Weekend Reads

This Week on the Lindy Newsletter

The Federal Government is closing in on a decision to ban the wildly popular Tik-Tok. It has stated two public reasons for the ban:

I argue that the introduction of the Smartphone with mass internet in the late 00s was a Gutenberg moment. That means it changed our social environment completely. It is no surprise the data says that the young people who grew up during this era are different than previous generations.

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Weekend Reads

New domestic migration data is out for the United States. The major metro areas on the West Coast, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, had substantial net domestic outmigration. In the Pacific Northwest, Portland & Seattle also stand out for net domestic migration losses. Vegas, Phoenix, Austin, and San Antonio are the only 'big' cities that brought in new residents. Even Miami lost people to domestic migration.

There is a widespread idea that medicine before the 20th century was primitive and useless. That is not quite true. Here, in the 1200s, is surgeon Ibn al Quff's account on surgical pain relief. It explains the use of a lot of our modern anesthesia such as: opium, mandrake, Hyocymus albus, belladonna, Cannabis sativus, Cannabis indica, wild lettuce. Scopolamine, derived from Hyoscymus Albus is used today for the exact same reasons. Latuca serriola is named "wild opium lettuce" and quite effective for pain relief.

A follower of mine on Twitter actually made a computer that looks like furniture instead of sticking out like technology. I wish there was more variety in choice in computers. They all look like an alien spaceship that sits in your home. This looks calm.

Movies are extremely dark today. A filmmaker walks us through the reasons behind the ‘dark cinematography’ that’s causing so many complaints

The car company Hyundai has pledged to employ real physical buttons in their cars and not replace them with touchscreens. Touchscreens and touch controls took over the world of automotive interior design, as automakers aimed to build vehicles on the cutting edge of technology and trends. As it turns out though, sometimes the old ways are best.

A story about ticks, lyme disease, a new treatment and why they are a recent thing.

AI is now able to do a good job imitating famous musicians. Here is an AI track by Kanye West covering an old Ice Cube song. If you think culture is stuck now. Wait until you can just tell AI to make new songs by artists who have been dead for 30 years. New Springsteen songs. New Pink Floyd. New Notorious BIG. No wonder they bought the rights to those artists for hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the 30 years that biomedical researchers have worked determinedly to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, their counterparts have developed drugs that helped cut deaths from cardiovascular disease by more than half, and cancer drugs able to eliminate tumors that had been incurable. But for Alzheimer’s, not only is there no cure, there is not even a disease-slowing treatment. A new class of Alzheimer’s drugs that aims to slow cognitive decline was granted accelerated approval in the United States in January, can cause brain shrinkage.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI thinks his new tool is going to replace millions of jobs in the US. He says UBI can replace the wages. He also owns a company that provides UBI (Universal Basic Income) to humans through World Coin. I don't like it. It sounds like a very utopian vision, and utopias never turn out well. The Atlantic recently published a piece on how the world would look like without work.

Peter Frankopan argues that nature has always played a fundamental role in the writing of history. From the fall of the Moche civilization in South America that came about because of the cyclical pressures of El Niño to volcanic eruptions in Iceland that affected Egypt and helped bring the Ottoman empire to its knees, climate change and its influences have always been with us. Frankopan explains how the Vikings emerged thanks to catastrophic crop failure, why the roots of regime change in eleventh-century Baghdad lay in the collapse of cotton prices resulting from unusual climate patterns, and why the western expansion of the frontiers in North America was directly affected by solar flare activity in the eighteenth century.

A story of an ugly bathroom

The Italian government has announced plans to ban synthetic meat, defying claims that test-tube steaks are good for the environment as it wages a patriotic war to defend traditional Italian food. I have serious doubts about lab meat being scalable or tasty enough to be any type of viable alternative to meat. Not Lindy.

Whatever happened to 3D printing? It was supposed to be the next big thing. We were all going to have a 3D printer in our home and print whatever tool or object we wanted. 3D printing is growing, not as a consumer-facing product but as a way to quickly build customized, lightweight prototypes and parts.

“Advice to Bride and Groom” by Plutarch (C. 100 CE). Several of the Plutarch works collectively known as Moralia resemble advice columns at times. The Roman historian and philosopher had thoughts on how to educate children, how to tell a true friend from an untrustw

Remember stick shifts? Can you remember the last time you saw one? They used to be really popular, even in America. But they are mostly gone now. This is not just a US thing anymore. More cars are sold in the UK that are automatic.

Music