The US prison system (aka the “US prison industrial complex“) is clearly absurd. Not only does it have the highest incarceration rate of any country…
Society, Politics and History
The Environmental Impact of Food
Our World in Data has an article with a series of very interesting graphics about the environmental impact of food, such as this one: The…
Family Wealth, Traced Centuries Back
I recently stumbled across two studies that trace family fortunes over centuries by tracing their surnames. One posits that the same families that were rich…
Using CRISPR to Create More Male Offspring
Scientists in California have used CRISPR, a gene editing tool, to engineer the genome of a bull calf. The idea is this: the region on…
Spit, Don’t Rinse. Also Floss.
The more you know! Apparently, you should not rinse your mouth with water after brushing your teeth. Instead you should spit, in order to keep…
A Blog Written by GPT-3
A lot of people have been blogging about GPT-3, a neural network capable of generating all sorts of text. Here is someone who finally let…
Lab Safety and the Origins of Covid-19
Until this day the origins of the Sars-coronavirus 2 remain unknown. The two ends of the spectrum of theories are the zoonotic theory and the…
It Probably Wasn’t Fake News
I just read an article about the 2016 election that argued two things: First, fake news probably had very little effect on election outcomes. And…
How 70 Research Teams Came To Different Conclusions Based on the Same Data
70 research teams were tasked with analyzing the same identical set of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans. In many areas, they came to…
Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good in the World?
Stephen Fry delivers a powerful speech arguing why the Catholic Church is not a force for good in the world. The speech comes from the…