Take time ot mow the flowers.

Newsweek, a Voice of the Crust.

Vegan diets have been growing in popularity in recent years. However, experts investigated the impacts of an all-plant based diet in mice and found that it had a worrying effect on their liver.

Researchers at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, saw that when mice were switched to an exclusively plant-based diet, within only a few days their liver function changed and they experienced a significant decrease in motivation to do physical activity.

Unlike human vegans, who are a pain in the ass wherever they go.

Not the Bee.

I mean it. This might be the best thing on Instagram this week.

Trisha Fenimore, a conservative content creator, posted a series of videos on Wednesday theorizing about a “conspiracy” by the Left to break major sex scandals right before elections to sway female voters.

Rollo Tomassi made the same point on his podcast last Sunday. He predicted that on the day after the election the Cornell 7 will disappear into the void. Considering that the incident happened two years ago, I think he’s got a point.

Don’t call it ‘conspiracy theory’—call it ‘spoiler alert’.

Read it.

To indoctrinate Leftists, of course. Ask me a hard one.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Dutch dairy co-operative FrieslandCampina, for example, no longer sells whey proteins for animal feed. Instead, it intends to turn more of the whey left over from cheesemaking into concentrated proteins for human nutrition.

For centuries whey has been seen as a byproduct of cheesemaking and used for fertiliser or animal feed. Now, says Guus Aerts, the co-op’s global director of marketing and product strategy, “to some extent, cheese has already become a byproduct of whey.”

This turnaround reflects a protein boom that is reshaping the food industry. From dairy co-operatives to meat processors, companies are extracting more valuable ingredients from materials they once sold cheaply, while food manufacturers compete to secure supplies. The appetite for protein is driving billions in factory investments and acquisitions.

“Protein is increasingly [dictating] what food companies produce, where they invest capital, and how they differentiate and grow,” says Brian Earnest, lead animal protein economist at agribusiness lender CoBank.

Robb Report.

Elon Musk is not a funny man. Well, not the sort of funny that makes you laugh until your ribs ache. Forward-thinking people in the U.S. and beyond initially embraced Tesla for its all-electric foresight, and techy types recognized the genius of its software integration. But did anyone notice the company’s tongue-in-cheek naming strategy? There was the Model S, followed eventually by the 3, X, and Y. Arrange them in Musk’s preferred order and you get S-3-X-Y. See what he did there? Never mind the pesky numeral—or, for that matter, the actual order in which the cars arrived. Musk isn’t the sort of guy who’s lets a minor linguistic or chronological irritation get in the way of a grand plan. The aberrant digit only crept in because Ford owned the rights to Model E and wasn’t interested in selling. Still, 3 works, right… ?

It’s conceivable that all the great automotive names have been taken. Let’s hope not, but inspiration is increasingly difficult to come by. I was in the room—the Sky Lounge of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, in fact—when Ferrari executive chairman John Elkann revealed that the company’s first electric car would be called Luce. In Italian, it means “light,” as in “seeing the light,” rather than the opposite of heavy. Quite clever, really, although English speakers invariably pronounce it “Lucy” when, in fact, it’s “LU-chay.” Judging by the online reaction to the car’s launch, pronunciation issues are the least of its challenges. Turns out Ferrari’s ardent fan base is curiously conservative. Still, I admire the bravery.

I like the name ‘Bumbershoot’. I would buy such a car.

Watch it.

We don’t have the technology … yet….

Read it.

Claudius had native informants, a practising priesthood, imperial money and a library at Alexandria endowed to read his Etruscan history aloud once a year, forever. Not one sentence of it survives.

Read it.

Modern visions for the future of human-computer interaction are excessively focused on smart glasses and headsets – devices that are constraining & socially awkward.

This project explores an alternative direction – a speculative device called the Lightbulb Computer that uses modern projector technology & computer vision advancements to blend ambient computation & spatial information display in everyday spaces.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these.

Babylon Bee.

Shake it, shake it!

Josh Pray.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

In evolutionary biology this is called ‘mate choice copying’ and it has been monetized by Michael Sartain for his Men of Action program.

The last woman who hit on me while I was wearing a wedding ring was my wife. Can’t say it doesn’t work.

Read it.

Harden uses this autobiographical episode as a springboard into deeper philosophical questions about what it means to be responsible in an era when science can predict who is more likely to commit a crime based purely on their DNA. She ponders whether we should take people’s genetics into account when deciding “whether and how they should be punished for the sins they commit.” She asks, “Does science let us off the hook … or is science, in the end, as accusatory as a bad acid trip…?” Importantly, she tackles these questions about causation and responsibility as someone who was “raised religious and fled the church as an adult,” addressing her book to “modern, enlightened” readers like herself who “don’t believe in God anymore.”

Harden made a first attempt to grapple with these questions in her previous book, The Genetic Lottery, in which she sought to put a progressive spin on the finding that current social inequalities are partly due to genetic differences between people. Unfortunately, both of Harden’s books fail to confront the hard choices that a naturalistic worldview presents us with, though each fails to meet this challenge in a different way. The naturalistic worldview implies that all human behaviour has non-supernatural causes of one kind or another. Insofar as that view is accepted, there are only two possibilities: either moral responsibility is compatible with the comprehensive causation of human behaviour or moral responsibility cannot exist. We might call this the “determinist’s dilemma.”

It doesn’t matter whether our genes determine our behavior: The body, like an economy, is a system so complex that it is effectively unpredictable, and therefore the results are exactly the same as if we had free will. Do some reading on chaos theory and it will open your eyes. (Or just go watch the first 15 minutes of Jurassic Park.)

The Economist, a Voice of the Crust.

Hint: No.

Jeff St. James: “Men want to be married, women want to get married.”

Read it.

Scientists accidentally discovered a microscopic organism with a genetic code that breaks a rule researchers thought was nearly universal. While testing a new DNA sequencing technique, they examined a previously unknown protist collected from a freshwater pond at Oxford University. To their surprise, the organism uses two genetic signals that normally mark the end of a gene to encode two entirely different amino acids instead. These signals were previously thought to evolve together, making the discovery particularly remarkable.

A gentle reminder that when life doesn’t act according to your rules, it’s your rule that is wrong, not life.

Read it.

There’s been an ongoing controversy over Donald Trump for the last decade, both when he appeared on the escalator in 2015, the campaign, the first term, the wilderness years, and the first two years of his second administration.

It works out like this. He has an art of the deal style, where he is bombastic, that he says wild things. He puts his opponents, his partners, whatever the situation is that he’s across the table from, off balance. He demands things that are ludicrous. People are shocked, they criticize him.

And then the negotiations continue, and Donald Trump gets an edge, maybe a 52, 53% edge over the original request. They sign a deal. Donald Trump is very careful not to insult his trading partner or his trading opponent in any deal. And then he says he might have been taken himself, and he walks away with a singular accomplishment.

And then people are troubled. They look at the result of the negotiations, and they’re impressed, especially if you’re Americans. But they also say the methodology clouds the achievement.

Let’s see if that’s a legitimate criticism.

I don’t think it is. I judge him by his results, and he’s gotten better results, from my point of view, than any President in my lifetime.

Read it.

Pure crack for a history geek like me.

Read it.

Note that all the bluest have their red areas around the fringes, while all of the reddest have a blue pustule in their central core.

Watch it.

hoe_math points out that once you see ’em you can’t unsee ’em.

More wisdom from hoe_math: Modern Women, Influencers, Propaganda [with Rachel Wilson]

Construction Physics.

In 1960, a team at the University of Illinois released the first version of their PLATO “computerized instruction system,” a network of what would eventually be thousands of computer terminals connected to large mainframe computers. Users of PLATO could use the system to learn about various topics, with courses on subjects such as chemistry, math, music, and foreign languages.

I remember PLATO from my years in graduate school at Indiana University. It raised expectations that have even now not yet been fulfilled.

The first iteration of PLATO used a simple TV screen for a terminal display, but this was at best a stopgap measure. TV screens used cathode ray tubes (CRTs), which used a magnetically deflected beam of electrons to paint an image on a glass screen. This beam redrew the entire screen 30 times a second, which meant that a computer had to feed the CRT screen a constant stream of high-bandwidth video data. This was fine for broadcast TV, since the same signal was being sent to every TV that received it, but on the PLATO system every terminal needed to be sent different data, depending on what the user was doing. Not only would this require high-bandwidth data connections between the mainframes and the PLATO terminals, it would force each terminal to have a large amount of memory storage to hold the video data, which at the time was extremely expensive. CRT-based screens worked well enough for a small system with a few terminals, but it was felt that the technology wouldn’t scale to the thousands or millions of terminals the PLATO designers envisioned. What was needed was a new type of screen, one that had a built-in “memory.” On such a screen, only the things that changed on the screen would need to be redrawn, which would dramatically reduce the bandwidth and data storage such a screen required compared to a CRT.

