Read it.

A massive, yearslong study shows the overwhelming majority of young people who identify as transgender will grow out of the diagnosis within five years.

Forbes.

“Where are all the genetic cures?” asks Denis Noble, a frustrated biophysicist, Royal Society fellow and pioneer of the field of systems biology. “They don’t exist. Where will they be? They won’t exist.” Since mapping the human genome in 2003, research priorities and funding shifted significantly towards genetics. The investment improved disease detection and management but failed to deliver on its promise of cures for our most common deadly diseases like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s and most cancers. Compounding the issue, a large-scale, 2023 study concluded that genetic risk scores perform poorly at predicting who’s going to develop common diseases. For Noble, the billions invested annually in genetic research represents less of a strategy and more of a scientific confusion—that we are our genes.

Read it.

I still tend to think in 24-hour terms.

Watch it.

Hoe_math explains why promiscuity is a Bad Thing.

Read it.

Nearly 1 million American citizens living abroad are considering renouncing their citizenship due to U.S. tax filing requirements, according to 1040 Abroad, a tax filing firm for expatriates.

There is a YouTube channel called Nomad Capitalist that specializes in such things. It’s motto is “Go Where You’re Treated Best”. Apparently the U.S. ain’t it.

Read it.

We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews (n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey (N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

Read it.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Read it.

The new Conservative New Zealand Coalition Government has cancelled a climate flatulence tax which was due to start in 2025.

Tyler Cowan, an economist at George Mason University in D.C.

The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain. South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a larger role in its history and also in its present. You can put different glosses on that, but a variety of those paths lead to right-wing conclusions. The left-wing lessons are more novel to ponder, here are a few.

Cowan is generally libertarian, and when dealing with libertarians, labels such as ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-wing’ really say more about which Modern Political Tribe one belongs to than it does to the labelee. Generally libertarians tend to be realistic about Noticing, so he’s got that going for him.

Read it.

As the Supreme Court gears up to conclude its decision season by the end of June, several high-stakes cases loom that could significantly alter the nation’s political and social fabric in a crucial election year.

Read it.

When a lot of people think about AI, they think, “Oh, it’s going to fool people into believing stuff that’s not true.” But what it’s really doing is giving people permission to not believe stuff that is true. Because they can say, “Oh, that’s an AI-generated image. AI can generate anything now: video, audio, the entire war zone re-created.” They will use it as an excuse. It’s just easy for them to say.

Follow the Nomad Capitalist on YouTube.

Watch it.

It’s not what you think.

Read it.

If you are a fan of reading or watching science fiction, you have definitely encountered the concept of curvature propulsion — one of the most fascinating and speculative frontiers in theoretical physics and advanced space travel.

Rooted in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it proposes innovative methods to manipulate spacetime itself to achieve faster-than-light travel without violating the laws of physics.

Read it.

Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors resigned from the embattled charity in 2021, but the charity suffered from the excesses of her tenure well into 2023, according to a copy of its latest tax return obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Under Cullors’s leadership, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation doled out massive contracts to her friends and family, purchased a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles in 2020, and financed the purchase of an $8 million mansion in Canada in 2021. By the end of its 2023 fiscal year, the tax forms show, Black Lives Matter saw the $80 million windfall it raked in during the George Floyd riots of 2020 diminish to under $29 million as it hemorrhaged cash fulfilling lingering contractual obligations to Cullors’s associates.

Those individuals include Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’s only child, whose art firm Trap Heals received $778,000 from Black Lives Matter in 2023 despite performing no work for the charity that year.

I guess black bucks matter even more.

Watch it.

This is why men think about the Roman empire at least once a week.

Read it.

The giants of the early days of tech, like Bill Gates and Michael Dell, had one thing in common: they were all autodidacts. These computer-geeks turned billionaires were and still are so much more than just gifted — they are self-learners. Early in their careers, they questioned formal paths to success, learned complex information all by themselves (most of them also dropping out of college) even though the information was still mostly inaccessible.

Today, 20 years after Google was founded, technological advancements have changed everything: access to information has improved immensely, freeing us of institutional education’s monopoly of learning.

Read it.

