Special Guest: Ivana Milojević.

Links:

• Gaslight (1944 film) - Wikipedia — Gaslight is a 1944 American psychological thriller film directed by George Cukor, and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten and Angela Lansbury in her film debut. Adapted by John Van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John L. Balderston from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light (1938), it follows a young woman whose husband slowly manipulates her into believing that she is descending into insanity.
• Whistleblower testifies U.S. salvaged 'non-human biologics' from UFO crash sites : NPR — U.S. recovered non-human 'biologics' from UFO crash sites, former intel official says
• Pentiment (video game) - Wikipedia — Pentiment is a narrative adventure role-playing video game played from a 2D perspective. The player takes control of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist from Nuremberg who becomes embroiled in a series of murder mysteries in Upper Bavaria. The story is set in the fictional Alpine town of Tassing and the nearby Benedictine Kiersau Abbey during the 16th century, and takes place over the course of 25 years.

Links:

• The Infinite Conversation — A never-ending conversation between Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. When you open this website, you are taken to a random point in the dialogue. Every day a new segment of the conversation is added. New segments can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, this conversation could continue until the end of time.
• Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks its LaMDA AI has come to life - The Washington Post — In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”

Links:

• Aphantasia - Wikipedia — Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images in one's mind. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 but has since remained relatively unstudied. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 conducted by a team led by Professor Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter. Zeman's team coined the term aphantasia, derived from the ancient Greek word phantasia (φᾰντᾰσῐ́ᾱ), which means "imagination", and the prefix a- (ᾰ̓-), which means "without".

Links:

• Business Dudes Need to Stop Talking Like This — The scourge of business-dude lorem ipsum
• Lorem ipsum - Wikipedia — In publishing and graphic design, Lorem ipsum is a placeholder text commonly used to demonstrate the visual form of a document or a typeface without relying on meaningful content.

Links:

• The BA.5 story - by Eric Topol - Ground Truths — The Omicron sub-variant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen. It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility, well beyond Omicron (BA.1) and other Omicron family variants that we’ve seen (including BA.1.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, and BA.4). You could say it’s not so bad because there hasn’t been a marked rise in hospitalizations and deaths as we saw with Omicron, but that’s only because we had such a striking adverse impact from Omicron, for which there is at least some cross-immunity (BA.1 to BA.5). Here I will review (1) what we know about its biology; (2) its current status around the world; and (3) the ways we can defend against it.
• The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care: Topol MD, Eric: 9780465061839: Amazon.com: Books — How genomics, big data, and digital technology are revolutionizing every aspect of medicine, from physical exams to drug prescriptions to organ transplants
• Small Study on Rectal Cancer Results in Remission in Every Patient - The New York Times — The study was small, and experts say it needs to be replicated. But for 18 people with rectal cancer, the outcome led to “happy tears.”
• Milošev blog – Ne, dostarlimab nije čudesni lek protiv raka koji može da izleči svakoga — Svakih par godina, priča o o revolucionarnoj novoj studiji koja je pronašla lek protiv raka počne da kruži svim svetskim medijima, pa i srpskim. Pre četiri godine to je bila priča sa Stanforda koja je dobre rezultate na miševima predstavila kao nekakvo epohalno otkriće. To je bio tipičan primer nenamernog širenja zdravstvenih dezinformacija kao posledica lošeg prevoda i nepoznavanja konteksta. Najnovija priča je malo drugačija.
• Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy | Vanity Fair — Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents, a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.
• Amazon.com: Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom: 9780062338785: Eban, Katherine: Books — Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics, the majority of which are manufactured overseas. We have been reassured by our doctors, our pharmacists and our regulators that generic drugs are identical to their brand-name counterparts, just less expensive. But is this really true?

Links:

• Priključenija 44: Mask — Da li je Elon Mask ho(h)štapler ili vizionar? Koje su prednosti i mane eksponiranog CEO-a? Ima li nečega dobrog među Maskovim projektima?
• Priključenija 28: Tviter
• 420 (cannabis culture) - Wikipedia — 420, 4:20, or 4/20 (pronounced four-twenty) is cannabis culture slang for marijuana and hashish consumption, especially smoking around the time 4:20 p.m., and also refers to cannabis-oriented celebrations that take place annually on April 20 (which is 4/20 in U.S. form). At locations in the United States where cannabis is legal, cannabis dispensaries will often offer discounts on their products on April 20.
• Priključenija 59: Generacija — ✓ Zašto plaćati sportistima za osvojenu olimpijsku medalju? ✓ Ko može da priušti sebi Roleks? ✓ U čijem dvorištu raste drvo sa parama?
• What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Others Are Learning From Curtis Yarvin and the New Right | Vanity Fair — They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics.
• Curtis Yarvin, Political Theorist - Tablet Magazine — How computer programmer Curtis Yarvin became America’s most controversial political theorist
• Jeff Bezos on Twitter: "Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?" / Twitter — Apropos of something: -Tesla's second-biggest market in 2021 was China (after the US) -Chinese battery makers are major suppliers for Tesla's EVs. -After 2009, when China banned Twitter, the government there had almost no leverage over the platform -That may have just changed
• Jeff Bezos on Twitter: "Agree — this is a fascinating piece — no one drawn as a cartoon. Thanks for the link and reco." / Twitter — This Vanity Fair article on the "New Right" by @jhensonpogue is so conspicuously different because he does something so rare for modern journalism: he wrote about controversial thought/people to understand and explain it, not prove he's on the Good Side:
• Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue: Holiday, Ryan: 9780735217645: Books - Amazon — In 2007, a short blogpost on Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-vertical of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel as gay. Thiel's sexuality had been known to close friends and family, but he didn't consider himself a public figure, and believed the information was private. This post would be the casus belli for a meticulously plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker, its bankruptcy and with Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, out of a job. Only later would the world learn that Gawker's demise was not incidental--it had been masterminded by Thiel.
• A look at Jeff Bezos' D.C. Estate - Daily Beat — Bezos paid $23 million for the 27,000-square-foot mansion at 2320-2330 S Street NW in 2016. Neighbors in the upscale Kalorama neighborhood include President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump also right around the corner. Bezos’s home was formerly the Textile Museum. He immediately undertook a $12 million renovation, which turned the mansion into an estate.
• Peter Thiel Buys $13 Million DC Mansion in Year's Top Sale: Report — No longer an open secret among neighbors, Peter Thiel was revealed as the "mystery buyer" of a $13 million mansion in Washington, D.C. in Monday's edition of Politico Playbook. Thiel, a tech billionaire and the co-founder of PayPal, made the district's biggest home purchase of the last 12 months by using an LLC to buy it from Wilbur Ross, the former Trump commerce secretary, according to Politico. The lavish home is located in Washington's ritzy Woodland-Nofmanstone neighborhood. Notable residents include former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, who lives just across the street from Thiel's new property, according to Playbook.

Links:

• Florida Man | Know Your Meme — Florida Man is a Twitter feed that curates news headline descriptions of bizarre domestic incidents involving a male subject residing in the state of Florida.[6][7] The tweets are meant to be humorously read as if they were perpetrated by a single individual dubbed “the world’s worst superhero.” In March 2019, a "Florida Man Challenge" game began trending across various social media platforms, in which participants shared news headlines taken from search queries for "Florida Man" followed by their birthday.
• Why Are There ‘Florida Man’ Stories? Sunshine Laws, Explained | Crime News — The most important reason Florida residents land in the headlines has to do with the state’s Sunshine Law, which makes official records related to state governing agencies accessible to the public. Florida’s position is that the government is a public business, and its leaders have stuck to that belief with this law.
• Yishan on Twitter — I've now been asked multiple times for my take on Elon's offer for Twitter. So fine, this is what I think about that. I will assume the takeover succeeds, and he takes Twitter private. (I have little knowledge/insight into how actual takeover battles work or play out)
• Back to the Future of Twitter – Stratechery by Ben Thompson — Indeed, when you consider the fact that Twitter’s board members not only don’t own much of Twitter, but famously, barely use Twitter at all, it is easy to wonder if the actual goal is not financial results but rather harnessing that immense cultural impact. This suspicion only intensifies when you consider that the bidder in this case is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time: if there was one person in the world who could realize Twitter’s latent value, wouldn’t Musk be at the top of the list? And yet he is anathema, not for his business acumen, but despite it.
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic — Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
• Libs of TikTok has become central to right wing politics - The Washington Post — A popular Twitter account has morphed into a social media phenomenon, spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and shaping public discourse
• Taylor Lorenz blasted for 'doxxing' 'Libs of TikTok' creator — Taylor Lorenz, the Washington Post’s internet culture beat reporter, is being accused of “doxxing” the anonymous woman who operates the popular Twitter account “Libs of TikTok.”
• Alex From Target / #AlexFromTarget | Know Your Meme — Alex From Target is a nickname given to American teenage cashier Alex Christopher LaBeouf who rose to global viral fame on Twitter for his apparent charming look after an anonymous customer tweeted a picture of him scanning and bagging items at a Target retail store in Texas. Since entering circulation in early November 2014, the hashtag #AlexFromTarget quickly became a worldwide trending topic and went on to inspire several novelty accounts and fan art image macros on Instagram and Tumblr.
• Alex From Target: Teenager who went viral for his good looks is now receiving death threats | The Independent | The Independent — Alex Christopher LeBeouf, the 16-year-old boy better known as Alex From Target, has been receiving death threats since becoming an internet meme. In an interview with the New York Times, Alex, from Frisco, Texas, has said that since his photo went viral on 2 November, he has received death threats on social media and in private messages. One reads: “Alex from target, I’ll find you and I will kill you”.
• Powerball: How Winning the Lottery Makes You Miserable | Time — If you win the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot, you may not be as lucky as you may think. Many winners befall the so-called curse of the lottery, with some squandering their fortunes and others meeting tragic ends.
• The internet is flat. - by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain — I’ve been thinking about a different internet flattening, namely the way that social platforms collapse time and space and context into one big pancake of conflict. [...] It’s called context collapse, which is when a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith.
• Republicans are overreaching in the culture war | Financial Times — A winning conservatism is one that rolls its eyes at the cultural left and asks the average voter to “get a load of this”. Once it crosses the line into its own kind of zealotry, it shouldn’t assume that people will come along.
• Mark Meechan - Count Dankula
• Bean Dad | Know Your Meme — Bean Dad refers to musician and podcaster John Roderick who on January 2nd, 2021, tweeted a lengthy thread telling the story of when his 9-year-old daughter asked him to open a can of beans but he insisted she figure out how to open it herself using a can opener. Six hours after she first made the request, she figured out how to use the can opener and opened it. While Roderick tweeted the story as though it were a proud parenting moment, many criticized the story for teaching poor lessons to the daughter with some going so far as to call it abuse and others made jokes about the story.
• Ben Thompson (@benthompson) / Twitter — Author/Founder of @stratechery. Host of @ditheringfm @exponentfm. @notechben for sports. @monkbent on other networks. Home on the Internet.
• Slaviša Tasić (@trzisnoresenje) / Twitter — Profesor ekonomije. Autor akademskih radova, knjiga i mnogo tekstova. Najnovije čitajte na https://tasic.substack.com
• Love in the Time of COVID. Socratic Spirit as the Imperative on… | by C.J. Mastropietro | Apr, 2022 | Medium — Jung and Nietzsche were among those who made this point most perspicuously: when society is overtaken by instincts that blur the lines between what is happening inside and outside of us, when it no longer has access to reflective symbols that allow it to know itself, when it is seized by forces it does not understand, those forces may in turn threaten to seize the world and engulf it. This gives rise to totalitarian impulses, the desire to use monologic declarations — like law — to close a fist around the world. When this happens, we lose the dialogic form of participation, the ability to reason which is so essential to spirit, the ability to bring consciousness, to know by being in the right kind of relation to what is known.
• Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts | AMA — Designed for physicians and other health care professionals, the Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts provides guidance and promotes a deeper understanding of equity-focused, person-first language and why it matters.
• Upton Sinclair - Quote — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Links:

• Deep Curiosity Inspires The Joy of Why Podcast | Quanta Magazine — The noted mathematician and author Steven Strogatz explains how the conversations with experts in his new Quanta Magazine podcast address his lifelong fascination with timeless mysteries.
• Otkrica bez granica Aleksandar Fleming Otkrice penicilina - YouTube — Dokumentarna serija za decu
• The sad devolution of Discovery Channel — Quartz — Forget the recent barrage of scientists saying that Shark Week programs are misleading, even deceitful. Shark Week isn’t really about sharks—it’s about ratings. And it’s more evidence that the Discovery Channel, also home to Amish Mafia, among other programs of questionable authenticity, has not been interested in broadcasting scientific fact for quite some time.
• Curiosity Stream | Stay curious — Thousands of documentaries. All on demand, all for less than $20/year
• Green brothers - Wikipedia — The Green brothers, John (born August 24, 1977) and Hank (born May 5, 1980), are two American brothers, entrepreneurs, social activists, authors, and YouTube vloggers. The two extensively work together, having started their collaborative popularity with a daily vlog project in 2007 titled "Brotherhood 2.0", in which they only communicated in vlogs posted to YouTube for a year. The Greens' portfolio of online work now includes their main Vlogbrothers channel, Crash Course, SciShow, their podcast Dear Hank & John, and several others projects spanning a number of forms of media.
• In a Nutshell - Kurzgesagt — We create beautiful videos to share our passion for knowledge. We value quality over quantity, always. Nothing in the universe is boring if you tell a good story.
• Huberman Lab Podcast — Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab Podcast. The podcast is frequently ranked in the Top 25 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked #1 in the categories of Science, Education, and Health & Fitness.