The change in personal computers from escape-code text to memory-mapped video was a major advance.

Donald Bitzer, one of the architects of the PLATO system, considered possible methods that might be used to make such a display. One potential option was gas plasma — running an electric current through a low-pressure gas, which would cause that gas to glow. Scientists had been making low-pressure gases glow using electric current since the 1600s, and the phenomenon had been used in neon signs since the early 20th century. But no one had yet found a way to turn the phenomenon into a computer display, which would require an array of thousands or even millions of independently controlled tiny gas plasma lamps, one for each pixel on the screen. Bitzer decided it was worth trying.

I lusted in my heart for a Grid Compass when I was younger. Ah, those were the days.

Read it.

This is a screw-cutting lathe of the kind Henry Maudslay built in London around 1800. A labourer turns the large wheel to spin the bar in the middle, and a cutting tool moves along beside it on a carriage that slides on straight iron rails. A long screw moves the carriage the same distance on every turn of the bar, cutting a thread into its surface. Lathes like this made shafts and screws for steam engines, looms, locomotives and other lathes.

But the lathe’s own parts have to be accurate first. If a rail is bent, the tool follows the bend. If the turns of the screw are unevenly spaced, the thread it cuts will be uneven too. These errors leave pistons leaking, shafts wobbling in their bearings and nuts jamming on their bolts. In the 1770s, workshops were still struggling to make large cylinders round, long rails straight and screw threads evenly spaced. Even checking their work was difficult: the smallest mark on an ordinary workshop rule was a sixteenth of an inch, about a millimetre and a half.

By the 1850s, Joseph Whitworth had built a machine that could detect a difference of a millionth of an inch. In this article we’ll follow how workshops learned to make flat surfaces, cut accurate screws and measure their parts, using interactive figures to explore each step (try dragging the lathe above, or zooming with ?/Ctrl + scroll). Let’s start with the cylinder of Watt’s steam engine, which we built in the previous article.

Read it.

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun.

Despite this, the elites of nineteenth-century Britain were, by their own lights, extremely successful. For much of the century, Britain was the richest country on Earth. Its companies dominated global commerce, industry and finance. Its huge navy reigned over the world’s oceans, and its tiny army won a long sequence of wars while keeping watch over an enormous empire. Britain progressed gradually toward democracy with none of the revolutions and civil wars that wracked continental Europe. There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well. Huel, STEM, and cold baths have their merits. But the example of the Victorians should make us hesitate before concluding that there is only one way to rule the world.

…

Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.

Babylon Bee.

Local man Chris Pinson made a bold guess today that the name of the Mall of America terror plot suspect would turn out to rhyme with “Bohammed.”

Great guess. Sign that guy up on a prediction market.

Read it.Canadian health researchers are urging the country to choose permanent standard time over permanent daylight saving time if it ends the twice-yearly clock change, warning that darker winter mornings could harm sleep and mental health.

As always, government is the reason why we can’t have nice things.

Oh, and if you don’t subscribe to Bluebird of Bitterness, my source for this cartoon, the angels will weep for you.

Read it.

Funny how the people telling kids to get jobs in the trades tend to be white-collar.

Or maybe not so funny….

There’s a popular story about working in the trades that goes something like this: College prices have spiraled wildly out of control, while trades salaries have skyrocketed, often surpassing those of college graduates. Even if you do get a degree, AI will displace most knowledge work. So why would anyone, the story goes, spend $200,000 on a worthless college education when union electricians make six figures performing work that’s impossible to replace with AI? There’s a populist angle here, too: The nerds with guaranteed B averages who waltzed into high-paying jobs will get their comeuppance as they’re pushed aside by the hard-working blue-collar moderates who ceaselessly toil at the real work of building the country!

The skilled trades hold a special place in the public imagination as a route out of poverty. Trades have advocates like Mike Rowe, former opera singer and host of the TV show Dirty Jobs, whose foundation routes smart, hard-working kids into the trades via scholarships. (Today, its website prominently advertises “AI-proof six-figure jobs.”) But Rowe has something in common with most people selling this popular narrative: a college degree.