Take a look at the average corporate car park and it will look like a still from a black-and-white movie. The vast majority of cars sold in the United States continue to be grayscale colors: black, white, gray, and silver—and it’s getting worse. According to data from iSeeCars, there’s been a 20% increase in grayscale cars over the past 20 years.

In 2004, grayscale cars made up 60.3% of the new car market, which is an understandable number. Grayscale colors are simple, widely liked, and look good on most cars. However, in 2023, that number jumped to a staggering 80%. And, according to iSeeCars, automakers offer the same number of different colors now as they did in 2004, with an average of 6.7 non-grayscale colors. So it isn’t that automakers are afraid of interesting colors. Customers just don’t seem to want them.

Wall Street Journal.

Why are so many Americans forgoing new vehicles? Used cars are not just a better bargain, they retain designs and features more coveted than their high-tech replacements.

Read it.

Why do we like Tolkien’s stories? This question has puzzled many authors who have dedicated books, studies, and essays to Middle-earth. Even some of the critics who have downplayed the value of the British author, considering him an unserious writer who invented escapist fairy tales for adults, could not suppress their curiosity when The Lord of the Rings trilogy was declared by Waterstones to be the most read novel of the 20th century. “How is this possible?” they wondered. “A storyteller, even if he is an Oxford professor, became the most influential author of the 20th century? Surely Hesse, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, Marquez, and many others were the most read, the most beloved citizens of the Republic of Letters. Why do readers like Tolkien’s stories?”

If you have to ask, you’ll never understand the answer.

Thank you, Justin “Benito” Trudeau.

Wikipedia.

In the year 2017, the United States has fragmented into post-apocalyptic wastelands with a few civilized areas. An ongoing economic crisis has led to the recycling of aging 20th-century mechanical and technological equipment. Society has also become averse to intimacy, as well as both increasingly hypersexualized and bureaucratic. Robotic technology has produced gynoids as substitutes for wives. The declining instances of actual sex among men and women is litigious, with one brothel having lawyers draft up contracts detailing the intended sexual rendezvous.

Only missed it by a couple of years. I blame COVID.

YouTuber hoe_math explains it all to you.

Takes ‘Do I need to draw you a picture?’ to a whole new level.

“What kind of person you are is the choices that you make. We have no way to judge you other than your choices, that’s what we can see.”

We are what we do.

• Not what we think.
• Not what we believe.
• Not what we say.
• Not what we wish.

WHAT WE DO. That is the thing and the whole of the thing.

Jesus knew this and made it quite clear–read Matthew 5: 31 et seq.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The real power of the media is the power to ignore, so noticing what they ignore is a good way to get a sense of what is happening in the regime. Sometimes they ignore something because it has no interest to the rulers and sometimes it is just to prevent anyone from discussing it. There are times when the media gives something a good leaving alone because the regime does not know how to respond.

The Trump verdict may be the last option. We had the usual stuff on the day it happened, but then the story sort of just disappeared. There were a few conservative cucks doing their normal cuckery, but otherwise the conservatives followed the crowd, which laughed and jeered the verdict. The kooks even had to accept that this was not going to be the winner they imagined. As a result, the story just died.

One possible reason is the verdict has created more problems for the regime, as no one has any idea what to do about it. The whole point of the lawfare gambit was to scare away Trump’s support or bully him out of the race. Instead, he has bulled his way forward to the nomination and he has more support than ever. Like Project Ukraine, the prophesies have not come true and there is no plan B.

CNN.

“Cozy” is Voice-of-the-Crust for ‘small’. The home in question is 600 sq. ft., which is about 25×25. That’s a good size for a one-bed apartment, but not what I’d call a ‘home’.

The new printer can produce objects as large as 96 feet long by 32 feet wide by 18 feet?high and can print up to 500 pounds per hour. Dagher says that the goal is to be able to print 1,000 pounds of material in an hour. At that rate, it could reproduce the BioHome3D in 48 hours, he says.

96′ x 32′ is 3,072 sq.ft. Yet what they ‘bolted together’ is only 600 sq.ft. Hmmmm….

Notice that the walls are 3D-printer horizontal wavicles, which will attract dust like nobody’s business. The first thing people are going to do is plaster that wall flat, or sheet-rock it. So much for the warm-fuzzy-wood vibe.

There are some obstacles to overcome first. “It takes years for codes to change,” says Dagher, referring to building codes that construction companies must meet.

Your tax dollars at work. Good luck getting that past the bureaucrat-and-union-pillared Democrat regime in most urban areas. The reason housing costs are so high in the People’s Republic of Maine is because government employees are restricting the supply of housing through strict zoning and environmental regulations, and union labor are filling their pockets and won’t look kindly on somebody trying to bring in a 3D house printer to ‘take union jobs’.

Will CNN report on it when it all comes a cropper? I think not. (‘Oh, look, MAGA squirrels!”)

Watch: Why 3D Printing Buildings Leads to Problems

Read it.

There’s actually a very obvious answer, which is that our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance over the Shire. This isn’t really extrapolation or interpretation, it’s more-or-less text, and I suspect the only reason it’s not spelled out is because Tolkien assumed any reader would understand that intuitively. Bilbo and Frodo are both gentlemen of leisure because the Baggins family is independently wealthy, and that wealth almost has to come from land ownership, because there isn’t enough industry or trade to sustain it. They can afford to go on adventures and study Elven poetry because they draw their income from tenant farmers renting their land. Merry and Pippin are from an even higher social tier; both are the heirs to powerful families that hold quasi-feudal offices (the Master of Buckland, for the Brandybucks, and the Thain, for the Tooks).

The strict definition of ‘farmer’ is someone who works another’s land. We use ‘farmer’ these days for anybody involved in agriculture because the Anglo-Saxon term ‘husbandman’ has fallen out of use.

Read it.

Imagine you could go back in time to the ancient world to jump-start the Industrial Revolution. You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc.

But to your dismay, the emperor responds: “Your mechanism is no gift to us. It is tremendously complicated; it would take my best master craftsmen years to assemble. It is made of iron, which could be better used for weapons and armor. And even if we built these engines, they would consume enormous amounts of fuel, which we need for smelting, cooking, and heating. All for what? Merely to save labor. Our empire has plenty of labor; I personally own many slaves. Why waste precious iron and fuel in order to lighten the load of a slave? You are a fool!”

My mother had the same habit.

Jonathan Turley.

Below is my column in the Hill on the most compelling grounds for an appeal in the Trump case after his conviction on 34 counts in Manhattan. There has been considerable criticism of the defense team and its strategy in the case, including some moves that may undermine appellate issues. However, after the instructions became public, I wrote a column that I thought the case was nearly un-winnable, even for those of us who previously saw a chance for a hung jury. Clarence Darrow would likely have lost with those instructions after the errors in the case by Judge Juan Merchan. At that point, it became a legal canned hunt. So the attention will now shift to the appellate courts. While it may be tough going initially in the New York court system for the former president, this case could well end up in the federal system and the United States Supreme Court. The thrill kill environment of last week may then dissipate as these glaring errors are presented in higher courts.

I pick Fauci too. Empty the magazine.

Read it.

I now make a distinction between education and learning. With education someone else decides what they’re going to teach you, and they push it onto you. With learning you get interested in a questions and pull the answer from books, people, videos, and other resources, and the information sticks.

I don’t think there’s much overlap between education and learning. Rarely a student will be interested in what the teacher is teaching (by coincidence or because the teacher is good at generating interest), and when that happens, the information sticks. But most of the time the two are unrelated and the student remembers little.

We’re all told that education and learning are the same—if education is happening, then learning is happening. And students go through years of education. No wonder they think that learning is something to be avoided! They’ve rarely actually experienced it. We all figure out that education (and, incorrectly, learning) is a game where the teacher tries to get you to remember something and you try to do as little work as possible while getting acceptable grades.

…

If you decide to homeschool, the most common question you’ll get from friends is, “What curriculum are you going to follow?” As soon as you use the word “curriculum”, you’ve already lost. You’re doing education, not learning, because the student isn’t pulling information they’re excited about, they’re having your curriculum pushed on them.

“I wouldn’t mind living in a world ruled by software. What I actually live in is a world ruled by crappy software.” — John Derbyshire

Power Line.

