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Assorted Links

2024-02-02

  • A woman spends 500 days alone in a cave. — via The Browser. Fascinating impacts on her psyche and her body. As an example, her peripheral vision decays since she’s always looking straight ahead with her lamp.
  • An observation from a podcast with Christopher Nolan that has stuck with me:

    “The thing that I’ve learned, that every writer needs to learn, the thing that I know absolutely, is that feeling you have that you can write something, when you know, “Okay, I’ve got it now,” you have to write exactly then and get it on the page, because that feeling will disappear like a fart in the wind. It’ll be gone. You’ll come back to the desk, and you’ll be like, “What was it?” You can write notes. That’s not going to help. You just have to sit down and write it…. It’s a really important thing for everybody to know, because the feeling is so convincing that you’ll always be able to write it. It’s like being drunk, then sobering up, or vice versa. You’re a different person the next day, and you don’t have it anymore, and then you’ve got to think your way back into it.”

  • Send Samples to your Customers. Absolute fire from Tony. The equivalent of write code and talk to customers for chemical companies
  • Sea to Sale: I’m participating in a webinar with Greenwave on Kelp and the cosmetics market. Sign up here.
  • Imagine this from the perspective of the chimpanzees! From Nicholson Baker in the Intelligencer (also via The Browser):

    “There was a whole colony of experimental chimps at Holloman. Monkeys went up in balloons and in V-2 rockets. Many of them died. Chimpanzees were strapped into a rocket sled and abruptly decelerated; they were spun, tumbled, ejected from their seats, subjected to wind blasts, and slingshotted in the “bopper.” They died, they were autopsied, or they lived but suffered injuries and were “sacrificed” and autopsied.”

Memory without the brain

2024-02-02

A compelling case that plants and animals without brains have memories.

“The neuron is not a miracle cell,” says Stefano Mancuso, a University of Florence botanist who has written several books on plant intelligence. “It's a normal cell that is able to produce an electric signal. In plants almost every cell is able to do that.”

On one plant, the touch-me-not, feathery leaves normally fold and wilt when touched (a defense mechanism against being eaten), but when a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience.

Found via The Browser.

Ripple effects from ad tracking

2024-02-02

Speculative from someone who knows the industry well: * The changes Apple made to Ad Tracking have totally ruined the playbook for DTC beauty brands, who can no longer grow using targeted ads on Facebook (this is well known) * A second order effect of this is that it’s making it harder for new ingredients to get adopted, because the DTC brands were usually the most willing to experiment here. * This in turn slows the pace of innovation in the ingredients industry, especially towards cleaner / more sustainable / more natural alternatives.

I can't prove or disprove this, but it does make intuitive sense.

American squalor

2024-01-28

Regulations themselves aren’t the problem, though. Germany, like much of northern Europe, is a high-regulation society, but it’s also high-trust, compared to the US. Here, nice and fully functional things are built without fear of misuse. For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.

I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. A mindset that manifests as one useless La Sombrita at a time.

By Chris Arnade.