Posts tagged “biology”

• Renewable energy was the world’s leading source of electricity in the first half of 2025 for the first time ever, knocking coal off its longtime throne. – via The Progress Network
• Narrative String Theory (NST) is an awesome collection of movies, television shows, and other assorted media that feature detectives (or conspiracy theorists) connecting pictures on a wall or whiteboard with thread.
• Taylor Swift gave her Eras Tour crew jaw-dropping bonuses because of course she did.
• Mississippi State will face Wake Forest in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, which requires head coaches to sign an agreement saying the winner will accept having a bucket of mayonnaise dumped on his head.
• RIP Tom Stoppard
• The Athletic did a great story on the current value of the sports collectibles seen in Home Alone.
  Related: Meet the family that pulled the most expensive Shohei Ohtani baseball card to date.
• Why do we have two nostrils instead of one big hole in our face? – via Jason
• 51% of the animals in farms across the world are shrimp. – via Tom Whitwell
• I know I’ve linked to this already, but I’m going to once again urge you to read the fascinating backstory of the Duck Tales theme song, history’s catchiest single minute of music.
• I’ve certainly experienced the Abilene Paradox plenty of times. I didn’t know it had a name, though. – via cassidoo
• Can Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player in the world, beat a novice while facing increasingly-difficult disadvantages?
• Jingle Bell Rock:
  • WTF? White House installs plaques mocking former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden
  • WTF? Liam Neeson Narrates Anti-Vax, Pro-RFK Documentary
  • WTF? Fake social media accounts attempted to push a ridiculous narrative framing Taylor Swift as a white supremacist.
  • Massachusetts Catholic Church Angers Conservatives with Its ICE-Themed Nativity Scene
  • Am I the only one thinking that there’s something really sus about this whole insane Venezuela lunacy? They’re not flooding us with drugs. We don’t need their oil. Why all the trumped up aggression? I feel like we’re living in the first few chapters of a 007 novel and we’re soon going to learn 90% of some critical part of cryptocurrency or artificial intelligence computer chips can only be found buried underneath some mountain range there or something like that.
  • “It makes my blood boil. It’s so ridiculous, so petty, so small minded,” wrote Maria Shriver, about the latest stupidity out of the current administration.

• T-shirt Worn by Taylor Swift Sparks a $2M Windfall for Sea Otters
• “It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” is the catchy lede of this article on editing genes with CRISPR, Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures, that everyone I follow has already posted.
• Got a few hours to kill? Check out the Space Exploration Logo Archive. – via kottke
• Imagine getting burned by the Pope.
• Kohler Wants to Put a Tiny Camera in Your Toilet and Analyze the Contents
• Score one for the good guys: Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules
• Research on 6,000 older adults reveals that optimistic people are up to 50% less likely to develop weak grip strength and lose mobility.
• Any golfer should be able to relate to this essay by Gabby Herzig: I made a 12 during the biggest golf tournament of my life. Here’s what I learned.
• Who doesn’t love a good story about a cursed Egyptian mummy? (Related: The Met is having its first Egyptian exhibit in over a decade.)
• It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on. – from The Majority AI View, a fantastic essay by Anil Dash.
• The beatings will continue until morale improves:
  • Top US Army general says he’s using ChatGPT to help make key command decisions
  • There is a special place in hell for those who use children as pawns in their quest for power.
  • I don’t understand why the headline on this article about a convicted felon isn’t simply Maliciously Incompetent, Aggressively Ignorant, Lying Buffoon Lies Again.
  • North Carolina Elections Chief Demands Voters’ Full Social Security Numbers from DMV

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill

• An Evolutionary Biologist Explains Why Cats Are Perfect. (This is from a couple of years ago but it’s a great re-read.)
• Dammit. I literally just had a conversation about how I have so many favorite t-shirts that I should seriously never buy another t-shirt in my life and then Jason finds a t-shirt I absolutely must purchase. – via kottke
• An underweight baby seal is getting all the fish it could want at an aquarium after being rescued off the streets of Connecticut near Yale University.
• Trust and believe that if I worked for the Federal Aviation Administration and I got an email telling me I was being fired and that email came from an @mail.outlook.com address I would hit print and then delete and continue to go to work every day.
• So, uh, whatever happened to Q? Did we ever learn who he (or she) was? Or was that years-long mania just lost in the firehose of stupidity the last decade has been?
• The world’s darkest and clearest skies are at risk from an industrial megaproject. – via @therickman.bsky.social
• One of the passengers on the Delta flight to Toronto that flipped on the runway did an incredible Reddit AMA. – via @cosmicrami.com
• Mark Cuban posted some bullish remarks about the future of AI that really rubbed me the wrong way and, after a flurry of pushback from his followers, posted a link to an essay that (I think) undermined his original remarks. He didn’t say whether it was enough to change his mind, but I do appreciate that he at least acknowledged the alternative viewpoint. (And all of this is, of course, ignoring the inherent immorality of being a billionaire.)

