Washington Post.

The Biden administration envisions dozens of ‘modular’ nuclear plants sprouting across the country. Why coal communities are so eager to be the staging ground for the risky endeavor.

 

Read it.

On the Carthusian monks’ decision to limit production of their famed liqueur and what it says about quality and scale in our soul-crushing modern world.

Read it.

For eight years, the Scottish National Party (SNP) was synonymous with Nicola Sturgeon’s name. However, her legacy will always be a divisive one, marked by (among other things) a continuous fight for a second independence referendum in the wake of Brexit, as well as controversial progressive policies such as transformative green initiatives or the infamous Gender Bill, which may have contributed to her eventual resignation.

Now, the SNP appears to be moving in an even more leftist direction under the future leadership of Humza Yousaf. The health minister was the first to announce his intention to enter the leadership contest and chances are he will win it comfortably after most other prominent members of the SNP turned down the opportunity. Instead, they have chosen to back Yousaf, believing that the party needs a “fresh perspective.” At the moment, the biggest challenger to Yousaf’s bid is Kate Forbes, the SNP’s young, more socially conservative finance secretary, albeit with considerably weaker prospects.

Yeah, I can’t think of a more obvious Scottish Nationalist than ‘Hamza Yousaf’.

Read it.

Anglish is a kind of English which prefers native words over those borrowed from foreign languages. Anglish is linguistic purism applied to English.

Tolkien would have loved it.

Read it.

I would have titled this piece ’40 Useful Concepts You REALLY REALLY NEED to Know’.

Freethink.

For many of us, the past year has disrupted deeply ingrained habits. Some people report exercising less, others are drinking more. As we look forward to life returning to some semblance of normal, it’s worth considering what scientists have learned about how to create good habits and break bad ones.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it. 

Proponents claim that plastic roads offer major improvements in design, cost, and quality while also serving as an outlet for waste plastic. Critics argue that plastic roads are empty ‘green’ hype or can’t compete with the benefits of traditional asphalt. The truth is most likely that using plastics in road building does have real environmental, cost, and structural benefits. But, outside of niches like bike paths and pedestrian paths, innovations still have yet to reach the scale and capabilities of the traditional asphalt road.

The Atlantic.

In louisiana, it takes $1,485 and roughly 2,190 days to become an interior designer. In Washington, it takes $319 and 373 days to become a cosmetologist. The District of Columbia requires $740 to become an auctioneer, and a college degree to watch children for someone else. (Having and watching your own children continues to be an unlicensed affair.) In Kansas, you have to cough up $200 to work as a funeral attendant. And Maine requires $235 and 1,095 days to become a travel guide. Want to move states? That could mean you have to relicense, as if, say, cutting hair is materially different in Massachusetts than it is in New York.

Read it. 

WD-40.

An atomic-scale experiment all but settles the origin of the strong form of superconductivity seen in cuprate crystals, confirming a 35-year-old theory.

Daily Telegraph.

Reissued versions of Ian Fleming’s classic works will feature a disclaimer following a review by sensitivity readers.

Wally is my hero.

Read it.

The first rule of politics is to never give government powers that you would not trust in the hands of your worst political enemy.

If there is one government institution that has proven this correct, it is the European Union. Born out of the Cold War, forged in the uncertainty of its ending, and built during the peaceful, prosperous 1990s, the EU was originally meant to be an enabler of freedom, commerce, and human ingenuity. In 1995, as an EU-skeptical candidate for its parliament (while still living in my native Sweden), even I could appreciate the virtues of facilitating the mobility of resources across national borders within the union.

Since then, the EU has been completely transformed. Today, it is an increasingly totalitarian entity, trying to force moral values upon its member states—values that are at odds with core conservative principles. To take a well-known example, the tensions between Brussels on the one hand and Warsaw and Budapest on the other would not have existed if the EU had stayed true to the purpose that gave birth to the union in Maastricht in 1992.

Read it.

The backlash began following an episode this past week of the YouTube show “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.” Among other topics, Adams referenced a Rasmussen Reports survey that had asked whether people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”

Most agreed, but Adams noted that 26% of Black respondents disagreed and others weren’t sure.

…

“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams said on his Wednesday show.

All perfectly reasonable positions. The problem is that Dilbert is syndicated to run in newspapers, bastions of the Woke agenda. Fortunately nAdams long since accumulated ‘fuck-you’ money, so he can afford to express his opinions honestly.

Interesting Engineering.

Can you dig it?

Read it.

The challenge of judging isn’t specific to the bluff-and-misdirect world of poker; “true enough to act on” is shaky even in the places where we expect it to be solid. For example, the science we’re taught in school has shared standards for validity; concepts like statistical significance and confidence intervals are complicated, but in a reassuringly mathy way.
As you keep going with science, though, you find that “truth” is very much not a solid concept. The ongoing (and frankly terrifying) replication crisis in psychology, medicine, and social sciences highlights just how shaky the foundations are. This challenge is multiplied for cross-disciplinary studies, which wrestle with whole different ways of deciding what is true enough to act on from the incompatible ways of knowing.

The trouble with most of what passes for ‘science’ these days, is that it isn’t.

A fundamental principle of Real Science is that correlation does not imply causation. Things that happen together are not connected just because they happen together a lot, not even if the happen together all the time; you must actually be able to identify the chain of events in order to call it causation.

Thus we see that a lot of modern ‘science’ is just correlation being considered to indicate causation just because things happen together a lot–which is like flipping a coin 100 times, getting 80 heads, and claiming that your odds of getting heads while flipping a coin is therefore 80%. Yes, correlation is important; there is no causation without correlation. But correlation by itself is not enough, no matter how strong.