Pratite nas na Tviteru.

Fireside • Spotify • Apple • Google • Amazon • Overcast

Links:

• Caleb From West Elm Took Over TikTok But He Wasn't As Bad As Claimed

Pratite nas na Tviteru.

Fireside • Spotify • Apple • Google • Amazon • Overcast

Links:

• Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines - Wikipedia — Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines is a 2004 action role-playing video game developed by Troika Games and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows. Set in White Wolf Publishing's World of Darkness, the game is based on White Wolf's role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade and follows a human who is killed and revived as a fledgling vampire. The game depicts the fledgling's journey through the early 21st-century Los Angeles to uncover the truth behind a recently discovered relic that heralds the end of all vampires.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Wikipedia — Vampire: The Masquerade is a tabletop role-playing game (tabletop RPG) created by Mark Rein-Hagen and released in 1991 by White Wolf Publishing as the first of several Storyteller System games for its World of Darkness setting line. It is set in a fictionalized "gothic-punk" version of the modern world, where players assume the roles of vampires, who are referred to as "Kindred", and deal with their night-to-night struggles against their own bestial natures, vampire hunters and each other.
• Mortal Stakes | Vampire: The Masquerade - L.A. By Night | Chapter 1 - YouTube — When a trio of vampires (Nelli, Jasper, and Victor) investigate a violation of their territory, they discover Annabelle, a fledgling vampire so new to the night that she cannot survive on her own. With their help Annabelle discovers what she is and how to survive in her deadly new situation.
• Midnight Mass (miniseries) - Wikipedia — Midnight Mass is an American supernatural horror streaming television miniseries created and directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Zach Gilford, Kate Siegel, Hamish Linklater, Samantha Sloyan, Rahul Kohli and Henry Thomas. The plot centers on an isolated island community that experiences supernatural events after the arrival of a mysterious priest.
• Vampire - Wikipedia — Two infamous vampire cases, the first to be officially recorded, involved the corpses of Petar Blagojevich and Miloš Čečar from Serbia. Blagojevich was reported to have died at the age of 62, but allegedly returned after his death asking his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the following day. Blagojevich supposedly returned and attacked some neighbours who died from loss of blood.
• Bullshit Jobs | Book by David Graeber | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster — From David Graeber, the bestselling author of The Dawn of Everything and Debt—“a master of opening up thought and stimulating debate” (Slate)—a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs…and their consequences.
• Paul Butler – “Play-to-earn” and Bullshit Jobs — In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely disconnected from any sort of value creation, and makes the case that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat having extra free time on their hands. It’s a thoughtfully presented case, but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
• The Great Bifurcation – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
• Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3 — I have only dipped my toe in the waters of web3. Looking at it through the lens of these small projects, though, I can easily see why so many people find the web3 ecosystem so neat. I don’t think it’s on a trajectory to deliver us from centralized platforms, I don’t think it will fundamentally change our relationship to technology, and I think the privacy story is already below par for the internet (which is a pretty low bar!), but I also understand why nerds like me are excited to build for it. It is, at the very least, something new on the nerd level – and that creates a space for creativity/exploration that is somewhat reminiscent of early internet days. Ironically, part of that creativity probably springs from the constraints that make web3 so clunky. I’m hopeful that the creativity and exploration we’re seeing will have positive outcomes, but I’m not sure if it’s enough to prevent all the same dynamics of the internet from unfolding again.

Links:

• The Complete History of Podcasts | Voices — The first iPod debuted in 2001. A few years later, in 2004, former MTV VJ Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer devised a plan that would enable them to download online radio broadcasts from the internet directly to Apple’s revolutionary device. Winer had authored an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) aggregator software, and Curry coded a program titled iPodder, which could extract audio files from an RSS feed so that they could be transferred to an iPod. For once, radio broadcast files could be stored on a portable player and listened to on the go.
• The Talk Show With John Gruber on Apple Podcasts — The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.
• The Joe Rogan Experience | Podcast on Spotify — The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan. Follow The Joe Rogan Clips show page for some of the best moments from the episodes.
• The Cactus and the Weasel — The phrase, strong views, weakly held, has crossed my radar multiple times in the last few months. I didn’t think much about it when I first heard it, beyond noting that it seemed to be almost a tautological piece of good advice. Thinking some more though, I realized two things: the phrase neatly characterizes the first member of my favorite pair of archetypes, the the hedgehog and the fox, and that I am actually much better described by the inverse statement, which describes foxes: weak views, strongly held.
• Niall Ferguson on Why We Study History (Ep. 128) | Conversations with Tyler — We don’t study the past for its own sake.

Links:

• Civilization VI - Wikipedia — Sid Meier's Civilization VI is a turn-based strategy 4X video game developed by Firaxis Games, published by 2K Games, and distributed by Take-Two Interactive.
• SimCity - Wikipedia — SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game series originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, SimCity, was published by Maxis in 1989 and sparked the creation of several sequels and many other spin-off "Sim" titles, including 2000's The Sims, which itself became a best-selling computer game and franchise.
• The ideology hiding in SimCity’s black box — City simulators like SimCity are serious games — the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say: a simulation of a city. But any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and the model underpinning SimCity has quite the history. In the video above, I unboxed the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time.
• Europa Universalis IV - Wikipedia — Europa Universalis IV is a grand strategy video game in the Europa Universalis series, developed by Paradox Development Studio and published by Paradox Interactive as a sequel to Europa Universalis III (2007).
• The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 - Lincoln Home National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service) — The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of formal political debates between the challenger, Abraham Lincoln, and the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, in a campaign for one of Illinois' two United States Senate seats. Although Lincoln lost the election, these debates launched him into national prominence which eventually led to his election as President of the United States.
• Chautauqua - Wikipedia — Chautauqua (/ʃəˈtɔːkwə/ shə-TAW-kwə) was an adult education and social movement in the United States, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, showmen, preachers, and specialists of the day. Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying that Chautauqua is "the most American thing in America."

Links:

• Drummer: About Drummer — Drummer is a multi-tab outliner that runs as a web app and as a Mac desktop app.
• ∞ regress — Half-baked notes and links c/o Miloš Miljković
• Outliner - Wikipedia — An outliner (or outline processor) is a specialized type of text editor (word processor) used to create and edit outlines, which are text files which have a tree structure, for organization.
• Outlining Software For Pros - OmniOutliner - The Omni Group — OmniOutliner is a powerful tool for organizing (and reorganizing) information, so you can see the full picture and structure your information effortlessly.
• Roam Research – A note taking tool for networked thought. — As easy to use as a document. As powerful as a graph database. Roam helps you organize your research for the long haul.
• Tinderbox: The Tool For Notes — Tinderbox helps you visualize, analyze, and share your ideas.
• List of concept- and mind-mapping software - Wikipedia — Concept mapping and mind mapping software is used to create diagrams of relationships between concepts, ideas, or other pieces of information.
• Cartesian Therapeutics Strengthens Leadership Team With Hire of Miloš Miljković, M.D., as Chief Medical Officer — Cartesian Therapeutics, a fully integrated, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering RNA cell therapy in and beyond oncology, today announced the hire of Miloš Miljković, M.D., as Vice President and Chief Medical Officer.
• In Memoriam: Thomas A. Waldmann, M.D. (1930-2021) | Center for Cancer Research — The CCR community is profoundly saddened by the recent passing of Thomas A. Waldmann, M.D., Chief Emeritus of the Lymphoid Malignancies Branch and NIH Distinguished Investigator.
• Leo Szilard - Wikipedia — Leo Szilard (/ˈsɪlɑːrd/; Hungarian: Szilárd Leó, pronounced [ˈsilaːrd ˈlɛoː]; born Leó Spitz; February 11, 1898 – May 30, 1964) was a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor. He conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear fission reactor in 1934, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb: Richard Rhodes: 9780671657192: Amazon.com: Books — The definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.
• BBC World Service - The Bomb — My grandad worked on the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima. Could another man - Leo Szilard - have stopped it?
• The Hidden Life of Otto Frank by Carol Ann Lee | PopMatters — Julianne Duke, a former neighbor of the Franks’ in Amsterdam whose family had emigrated to the United States, remembers that her parents asked the Franks to join them: “Mrs. Frank wrote that she wanted to emigrate, but Mr. Frank saw no need to leave Holland. He trusted in man’s basic goodness, rather than focusing on the darker, irrational side of human nature.”
• Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death - YouTube — Patrick Henry's historic speech dramatized during the Golden Age of Hollywood. "Give me liberty or give me death..." rang out on March 23, 1775.
• The Next Experiments in Elitism — Now, while a notion of elite is stable, there is what Vilfredo Pareto called circulation of elites. He traced how two kinds of elites, which he called lions and foxes based on earlier terminology from Machiavelli, tend to simply take turns being the elites. Foxes rule by the power of the pen, lions through the power of the sword.
• Twilight Struggle - Wikipedia — Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945–1989 is a board game for two players, published by GMT Games in 2005. Players are the United States and Soviet Union contesting each other's influence on the world map by using cards that correspond to historical events
• Živojin Mišić - Wikipedia — Field Marshal Živojin Mišić GCLH, KCB, GCMG (Serbian: Живојин Мишић; 19 July 1855 in Struganik – 20 January 1921 in Belgrade) was a Field Marshal who participated in all of Serbia's wars from 1876 to 1918. He directly commanded the First Serbian army in the Battle of Kolubara and in breach of the Thessaloniki Front was the Chief of the Supreme Command.
• Nassim Taleb, Absorbing Barriers and House Money — Taleb: … absorbing barrier is a point that you reach beyond which you can’t continue. You stop. So, for example, if you die, that’s an absorbing barrier. So, most people don’t realize, as Warren Buffett keeps saying, he says in order to make money, you must first survive. It’s not like an option. It’s a condition. So, once you hit that point, you are done. You are finished. And that applies in the financial world of course to what we call ruin, financial ruin.
• Missed Warnings: The Fatal Flaws Which Doomed Challenger – — On 7 March 1986, six weeks after the loss of Challenger, divers from the U.S.S. Preserver found the remains of the ill-fated shuttle’s crew cabin. It “was disintegrated, with the heaviest fragmentation and crash damage on the left side,” read the Rogers Commission’s final report into the cause of the disaster.

Links:

• A first look at Unreal Engine 5 - Unreal Engine — We’ve just released a first look at Unreal Engine 5. One of our goals in this next generation is to achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life, and put it within practical reach of development teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and content libraries.
• Oculus | VR Headsets, Games & Equipment — No matter who you are, with a growing library of games and experiences there is no limit to where you can go and what you can do in virtual reality.
• Augmented Reality - Apple — Apple has the world’s largest AR platform, with hundreds of millions of AR‑enabled devices, as well as thousands of AR apps on the App Store. And because Apple hardware and software are designed from the ground up for AR, there is no better way to experience AR.
• Apple Glasses: VR and AR Are Coming — Apple is rumored have a secret team of hundreds of employees working on virtual and augmented reality projects.
• Deepfake - Wikipedia — Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness.
• Knuckles the Echidna - Wikipedia — In January 2018, players began to flood the virtual reality video game VRChat with avatars depicting a deformed version of the character called "Ugandan Knuckles". The character stemmed from a 2017 review of Sonic Lost World by YouTube user Gregzilla as well as from fans of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds streamer Forsen who often make references to the African country Uganda in the chat section of his streams.

Links:

• Elon Musk Just Revealed More About His Plan to Colonize Mars — When Elon Musk announced his plans last year to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars, many did not think his futuristic goal would or could be achieved in their lifetime. But the SpaceX founder has now penciled in a date when he hopes the first human landings on Mars could take place—and it’s as early as 2024, just seven years away.
• Elon Musk: The chance we are not living in a computer simulation is 'one in billions' | The Independent | The Independent — Elon Musk has said that there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation. Our lives are almost certainly being conducted within an artificial world powered by AI and highly-powered computers, like in The Matrix, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO suggested at a tech conference in California.
• Elon Musk Embraces His New Status As Memelord — Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, can add a new line to his resume: memelord. Ever since the 47-year-old co-hosted PewDiePie’s “meme review” with Rick and Morty creator and voice actor Justin Roiland, he’s risen to a new status. Musk has long enjoyed a good meme, but following his meme review appearance, his appreciation for them seems to have grown.
• