Intro / Preface / Extra Words
Hey Ya'll!
And yes that is spelled correctly and don't give me any guff about it.
How YA doing.
ALL of the things.
Y A ' A L L.
If you say ya'll I guarantee the base word in your vocabulary sounds much more like YUH than YUU. We can't always trust the science, especially when it comes to the best 2nd person plural available to English speakers ("yinz" anyone? )
Hit reply and let us know the worst 2nd person you've heard....
Anyhoo... enjoy these links ya'll!
Veedeeohs
Two Vortex Rings Colliding in Slow Motion
That is not what I expected to happen when two smoke rings collide. Very cool. -B
Food
A long twitter thread about if you can grow almonds in Alabama
Here's the original argument being rebutted if you want to read it.
I have no idea who is right and wrong here. I'm a bit leery of "nobody grows almonds in alabama because of the racisms" type arguments as these things are never mono-causal and while something like that might be A root cause it seems more plausible that amongst other things the weather just doesn't work in the south for that type of agriculture to be the best option? Like it could be done but growing rice and soybeans and corn and cotton and tobacco are all just better economic options given the entirety of the set of circumstances. Also the almond industry out west is extremely disruptive in terms of water usage and the various knock on environmental effects of that. -B
In a serendipitous twist, I just read an interview with Sarah Taber that was entertaining, about how she thinks ag food waste is an overplayed marketing ploy. But the rebuttal thread to her thoughts on nuts was also quite entertaining so maybe I don't care who is right I just want to read snarky stuff. -C
The Disturbing Truth About Figs
I realize you probably don't think about almonds, pecans, and figs very often but here we are sharing multiple links about these foods. If you're new here, welcome. This is what it is. -C
Business Time
I wish I had a cheat sheet of principles for my first job.
This is pretty dang good! Be patient AND be ambitious. Ambituous does not mean just a desire for more money. It means wanting to be able to DO more. And the patience part recognizes you don't know anything yet. Every decade of my life I've looked back at my ten year younger self and realized I was a complete idiot who thought he knew everything. Learning is such a fun journey though so have the patience to invest in it long term. -B
TravelMASity
Amtrak should bring in foreign experts to make trains great again
I'm actually just seriously concerned in general about the USA's complete inability to build infrastructure of any sort. With our resources we should be doing so much cool stuff right now. We should be building out so much power generation of all kinds that energy is free. We should be building thousands of miles of HVDC power transmission. We should be building pipelines and LNG export terminals to become Africa and Europe and South America's gas buddies (witness what Russia is getting up to now since it now more or less has the ability to shut down the entire European economy with the flip of a single physical switch). We should be building high speed rail in about 5 different places that make sense now with the long term option to connect them. But apparently we don't know how to do any of those things. This is one of the reasons I've recently decided to become a libertarian monarchist. -B
Who was I talking to about trains recently? It was probably Brian but I feel like it was someone else. I should tweet Elon about doing it. Just build trains that work, they can be electric since that's his niche but if they could JUST EXIST that would be dope. They don't have to be fancy. They can have a punny name if they need to. You got this Mr. Musk. -C
Draw all roads in any city at once
This website allows you to select a city and then draws every single road on your screen and it is complex and beautiful. -C
This is so cool! -B
I love technology (and science)
No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air
If someone close to you is afraid of flying, this article will not comfort them so keep it to yourself. -C
Wireless Professional Weather Station
Did you know you could have your own weather station on your roof? Thanks to Patrick and Caitlin, now I can pass along this important knowledge to you, dear reader. -C
How a ‘fatally, tragically flawed’ paradigm has derailed the science of obesity
I appreciate all the amazing feedback we received on our previous issue on obesity. I was exhausted after the process of creating it and needed some sort of recovery period before I was ready to write words to share with other people again that weren't directly tied to the commission of my day job.
I still have a lot more thoughts on this topic and zero additional clarity or conclusions to share. Maybe at some point in the future we will come back to the topic more fully but in the short term I have two dots of an ellipsis to put out there.
1) (H/T Joe D) The attached link is to an amazing article that you should read if this topic is at all interesting. I've emailed a little with the author who I think is very smart but who is also clearly selling something so probably this is all snake oil nonsense. I trust you to use your brain as an adult to discriminate.
“Even when maintained on 50 percent of normal food intake,” Coleman reported in 1985, “mutants still become obese.”
2) (H/T Wes B) Below is a random picture of a random group of people at Woodstock in 1969. I want you to think about how many people you know, maybe the best 5 athletes you personally know, and whether or not they have a six pack. What does a random group of people at a music festival today look like?
-Brian
All Geek To Me
7 Wizards... or are they all the same guy?
They've got to be all the same guy because there's only like 1 actor out there playing these guys. He goes by different names (e.g. Ian McKellen and Richard Harris and Michael Gambon) but really it is just the same guy. -B