They offer specific evidence on their personal behavior to prove that for them politics is about policy, medicine is about health, charity is about helping, etc. But aside from that, they show little interest in what such hypotheses might imply about the world in which they live.
Category: Uncategorized
Death of Socrates
The artist consulted Plato’s “Phaedo” and a variety of sources including Diderot’s treatise on dramatic poetry and works by the poet André Chenier. The pose of Plato, the figure seated in profile at the foot of the bed (who was not actually present at the scene), was reportedly inspired by the English novelist Richardson. The printmaker and publisher John Boydell, writing to Sir Joshua Reynolds, called The Death of Socrates “the greatest effort of art since the Sistine Chapel and the stanze of Raphael,” further observing that the painting “would have done honor to Athens at the time of Pericles.”
Thiel on Innovation
the whole thing is worth reading, here’s an example:
the contrarian nonprofit question is what great causes are deeply unpopular? I only want to fund unpopular causes. I assume popular causes are funded relatively well
Food Woo
We need another Enlightenment to overcome all this superstitious nonsense.
Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, has amassed a loyal following. Hari implores her soldiers to petition food companies to change their formulas. She’s also written a bestselling book telling you that you can change your life in 21 days by “breaking free of the hidden toxins in your life.” She and her army are out to change the world.
She’s also utterly full of shit.
Full Stack
CSS is a conspiracy
another mickens episode, on w3c. too bad they’re in pdf:
Cascading Style Sheets are a cryptic language developed by the Freemasons to obscure the visual nature of reality and encourage people to depict things using ASCII art. The relationship between CSS and HTML is the same relationship that links the instructions for building your IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that purportedly contain latent bed structures
Firms Now 80% Dark Matter
in 40 years we’ve gone from a world where it was easy to see most of what made the biggest public firms valuable, to a world where most of that value is invisible.
Hospital alert fatigue
Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts, an average of 1 alarm beeping by the bedside every 8 minutes. For the entire month, there were 381560 alarms across the 5 ICUs. If you add the inaudible alerts, there were 2.5M unique alarms in 1 month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false
Medieval Robots
In 807 the caliph in Baghdad sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed the hours by dropping small metal balls into a bowl. Instead of a numbered dial, the clock displayed the time with 12 mechanical horsemen that popped out of small windows, rather like an Advent calendar
Host tolerance
Instead of focusing on how to kill specific pathogens, THoR seeks to catalyze the development of breakthrough interventions that would increase the ability of patients’ own bodies to tolerate a broad range of pathogens. The program will explore the fundamental biology of host tolerance in animal populations with the goal of expanding treatment options for humans in the future.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 