I don't think I've tried to put up an Instagram before. We'll see. If it doesn't work, this is the link.
There is a catch, now that all of you are considering getting a meerkat. Because they are very social, to keep them as pets you need twenty of them, minimum.
Probably not. There is some benefit in the hard sciences for high school students. Little else.
Ladd and Sorensen’s seminal 2015 paper on this topic used administrative data from North Carolina to assess the effects of teachers earnings Master’s degrees with fixed effects for teachers, students, and schools. With these fixed effects, it’s possible to estimate the effect of Master’s degrees after accounting for things that are constant among these groups. Thus, the question from this study is less ‘Do teachers’ Master’s degrees correlate with their success?’ and closer to ‘Does being conferred a Master’s degree make teachers more successful?’ The answer is a resounding ‘no’, with the only effect being on rates of high absenteeism among the kids, for some reason.
In NH there are "towns" which straddle the border between two towns. Pinardville is a section of both Manchester and Goffstown; Suncook has the border between Pembroke and Allenstown down the middle of it; Penacook is part Concord, part Boscawen. All three are heavily French-Canadian, or were when they were first founded. It makes for confusion of school districts, fire department coverage, Post Offices, and even telephone exchanges. A medical office will ask me which pharmacy I prefer, and it still offends me to have to say it's Hannaford in Manchester, because it's not in Manchester. It's a mile over the border, firmly in Goffstown in that Pinardville section which French-Canadians settled long after the town centers were built.
I'm not blaming the immigrants from Quebec. That's where the affordable land was and ethnic groups like to cluster together. The Yankees created the situation and have no call to kick about it now. Yet it does make for multiple answers to the question of "where are we, anyway?"
Whether you think rescuing the flag is a big thing or just an above-average thing, Monday's comment at the end is worth keeping in mind. You never know when the moment is going to come. A had a friend who ran back into the house to rescue his 12 year old stepson and a sleepover friend from fire and was permanently scarred himself. He remembers it had been a boring, rather irritating day before that, no hint that it was going to be the most significant of his life. The best and worst events of our lives often come with no warning even minutes before.
Simeon didn't know the Messiah would come that morning, nor that it would would be a baby. Simon of Cyrene was a spectaor at the crucifixion but was forced to carry the cross, which was not in his dayplanner that morning. He was just a visitor from North Africa who happened to be there. He was the father of later disciples Rufus and Alexander.
This Company Was an American Success Story. Until MAHA Influencers Sank It. by Laurie P. Cohen at the Free Press.
At Apeel’s peak, 60 percent of the avocados sold in American grocery stores were coated with Apeel. The number is now zero. Almost all of Apeel’s revenue in the U.S. has disappeared, and the company was forced to lay off most of its employees. Rogers was replaced as CEO in 2024.
“I love the product. It’s a pity it’s not out there,” said Debora Langston, a consultant who spent months testing Apeel for Limoneira, comparing it with the wax coating used for decades. Friends in the food industry warned that Apeel was dangerous and could cause cancer. She expected poor results but reached the opposite conclusion. Her customers in Europe still use Apeel...Robyn Openshaw, a wellness influencer who markets herself as GreenSmoothieGirl, published over 60 anti-Apeel posts on social media and her own website from July 2023 to May 2025. She wrote that Apeel’s coating was made with heavy metals and solvents, including chemicals found in gasoline, and encouraged her “Green Smoothie Girl Army” to protest by phone and email and in person.
In June 2024, Openshaw called Edwards, the Limoneira CEO, on his personal cellphone, asking him if the company was selling Apeel-coated products. He replied by text: “Hi Robyn, We tested Apeel but never sold any products (avocados or lemons) with Apeel on them. We stopped when the market told us it doesn’t want Apeel.” She published a blog post with the headline: “GreenSmoothieGirl Gets Apeel Shut Down at Billion-Dollar Produce Company.” A video on YouTube boasted that she got Limoneira to “quit using Apeel products.”
I get a lot out of Instapundit, which is mostly pro-MAHA. But they are too pro-MAHA, never giving you both sides of the story. Every mention of it is positive now.
I think of myself as someone who keeps those who are interested in Indo- Europeans and Ancient DNA up-to-date on developments, and up until a few years ago that was true-ish. But it is all happening and changing so quickly these days that I would have to devote much more of my life to it than I choose to. Yet I still listen and hear interesting things, so I will link to those and bring up some points that intrigued me.
Dwarkesh Patel has a lengthy interview with David Reich about what has been happening the last few years, in particular a paper headed by Avi Akbari that has been discussed in preprint for three years and now out as a paper in Nature. Why the Bronze Age was an Inflection Point in Human Evolution. I am not symmarising that paper but am drawing from it. Razib also makes extensive reference to it in his 10,000 years of selection in Western Asia monologue and his interview with Greg Cochran. I'm reading the new JP Mallory, just read Proto, and I'm no summarising any of those either. For openers, I'm not sure I understand any of them well enough to get them right. But here are some interesting bits.
You will hear it asserted that there has been very little selection over the last 50,000 years in the human genome, and the differences between us then and now are small. You will also hear that selection has been intense and recent, creating significant group changes. Both are true in their way. 98% of the genome isn't moving much. 2% is under intense evolutionary pressure.
Immunity tends to be the area of greatest change. When groups interbreed, the variants that keep people alive have the biggest effect, withnlittle explanation needed. The genes tend to be fewer, or even individual, such as genes for Down Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, or Cystic Fibrosis. Africans have an enormous number of variants offering partial resistance to malaria and other insect-borne diseases. They would have fullresistance, but the diseases change their chemistry to live off humans, and it is an ongoing competition. The studies that show the various blood types or those with more Denisovan ancestry having more covid resistance are remnants of those same battles a quarter-million years ago.
Behavioral and psychiatric traits are more polygenic, so while they are also under heavy selection compared to the 98% of the genome, it is less strong than immune selection. Cognitive ability, height, and BMI are more polygenic still. There are a thousand places to be a little taller or smarter, and a hundred versions of slight improvement at each place. There is no overall tall gene except for diseases like acromegaly, which kills you early, like Andre the Giant.
Oddly, the selection for the cognitive traits has not been strongest in the last 2000 years, but the 2000 years before that. The genes which correlate with educational attainment now became more concentrated long before anyone had formal education. But those genes also correlate with age of first birth for women and value of grave goods for men, which one can see might be associated with better planning and better self-control in both social and financial situations. The biggest changes were 2-4000 y/a, the second biggest 4-6,000 y/a, but our last 2000, which one would think held the big ticket items for cognitive traits, are not as dramatic. There is a lot more than in most of human history, but not as dramatic as the move from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The researchers expected to see the biggest changes with the beginning of agriculture, but the genetic changes did not happen until well after. There are signals that it was not the beginning of agriculture but the final end of foraging in a society that put the pressure on. The genetic patterns needed for foraging held on in selection long after they disappeared in the skeletal and burial evidence. As long as they were still needed occasionally, they persisted.
We picture tribes moving into a colder place because they have slightly better adaptation to cold, but that is cart before horse. They move first, then adaptations slowly come in. Tribes are likely driven by necessity to keep on milk longer, eat riskier food, or move into the cold before they are ready. Desperation is the driver, not slight advantage. At that point, a hundred tiny improvements might keep one person alive a little longer, and those accumulate over time. It's not a single big improvement, but a slight one, then a slight improvement in that.
A lot of extra material that has nothing to do with cold or dairy comes along as well. If someone has a mutation of slight advantage, when the DNA helix folds on itself, it doesn't do it only at that one spot. a bunch of other genes on either side of it get pulled in as well. It can be tough to tell which of the hundred SNPs in a chunk are the advantageous ones and while are only along for the ride, or even deleterious for some other trait. From a single ancestor, each child and each grandchild will have that helical twist at a different place, but it will still take generations to isolate the one with 1% cold tolerance advantage, and six in the area that increase the likelihood of curly hair will be associated accidentally.
Eh, I'm done for now. That's only one small point and I've taken forever. I have just demonstrated by bad example why teachers who can package such things clearly and compactly onto a greenboard or into a single analogy are so valuable.
Whatever isn't clear, ask. I might be able to answer rather than sending you to the pros to do your own research.
Paul Shearer: "Short sentences. Punchy. To the point. Sounds like efficiency. Serious. Muscular. Yet. Not saying anything. Not this part either. Still haven't said anything. Nope. Not yet. But they sure are punchy. M&M sentences. Dorito sentences. Pringles sentences. Once you pop. You don't stop."
In Central Europe there are narrow erdstals estimated to have been carved out between 900-1200AD. We haven't figured out why and Weird Medieval Guys thrive on telling us about this stuff. There are theories, of course, but most are tentative because none cover all the facts.
No theory has yet been able to account for:
The number and distribution of the erdstall
The similarities between the many erdstall
The inconvenience of accessing the erdstall
The secrecy with which these tunnels were built and guarded
The complete lack of artefacts found within
Fun stuff. Great site. We don't know why knights in medieval texts fought so many giant snails, either.
