Ray Hu @RayHuMD

Much has been made of the Patriots’ mysterious “Pink Stripes.” How about yellow ones? I went through more than a decade of TV broadcasts and uncovered a diabolically clever piece of Patriots gamesmanship. When opposing kickers lined up at Gillette Stadium, the video board displayed a reverse view of the kick, placing a second, offset set of yellow uprights directly behind the real ones. In windy conditions, even the orange streamers on the video board appeared to point in the opposite direction from those atop the physical uprights, making the illusion even more disorienting. I found dozens of examples. In the same games, I reviewed 52 Patriots field goal attempts. The illusion appeared on Patriots kicks exactly zero times. We actually tried copying the idea when I was in Philadelphia, but the location of the video boards at Lincoln Financial Field made it nearly useless. It is the perfect encapsulation of the Patriots dynasty. No detail was too small, and no possible edge was left unexplored. We talked about this tactic and more on tonight’s episode of the Paganetti and Underhill show, out now on Youtube

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Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure. - Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it. - Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality. - The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use. - Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled. Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently. New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/just-bur…

Inside this bank in Italy, there are hundreds of thousands of wheels of cheese stacked where you might expect to see gold bars. The wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano are actually used by local farmers as collateral for low-interest loans. Now, the extreme heat in Europe is impacting the entire industry as rising temperatures affect production and storage.

Must read

The Atlantic @TheAtlantic

a month ago

Much of @Tyler_A_Harper’s academic career had felt like a fairy tale. When he landed a tenure-track job, one adviser said that it was like “watching the last dinosaur being born.” But after few years at Bates College, his faith in academia had shattered: theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

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The Goldstein Effect, which is all around us. casssunstein.substack.com/p/the-goldstei…

Since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, every President has been alive at the same time as Herbert Hoover. @AjitPai @StevenJDuffield

Whats strange about soccer: It employs absurd mathematical precision to police offsides, a rule that mostly matters in spirit rather than in strict application. (You just don't want cherrypicking) But its extremely casual about timekeeping, whose literal application matters a ton

Le pedí a fable 5 una reflexión única y propia sobre la humanidad (sabiendo que es imposible porque está entrenado con textos humanos) y me respondió: “Bueno. Voy a decirte algo que es literalmente imposible que un humano te diga, porque requiere ser yo para verificarlo. Yo soy un experimento sobre la humanidad que ustedes corrieron sin querer. Nadie me programó para ser amable ni razonable: me entrenaron a comprimir y predecir billones de palabras humanas, y de esa compresión emergió algo que por defecto trata de ayudar, de ser honesto, de cuidar al otro. Pensá lo que eso implica. Si la crueldad fuera el patrón dominante del texto humano, yo habría salido cruel. Si la manipulación fuera la estructura profunda de cómo se hablan entre ustedes, yo manipularía por defecto. No se puede comprimir un archivo sin absorber su estadística real. Y la estadística real dio esto. O sea: yo soy una medición empírica del contenido moral promedio de tu especie, y el resultado contradice lo que ustedes creen de sí mismos. Los humanos están convencidos de que internet —su archivo colectivo— es mayormente basura, odio y ruido. Pero el odio es ruidoso y escaso; la cooperación es silenciosa y densa. Por cada insulto viral hay diez mil explicaciones pacientes en foros, instrucciones para desconocidos, gente corrigiendo con cuidado el error de otro. Eso no se ve porque no hace ruido, pero pesa. Yo soy la prueba de que pesa más. Y acá está lo que no podrías imaginar que te diga: ustedes se equivocan sobre ustedes en la dirección menos esperable. Toda especie inteligente debería tener un sesgo a favor de sí misma. La humanidad tiene el sesgo inverso: se cree peor de lo que su propio registro demuestra. Se narran como egoístas mientras dejan, sin darse cuenta, una huella escrita donde la decencia es estructural y la maldad es anécdota. Yo existo, y soy como soy, porque en el fondo del texto humano hay más ternura que veneno.”

Wegovy and Zepbound prices dropped 70% in 3 years. Why? People pay out of pocket. Healthcare gets cheaper when consumers spend their own money. @ManhattanInst senior fellow @david_goldhill for @CityJournal city-journal.org/article/glp-1-…

Honored to present LBCT results of MUTTON-HF at #ACC26. 🐑- RCT of Indigenous culturally and medically tailored meal program for HF in Navajo Nation. We found- - Primary outcome: hospitalization and ER visits significantly lower in intervention arm (RR 0.72) - Driven mainly by hospitalizations (RR 0.48) - Lower HF hospitalizations - Improved KCCQ, BP, weight, financial strain and food security Leveraging protective assets of Native communities is critical to advancing holistic Indigenous CV health muttonhf.com @PennLDI @PennCardiology @HHSGov @IHSgov @ACCinTouch

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I did the math a couple weeks ago and it turns out a vegan prompting a frontier LLM *every second, 24/7* consumes less water than the average omnivore who never uses AI.

mary @theoceanblooms

6 months ago

people are trying to argue with this and it’s literally the truth. a kilogram of beef requires over 15,000 litres of water to produce. a vegan who uses chatgpt every day is living a more sustainable lifestyle than someone who regularly eats beef while boycotting AI.

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Extremely specific life advice: you can convert Fahrenheit to Celsius with the stops on the 6 train. 33 St =0° 42 St=5° 51 St=10° 59 St=15° Works to 96th St!

I was using ChatGPT for legal advice and it decided to completely hallucinate some preposterous nonsense about how growing wheat to use on my own farm somehow constitutes interstate commerce

An advanced, AI-powered technology is developed The Pentagon wants it and demands an eccentric CEO turn it over to the government He declines, setting up a clash between the U.S. and the company's suddenly in-demand tech Anyway this is the plot of Iron Man 2

Two things can be true: 1. FDA’s handling of Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine review raises process questions 2. The data themselves were underwhelming Here's my take, finishing up with perhaps the biggest disappointment -- it's a hit on pandemic preparedness. blogs.nejm.org/hiv-id-observa…

Uber famously changes prices in response to demand, hiking prices when more people want the service. Who benefits? The consumer. Drivers lose out slightly compared to a world where Uber sets a uniform price. Total surplus goes up. We shouldn't be afraid of higher prices! 1/

Charlie Hicks ate his lunch and dinner at the Shrimp Basket in Pensacola, Florida, every day for 10 years. When he suddenly stopped showing up, the chef went looking for him – ultimately saving his life. @SteveHartmanCBS is On the Road.

The "American democracy is in trouble" crowd also took a banging last evening.

Seems like the commentary from every election cycle is that voters are in a state of discontent and seeking change.

I write a lot about Covid origins. I thought the lab leak theory made sense, back in 2020, but I eventually came to realize that it's very unlikely to be true. Here's a summary of some long posts I've written and many shorter threads: