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Entries for January 2024
Rat Selfies
For a photographic experiment based on the Skinner box, Augustin Lignier trained a pair of rats to take photos of themselves, aided by a sugary reward. When the rewards became intermittent, the rats kept snapping away, sometimes even ignoring the sugar.
To Mr. Lignier, the parallel is obvious. “Digital and social media companies use the same concept to keep the attention of the viewer as long as possible,” he said.
Indeed, social media has been described as “a Skinner Box for the modern human,” doling out periodic, unpredictable rewards — a like, a follow, a promising romantic match — that keep us glued to our phones.
Or maybe being able to keep ourselves busy pressing buttons is its own reward. In a 2014 study, scientists concluded that many human volunteers “preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.” Maybe we would rather sit around and push whatever levers are in front of us — even those that might make us feel bad - than sit with ourselves in quiet contemplation.
Railroad workers have solved the trolley problem. “‘Slip the switch’ by flipping it while the trolley’s front wheels have passed through, but before the back wheels do. This will cause a controlled derailment, bringing the trolley to a safe halt.”
The NY Times takes a look at current trends in restaurant menus. “Like purses, menus have shrunk. Many restaurants favor a vertical, half-page menu — just the right size for holding in your hands, with no pages to flip through and, often, fewer items…”
A lovely short story about the iPhone 15. (It’s not actually about an iPhone.) “The difference between learning a person and learning an iPhone is that, eventually, you learn the iPhone. You even forget the learning part.”
Cooked looks interesting: you add ‘cooked.wiki/’ in front of a recipe URL and it’ll show just the recipe, generate a shopping list, save it for later, etc.
Intriguing new book: Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are. “…a dazzling tour revealing the intimate role that [the Moon] has played in our biological and cultural evolution”.
The 20 best acting performances that didn’t even get an Oscar nomination in the 21st century. Includes the likes of Amy Adams, Lupita Nyong’o, Jennifer Lopez, Scarlett Johansson, and Jake Gyllenhaal.
I’m late to it this year, but here’s director Steven Soderbergh’s list of everything he read and watched in 2023. To call him voracious would be an understatement.
Can you solve the greatest wordplay puzzle ever? It relates to texts using all 100 letters in a Scrabble set exactly, e.g.: “A clown jumps above a trapeze. Arcs over one-eighty degrees. Out into mid-air, Quite unaware. Of his exiting billfold and keys.”
Ryan Gosling getting an Oscar nom for Barbie while Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were snubbed… well, it looks like the plot of Barbie II is all set then.
The colorful mating dance of the Tragopan pheasant. Having seen quite a few bird courtship displays on various Planet Earths, I thought I knew what to expect here, but I. did. not. Wow. Takes a bit to get going but stick with it.
Tiny Flying Rainbows
It’s not like we need another reason why hummingbirds are so cool, but if you photograph them backlit by the sun, their wings turn into tiny rainbows. These great photos are by Christian Spencer, who used them in his book Birds: Poetry in the Sky. (via present & correct)
The World’s Largest Cruise Ship Is a Climate Liability. “Taking a cruise generates ‘about double the amount of total greenhouse gas emissions’ as flying.”
Wikipedia’s list of cryptids. Includes Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and chupacabras.
The Strange Energy of 50th Birthdays
In writing about model Kate Moss turning 50, Zoe Williams explores the weird cultural energy around people’s 50th birthdays. I loved this short anecdote + observation:
A friend of mine manages an event place in Scotland, and they’ve banned 50ths. Hen nights, stag dos, 40ths, no problem: but some combination of the manic nihilism that sweeps over people and the middle-aged mal-coordination that crept up on them leads to a wild amount of breakage.
Lol. I turned 50 back in September and I had a lovely and quiet dinner with friends — I may have had two cocktails and a nightcap (!!!) but there was no breakage or manic nihilism. I know a lot of folks who read the site are around my age — have you noticed any 50th birthday craziness in your lives?
Thing that actually exists: a Doritos nacho cheese-flavored vodka. “The bouquet is brimming with the unmistakable tang of cheese dust. But in the sip, it’s all about cornier elements.”
I’m Edgar Allan Poe’s Landlord, and He Will Not Be Getting His Security Deposit Back. “Within the past three months alone, the violations of your lease and our community standards have included: Prying up the floorboards in your unit.”
The Stanley Water Bottle Craze, Explained
Amanda Mull, writing for the Atlantic about the internet’s fad du jour, the Stanley cup (the water bottle, not the hockey trophy):
How did Stanley, which has seen its annual revenue increase from $73 million in 2019 to a projected $750 million in 2023, become so popular, so quickly? Lots of very smart people have tried to reverse engineer an explanation to the Stanley mystery — why this cup, right now, out of all the zillions of insulated drinking vessels available to American shoppers? But the actual story here is more about the nature of trends themselves than about a cup. There is no real reason any of this happened, or at least no reason that will feel satisfying to you. Sometimes a cup is just a cup in the right place at the right time.
But actually, I think this video from Phil Edwards comes pretty close to nailing why these cups are hot right now: it’s got a lot to do with savvy marketing and the CEO Stanley brought in in 2020.
From a Harvard Business Review podcast with Stanley CEO Terence Reilly, who was formerly the CMO of Crocs:
TERENCE REILLY: Well, I didn’t do anything, we had an amazing team at Crocs, similar to Stanley. One day, Toria Roth, who was just fresh off of her internship at Crocs, she walked into my office, the CMO’s office, and she said, “Terence, do you have a minute?” And she showed me a photo of Post Malone wearing Crocs.
ALISON BEARD: And Post Malone is a very popular musician.
TERENCE REILLY: Absolutely. And he wasn’t wearing them with any sort of irony, he just was wearing them. And she said, “This could be something for Crocs.” And so, I reached out to the folks that manage Post Malone, and I said, “Hey, would you be interested in a partnership or a collaboration where Post could create his own Crocs?”
And a few months later, the first celebrity collaboration with Crocs was born. And I think it broke the Crocs website when they went live, we had more people waiting than we could handle. And obviously, that set the stage for multiple artists and brands over the following years to collaborate with Crocs.
I remember when Crocs suddenly (and confusingly) became cool — one summer, all of the campers at my kids’ summer camps were wearing them. The summer before that, well…”those holes are where your dignity leaks out”.
I watched Edwards’ video with my 14-year-old daughter (she saw it on my YouTube homepage and was like, “wait, what’s that?”) and we talked about it afterward. She has a Quencher that she bought a couple of months ago and when I asked her why she got it, she replied that it had been blowing up on TikTok. But, she also said that the Stanley is better than any of her other water bottles because of the straw — she actually uses it more because the straw is easier to drink from and doesn’t require any unscrewing or flip-topping or anything and can be done without actually picking up the cup.
I also told her about how cool teen trends spread when I was a kid growing up in the 80s in an isolated rural area. There was no internet and certainly no TikTok, so we’d end up getting trends months later than other parts of the country, after they were already trending downward. We’d usually hear about them from the TV news…Tom Brokaw or some local anchor on channel 4 telling us about Rubik’s Cubes or valley girls or hacky sacks or parachute pants. She thought that was hilarious: teens hearing from adults about what teens thought was cool. We had it so hard back in the day — our memes delivered by adults, weeks late!
Looking forward to this one: my pal Nicola Twilley’s book is coming out in late June — Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Science + infrastructure? Yes, please.
Raising Artificial Intelligences Like Children
Over the weekend, I listened to this podcast conversation between the psychologist & philosopher Alison Gopnik and writer Ted Chiang about using children’s learning as a model for developing AI systems. Around the 23-minute mark, Gopnik observes that care relationships (child care, elder care, etc.) are extremely important to people but is nearly invisible in economics. And then Chiang replies:
One of the ways that conventional economics sort of ignores care is that for every employee that you hire, there was an incredible amount of labor that went into that employee. That’s a person! And how do you make a person? Well, for one thing, you need several hundred thousand hours of effort to make a person. And every employee that any company hires is the product of hundreds of thousands of hours of effort. Which, companies… they don’t have to pay for that!
They are reaping the benefits of an incredible amount of labor. And if you imagine, in some weird kind of theoretical sense, if you had to actually pay for the raising of everyone that you would eventually employ, what would that look like?
It’s an interesting conversation throughout — recommended!
Chiang has written some of my favorite things on AI in recent months/years, including this line that’s become one of my guiding principles in thinking about AI: “I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism.”
Recharge, 2023-2024. “Installation featuring a chair where you can relax and charge your phone. However, your phone will only charge when your eyes are closed.”
Air Jordan Is Finally Deflating by Ross Andersen. “Perhaps footwear just doesn’t pop like a jersey on the illuminated wall of a plutocrat’s man cave.”
Free download: a knitting pattern for a sweater depicting the cover of the iconic Penguin Classics version of George Orwell’s 1984. “The pattern includes extra alphabet charts so that you can customise the title and author to your favourite book.”
Ayo Edebiri (Sydney on The Bear) has an account on Letterboxd and her movie reviews are pretty entertaining.
This new induction stove seems interesting: it runs on 120V, it has a battery (which charges when energy is cheap), works if the power goes out, and can boil a liter of water in 40 sec., and can send power back to the grid.
Recommended: this episode of the Scriptnotes podcast in which John August talks with Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer and screenwriting. I could have listened to this for a couple more hours at least.
“Show Me Your Favorite Dance Move”
These compilation videos of Ed People asking folks from around the world to teach him how to do their favorite dance moves has been going around social media for awhile. I finally sat down to watch them and they are as wonderful, charming, and happy-making as everyone says they are. (thx, caroline)
Oooh, Robin Sloan has announced his latest novel: Moonbound. “It is eleven thousand years from now… A lot has happened, and yet a lot is still very familiar.”
A recent report found that corporate profiteering “accounted for about 53% of inflation” in Q2 & Q3 of 2023 in the US. All this while companies complain about high interest rates, crow about their profit margins, and ppl blame the President & the Fed.
Which One Wins? LeBron’s Brain or His Body?
