.k.a. “compassionate use”) for those who may not be eligible for a trial.

So how would “provisional approval” help? If anything, wouldn’t it transfer the risks and — importantly — costs of drug development from the drug manufacturer/sponsor/study investigator to the patient?

Ultimately, the reason why there aren’t many cures for rare, terminal diseases is not because the big bad FDA is keeping the already developed drugs away from patients but rather because they are devilishly difficult to develop at our current level of technology. Wouldn’t it then make more sense to work on advancing the technology ⊕ The careful reader will note that the opposite is being done, and I write this as no great fan of AI. that would lead to those new cures? I worry that the Promising Pathways Act would solve a problem that doesn’t exist by adding to the already skyrocketing costs of American health care. But that could be just me.

(↬Derek Lowe)

Do you know about a horse named Jim? The one whose tetanus-contaminated serum was used to make diphtheria antitoxin that killed kids:

These failures in oversight led to the distribution of antitoxin that caused the death of 12 more children, which were highly publicized by newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer as part of his general opposition to the practice of vaccination.

There is a straight line from Jim to the creation of US FDA, in case you want to remove that particular Chesterton’s fence.

Bryan Vartabedian on the angry email:

The angry email is usually rooted in frustration over inefficiencies or some nagging problem that hasn’t been fixed. Ultimately, it’s about the fantasy of the willful imposition of change by the sender. […] The defining element of the angry email is that it’s ultimately regretted. Or it should be.

I’ve written thousands of angy emails in my head, a dozen or so on the computer, and sent zero to date. If there is a next one, I’ll write it in longhand.

One of the better DC landscapes I’ve seen. And by a Serbian artist, no less. The painting hangs in the Residence of Serbia’s Ambassador to the United States, which just opened, and looks like it’ll be a nice venue for exhibits and gatherings.

I’ve been on bluesky’s wait list long enough for it to become irrelevant, so of course I received an invite code last night. If you want to see an empty profile that probably won’t see much use check out @miljko.bsky.social.