Smidgeons

This Hank Green video on the moons of Jupiter is super interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grdu6UBK76w

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/

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

https://victorpoughon.fr/all-clocks-are-30-seconds-late/

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.

I read this on Matt Webb's blog which referenced this article

https://music.apple.com/hu/album/death-letter/1767458626

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.

Frank Zappa on improvisation — https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1737542431795507481

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.

If you don’t care about slowing down and landing it seems. I saw a flight from Vienna to Shanghai on Flightradar24 which was passing overhead and it departed 18 minutes ago.

Good chance I’ve seen the only one I’m ever going to.

Despite the toy sets my son plays with, the T. rex was a 'late-stage' dinosaur, who lived 70 million years ago, and is one of the last new species to have existed before the dinosaurs all got wiped out.

Stegosaurus seems to have died out around 145 million years ago.

The generic Hungarian word for trash cans, 'kuka', unexpectedly originates from the names of German industrialists Johann Josef Keller and Jakob Knappich. The story is quite involved, to the extent that one would be tempted to dismiss it as a folk etymology, if it wasn't ridiculously well-attested. Keller and Knappich founded an acetylene factory in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1898. They named it Keller und Knappich Augsburg (KUKA). Their venture quickly expanded into manufacturing of welding equipment, household appliances, and eventually car parts and heavy industrial robots. In the 1920s, they manufactured hoppers for Hungarian municipal garbage trucks, which they stamped prominently with their logo. This led to refuse trucks being known colloquially referred to as "kukás auto" (lit. "car with KUKA written on it"), even long after KUKA stopped manufacturing those hoppers. And the noun kuka, referring to trash cans, arose as a backformation from there! And this is how two German industrialist gave their names to Hungarian trash cans. Of course, it probably helped that a word kuka existed in the Hungarian language already at that point (as an unrelated adjective referring to a mute person), much like snowflake existed before Snow and Flake founded the town.

From Geoff Boeing.

In some countries (US, Canada, Spain/Japan to a lesser extent) this is a result of deliberate planning. Outside of the US, it looks like there are a couple of key factors:

• Where the city is coastal (e.g. Bangkok, Barcelona, Dubai, Lagos, Melbourne) the orientation is perpendicular to the coastline, with the longest roads leading away from the sea
• Where the city has a river running through the centre (e.g. Budapest, Cairo, Warsaw)

Exceptions There are more exceptions than cities that actually support my hypothesis, but the world is a funny place:

• Berlin, but there are potentially political reasons for this
• Hong Kong, likely due to its topography (Hong Kong is squeezed in between mountains and the sea)
• Moscow, but the Moskva river does not flow neatly from one side of the map to the other, it snakes its way from North West to South East taking lots of backwards and forwards turns
• Mumbai, which is built on a peninsula, limiting the number of roads which can go perpendicular to the coastline
• Rio, which is built on the mouth of a bay
• Rome, which is an interesting exception. I can't really see why this is. The Tiber does meander somewhat but has a clear North/South direction.
• Tehran is inland, but seems to pick up its polarity from the Caspian Sea to the North, so not fully an exception here
• Venice, which is also a geographical peculiarity in lots of ways

I wonder if this creates any ways for businesses to artificially reduce their tax bills by paying large 'ransomware' fines and then laundering that back into the company somehow (or directly into individuals' pockets)? I mean, it sounds a lot like fraud, but I'm sure there are some people out there already doing it, and probably people providing this as a service on the Dark Web or something.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/gpsolo/publications/gp_solo/2021/november-december/impossible-be-sure-anything-hacking-taxes/

Barrett told the BBC in 2013 that he had fathered 23 daughters and 18 sons. Bassist for Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and for Bob Marley, died today ages 77.

From{" "} Wikipedia

Check Name	Frequency	Time	Time per year
A	~500 flight hours	~60 hours	41 · 60h = 240h
B	6-8 months	~170 hours	7/12 · 170h = ~100h
C	20-24 months	~5 000 hours	11/12 · 2 500 = ~2 300h
D	6-10 years	~50 000 hours	50 000 / 7 = ~7 100h
Total			~9 760h

1: An average 737 flies around 2000 hours per year: [ https://simpleflying.com/the-worlds-most-flown-boeing-737s]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028672