Camels actually kind of do store water in their humps
As Hank Green explains, camels store fat which they can then metabolise with oxygen to create water. And it turns out you get more water that way.
Smidgeons
Inspired by Maggie Appleton's smidgeons
Tue, 2 Sept 2025
Sidewalks are a promise. A promise of connection. If there’s a sidewalk, there’s gonna be things that sidewalk connects to, be it a dog park, or a café, or a record store, or a barbershop.
I love Mike Monteiro's writing and his thoughts on life. This is a brilliant newsletter piece.
https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-leave-the-house/
2025/05/28 and 2025-05-28 are parsed differently by Date
This is because “2025/05/28” is considered to be a local date (and so is parsed with the users current timezone factored), while “2025-05-28” matches the ISO8601 format, and so is parsed as UTC.
New Jorja Smith is banging UK garage/bassline
Fri, 16 May 2025Kiwis lay unbelievably big eggs
I don’t really share pictures or details about my son online. The Atlantic has a great write-up of one of the things that factors into my decision on this—if my son wants to post all of his life online when he’s older, let it be his decision.
Wed, 9 Apr 2025Flying saucers might have been a US government conspiracy to decrypt Soviet communications
Apparently, it’s called “gardening”. The idea is if you can plant known phrases (like “flying saucer”) which are going to be encrypted, you can do some more sophisticated attacks against encryption.
New Coheed and Cambria album released today 💿
Fri, 14 Mar 2025If you put huge amounts of energy into small amounts of space, mass can condense out of nothing
10^26^ W/cm^2^ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgafb8G7i4o
This sounds like an interesting idea to include in a sci-fi novel.
Ganymede is bigger than Mercury
This Hank Green video on the moons of Jupiter is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grdu6UBK76w
Bees are more closely related to their siblings than their offspring
Male bees are all essentially clones of their mothers, and female bees inherit 100% of their father’s genetic material and 50% of their mother’s, meaning that male bees are genetically identical to their brothers, and female bees are 75% related to their sisters while they are 50% related to their offspring (the other 50% coming from the father). https://www.subanima.org/bees/
Having friends makes you less sick
Social support and social networks have also been linked both to the incidence of cardiovascular disease and to recovery from heart attacks. In a striking experiment, researchers have also shown that people with friends are less likely to catch a cold when given the same measured exposure to the cold virus - in fact the more friends they had, the more resistant they were. Experiments have also shown that physical wounds heal faster if people have good relationships with their intimate partners.
- The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone - Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
All clocks are thirty seconds late (or more accurately: we would tell time more accurately if clocks were thirty seconds fast by default)
Tue, 7 Jan 2025Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
Great quote from Warren Buffett. I think he probably meant this to apply to naïve investors but I like it because it applies everywhere. It’s easy to be successful when everyone else is successful too, but it’s much harder to be successful when circumstances are not conducive to success.
The phrase "Any similarity to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental" is because the guy who killed Rasputin's wife sued MGM for defamation.
I read this on Matt Webb's blog which referenced this article
New Alexisonfire album - acoustic and piano covers of some of their best work. Hauntingly beautiful.
Fri, 27 Sept 2024ChatGPT can transform and analyse data
In order to make the Voter Power Calculator I needed to transform the data into a specifically shaped JSON object.
In previous years, I've done this by hand. This year, I just used the following prompt:
please convert the following table into a JSON object with the party name as the key, the number of votes under the subkey of 'votes' and the number of seats under the subkey of 'seats', and ignore all other data:
and copy-pasted the table from Wikipedia. I also was able to ask ChatGPT to
please summarise the total of votes from the above
and it gave me the correct answer, along with a little button that allowed me to expand its 'thinking' on the topic.
The 'No Space Left on Device' error from Apple Configurator does not mean on the target device, but on the Mac you're using to configure the phone/iPad
Wed, 19 Jun 2024It’s a game where you have a piece of time and you get to decorate it
Frank Zappa on improvisation — https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1737542431795507481
People with ADHD do not use available glucose in the same way as folks without
https://finallyfocused.org/adhd-sugar/
Interesting topic for discussion—although this article heavily implies that the key takeaway here is about sugar, for me the more interesting topic is actually:
And when the researchers looked closely at 60 specific regions of the brain, they found glucose metabolism in people with ADHD was “significantly reduced” in half of the regions. Those regions included areas in the brain that control attention and distractibility, movement (i.e. restlessness), and impulsivity.
To me, this looks more like the metabolism of glucose in the brain is more of a proxy for the energy requirements of each part of the brain. Seems like the 'diet' topic is a bit of a jump, even though a diet with properly controlled glucose intake is likely a good thing.