flâneur

Aidan Smith

57 followers · 45 following · 2762 views

on the atlas — 93

highlights — 439

  • So nat'ralists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em. And so proceeds ad infinitum.
    Hyperparasite
  • Famously, the struggle was commemorated in the Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum. Rockoff provides a brilliant reading, of how Baum encoded the gold standard battle in his modern fairy tale.
    Chartbook #44: The Cross of Gold - populism, democratic iterations and the politics of money
  • La Jolla library did actually have a public biolab for a time - according to their website it is currently shut-down
    A Brief History of Biohacking - Seeds of Science
  • So English developed a fix: word order became rigid. In Alfred’s time, you could arrange words freely because the endings carried the grammatical signal. Today, position carries that signal instead.
    How AI Is Learning to Think in Secret
  • This immense diversity led the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane to quip, when some theologians asked him what could be inferred about the mind of the Christian God from the works of His Creation, "An inordinate fondness for beetles".[14]
    Beetle
  • You, music of my late years, I am called By a sound and a color which are more and more perfect. Do not die out, fire. Enter my dreams, love. Be young forever, seasons of the earth.
    Winter by Czeslaw Milosz - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry
  • Study has ruled out the presence of carbon as the resource attracting the fungal colonies, and in fact concluded that some fungi will preferentially grow in the direction of the source of beta and gamma ionizing radiation
    Radiotrophic fungus - Wikipedia
  • The best option is to read something about the place and then go consume the real thing, the more specific the better. The material culture and maps in the Hong Kong Museum of Art came to life having read Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight.
    2025 letter | Zhengdong
  • INTERVIEWER I heard a story that you once spent a night in a tree at Vassar outside Cushing dormitory. Is it true? BISHOP Yes, it was me, me and a friend whose name I can’t remember. We really were crazy and those trees were wonderful to climb. I used to be a great tree climber. Oh, we probably gave up about three in the morning. How did that ever get around? I can’t imagine! We stopped being friends afterwards. Well, actually she had invited two boys from West Point for the weekend and I found myself stuck with this youth all in—[her hands draw an imagined cape and uniform in the air]—the dul…
    Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 27, Elizabeth Bishop
  • ? Even so, you can’t! I found this very disturbing. TV was real and no one had observed that it wasn’t. Like when Aristotle was right and no one pointed out, for centuries, that women don’t have fewer teeth than men.
    Paris Review - The Art of Poetry No. 27, Elizabeth Bishop
  • it is not the earth I will miss, it is you I will miss.
    Crossroads - Griffin Poetry Prize
  • And if the world does turn, and if London burns I’ll be standing on the beach with my guitar I want to be in a band when I get to heaven – Radiohead
    Old Castle, by the river, in the middle of a forest — Andrew Kortina
  • These days, it feels like such a delicious indulgence when I do this. When it does happen, it’s glorious, and, I think, I really need to do this more often. But then how often do I do it? It’s just too easy to get pulled into all the problems of the world, and it kind of feels like you need to apologize when you look away for a moment…
    Old Castle, by the river, in the middle of a forest — Andrew Kortina
  • Countless nights in the office at 289 7th Ave, above the Dunkin Donuts, working til 11pm, 1am, 3am – with either Natural Wonder or Live at Last blasting on repeat. My friend Julian, who joined Venmo as a software engineer just after graduating from college, said to me years later, “I just thought you guys were taking tons of Adderrall all the time.”
    Old Castle, by the river, in the middle of a forest — Andrew Kortina
  • Try it. Go around your day, narrating all of your choices to yourself. With everything you do, consciously say, in your head: “I am choosing to do this, because it’s the best course of action according to all the information I have available.” See if it feels true. It might — perhaps this exercise will reinforce your conviction. But you might also find that entire regions of your life suddenly look strange. The declaration that you’re doing the best thing will sound like hollow propaganda, an attempt to convince yourself of something you know just isn’t so.
    In praise of quitting - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions
  • “There are many other names for it; the English call it Shiner or Steam Fly; in Russia it has been called the ‘Prussian,’ and in Prussia it was known as the ‘Russian.’”—James Rehn
    The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach
  • I know of no pathway out of poverty and to prosperity that doesn’t run through city streets
    Yes In My Bamako Yard - Asterisk Magazine
  • In Kenya, the building codes for Nairobi, first established during the British colonial period, were copied from the industrial town of Blackburn — including a rule requiring roofs to withstand six inches of snow (a rule only recently repealed).
    Yes In My Bamako Yard - Asterisk Magazine
  • The thermal efficiency of our computers has improved over time, of course. We get more compute while producing less waste heat over time. The gains in the thermal efficiency of compute can be plotted on an empirical curve in what is known as Koomey’s law
    The Moon Should Be a Computer
  • This intolerance is due to a defect in glucuronosyltransferase, a common detoxification enzyme in other mammals, that also makes the cat intolerant to paracetamol (acetaminophen
    Permethrin - Wikipedia
  • “The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.”
    Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia
  • He was trying to study afterimages, those glowing spots you get in your field of vision when you look at something bright and then look away. If you do that too many times, it turns out, you fry your retinas and get really depressed for three years. Fechner was completely blind for a while, and then he underwent treatment by moxibustion, which is where you put a weed called mugwort on someone's skin and then set it on fire. Besides leaving scars, this treatment somehow ruined his digestion, and he almost starved to death before a family friend figured out a way of preparing ham in a way that h…
    On the importance of staring directly into the sun
