P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #407
Don't freak out
my story 🚀
🚰 I received this copy of The Worth of Water as a gift from a friend (and subscriber - hi!) who gifts a book each year. The work that Matt Damon and Gary White are doing with Water.org was not on my radar. Way too many people around the world lack clean water access, and they’ve created an innovative model that provides loans for water and sanitation. Those loans have very high payback rates. Unlike traditional charity, where a donation is spent and that’s the end, this money is recycled to make an impact over and over again. The authors took turn on chapters, but in my head it was Matt Damon’s voice narrating all of them.
🧪 I watched the Bryan Johnson documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. The description is, “In this documentary, wealthy entrepreneur Bryan Johnson puts his body and fortune on the line to defy aging and extend his life beyond all known limits.” It came across as a PR effort for Bryan more than a documentary about longevity science. Maybe raising his profile is an indirect way of raising the profile for the field?
✨ I only recently started playing with OpenAI’s video streaming into the model. It’s an amazing experience, like a Facetime call with the chatbot. Recommend giving it a shot so you can be amazed like me. But whatever you do, Don’t Freak Out.
fun facts 🙌
We are closer to 2040 than 2010. And other fun mind-bending facts about our present era from Tim Urban. ~ learn more
Devon Lévesque bear-crawled a marathon. “It wasn't easy. Around mile 21, Lévesque was exhausted. He had been bear-crawling for the past 17 hours with breaks every 3 miles to wrap his hands to protect them from deep blistering. As he entered Central Park for the last leg of the race, he learned couldn’t get his hands rewrapped. Suddenly, all the hills in the park felt daunting.” ~ learn more
52 things I learned in 2024. Subscribed to this once-a-year blog after reading the 2023 post. The things that Kent Hendricks learns are very interesting to me, so I think they’ll be interestig to you! ~ learn more
Underrated reasons to be thankful. 4th edition from Dynomight. “That while we now have microplastics in all the food we eat and all the water we drink and all the air we breathe and this is decidedly non-awesome, current science suggests that the actual health impact from consuming most types of plastic might well be essentially zero.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Simon Willison has been keeping good notes! “Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.” ~ learn more
CES 2015 impressive reveals. Someone made a roomba-looking vacuum that has an arm to move dirty socks. Follow the link for that video and nine others. ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
An unreasonable amount of time. “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
A summary of all the 2025 trends forecasts. You know how every research agency and big company likes to public an annual trends report? Imagine taking 233 of those and feeding them into an LLM to extract the key points by industry. Someone did that, then summarized it in a notion doc and a NotebookLM podcast. This is a pretty neat project by Narain Jashanmal. I think some reports ended up being overweighted and dominating the summary, so I find being able to actually browse all the underlying PDFs is extra great. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Topology from mental models of physical space. Pretty much this: “if you take the most prominent description of how the rat's neurons spikes when exploring a maze, that very description is structured like the maze itself” ~ learn more
A football field in a teaspoon. Researchers created a new carbon material with a vast molecular surface area. “After the material was created, the researchers tested it to see how much carbon dioxide it could sequester from the atmosphere. The result was that in just two minutes it was able to capture 99% of its total capacity, a yield that nearly doubles current activated carbon products.” ~ learn more
Halloween, ADHD, and Subjectivity in Medical Diagnosis. “Using data on over 100 million physician office visits, we compared ADHD diagnosis rates, by day, among children seen by physicians in the 10 weekdays surrounding seven Halloween holidays. The rate of new ADHD diagnosis was 62.7 per 10,000 child-visits on Halloween, compared with 55.1 during surrounding weekdays, a 14% increase.” ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
Commercial tea bags release millions of microplastics. Sorry for ruining your tea experience. I guess now I have to get up to speed on the material of my tea bags. “The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose. The study shows that, when brewing tea, polypropylene releases approximately 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, with an average size of 136.7 nanometers; cellulose releases about 135 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 244 nanometers; while nylon-6 releases 8.18 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 138.4 nanometers.” ~ learn more
Twin study links depression to fruit and vegetable consumption. Plenty of weaknesses in the study design but if you like the conclusion just go ahead and believe it! “A high intake of both fruit and vegetables was associated with lower depressive symptoms over time compared to a low intake. A moderate intake of veggies, but not fruit, was also associated with lower depressive symptoms versus low intakes.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
A podcast on telepathy. Someone sent me this so I listened to the first episode. “In the premiere episode of The Telepathy Tapes, host Ky Dickens embarks on a mind-bending journey into the mysterious world of telepathy in non-speaking individuals with autism. Through personal stories and expert interviews, Dickens uncovers a phenomenon she never thought possible—a hidden form of communication that defies mainstream science.” I mean, this is basically a radio show so as far as I know it’s like War of the Worlds and a total fabrication. But maybe it’s not? ~ learn more
on the blockchain ⛓
If you don’t like Bitcoin you won’t like Bitcoin bonds. An analyst’ critical take on “Allianz’s foolish bitcoin bond buying.” It’s an interesting analysis, even though I think the underlying premise of “Bitcoin is going to ~zero” isn’t one I align with. “Last month, [MicroStrategy] raised $3B of debt to buy more Bitcoin, and it is rumored one of the buyers of the bonds was… Allianz!!!” ~ learn more
profiles of people 🚶
Morris Chang and the origins of TSMC. Brian Potter took the time to translate (with tech) Chang’s Chinese-language autobiography then write up this great 30 minute summary. “TSMC has a fascinating origin story: it was founded in 1985 by Morris Chang, who, after working in the US for Texas Instruments for more than 20 years, was enticed to go to Taiwan and help develop their high-tech industries as head of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).” ~ learn more
The luckiest fool who ever lived. I did not fact check anything about this story of Lord Timothy Dexter. I sure hope it’s all true. Married into money, his first move was to try and prove how cool he is to the Boston elites by buying the most worthless Continental dollars to support the war effort. Turns out that buying all these at a discount proved fortuitous when Alexander Hamilton later redeemed them for Treasury bonds. This is just the beginning. ~ learn more