For readers still puzzled about exactly how the Trump trial went down and why Alvin Bragg’s case was so convoluted, Brad Smith, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission whose testimony on this point was disallowed by Judge Merchan, offers this primer in two long threads on Twitter/X.

Read it.

Google pours millions into development of their email service called Gmail. Its operating costs are insanely high. Yet, the service is offered free of charge to billions of users.

Gmail is not even a Freemium service. It does not have a paid tier with which it compensates the free tier. Even if it did, we have learned through our own experience here at Migadu that free email services do not work without a catch.

We offered free email services between 2015 and 2020 to more than 200.000 email accounts. The free tier was responsible for more than 80% of our costs, both in infrastructure as well in support. This has led to sunsetting the free tier in October 2020.

On the other hand, Gmail offers its free service to billions of users worldwide. Where is the catch?

TANSTAAFL. If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product. (This maxim also applies to the American welfare state. The outcome of getting free stuff from the government is more votes for the Party of Free Stuff, i.e. Democrats–with results as you see them.)

Ars Technica.

The battle formations included the “promachoi”—the foremost fighters who formed the first line—and the “plithos,” men that were staying in the rear. The warriors took turns in the first line and then retreated to the rear to rest. Toward the end of the day, the armies disengaged and returned to their camps. The army operations lasted 11 hours each day.

During those 11 hours, a typical warrior in Homeric tales would go through 31 one-versus-one duels, 10 encounters with the enemy on a chariot, two chariot-versus-chariot engagements, and one chariot-versus-warrior-on-ship encounter (a ranged battle where the warrior defended beached ships from charging chariots). The composition of this ordeal was inferred from statistical analysis of fights in The Iliad. Each of those scenarios included a fair share of spear throws, sword strikes, shooting arrows, and spear strikes, all performed in full body armor. Overall, the whole day was effectively a long, high-intensity interval exercise.

“So, we asked a group of special-armed forces personnel wearing a replica of the Dendra armor to complete this protocol,” says Flouris. The 13 marines who volunteered were trained in historical combat, fitted with sensors that monitored their performance, and fed roughly 4,500 calories worth of goat cheese, roasted meat, olives, bread, water, wine, and other Bronze Age culinary delicacies. And then they had a go at it.

“Sing, goddess, of the sweat of Achilles Peleus’ son….”

Read it.

Evolution is often thought of as a haphazard process acting on an assortment of traits that randomly appear through genetic variation.

So much so that if we were to wind back the clock on evolution and “replay the tape of life,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, he doubts “anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

But a new study of stick insects suggests that evolution may sometimes repeat itself in a predictable manner, which could help our understanding of how organisms may change in response to selection pressures.

Why this comes as a surprise puzzles me. Environmental conditions favor certain traits over others; this is the whole basis of the notion of ‘convergent evolution’. Modern epigenetics demonstrates that environmental factors will influence gene expression, and so it takes very little brain to realize that similar environments will promote similar epigenetic changes.

What passes for ‘science’ these days is very weak beer.

NavalNews.

Fincantieri are the folks from whom the U.S. Navy took the design for the new Constellation-class frigates and proceeded to FUBAR it.

There are 50 years’ worth of advances in shipbuilding technology that the U.S. government has resolutely refused to adopt; the poster child for this is the Littoral Combat Ship, which has failed and is failing even as we write, despite Austal being the premier successful builder of high-speed catamaran transports in the world. (The only ships Austal has ever built that have serious problems are the Independence-class LCS, with the Navy pissing in the design process constantly from day 1.)

UPDATE: Shipbuilding 4.0: Using Digital Twins to Enhance Efficiency (MarineLink)

Wait until you see whether he can successfully monetize it….

Read it.

Last year, efforts to pass a school choice bill in the state Legislature were stymied by a coalition of anti-school choice Republicans and Democrats in the Statehouse.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, made the bill to create a K-12 education savings account policy a top priority. Although the Texas Senate passed it, the bill failed in the lower chamber when 21 Texas House Republicans joined with all House Democrats to kill it.

Weeding out the RINOs,
Weeding out the RINOs,
We shall come rejoicing
Weeding out the RINs!