Correspondingly, studies based on statistics are just opinion, not science. There may be a causal chain there; the more things happen together, the stronger the prospect that they are causally connected; but until the actual causal links can be identified, it remains opinion, not science.

I may have to write a book on this, once I can use both hands again….

Read it.

Daisugi is an ancient Japanese forestry technique in which planted cedars are pruned in a special way to produce “shoots” that eventually become perfect, straight, knot-free lumber.

This is an ancient method, developed in the 14th century, which was originally used by people living in the Kitayama region of Japan because saplings were lacking.

The terrain in the region is very mountainous, and the steep slopes make planting and caring for trees very difficult, so arborists used the daisugi technique not only to reduce the number of plantations but also to produce denser wood in a much shorter time.

Brink Lindsey

No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash — the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and 70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.

The Guardian

This ought to come as no surprise.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Check it out.

A silicon-based Guide for the Perplexed.

Read it.

Redpills come in a wide variety of grades and dosages. As far as health and nutrition is concerned, a classic “gateway” redpill is hospital food. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be laid up in the hospital, or to visit a friend or loved one there, you probably won’t need to be told how terrible the food is. I remember vividly, back when I was perhaps a little less health-conscious than I am now, visiting my grandfather after he had a stroke. A nurse appeared and dumped a scuffed plastic tray on my grandfather’s lap. This, apparently, was lunch. Item one: a plate of three different kinds of watery mush, which pooled separately and refused to mix, as if somehow they were chemically incompatible with one another. Item two: a small cup of the thinnest squash I’d ever seen. Item three: a token, rather sad-looking, banana, exiled to the outer rim of the tray. And that was it. How, I asked myself, would any of this help an 81-year-old man to rally from a devastating stroke that had left him immobile and incontinent? The situation was only made worse, for me at least, by the fact that I had to try and feed my grandfather this dreck myself.

Read it.

Tradition and pride in institutions are obstacles to a managerial class who prefer people whom they manage to be birds of passage, or particles in Brownian motion in the ocean of time, who are completely fixated on the present moment. The managerial revolution, when it takes place, is very thorough, and nothing is too small to escape its destructive notice.

WIRED.

Vertical farming will remain only a niche hobby until it can provide one of the global master crops–wheat, maize, or rice–in a cost-effective fashion.

Check it out.

Enter Zomes. The California-based company makes 265-square-foot dome structures called Zomes, each of which features one to three windows, a skylight, and a 14-foot-high ceiling. Zomes are made of about 200 panels, which are assembled on site over the course of about three weeks.

Domes and tiny homes are nothing new. But one key trait that sets Zomes apart from other alternative housing options is that the structures use bioceramic instead of cement, the prod

Plus they look really funky … not necessarily a bad thing. My first thought was ‘African hut’.

Read it

As do I.

Read it.

I’m curious what a 9-year-old was doing on a “news crew”.

Read it.

It’s this kind of shit that gives lawyers a bad name.

Read it.

And whose fault is that?

Read it.

Sounds about right.

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have found why zebra fur is thinly striped and sharply outlined.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Daily Mail.

Vanderbilt’s Peabody Office of Equity, Diversion and Inclusion emailed students on Feb. 16, reminding them to ‘take care of each other’ after the MSU shooting
At the bottom, it revealed it was written by AI: ‘Paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI language model, personal communication, February 15, 2023’
The two deans who signed off on the email – Nicole Joseph and Hasina Mohyuddin – have temporarily stepped down while the school investigates.

Both are “women of color”.

Read it.

• Introduction
• How did the term come about & become a tool for defamation?
• A German journalist spills the beans
• Same Playbook, Different War
• The Council on Foreign Relations conspiracy
• Conspiracy Theories that turned out to be true
• Notable Unresolved Conspiracies
• Conspiracies to Watch
• Mini-Guide to Investigating Conspiracies
• Conclusion

I am willing to use my own shoe on such people pro bono publico.

Read it.

Figuring out what’s actually in a box of chicken stock shouldn’t be that hard. Right?

Read it.

Recently, I attended a brilliant address in Cambridge by the remarkably insightful quasi-prophetess, Mary Harrington. She spoke about the age of social media and presented the degree to which, in her view, we are not so much on the verge of a transhumanist world, but already living in one. She pointed to the contraceptive pill as the first great transhumanist innovation, which, as she put it, “moved us into a completely new paradigm in regard to what medicine and healthcare actually are.” Harrington began as a feminist thinker, and today calls herself a “reactionary feminist,” which is fast becoming a title for several public intellectuals who are developing certain feminist criticisms into a full-scale assault on late modernity. The contraceptive pill, Harrington argued, changed healthcare as a discipline exclusively organised to remedy failing bodies to include the altering of well and properly functioning bodies as if they were problems to be solved. Whilst contraception per se frustrates the procreative act, the pill is unique in doing this by modifying what would otherwise be the natural functioning of the body. She claimed that this moved us into the transhumanist epoch, in which we are now far more entrenched than we realise.

Read it.

People typically think of food as calories, energy and sustenance. However, the latest evidence suggests that food also “talks” to our genome, which is the genetic blueprint that directs the way the body functions down to the cellular level.

This communication between food and genes may affect your health, physiology and longevity. The idea that food delivers important messages to an animal’s genome is the focus of a field known as nutrigenomics. This is a discipline still in its infancy, and many questions remain cloaked in mystery. Yet already, we researchers have learned a great deal about how food components affect the genome.

Read it.

Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more.

The over-reliance on English in the cognitive sciences has led to an underestimation of the centrality of language to cognition at large.

Read it.

Tech companies with names from the world of Lord of the Rings.

Recovering from surgery.

Will return as soon as I can.

Check it out.

Just, you know, in case it should come up.