alejohausner

In a related research paper, scientists proved that water is wet.

I really don't understand why Israel has such animus against Iran. Didn't Cyrus the Great, the Iranian emperor, free the Israelites from bondage in Babylon, and to boot, rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem? Don't the Israelites owe a long-standing debt to the Iranians?

No. There are lots of colors that our eyes can see, but which no 3-color device can produce. They're usually highly saturated, and many of the deep greens can't be produced by 3-color devices.

What's going on here is different. The researchers managed to identify individual cones in the retinas of human subjects. They then shot tiny pulses of light at ONLY the M (green-sensitive) cones. This avoided stimulating the other cones, and subjects saw a color they could not have seen otherwise.

The issue here is that the S, M, and L cones have overlapping sensitivity curves: normally if you shine green light on the retina, all three cones will respond, and your brain will say "green". But here they are stimulating only one cone, not all 3.

That's because you probably are using gmail, and Google is reading your emails and harvesting your shopping history. That's why Amazon is being secretive: to deny Google that information.

I see quite the opposite. On the left side of the plot, for countries with the lowest cvd rates, there is a whole range of dosages for statins. In other words, countries with low and high statin usage have low death rates from cardiovascular disease.

My favorite is

"Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert."

Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Liebovitz"

Tom Murphy a "recovering astrophysicist" from UCSD, would beg to differ. His basic thesis is that, in order to build human settlements in other worlds, we would have to construct, from scratch, a large part of the ecosystem on which our life on Earth depends. That ecosystem is huge, interconnected, and largely unknown to us. We can't build it ourselves.

You can't just strap on oxygen tanks and take protein pills and expect to live very long, away from this planet.

I agree with him that the moon landings and the current batch of people living on the ISS are part of extremely expensive and unsustainable stunts. They're not steps towards living off-world.

See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/

I'm glad it's a push-button phone, and not a rotary phone. There's a hilarious YouTube of today's teenagers tasked with making a phone call on a rotary phone:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok

The interface on a rotary phone isn't self-explanatory.

From what I’ve heard on “the history of English podcast”, after the Norman and invasion written English disappears completely for about a century. This is because the clergy and lawyers were the only literate people at the time, and they were all French. When it re-emerges, it doesn’t have much French in it yet, because only the common folk spoke English, and the norman upper class spoke French, and they didn’t interact that much. It actually took another 100 years or so for French words to percolate into the language.

What I learned from the podcast was that what really changed old English into Middle English was the viking invasion around 800. Danes and anglosaxons had different grammar and as a compromise a lot of the germanic cases on nouns, which allowed for arbitrary word ordering in a sentence, got discarded, and English developed the current emphasis on strict word ordering that we have today.

This is a tax on wealth. Since many wealthy people don’t want to share their money, maybe it’s reasonable for some of it to be taken away from them and redistributed. That’s the real issue.

As Pikkety pointed out, vast fortunes distort the democratic process, because a few rich people can manipulate politicians to pass laws that favour them. Moreover, the growth rate for investments is always greater than the growth rate of wages, so exponential growth means that wealth inequality will only worsen with time. One way to reduce inequality is to tax wealth more than income.

I bought some amber glasses from blublocker.com[1], because they link to a research paper that actually measured how much of each wavelength their filters allow (as well as other brands). They're pretty dark, so you have to crank up the brightness on your screen, but I'm confident that I'm not getting ANY blue.

1: https://www.blublocker.com/blogs/news/what-blue-light-blocki...

Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.

He criticizes the military-industrial complex. Don’t you think that’s an institution worth dismantling?

I don’t see where you’re coming from. Greenwald is constantly pointing out abuses of power and hypocrisy in government. Have you actually read what he writes? He is in no way a fan of totalitarian strongmen.

The backlash against the use of Ring cameras began with their tone-deaf superbowl ad. Amazon assumed that customers would buy their surveillance technology. The whole thing reminds me that we have returned to the Gilded Age, when the rich people who run the world strutted about arrogantly, without fear of shame or public disapproval. It’s as if Bezos is telling us “you have no choice. You will buy our product whether you like it or not.”

Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

Air is mostly nitrogen. Nitrogen gas is blue.

There.

As the poet Quevedo wrote,

Nace en las Indias honrado, // donde el mundo le acompaña; // viene a morir en España // y es en Génova enterrado.

(Mr. Money) is born in the Indies an honest man, with the world on his side; he comes to Spain to die, and is buried in Genoa.

Ulichney (who wrote the book on halftoning) came up with ordered dithering matrices that give much nicer results than Bayer's, as good error as diffusion, and parallelizable. Look up "void and cluster".

Why is there no mention of Don Quixote (1605) the first modern novel? It was divide into chapters, long before the Victorian era, which the author claims is when chapters in novels became accepted?

That’s kind of scary in itself. I’ll make a note to avoid drinking coffee from paper cups in the future!

PFAs are everywhere in food packaging too. It’s disturbing.

I’ve heard RFK say that it’s hard to ban TV ads for drugs. They are “speech” according to the 1st amendment, or something like that.

Too bad. News broadcasts are full of those ads, and hence TV journalists are loath to investigate the people that pay their salaries.

Yes, the measles vaccine is effective. It reduces cases of measles. But the paper in question says that deaths were reduced to almost zero before the vaccine was introduced. The graph that you linked to shows the same thing.

For me the paper shows not just that good sanitation and nutrition help reduce deaths from many infections diseases, but that they are the primary agent in that reduction. I thought it was a very cool paper, although you don’t seem moved in the same way as me.

When I was a child, my parents weren’t upset when I got measles (I was, because it meant missing a trip to the seashore). It meant that you were going to be miserable for a week, but would be immune afterwards. So I became one more case, but not one more death.

I know I'm coming to the discussion late, but actually there is good evidence that improvements in nutrition, working conditions, and sanitation are a big factor in improving resistance to infectious diseases.

Look at "The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century", by Mckinlay and McKinley (1977). I know it's an old paper, but it has some fascinating and, to me, very persuasive time series. Those plots show mortality from various infectious diseases over the 20th century.

Example: death rates (per 1000) from scarlet fever dropped from 0.1 in 1900 to effectively 0 in 1940. There is NO VACCINE for scarlet fever.

Example: death rates from measles (lately very much in the news) dropped from 0.12 in 1900 to 0 in 1960 (a vaccine for measles was introduced in 1960).

A similar trend exists for many other infectious diseases: huge drops in mortality PRECEDE the introduction of vaccines or antibiotics for the disease. Surely we can't credit vaccines with such a drop in death rates. I don't see how anybody could come to such a conclusion.

In the animations, New Zealand stood out: the high and low tide chase each other counterclockwise around the islands!

On the other hand, since cell cameras don't filter out infrared, you can use them to detect spy cameras in your airbnb, which are using IR to illuminate the room.

You're right. Coming up with a proof is a creative process. Each major proof in mathematics is so unique, that it usually gets named after its inventor. So we have Euclid's proof that there are infinitely many primes, Euler's proof that e is irrational, and Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem.

Are you sure? The video I just saw on the BBC shows the tree being felled at its base! That's not pruning.

Wow, that sounds scary. I hope it doesn't come back. Weird about the 4.2 PSA; that wouldn't have raised alarms, normally. I guess acceleration is as important as absolute values.

This work by Gat and Gornish gives a great explanation for prostate enlargement. There's an article by Donaldson [1] that suggests a connection to vitamin K2:

A large study from 2014 by Nimptsch et al found a strong inverse correlation between intake of vitamin K2 and prostate cancer [2]. Dairy foods with K2 had the most effect (K2 is soluble in butterfat).

Vitamin K2 helps remove calcium from the elastin in artery and vein walls, reducing their stiffness. Donaldson hypothesizes that K2 improves venous flow, and hence might reduce the varicoceles that lead to too much free testosterone getting to the prostate and causing enlargement.

So eat more grass-fed butter, or take a K2 supplement. At worst, you might also improve your bone strength. At best, men might prevent prostate cancer.

1: DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2014.12.028

2: DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/87.4.985