Author: Aceso Under Glass

Butterfly cocoon that thinks it’s a snake.

The bouba/kiki effect: cross-cultural agreement in what certain shapes “sound” like.

US Military released bacteria they thought to be harmless onto an American city.  239 times.  Spoiler alert: was not harmless.  Other people have covered the whole “jesus christ the military proved America was vulnerable to biological warfare by committing biological warfare” part, so I’m going to focus on the harmless part.  The US government, and humans in general, have a nasty tendency to say “harmless” when they mean “you can take it.”  Most humans could shake off the bacteria they were using; it was only a problem in a small portion of the population that couldn’t fight it.  I’ve heard the same thing about the pesticides they used to kill mosquitoes to prevent West Nile: totally harmless because the human liver is amazing, hard on those without that super power.

Opportunistic bacteria aren’t all bad though.  Glow in the dark bacteria saved civil war soldiers from septicemia.

UK government spies on children for thought crime, ends up leaving them vulnerable to hackers.  And by hackers, I mean anyone who attempts the password “password.”

Sydney, my co-organizer for Seattle EA, talks about money, class, and effective altruists.  I was part of the problem here: when people talked about discomfort with the emphasis on money in EA, I assumed they meant donations.  The idea that the money spent during meetings would be an issue literally never occurred to me. Also, with God as my witness, I thought going around saying “la la la everyone’s a programmer la la la is anyone here not a programmer? because that would be notable” was helping.  I think I was trying to avoid the problem of claiming there’s more diversity than there is and overcorrected.  I also think this is a specific instance of the general difficult of owning your advantages without rubbing it in, which is made much more difficult by the fact that one of our goals  is giving people a place to brag about giving.

I find most meat gross, but bacon is an exception.  Unfortunately pigs are really smart, to the point I mostly avoid pork even though I eat other animals. Science is helping me out by investing kelpt that tastes like bacon with a better nutritional profile than kale.  I’m skeptical, because nutrition is part of what generates taste so having that many vitamins should make it taste different, and seaweed usually isn’t 50% fat.  But I’m hoping the collective wishing of everyone reading this will make it so.

80,000 hours says few effective altruists should earn to give as their permanent plan.  I’m a little annoyed that it’s framed as “your beliefs about us are inaccurate” when the truth is more like “we changed our minds”, but if you ignore that it’s good context.  My own take on it is that if the idea of EtG sounds like permission, you should do that.  If it sounds like an obligation keeping you from direct work, EtG is a strong default to occupy you until you have the skills and opportunity to do direct work.

This week’s beautiful gang of theory killed by an ugly gang of facts:  You know that woman who was committed for saying Obama followed her on twitter when he actually did follow her?  The truth is more complicated.  I’m embarrassed to admit this didn’t occur to me.

Non-incentive ways to reduce fraud in science.  Appears to boil down to not accepting “I’m good for it” as an explanation for data.

So you’re saying yelling at myself for an unwanted emotion is…not…helpful?  But then how will my brain know it was wrong?

Speaking of which: they discovered a new organ in the brain.  It’s always been there, we just didn’t notice till now.  Like the biological equivalent of  the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.  The new organ is lymph tubes that drain lymph fluid from the brain to your lymph nodes, which means the brain is more connected to the immune system than we thought.

Science also discovered a tiny lobster that eats bacteria and  lives on deep sea thermal vents.

4500 words on energy work and neurology.  I love this because it’s so respectful of people’s experiences and the long tail of what the work can accomplish, while being really rigorous with the explanation.  Caveat: does not actually cite any science for explanation.  But I still found it useful and interesting.  Also it taught me the word psychoneuroimmunology, which is even better than neuroendodontics.

Nintendo used to model Super Mario levels on graph paper.

One argument against earning to give is that people won’t follow through: the culture will corrupt them and they won’t give.  Will Macaskill points out that people dedicating their lives to charity don’t have a 100% follow through rate either.  The miserable conditions we expect people to tolerate because “it’s for a good cause” (read: you’re selfish for asking for more) are a recipe for burnout.  Half of all teachers quit in their first five years, and high poverty schools have a turnover rate of 20%.  That’s not actually that much higher than other professions- but 40% of people who pursue an undergrad teaching degree never teach at all (source for all).  The best number I can find for nonprofits as a whole is that 45% of young workers expect their next job will be at a for-profit.    Would love to see comparable numbers on earning to give.

Another argument for remote work.  Pixar once accidentally deleted the entirety of Toy Story 2.  When I read the headline I assumed this was some sort of really complicated RAID failure, but no, someone “rm –rf”ed from the wrong directory and the backup’s overflow mode was “overwrite old data.” Translation: someone typed “delete all” from the wrong directory, the backup system didn’t have half the space it needed, and it didn’t tell anyone when it ran out.  The movie was saved because an employee was working from home after giving birth, and she had a two week old copy at her house.

Then Pixar decided they didn’t like the movie and redid the whole thing.  But it was a great story up till then.

How do you think family income predicts children’s college attendance?  This article gives you a chance to predict it before you see the actual results (along with other people’s guesses).  Keep in mind the x-axis is income percentile, not income.  I was unable to find a graph that went by income.

Attempted chlamydia vaccine in the 1960s made people more likely to get the infection (and this was not just because they had riskier sex- they saw the same effects in mice).  New research suggests this is because the vaccine somehow stimulated the part of the immune system that is supposed to recognize your own cells and prevent your immune system from attacking it.  The vaccine taught your immune system to ignore chlamydia infection.  They think they’ve found a way to correct for that.  Bonus: Vaccine works better as a nasal spray than a skin injection because the uterine lining is more like the sinuses.

Putting the bed net problem in perspective.

Diet, Skeptics, and Getting It Wrong:  “Mocking people for wanting to absorb their food and avoid intestinal cancer isn’t going to teach anyone anything except that they should stop listening to you.”

It always makes me happy to see researchers studying who a drug helps, rather than looking at the population average.  This week it’s a suspected link between blood pressure and the efficacy of a particular PTSD treatment.

Many software teams operate on “you were the last person to touch it, you own it.”  Sometimes this makes sense (it prevents people from checking in cheap hacks and leaving others to deal with the consequences), but it also engenders a learned helplessness, because you can’t make one change without becoming responsible for every bug and feature request until someone gets desperate enough to make one little check in, at which they become responsible for every bug and feature.  It engenders a kind of learned helplessness that encourages hacks rather than digging in a fixing a problem.  The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is this problem, but for altruism..