I have rotator cuff surgery tomorrow. I am not apprehensive, but I am also not all that optimistic. The most likely outcome is mild improvement in range-of-motion after months of rehab. There is some chance of greater recovery, but there is also some chance of none at all.
Yet a hundred years years ago I would just have been a guy with a bad shoulder for the rest of his life, so this isn't terrible, really. Also, it's my left shoulder, which I use less often anyway. There are many things like that these days. Health care is much more expensive now because we can do magic compared to then. Any D&D gamer knows that magic is expensive. My mother died in 2000 of a third diagnosis of cancer and my father a couple of years later because of congestive heart failure. If medicine had been this far along in 1990, both would have probably gotten another decade of life, anyway. As I know the events that occurred until 2010, it's interesting to think of that.
My wife has always relied more on context than on my actual spoken words to read me. This seems unusual for a woman who reads more than anyone you know, but there it is. If I say that dinner will be in half an hour, she will ask ten minutes later if dinner is ready - because she sees me setting the table, and that is the stronger cue for her. As I don't expect this to get any better as her hearing gets worse, it occurred to me that a technology which provided closed captions for all our speech might be useful. Women might object to the discomfort of having the words be below their necks, but fine, have what you want. Having my words be visible as well audible sounds great to me.
I do see immediate problems. It might be considered rude to turn it on or off at "wrong" times according to some artificial standard imposed on us by teenagers who are the first adopters. But still, I see great possibilities here, especially for my audience friends.
I had not heard the kind versus wicked distinction between systems A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to priove that any child can become a chess grandmaster through early specialisation. It's a fascinating article, showing that in kind domains, early specialisation works, but in wicked domains (which is most of real life), it stops working after initial success.
The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.
There is the usual failure to note that the three daughters all shared the genes of the chess-playing father, but I'm used to that by now. I just point it out to refute the constant claim of the environmentalists that all the experts acknowledge the influence of heritability on ability and behavior, and even quote them saying over and over that they do take that into consideration.
They don't.
But the article is still worthwhile for what it is.
Data Republican is a new treasure, who knows how to find information and convey it. The Shadow Cabinet of Soros confirms what conservatives have long asserted with only partial information and intense suspicions. She puts the names, the dates, and the millions of dollars out for everyone to see. For those who suspected that the Biden presidency was mostly Obama III, for foreign policy, at least, here is the data. Politicians and operatives working behind the scenes is nothing new, and not necessarily illegal. But secrecy in such matters is never a good sign. The shadow cabinet of Obama officials oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan, just as one example.
National Security Action launched with approximately seventy people (in 2017, funded entirely by Soros)— sixty advisory council members and ten staff. Its advisory council included Tony Blinken, Avril Haines, William Burns, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Denis McDonough, Alejandro Mayorkas, Wendy Sherman, Wally Adeyemo, Kurt Campbell, Colin Kahl, Kathleen Hicks, and Jon Finer. Tom Donilon — Obama’s former national security advisor — served on the advisory council.
Forty-six of seventy roster members — 65.7% — received Biden administration appointments. Sullivan became National Security Advisor. Blinken became Secretary of State. Burns became CIA Director. Haines became Director of National Intelligence. Power ran USAID. Thomas-Greenfield became UN Ambassador. McDonough ran the VA. Mayorkas ran DHS.
Ioffe found the same wall of opacity: “Nobody — not even the various comms people working for N.S.A. — would tell me who is on the organization’s board or confirm that the group’s funding comes from Soros.”
But Data Republican tracked the numbers.
I could argue with this woman all day, but really, this essay was a lot of fun. 5 "Boring" Classics That Are Actually Unhinged. She starts with Moby Dick.
Why It’s Unhinged:
Ahab isn’t a tragic hero. He’s a cult leader. He manipulates his crew into joining his death wish. He knows the whale will kill him. That’s the point. He wants to die destroying the thing that maimed him.
And the whale? The whale is just... a whale. It’s not evil. It’s not symbolic. It’s an animal that defended itself once, and Ahab has projected his entire existential crisis onto it.
She also has a series on "Wholesome" children's books that traumatised entire generations, includes Charlotte's Web, Watership Down, Black Beauty, and others that you gave to your own children.
This bears some relation to my post years ago on Folk Music Vs Rockers. Which is more traumatising, really?
