Category: Uncategorized

The longevity gap

this has been called species bifurcation elsewhere.

After 1 week, tissue from older mice resembled that of 6-month-old mice. This would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old before our eyes, combining the maturity and wisdom of age with the vitality of youth. Researchers hope to launch human trials soon.

and it ends in what is essentially a call for basic income.

The right to feed lions

Little Caesar’s argued that the persecution of Christians and the feeding of them to ravenous big cats was a “deeply held” religious belief, that the continued survival of the 6k Christian employees, as well as the fact that they remained on company payroll, imposed a “substantial financial burden” on their religious liberty.

Last American Man

At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him 1 day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d ever want to meet. They’d offered Eustace crack, which he’d politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.

“Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?”

Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and softened the hide with the deer’s own brains and then sewed the shirt together using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer’s spine. He told the drug dealers that it’s not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature. “Eustace, we gotta go.”

The drug dealers shook his hand: “Damn, Eustace. You something else.”

Rebuild cities before population decline

What we need is for self-driving cars to become available and cheap enough in cities that are still growing fast enough, and which have legal and political support for driving such cars fast close together, so they can achieve high throughput. That is, people need to be sufficiently rewarded for using cars in ways that allow more road throughput. And then economic activity needs to move from old cities to the new more efficient cities.

NYC Abandoned Islands

New York City life is shaped by the archipelago upon which it lies. Nearly 30 of these islands bear names and distinct, if a little peculiar, backstories. We rounded up 11 such islands, all linked through the common themes of abandonment and obscurity. Many were at one point inhabited, either by individuals or institutions, but today all have slipped out of the public’s consciousness. Indeed, to many native New Yorkers, their existence remains unnoticed.