P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #312

Running experiments.

my story 🚀

Un-glamorous backstory: we’re leaving the concert because it’s too loud for our kids.

i’ve been thinking 💭

Animal Experiments. The kids watched Clifford the Big Red Dog this morning. The movie’s villain runs a research lab and intends to run experiments on him. He orders his henchmen to kidnap the dog to advance his scheme. Without a doubt, this is a bad guy. While explaining a scene, Kim told the kids something like: he’s not nice because he wants to run experiments on Clifford. Certainly that’s true in this case! I recoiled at the statement, though, knowing just how embedded animal testing is in medical research. I’m always cheering on the research (especially in this newsletter), so implicitly I must be comfortable with the methods. And, while I accept that it is indeed “not nice,” I also think it’s often worthwhile and appropriate. Curious, I turned to PETA to learn how they view the tradeoff. Not surprisingly, they’re opposed to it. They make the valid point that in many some cases the animals are poor analogues for the humans we truly want to help via research. They do seem to accept it in cases where it’s “required by law.” Mostly, though, they want to promote alternatives like in-vitro testing and computer modeling. I’m not yet changing my position on the usefulness and ethicalness of animal experimentation. But I am open to learning more about how we might advance medicine without it. And hearing about how to talk about these hairy topics with young kids.

fun facts 🙌

Emma Willard’s maps of time. If you think infographics are cool, you’ll love this! “Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.” ~ learn more

The difference between soil and dirt. Our kid schooled us on this earlier this week. Soil is living; dirt is dead. ~ learn more

How lithium gets from the earth into your electric car. This Washington Post article is an engaging, multimedia, tutorial that covers the entire process. Highly recommended. ~ learn more

Legal loophole legalized ecstasy in Ireland for 48 hours. This is old new from 2015, yet entertaining to me in 2023. “Following what appears to be a major oversight, lawmakers in Ireland are scrambling to pass emergency legislation after a Tuesday morning court ruling resulted in the legalization of a number of drugs, including ecstasy, ketamine, and crystal meth in the country.” ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

28 things that are normal in Chicago but seem weird to outsiders. This one felt like a gut punch: “Parking meters that pay private investor but are taxpayer enforced.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Zipline’s next generation delivery drone system. Two comments on this. First, this thread, including videos, is an incredible glimpse into the future. Second, one commentors rightfully calls out the disconnect between the claim of half a million fully autonomous deliveries and the fact that most of the videos are CGI. ~ learn more

What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work? Written by Stephen Wolfram, this is a technical explanation about how ChatGPT and Large Language Models work. He builds up from the ground floor, providing simplified mathematical examples that are somewhat approachable to regular people. But it is Stephen Wolfram, who is out-of-this-world smart, so I wouldn’t expect to grok it all on the first try. ~ learn more

Lessons learned from 100+ angel investments. A neighbor in Austin launched a new podcast called Wannabe Angels. In their first interview, they talk to Jack Greco, who has invested in 120 startups and 50 funds. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Hemingway’s warning about habits. I just learned the phrase “gradually, then suddenly” was coined by the famous author of The Sun Also Rises. It’s the response to one character asking another “How did you go bankrupt?” ~ learn more

Urgency doesn’t exist. “The first and most obvious sense in which urgency isn’t what it seems is that virtually none of the things that generate that knot-in-the-stomach feeling are the matters of life-or-death we tend to assume. By the strictest definition of the word “need”, they don’t actually need doing before anything else.” ~ learn more

How to be a better parent. I listened to this podcast at 1.5x so it was about 30 minutes. Dr. Shefali is promoting her new book and her theory of conscious parenting. One idea that I put into practice right away (see photo caption above) is to show all sides of parenting when sharing online, not just the highlights. The goal is to avoid perpetuating the damaging standard of “perfect” that we see on social media. ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Studying autism with lab-grown brain organoids. “For years, the neuroscientist Sergiu Paşca has been a leader in the use of brain organoids in studies of human neurological disorders. His latest work, in which human cells become working parts of rat brains, carries that effort to new heights.” ~ learn more

Scientists target ‘biocomputing’ breakthrough with use of human brain cells. Like the link above, this is also about organoids. A bit farther ‘out there’, these researchers want to turn the lumps of brain cells into fast and efficient computers. Given the revolution happening in artificial intelligence on silicon, this could take things to a new level. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The unpredictable abilities emerging from large AI models. I suspect “emergence” will continue to be a dominant force in human progress in this century. Seems like a safe benefit since it’s also responsible for, well, pretty much everything. “A raft of researchers, detecting the first hints that LLMs could reach beyond the constraints of their training data, are striving for a better grasp of what emergence looks like and how it happens.” ~ learn more

on the blockchain ⛓

LinksDAO is under contract to buy a Scottish golf course. I think this is cool news because it demonstrates that the crypto world can manifest in real life. It’s not all just a bunch of gamblers trading BS tokens and NFTs back and forth! ~ learn more

Forget HTTP: Ethereum has a new URL standard that can’t be blocked. Instead of http:// it’ll be web3://. But it’s pretty expensive, so don’t expect it to take over most use cases quite yet. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!