When the boys were younger and were acting up I would sometimes deadpan "LOCAL FATHER GOES BERSERK. SLAYS TWO IN BIZARRE DINNER INCIDENT. Broccoli dispute rumored." It seemed funny at the time. I did not use that with the two Romanian sons or with Kyle who arrived last. My oldest son had daughters, who are gentler creatures and might not have found it funny.
Maybe no one would find it funny now.
I wondered if dogs stick their heads out the window because of the rush of smells on the breeze. They look like they are having a hallucinatory experience, with so much going on that they can't process it.
That turns out to be the second-most important reason (of five) why they do that. #1 is the breeze itself.
I went on a run.of watching Marvin Hagler fights a few years ago, and think I saw them all twice. About two years ago I got into Mike Tyson videos and I think I've seen all of those twice. I've tried to do classics, like Ali and Frazier, or Floyd Paterson, Rocky Marciano, but I don't stay interested for more than a few fights. I can't do the novelty fighters like Butterbean at all, even though I can see they have some talent.
Who does the crowd recommend? No MMA or UFC. Just boxing.
Might be my favorite bluegrass tune. There's a lot of versions out there, including one by Mannfred Mann, of all things. This is one of the best. Good solos, and you don't always get a dobro. Very uptempo, which is right for this one.
I am pleased that Heterodox Academy is having a go at this. Conservatives make angry claims, while liberals say it's all bosh, but HxA attempts to be disciplined about it: How politically diverse are university faculty? The short version is that faculties do skew liberal pretty reliably, more so in some subjects than others - and you will accurately predict which those are, most of you. However, there are more moderates and apoliticals than is usually reported, and studies showing the greatest divergence are more likely to be underpowered and have the worst percentage of faculty response.
The standard response of "But we are professionals and know how to teach both sides" is not addressed here, but we know the human nature answer already: That is true for some people but others are falsely claiming objectivity because of self-deception or dissembling. That discussion has to follow from the basic data, however, not anticipate it.
Looking at sports highlights this afternoon, I noticed that everything is faster. Misieroski for the Milwaukee Brewers; UNC lacrosse in the tournament (movement, reflexes, shots - all a little faster than even a few years ago); and T&F has all sorts of records this year, with Cooper Lutkenhaus, Quincy Wilson, and Sam Ruthe still in high school but coming close to world records already.
It's film and coaching. Better equipment is part of it, but breaking down movement to hundredths of a second and a generation's worth of practice putting that knowledge into the relevant motions pays off. Identifying talent and teaching them better habits early is the real deal.
Scott Alexander takes on what he calls "reddit vexillogy" in his Three Model Organisms For Taste.
If you’re like me, you learned the following code of good flags:
1. They should be so simple that a child could draw them.
2. No images, no “busy” areas, and - for God’s sake - no text
3. The rule of tincture: “never put metal on metal, or color on color”. In medieval heraldry, “metals” were yellow and white (sometimes implemented with literal gold and silver) and “colors” were every other color (except black, which is a “fur” and has its own rules). A good flag shouldn’t have a metal touch another metal, or a color touch another color. So the French tricolor (blue then white then red) is okay, but a hypothetical (blue then red then white) tricolor wouldn’t be okay, because blue would be touching red, which would be “color on color”.
Good old Indonesia, they know how to follow the rules.
I received spam from a new place, assuring me that there were CIA documents that Hitler had survived and lived another ten years. The National Enquirer and similar rags reported a hundred different stories of how he was still out there throughout my childhood and well beyond. There were also alien and bigfoot reports as well, and it was a good education to see how people could take marginal evidence - anything that looked unusual, really - and assure you of a particular interpretation. Well, maybe not an education, because a lot of people grew up with the same weeklies at the supermarket but somehow still at least half-believe them. I was with some of my old Jesus Freak friends this week because of a funeral, and my goodness, they still believe rumors about everything. As with other personality characteristics, credulousness seems to be installed at a stable level in all of us, regardless of what education or logic classes we are exposed to. Sumus quod sumus.
This particular website was even more worrisome than usual, though. It assured me that Hitler had lived those ten years in "Columbia." Whether that was the university or the "gem of the ocean" it didn't say.
Madeline Kahn shows off her versatility
I don't think I had ever heard it. I have an identical plaid shirt to that guy in the center.
I will be in the State o' Maine, Bah Hahbah and Acadier Tuesday to Thursday. I wanted to leave you with a little something to tide you over.
I should probably put up a couple of songs, too.
Just an offhand note on who gets to define Feminism.
Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler? The theme song from "Dad's Army."
The real American folk instrument is not the guitar.
Quiet Rant about supposed life behind the Iron Curtain
Post 4500n- Roger Scruton on How to be a conservative.
Because we are doing the last of emptying the house that my father's second wife lived in since 1946, the subject of keeping unnecessary thing that are a burden to your descendants came up this weekend, as it often does in these situations. Our daughter-in-law found a strategy that a reditor reported, approximately this.
Here was a trick my brother used. He would find boxes of things that could be thrown away or donated. Then he would replace them with empty boxes. My father never knew things were missing, but it also did not leave empty spots on the shelves that would just have been replaced with...more stuff. My brother had slowly started to thin things out, so when my father died, we weren't having to start at square one on the cleaning out process.
It was not only one person who created the many full closets on the second floor filled with children's toys and dress patterns, nor the garage with old furniture, gardening chemicals, and lamps. The surface layers and some of the deeper piles were clearly created by Ruth, who just died, but it was quickly obvious that my father who died in 2004 had not been responsible in getting rid of things in his last years either. As we got to very bottom, it became clear that Ruth's parents, who died in the 1970s and 80s, had also not done their duty of weeding through old calendars, sheet music, and cookbooks. It was in fact clear that when they had moved into the house in 1946 they must have brought considerable amounts of saved stuff from the previous house even then. Sunday School books from 1915 (in Swedish), depression glass, 78 rpm records, and somehow, decorative glass from a Packard hearse.
I also just found a use for the oldest of your empty boxes.
There is a lot of deploring of the amount of time the Youth of America is spending in front of screens, and how that has taken over older people's attention as well. Reading from a book is considered better, more ennobling, and certainly better for learning. Silence is considered superior to listening to a speaker, even if one is learning from a course on tape or a podcast.
Are we sure? The research I have seen largely assumes what it sets out to prove. The worst aspects of the new are contrasted to the best aspects of the old. I spend a lot of time on screens, and I did while I was working as well. Am I damaged? Am I not what I should be? Have I let go of the rope and ceased to be a Real Intellectual? Whatever shall we do? The Apocalypse is upon us. Again.
When I was in college and reading Lord of the Rings, I thought invisibility would be the best superpower to have. I also thought that Time Stop would be useful in sports. I eventually settled on Time Travel, but I have been waiting for this and nothing has happened.
I think getting into asimulation that picks up at a particular point of my life might be just as good. I do worry about having to listen to and participating in the boring parts again, but if I make some changes, who knows what I might get out of. A couple of you won't make the friend list next time around, but I intend to be minimalist in my interventions. Who knows what might be upended.
The objection would be that it would be less valuable because it "wasn't real," to which I say "Compared to what?"
There is a FB argument between two Christians who I find rather tiring. One is saying "Tolerance is not a Christian virtue." The other is insisting that it is, while acknowledging that the word itself does not appear in the Scriptures, and his wife jumps in to state even more emphatically that of course it is, quoting Bible verses in a proof-text fashion.
It looks like a clear problem of definition to me. By some definitions of tolerance, such as tolerating sin within the congregation, or tolerating the teaching or sin, the first man is of course correct. In terms of putting up with differences and difficulties from others, especially within the Church, the second man is correct. A mediated or refereed discussion between Christians who desired to live together in harmony could find points of agreement rather quickly, but neither seems interested. One is a State Rep and the other is a college history professor, so they both feel they have territory to claim and protect for the sake of others who might be led astray.
You see why I find this tiring. When disputatnts cannot acknowledge that they are at least in part arguing definitions and relent at least to the point that the other has a point according to his own definition, I find that one or both is trying to smuggle in other ideas with their definition. In current America, this is usually trying to add in some favorite political or cultural idea in disguise. At its worst it can insist that patriotism is the same as Christianity, or that socialism is the same as Christianity if one will only squint hard enough and count a second cousin as a sibling.
Duelling Motte-and-Bailey arguments, both attempting to claim territory they cannot fully defend on the basis of narrower claims that they can.
Two Misinterpreted Insights in the History of Heredity. Why did it take humans so long to discover what we now consider obvious, that things "run in families?" We knew there was similarity between parents and children, but somehow couldn't stretch that to families as a whole. It seemed interesting enough, but when I ran across the sentence
In 1644, the English philosopher, astrologer and pirate Sir Kenelm Digby published an exploration of the nature of matter, including problems associated with generation. (Italics mine)
I was all in. OK, now you're talking! Philosopher, astrologer, and pirate. No one has had that on their resume for perhaps 300 years now, and it couldn't have been common in any era. Even two out of those three in a single individual would be rare after 1600.
I missed this 18 months ago. Monkeys accurately predict the outcomes of elections 54% of the time just by how long the look at the photos of both candidates. One of the commenters suggested that this implies humans could predict the outcome of monkey elections, which does seem equally likely.
We had a PDQ Bach concert when I was in college, but I skipped it. I didn't know any better, and didn't tend to take advice then.
David Foster talks about Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was a founding mother of libertarianism.
In modern Europe, some years of every young man’s life are consumed in training for war. But a far greater loss of productive energy is in the attempt to control productive energy. All their lives, all workers pour an enormous amount of energy into producing food, clothes, shelter, light, heat, transportation, all the necessities and comforts, and mountains of paper, pens, ink, stamps, filing cases, and acres of beautiful buildings, all to be used by men in Government who produce nothing whatever.
Nellie Bowles reports that Bernie Sanders held a discussion with Chinese, Canadian, and US professors about the existential threat of AI.
→ Well, I’m sure China is doing this altruistically: Bernie Sanders hosted an event on The Existential Threat of AI. It featured the dean of the Beijing Institute of Al Safety and Governance and a professor from Tsinghua University. Wow, all the Chinese professors think America should stop pursuing artificial intelligence research, maybe we should listen to our foreign friends! They also keep saying that we should disband our military. Seems thoughtful and reasonable. This just in: Great white sharks think seals should stop jumping out of the water and actually just stay in and float around a while.
China and Russia have also contributed heavily to American environmental causes over the years. Which is odd, because they don't spend much on their own environmental causes. It's a puzzle. AI might in fact be an existential threat and we may need to have serious discussions with lots of people. I'm just not sure we should start with the Chinese...
Do you think there are Chinese preppers? That might be an international conference worth having.
25 medieval manuscripts you can look at online right now.
The Beatus of Saint Sever Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 8878 (France, ca. 1028-1072 AD)
"A good medieval illuminated Apocalypse should still be a bit disturbing to look through, even today. If you ask me, this Romanesque edition with its flat, expressive, colourful compositions fits the bill nicely."
The Vampirist to Catholic pipeline
Medieval-themed gifts from the Weird Medieval Guys site
The history of disposable diapers is more interesting than I thought. By Virginia Postrel at Works in Progress.
Motivated by the less pleasant aspects of spending time with his new grandchild, the company’s director of exploratory development, Victor Mills, suggested disposable diapers. After analyzing existing products and conducting consumer research, P&G created a dedicated diaper research group.
The research this group conducted, like that of its successors and competitors, wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t advance basic science. It wasn’t even an obvious route to profit. (One percent of the market!) It was a high-stakes gamble that required solving difficult engineering problems. How that happened represents the kind of hidden progress that leads to everyday abundance.
I was just thinking, "y'know, I've never posted a juggler before, and it's about time I got around to it."
No I wasn't really. I was looking for something else and saw this.
Institute for Christian Machine Learning. I don't know what to make of this.
March Madness set to expand to 76 teams. William and Mary men's team has never made the tournament. In their best years they make it to the bubble. This is our opportunity!
One of my book clubs is reading Uncle Fred In The Springtime and I began it today. The opening sentence is "The door of the Drones Club swung open..." A sense of calm came over me. I am in good hands.
In the context of control variables, Cremieux quickly dispatches the argument that glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is dangerous. "What do the critics have? They have their confusion." Similarly, he shows how "attribution studies" that claim for example that 68,000 people a year die because they don't have health insurance are riddled with logical and statistical holes.
Gurwinder discusses how resentment and victimhood mentality leads to injustice, and Nikki Stolz relates this to self-pity in literature.
I think I have caught up, and will resume my usual posting speed.
Chihuahuas don't really kill more people than pit bulls. You will be amused why people thought so.
If you are prescribed the new antidepressant Auvelity but it is unaffordable, with little research you can bring the cost down from $1000 to $5 by buying both parts of the mixture separately and following the formula.
One daughter-in-law, a hearty Trump disliker, sent along a link that Cole Allen was not the sort of person the White House is saying he is. I thought you might be interested in my reply to the dear woman from my immediate mental health perspective.
That is fascinating. It does seem likely that painting him as anti-Christian is at minimum, highly superficial and recent, and more likely, imposing a predetermined view on him.
He has sounded somewhat psychotic to me, of a point of view that has grown gradually more paranoid. In a very usual fashion, he has drawn his paranoia from what is in the air at the time. Parts of his reasoning are indeed extremely solid, but finding the antichrist in anyone who is prominent in one’s own moment is always deeply suspicious, and attributing a special level of sinfulness to behavior that is always with us seems like a sort of "spiritual impression cherry picking."
It feels to me like an intensity of thinking about subjects that at one time was quite nuanced and able to look at contradictions and try to resolve them, but because of growing paranoia has settled on its answer and can no longer look at two sides of an issue .
Because this is an enormous ambiguity about who he is, and what has motivated him, everyone will have plenty of evidence for their own side, and plenty of reasons why their opponents are just stupid and refusing to look at "the evidence." I think we will see no shared resolution.
She was around a lot of PhD candidates and PhD's at Rice in her 20's (she is early 40's now) and wondered if there is an increase in instability among such folks. I had thoughts about that as well.
I have thought about this a lot in my career. My belief is that in a clear and protected environment like academia, you can go longer before your instability becomes a dealbreaker. It also happens in fields where you can work alone and submit your work with minimal interaction . So people “choose“ those fields because they get selected out in other fields earlier. They like those fields better for survival and social reasons. If you learn how to avoid whatever the real forbidden behaviors are in a group, you can break lots of other rules for a long time and still get paid. Academia is just one of them.
Life in the Fully Politicized Society, on David Foster's substack. He has written earlier versions of this at Chicago Boyz. He links to some of that in this essay.
He darts back-and-forth between modern events - a speech by Michelle Obama, residence training at the University of Delaware - and events in Germany between the wars and in the Soviet Union. It's not the same, as conservatives are wont to claim. But it's the same thing. One of my great surprises when first working in mental health was that the bleeding heart liberals, who at the time I expected to be the good guys and care more about the downtrodden than those evil conservatives, were the ones who most wanted to make people do things that were Good For Them. Oh sure, that's not what the law says, but it would be really good for Jerry to have a good long stay in the hospital so that he could "stabilisise," and then be required to go to day program five days a week when he gets out for the whole year. Jerry was 24, and would point out that day program was groups of older women complaining about their first husbands, meditation groups, and healthy eating.
Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed….You have to stay at the seat at the table of democracy with a man like Barack Obama not just on Tuesday but in a year from now, in four years from now, in eight years from now, you will have to be engaged. (bolding by Mr. Foster)
From GenX Anecdotes: The Manosphere isn't the Problem, Feminism is. I did wonder what would happen to a man who wrote this, but then I figured I knew the answer. In most circles, that man would be hated and off-limits forever. But these days, there are corners of the internet where he could get together with other guys and exchange stories in gleeful anger. He would incredibly reduce the number of places he could safely hold a job or go to school, but he could have a social consolation prize anyway. What happens to a woman who writes this I don't know. Most would be pseudonymous for self-protective social reasons. Their comments sections might include a lot of other women agreeing with them and men thanking them, but I'm sure they would attract a lot of hate as well. There will be people who want the world to know that this woman is 100% wrong and dangerous, no quarter given*.
In the video, the three women discuss the findings of a poll they carried out on Gen Z and their attitudes towards the opposite sex. The results of the poll certainly aren’t a surprise to me and won’t be to anyone who has been actually paying attention. But the women seem to be taken aback and surprised by the findings.
It turns out, drum roll…… young men don’t hate young women anywhere near as much as young women hate men. What a shock!
For me, the results are depressingly predictable. What was fascinating to me was listening to their response to it. Lot’s of “what could be going on here?” and “I don’t really understand why”…..
Well she's not wrong, though she may oversell it. Schools have tended this way for a long time and it may be worse now. When I go to vote at the highschool the signs and posters are like this, but much milder. There is also the usual "Our school is great!" and helpful nagging not to do certain things like take drugs or be a bully. But for those messages which are gendered they are definitely all in one direction. The is also the subtler messaging of "Our school teaches kids to have particular virtues, especially ones preferred by women." This woman has a daughter, BTW.
She tells me what’s going on in her lessons and I see her homework assignments.
English? Let’s focus on women and women’s struggles and how bad it is for women and write an essay about it. History? Women. Art? Women. Science? Women. Even in maths I went to an open evening and her female maths teacher kept going on about the fact that my daughter is a “girl” and that it’s great that she’s good at maths, because we MUST encourage more girls in maths. Do we? Why?
There are posters in the school corridors celebrating female writers, scientists, artists. School assemblies? Let’s talk about women.
Women Women Women…. It’s everywhere.
If they do talk about boys and men, it’s to treat them like broken, dysfunctional girls, bombard them with “education” about “toxic masculinity”, “the patriarchy” and give them the impression that the only way they can be “good boys” is to act like “girls”.
*Technically, no quarter asked either. Online, such things are demanded, not requested. See also billionaires, Gaza, 62 million visits, and Epstein files.