Trades workers tell a very different story. When I was an apprentice over 30 years ago, we would tease the old-timers for badgering us to quit construction and return to school (the “look at these hands” lecture). In fact, one of the most reliable indicators of an apprentice’s low intelligence was being quickly embraced by old-timers, because it meant they immediately recognized that the kid’s greatest potential was in construction.

No one understood the physical demands and uncertain rewards of trades jobs better than older tradespeople. So take it from an older tradesman: The story is more complicated than you might think.

Read it.

One of the enduring weaknesses of the modern US economy is the lack of redundancy. As long as most of the world is operating normally and there are no serious geopolitical disruptions, America’s “just in time” system works fine. But, throw a monkey-wrench into distribution, global exports, freight systems, shipping or elements of production and cracks quickly form in the armor.

This does not mean that the US economy can’t adapt; the pandemic shutdowns were horrifically pointless but they did prove that the system has the ability to function despite deep deficiencies. However, when it comes to the management of vital resources, such as energy resources, it’s clear that some changes need to be made in the near term.

Before the war in Iran a large portion of the public was oblivious to the fact that the US is the largest exporter of oil in the world, and of the foreign oil supplies we do receive, only 8% come from Gulf nation producers. A mere 7% of those supplies travel through the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, the US doesn’t rely on the Gulf for oil. With the new Venezuelan deal and oil flows from the gulf back to 98% of pre-conflict levels, the war is even less of a concern when it comes to US energy.

Similarly, the U.S. has too few competent Navy ships because it has too few competent shipyards—in marked contrast to China, South Korea, and Japan, for example.

Read it.

The first being the ‘social science’ is in any meaningful respect a science.

Read it.

Amelia was originally a character in a videogame developed by the UK government to tell kids that they should…and they darn well better…avoid ‘hate speech’ and other unapproved behavior. However, she has been turned, and Amelia characters have been deployed by several creators to make videos focused on traditional British patriotism.

Some of the best Amelia videos have been done by Epochalypse–many, but not all of them, are musical and visual settings of Kipling poems.

Read it.

Housing prices ultimately come down to supply and demand. So how has Tokyo managed to keep housing relatively affordable, while New York has struggled to do the same?

Tokyo has been focused on keeping up with demand; its housing stock nearly tripled between 1963 and 2013, reaching 7.36 million homes. To do this, Japan keeps zoning flexible. Instead of limiting each area to a single use, zoning allows homes, shops, and light industry to coexist on the same blocks. Projects that follow these rules can be built “as-of-right,” without discretionary review or giving neighbors the power to block them.

As usual, government is the reason we can’t have nice things.

Quillette.

What is the purpose of a university? People ask this question all the time in conferences about academic freedom and the future of higher education. But an institution like the academy has different purposes for different people. And this is what we should expect in the modern world. A company likely has one purpose for its customers, another for its employees, another for its shareholders, and maybe a fourth for society at large. So too with academia. But do these varying purposes have any common thread?

The whole educational establishment is a massive illustration of Scott Adams’ contrast of goals vs. systems. Modern education is based on goals when it ought to be based on systems.

Anybody who gets 60% of the questions correct on a test will get an F. But think about it. The test-taker has absorbed almost two-thirds of what was being taught. And this is denigrated as failure? The distinction between ‘goals’ and ‘objectives’ needs to have a great place in our lives.

Rory Sutherland:

Actually, the really good thing about capitalism is that it solves the same problem in eighteen different ways.

The Foundry.

The Democratic Socialists of America believes that if society were to eliminate “the nuclear family,” which it describes as a “structure built to preserve capitalism,” the United States would enjoy more “women’s, queer, and Indigenous liberation.”

I’m here to debunk that myth. This is nothing more than another DSA fairy tale.

When I was a child, attempting to flee Venezuela after the communist uprising of 1998, my parents, who were of age and not Venezuelan nationals, were allowed to leave the country. I wasn’t, simply because I was a kid. I was considered “property of the state.”

Divine intervention is what granted my family and me a life here in the United States, a country we now call home.

Now, this move by the Venezuelan regime was not intended to liberate women, as I’m not one, or to advance the cause of Indigenous self-determination, as I’m not Indigenous either. The Indigenous population of Venezuela was and remains a minority of the country’s population.