Back Inside the Box | How I structure my time Here’s a look at a page from an old journal/daily planner of mine. A few years ago, during my last semester in college I was so burnt out that I decided to quit my job and fall off the radar for a few months. I used the time to digest my experiences over the last few years before making any decisions about my future. In that time, I developed a journaling format that really helps me when I’m in a slump. First thing I do is break…
The Lesson of Heraclitus The following sentence in ancient Greek was the first in book by Heraclitus that has since been lost: τοῦ δὲ λόγου ἀεὶ ἄνθρωποι γίγνονται ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον πρόσθεν ἀκοῦσαι. It’s translated in modern English as something like, “Though this discourse is true evermore, men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all.” The reason we know about this fragment at all is because…
The Automation of Charisma “The technique of warfare and the structure of armies being what they were, the individual decision and driving power of the leading man—even his actual presence on a showy horse—were essential elements in the strategical and tactical situations. Napoleon’s presence was, and had to be, actually felt on his battlefields. This is no longer so,” explains economist Joseph Schumpeter in “Can Capitalism Survive?” This military analogy summarizes a…
The Myth of Diogenes | The two cosmopolitans “Commander, we’ve reached Corinth.” Alexander, without looking up from his page, replied, “Thank you, Captain. I’ll be right out.” He scribbled his final thoughts onto the page. Alexander was returning from a military campaign in the East. He had heard that a man named Diogenes was in Corinth, and he had hoped to finally meet him for he had a reputation of being one of the wisest living philosophers. He stepped ashore the port in…
Two Enlightenments There are two moments in history that are referred to with the term “Enlightenment”: one in India in the 6th Century BC, and the other in Western Europe in the 18th Century. Each is directly opposed to the other on three metaphysical doctrines. Whereas the Indian Enlightenment puts forward the doctrine of Dukkha—that pain is an inescapable aspect of existence—the European Enlightenment puts forward the doctrine of Utilitarianism, which states that we can…
Finding Evolution in the Data In the 1980s, David Penny and his colleagues pooled together their collective knowledge of biology, statistics, and philosophy to address Karl Popper’s criticism that “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a ‘metaphysical research program’—a possible framework for testable scientific theories." While he was personally convinced that evolution was a fact, Popper was concerned that the theory of evolution boiled down to a tautology:…
The Forces of Status and Shame See that guy in blue robes sitting by himself on the stairs? That is Diogenes. No one dares be near him because he smells like shit. The other day I retold an apocryphal dialogue that took place between him and Alexander the Great. His great contribution to Western philosophy is the idea that if something isn’t shameful in private, then there is no reason to feel shame for it in public. He lived his philosophy every day by masturbating out in…
Now We Can Reproduce Inanimate Objects like Living Organisms Imagine if inanimate objects were like living organisms in the sense that they contained their own assembly and operating instructions in the form of DNA. You could sample the genetic code of chair and clone it, for example. It turns out, we are on the verge of doing just that. A team of scientists at ETH Zurich devised a ‘DNA-of-things’ (DoT) storage architecture to produce materials with immutable memory. This…
Scientists Created Empty Synthetic Cells that Behave like the Real Thing Sometimes there is an art to doing biology, especially when it comes to overcoming technical limitations to your research. Cellular biologists, for example, have to trade off between the frustrating challenge of growing cells for experimental use and the considerable “lifelessness” of synthetic cell models. Back in August of 2019, a team of researchers at Penn State published a paper in *Nano Letters*…
This GIF was Encoded into the DNA of a Bacterium It may not look like much, but consider the fact that this GIF was encoded into the DNA of a bacterium. From a study published in Nature back in 2017, a team of scientists lead by Seth L. Shipman and Jeff Nivala used the CRISPR–Cas system to encode the pixel values of black and white images and a short movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23017 What they did was they…
To Be a Better Writer, Don't Identify as a Writer After college, I got a few gigs by offering editing and proofreading to writers with many different goals. I found that I much preferred the dry and clunky writing of an ESL graduate student’s thesis over the super writer-y writings of a writer. The graduate student has something to tell us, so she uses language as a tool to convey that information. But the writer is trying to be a writer. He uses language to present himself…
Scientists are Cracking the Code to Industrial Protein Production Until now, it has been difficult to control the amount of protein that can be produced from a given gene. We have been using model bacteria organisms as tiny little factories for while not to produce medicines such as insulin for diabetes and clotting factors for hemophilia; the problem was that it is difficult to get control for producing large amounts of the desired protein product. Protein synthesis is…
Organic Bots and Authenticity For a few years now, human traffic has made less than 50% of total internet traffic. This is annoying for people and companies who run websites trying to attract authentically human traffic to translate into views, customers, and sales. We have useful tools to manage this for now, but those days are numbered. Experts at Google forewarn about a day called “the inversion”, when human internet users are falsely flagged for being bots more often…
How the Internet Made Our Cruelty more Sustainable Spend enough time watching the animal planet and you'll eventually see a chimpanzee bite his rival's testicles off, and you'll say to yourself, "I'm definitely more evolved than that guy." You're not. You and that chimpanzee are cut from the same cloth. Equally evolved, but under different circumstances. As a standard ape, you have the same instinctive craving for cruelty that he does, but being much weaker, you have to find…
Two Brief Essays on Mind Viruses [1] Back in 2012-3, a mind virus called “The Pixar Timeline Theory” spread through the writers’ rooms at Buzzfeed, The Verge, and Screenrant. Patient zero was a writer named Jon Negroni who contracted the virus from a website called Cracked. The original strain of the virus was a fan theory that all the Disney Pixar Films tell one long story of an apocalypse where animals and toys become sentient while humans were gradually destroying the…
On Narratives, Models, and Theories Take a moment to think back to your 4 or 5 earliest memories. Have them in mind? Good. Now, is there a common thread that runs through them? A theme? Maybe if you had difficulty finding five memories at first, there might be a theme because you based your retrieval of the next memory by branching off the one you just thought of. Perhaps try comparing these memories by their continuity to each other. Here’s what I mean. Say I asked you to…
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