  • While in Mill's care the manuscript was destroyed, according to Mill by a careless household maid who mistook it for trash and used it as a firelighter. Carlyle then rewrote the entire manuscript, achieving what he described as a book that came "direct and flamingly from the heart."[1]
    The French Revolution: A History - Wikipedia
  • It did land him one lifeline: in the two years between the publication of Memoirs and his death, he became a frequent dinner guest of William F. Buckley
    The Georgist Roots of American Libertarianism—Asterisk
  • On average siblings share 50% of genes. But there’s a little randomness in meiosis, so some siblings might share 40% and others might share 60%. The more genetic influence on a trait, the more similar sibling pairs who share 60% of their genes will be, compared to sibling pairs who only share 40% of their genes. Since 60%-gene siblings and 40%-gene siblings are both equally part of the same family, you can use these numbers to calculate heritability unconfounded by a range of family factors. This is Sib-Regression. If you do a more complicated statistical process to extend the same idea to rel…
    Missing Heritability: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
  • we know that children infected with rubella virus in utero have 20x the usual schizophrenia risk.
    Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes
  • for example, they die about 15 - 20 years earlier, often of heart problems.
    Contra Skolnick On Schizophrenia Microbes
  • What’s frustrating here is that the French Kiln was apparently too popular to even bother describing: “of the form or model whereof I will not here stand to entreat, because they are now so generally frequent among us, that not a mason or carpenter in the whole Kingdom but can build the same, so that to use more words thereof were tediousness to little purpose.” Argh! Will nobody think of the historians?
    Age of Invention: Just Kiln Time
  • onsidering that just a few years later the patentees then persuaded the king to ban the use of wood for making glass entirely, they were clearly willing to make whatever convoluted argument was necessary just to get their way.
    Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest
  • . Deforestation was caused by the arrival of cheap coal.
    Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest
  • hich may help explain why the Holy Roman Empire had so many tiny sovereign states: it had a great many inland salt sources.
    Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I
  • (While we’re on myths about the Romans and salt: there is an oft-repeated notion that “salary”, from the Latin salarium, comes from Roman soldiers being occasionally paid in salt. This, too, appears to be completely made up — yet another zombie myth to add to the growing list.)
    Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I
  • seemingly practised by Ashurbanipal in the subjugation of Elam, for example — was to sow salt with the seeds of particularly aggressive weeds.
    Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I
  • It exploits several implementation details in V8 and a few quirks of JavaScript. In particular, a JavaScript number lookup obj[100000] is equivalent to looking up the "stringified" value of the same number obj["100000"].
    HashWick V8 Vulnerability
  • Kafka was editing "A Hunger Artist" on his deathbed, a story whose composition he had begun before his throat closed to the point that he could not take any nourishment
    Franz Kafka - Wikipedia
  • Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time
    Franz Kafka - Wikipedia
  • then-girlfriend suggested filters so that her otherwise terrible photos would hold up against everybody else’s.
    No Filter | Soraya Roberts
  • The Sea was the bestselling album in the Warner Bros. back catalog.
    Rod McKuen was the bestselling poet in American history. What happened?
  • Locks & safes have many other interesting vulnerabilities; I particularly like Matt Blaze’s⁠ master-key⁠ vulnerability (⁠Blaze2003⁠/⁠Blaze2004a⁠/Blaze2004b⁠), which uses the fact that a master-key lock is actually opening for any combination of master+ordinary key cuts (ie. ‘master OR ordinary’ rather than ‘master XOR ordinary’), and so it is like a password which one can guess one letter at a time. (These papers made locksmiths so mad they harassed Blaze into quitting⁠.)
    On Seeing Through and Unseeing: The Hacker Mindset · Gwern.net
  • we are outperformed on the Monty Hall problem⁠ by pigeons a
    The Algernon Argument · Gwern.net
  • Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.⁠⁠27⁠
    The Algernon Argument · Gwern.net
  • Greebles, also called greeblies (singular: greebly)[1] or nurnies, are small relief details used to give visual complexity to a model. The act of decorating a model with greebles is known as greebling.
    Greeble - Wikipedia
  • To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.
    Maybe you’re not Actually Trying - by Cate Hall
  • But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.
    Maybe you’re not Actually Trying - by Cate Hall
  • People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.
    Maybe you’re not Actually Trying - by Cate Hall
  • By default, you will ignore a path to your dreams if a personally perilous emotion—worthlessness, loneliness, imperfection—is along the way.
    Crossing the cringe minefield - by Cate Hall
  • You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively. By default, you will ignore a path to your dreams if a personally perilous emotion—worthlessness, loneliness, imperfection—is along the way.
    Crossing the cringe minefield - by Cate Hall
  • It took a year of forcing myself to say cute things over an inner reaction that kept insisting “this is wrong” for the cringe to go away.
    Crossing the cringe minefield - by Cate Hall
  • “You should be grateful just to have this job, how can you think you’re entitled to more?” “If you were doing this for the right reasons, you wouldn’t be so fixated on what’s in it for you.” Etc. I’ve spent weeks deliberating whether I could justly be fired for making an ask that was then quickly granted.
    Crossing the cringe minefield - by Cate Hall
  • Their breeding habitat is coniferous woods in Canada, Alaska, and the northernmost portions of the contiguous United States. They generally breed from early May to the end of August and remain within their breeding range throughout the year, but sometimes move south in winter.[7] When a female chickadee finds a high quality male to mate with this provides direct and indirect benefits such as exceptional parental care and high quality genes.[7] The pair remains together year round and may mate for life. Winter movements south of their range, however, appear to have become increasingly rare. Lar…
    Boreal chickadee - Wikipedia