Weekend Reads

This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

In the recent Martin Scorsese Film “The Irishman” the director uses technology to de-age Al Pacino and Robert Deniro by 30-40 years. But it created an uncanny effect because the actors didn’t walk or move like 40 year old men, they had the gait of their real age, 70 years old. This scene where Deniro beats up that guy. Just look at the way he holds his arms and it's obvious he's geriatric.

Gait is such a deep part of us that it is almost impossible to fake. Pre-historic hunter gatherers understood this even as moderns forgot about it’s importance.

But gait is back. Science has revealed everyone has their own unique gait and it is being used as a biometric tool for surveillance and identification.

What are the implications? Click here to read the rest….

Weekend Reads

Turkey/Syria was hit by a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake, followed by another one 5.5 magnitude aftershock this week. It’s expected that tends of thousands have perished and cities wiped out. The footage coming out of there looks terrible (One, Two, Three). This particular area has been home to a large and prosperous population throughout ancient history. It was hit by massive earthquake in 526, and then

again in 1138 (third deadliest in history).Eric Cline of the Bronze Age Collapse, has an interesting theory of what reset civilization ~3200 years ago.

The United States is a big country. Bigger than most people realize. 41% of the country has a median home price under $150,000. You wouldn’t know that by reading the news. People on the news, who talk about real estate, tend to be more upper income and thus living in more upper income areas and then they're projecting that high cost housing market situation onto everyone else. When in reality, the high price areas are under 5 percent of landmass.

Who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline a few months ago? The pipeline was built by Europe and Russia to transport Russian gas to Northern European countries. After Russia invaded Ukraine, someone blew pipeline underneath the Danish sea making it incapable of Russia sending gas on it. No one really knows. The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh thinks its the United States who did it. Here is a counter-argument of Hersh.

I think about this video when I’m buying bottled water at the store.

Tennessee Williams once said, “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” San Francisco is an interesting case. What happens when 50% of your downtown workers are remote and the average home costs millions of dollars? What’s the future of a city like that?

Microsoft released the new Bing, which is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. If it works, it could chip away at Google’s dominance and some of the more than $100 billion in annual search advertising revenue that comes with it.

Modern humans lived in an environment with many other human-type creatures. We only see other humans now, that’s a new thing. That’s only 35,000 years old when the last neanderthal died. People would don’t realize how wild pre-history was. I think we’re going to go back to those times soon. Except, it’ll be us changing ourselves with genetic modification, enhancements and different types of treatments.

Trial by ordeal was an ancient and medieval judicial practice by which the guilt or innocence of the accused was determined by subjecting them to a painful, or at least an unpleasant, usually dangerous experience. The ordeal of hot water required the accused to dip their hand into a pot of boiling water and retrieve a stone. A study on this procedure mentioned that it was actually a logical way to dispense justice.

Does Blood Pressure naturally increase with age?

How tall can we actually build a liveable building? High-rises have become so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget what a triumph it is to build even a humdrum office tower. For millennia, our ancestors inched slowly but steadily toward the clouds. Archaeologists have called the Tower of Jericho, completed about 10,000 years ago, the “super-skyscraper of its day.” It reached a grand total of 28 feet.

Florida could soon have permitless carry. If you had to say what one political issue has been the most succesfull, I would say the right to carry a gun. It was only legal in a few states in 1986 and now, it’s legal in all the states. In less than 40 years.

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