Yesterday on her Instagram story, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky posted a short clip of a lecture in which she posed an intriguing question: if she switched brains with LeBron James, which of them would win in a 1-on-1 game? Some relevant facts: LeBron is 6’8”, 250 pounds, a 4-time NBA champion, 19-time All-Star, 4-time league MVP, and is the all-time NBA points leader. He also possesses a singular basketball mind:
“I can usually remember plays in situations a couple of years back — quite a few years back sometimes,” James says. “I’m able to calibrate them throughout a game to the situation I’m in, to know who has it going on our team, what position to put him in.
“I’m lucky to have a photographic memory,” he will add, “and to have learned how to work with it.”
Boroditsky is 5’3”, 105 pounds, and by her own admission knows nothing about basketball and has “no hops”. So who would win? Boroditsky’s body with LeBron’s brain or LeBron’s body with Boroditsky’s brain? And why?
Watch live as JAXA’s “Moon Sniper” mission attempts to land on the surface of the Moon.
Randall Munroe remembers hearing a song once featuring a chorus of women chanting “LOLOLOL”. He found a reference to it in a single Reddit post. Can you help him find it? (And no, it’s not anything obvious, like Rihanna or Kylie Minogue.)
Numberphile: “A Sudoku Secret to Blow Your Mind”
I am not a sudoku player but I do appreciate the logical nature of the game, so Numberphile’s explanation of a simple pattern hidden in every single sudoku puzzle was pretty satisfying.
But really, it’s just an excuse to revisit this other video about solving “The Miracle Sudoku”:
Every once in a while during my internet travels, I run across something like this video: something impossibly mundane and niche (a ~26-minute video of someone solving a sudoku puzzle) that turns out to be ludicrously entertaining.
Oh and this perfect explanation of cryptocurrency is always worth another look:
imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin
All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour. Josh Drummond very easily found all sorts of monetized anti-vax, anti-science, Nazi, anti-trans, and antisemitic newsletters on Substack. (Yeah, they’re not going to do anything about this…)
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Long Island Compromise is a forthcoming novel by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose Fleishman Is in Trouble was one of the best things I read last year. Look at that great cover and check out the synopsis:
Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, orgies, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
The book comes out on July 9 — impeccable timing because this thing is going to be read on many a beach this summer.
The nominees for the second annual Stunt Awards have been announced. Categories include “Best Stunt in a Nonaction Film”, “Best Practical Explosion”, and “Best Vehicular Stunt”.
Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles. “Google said it doesn’t focus on how an article was produced — by an AI or human — opening the way for more AI-generated articles.”
The Winners of the Nature Photography Contest
I really like the winning image (by Glenn Ostle) in the 2023 edition of The Nature Photography Contest, the results of which were just recently announced.
That sea lion has the same energy as Aragorn at the Black Gate of Mordor, just before he whispers “for Frodo” and charges into the horde of orcs assembled before him. “For lunch.”
Anyway! You can check out the rest of the winners and finalists on the website.
A map of EV charging costs in the US. “Now that the price of gasoline is dipping below $3 per gallon, is it still cheaper to fill up a car on electrons rather than gasoline? The answer is yes — by a lot.”
The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams. Andy Baio writes about the failure of a social network with big ideals…until the founders took a bunch of VC money. “You are not a product.”
Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather. The struggle is real: yesterday I drove to visit a friend and thought I had plenty of range to get home but heating the battery for two interim round-town trips totally screwed me.
The 1944 CIA guide to sabotaging meetings sounds an awful lot like how Congress or large company meetings are run. “Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
“Black holes can be difficult to study, so researchers have made a powerful quantum vortex in a tank of superfluid helium that acts as a simulation of a black hole.”
Inspired by an Oppenheimer screening, NY Times congressional correspondent Catie Edmondson chased down how the US government funded the Manhattan Project. “Did Congress approve the money? And if so, how did lawmakers keep it a secret?”
Gathering Ice for a Hot Mongolian Breakfast
In this video, a pair of YouTubers from Mongolia show us a glimpse of the nomadic lifestyle in their country as they gather ice from the river to make their hearty breakfast, a hot milk tea combined with meat, flatbread, and clotted cream.
The Kid Should See This has more information about the creators and some of the other videos they’ve done.
The Frozen Colors of Winter
Jan Erik Waider’s speciality is abstract landscape photography of cold climates. But in this series of projects, he takes a closer view of his subjects: Frozen Colors of Winter, Frozen Air, and Geometry of Ice.
The rest of Waider’s work is well worth a look. Prints of his work are available and you can keep up with his newest stuff on Behance and Instagram. (via present & correct)
Whistler Blackcomb might not be a ski resort in another few decades. “Climate models suggest that by 2085, half of winter precipitation falling on Whistler Village will come as rain.”
Flickr Commons celebrated its 16th birthday with 16 stories about some of the lesser-known images in its archive. Flickr Commons is one of the absolute gems of the web.
The Artifact news app (by the Instagram founders) is shutting down because “the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment”. I’m so tired of devoting time to new VC- & BigCo-funded apps that are just gonna shut down after 12 mo.
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