• The key difference between a calque and a loanword is that a loanword isn’t translated into English whereas a calque is. – surprisingly not via kottke, although he posted it, too!
• Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina are television writer/producers with over forty years of combined experience — on shows including Lost, Firefly, Sleepy Hollow, and Helix — and they have a great podcast.
• Should We Be Punching Nazis? You already know where I stand on this.
• My sons and I love Cautionary Tales, the Tim Harford podcast about mistakes and what we should learn from them. (He’s also written a children’s book, The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up.)
• Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality
• Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
• What are Progressive Web Apps?

• Just a few days ago I said Shrinking was the best show on TV right now. Obviously I didn’t think I needed to include an “except for Bluey“ disclaimer, because certainly everyone agrees Bluey might well be the best show in the history of television. And they’re working on a Bluey movie?!
• “A well-placed swear word triggers emotional and physiological arousal, like an adrenaline boost, where your heart beats faster, and your sympathetic nervous system is given a charge, which enhances focus and energy just enough to help you perform better.” – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• “As we continue to face adversity in our daily lives, I’m reminded of the power of the deep breath and the walk in the woods, the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system.” – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter from Jodi Ettenberg (threads / bluesky)
• I’m very frustrated that we haven’t made time to watch the new Disney+ Star Wars series Skeleton Crew yet. Winter break starts this weekend so I imagine big bowls of popcorn and a few hours—in between football games—glued to the TV. (I’m worried that shareholders will look at the streaming numbers and decide it’s not worth the cost to keep producing Star Wars content.)
• Sotheby’s just auctioned off a 115-pound, two-foot-tall slab of marble that, around a millennia and a half ago, was inscribed with the Ten Commandments. – via crooked
• You are cutting it close if you haven’t gotten all your Christmas and/or Hanukkah shopping done yet. Might I suggest a plain white bolt t from Aviator Nation? They are crazy comfortable, cozy, stylish, and on sale right now. (Or you could buy someone an Apple App Store gift card and tell them to use it to download my handy cocktail recipe app!)
• Health department medical detectives find 84% of U.S. maternal deaths are preventable.
• The latest issue of Simple Apple Tutorials from Gannon Nordberg is a killer iPhone Notification Detox Guide.
• Bad news for people who hate good news:
  • 93% of kindergarteners in the U.S. are up to date on their childhood vaccines. – via Your Local Epidemiologist
  • HPV vaccines have been linked to a 62% drop in cervical cancer deaths in young women over the last decade. – via kottke

• I think it’s safe to say that bluntcard.com is my new favorite ecard site.
• Ferris Club
• Few things are as cool as Batman riding a robotic unicorn over a rainbow full of dolphins.
• There was once a woman who had immortal cells.
• True fact.
• I live in Los Angeles, so I am almost always “near” the ocean. There’s nothing like being in Hawaii, though. I need to be near a big body of water on a regular basis. I need it to reset my psychic metronome.
• To promote his new novel, Doubles, author Nic Brown challenged pro tennis player Tripp Phillips to a tournament. The story of the match is terrific.
• Fantastic feline fun for the whole family!
• Is anything sadder than a sad bear?

• Drop everything and go watch Teenage Zombies right now.
• The Green Day rock opera album American Idiot is now a Broadway show.
• After a grueling 58 hours of continuous play, John McAllister of Seattle, Washington officially became the best Asteroids player on the planet.
• I also spend a fair amount of my life trying to determine what went wrong, so I can appreciate a stroke of luck.
• Well this is pretty crazy: There are a bunch of functioning oil wells hidden around Los Angeles. The first one they feature is about two miles from my house; it’s covered by giant paintings of flowers right next to a high school football field. (I always thought it was some funky art project!)
• A few drinks and a little idle curiosity have led to the discovery of a hidden chapel under a family home.
• This is what I keep wondering about Dancing with the Stars: “Oh you mean world champions like Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Ocho Cinco, who make millions because of their brilliant hand-eye coordination and ability to move in a rhythm with exact timing and precision? How will that translate to dancing?”
• It has a double penis, is as long as a tall human, and lives in a heavily populated area of the Philippines. Yet somehow the giant lizard Varanus bitatawa has gone undetected by science until now.
• I’ve been skeptical of solar power for a long time. There are simply too many cloudy days. (Not here in LA, but certainly in Florida.) But I’ve always been a fan of wind. [ed: I have since changed my stance! Solar power is awesome!]
• The reason why Apple is going to win — again — with the iPad, is because the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about Flash, software, files, directories, RAM, or whether their machine has a CD-ROM drive. They just want stuff that works.