Megan McArdle: The existence of a problem does not imply the existence of a solution.
Ann Althouse: The war is over. We won. Iran just won't admit it, and we're not going to give them anything for holding out on admitting what is true.
Magatte Wade. Energy poverty kills more people than climate change ever will
Steve Stewart-Williams: IQ remains the strongest predictor of educational success, yet many teachers misunderstand it, underestimate the role of genetics, and embrace widely debunked ideas like Gardner’s multiple intelligences.
AVI: When your opponents are 50% insane by your estimate, you will never switch to them, even if your allies are 90% insane. At that "balance" you might go neutral, but you will not switch sides. Because...you see quite clearly that the other side is 50% nucking futs. You cannot leave your position until you have a place to land. Therefore, pointing out to people that their side is 90% insane will likely have no effect., They won't see it. All they will see is that some people on your side are upwards of 50% nuts. It's not very Bayesian, but it's how we think.
I link to interesting things, but sometimes underestimate how important simple sanity is in national affairs. Razib interviews Megan McArdle. The Follies of Populism part is more his than hers, though she doesn't disagree. Her strength is economic issues.
We're gonna have a fiscal crisis, what that means is up for debate. We're gonna have a fiscal crisis in the sense that at some point we are gonna get into a bad situation where the interest rates on our debt are rising enough - Okay, let me qualify this. If we reach super intelligence, I don't know the universe gets wierd, economics is riding around in the sky, we're all like living on clouds. at that point I don't know. But assuming that we do not get super intelligence that rips through the economy and raises the GDP growth to 35% and/or super intelligence just looks around at all the carbon based life forms, and is like, why? This is very untidy. We should get rid of that. It's those uses could be those, those resources could be put to better use for silicone production. But assuming that neither of those things happens, we're just kind of past the point of no return to getting a good outcome. I've been screaming about this literally for my entire writing career. And when I started, I would say this is coming in the 2030s and people would it was as if I might have, I might as well have said, this is coming in the year 40,000 ad. It's just didn't register. No one was interested. It was so far off that no one paid attention. And that was the point at which we could have had very good outcomes. There were lots of ways to make small tweaks to Social Security, to bring it into balance, to make small tweaks to Medicare. We did not do that. You know, to lightly raise taxes, to lightly change the rules for getting benefits. We did none of that. Instead, we spent more on Medicare, and we did not reform Social Security. And at this point we're less than a decade off, yeah, the solutions are much harder.
Links as threatened.
Venn Diagrams get messy quickly. The purpose is to visually represent the relationships clearly. After four it doesn't look very clear and doesn't help much, however accurate it might be. Of course, there may be those who still find them useful at higher numbers, and good on 'em.
Low Elite Fertility contributed to Roman instability You can't have a hereditary monarchy if the monarchs don't have children
The Outliers by Joseph Heath. Progress comes from both our sociability and our unsociability in tension.
Kant went on to claim, somewhat provocatively, that the tension between these two aspects of our nature is responsible for the progress that can be observed in human society. Without the “unsociable” aspect of our nature, we would sink too easily into complacency and stasis, but without the “sociable” aspect we would be unable to realize any of the benefits that come from the occasional disruptive insight.
Ex-climate-activist Lucy Biggers goes back and watches "An Inconvenient Truth."
Fouling when up three. This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable. A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343) Tiago Splitter gets it.
When I was a young man, I thought this would never happen in my lifetime. Even twenty years ago, I wondered. The last few years have seen the time come down regularly.
Sawe breaks the 2 hour mark in the marathon, in London. I hadn't even heard of the second place finisher Kejelcha for good reason. It was his first marathon.
Astral Star Codex puts out links every month. I will link to a few specifically, but you might like the whole batch.
A small version of this Biblical principle (James 2:16) from Steve Stewart-Williams Life Hack: A Small Gift...
The Real Casey, The Real Servant Humor about persistent frauds
The Visit; 1984 & Animal Farm; The Lesson and Rhinoceros As Paul Simon said "Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest." An excellent link from James in the comments.
Circular Time, Julian Jaynes, and Greg Cochran A commenter refined the idea to Helical Time for me, and I no longer think the last part of this is quite accurate. Still, the concept (also at the internal link) was a big one for a decade or so for me and I still think it has some explanatory power for both history and prehistory
Tessie bsking was there at Fenway that night.
California Rocket Fuel The old all-or-nothing antidepressant combo discussion revisited. I was going to delete half the comments, including my own, but Granite Dad saved us in the end.
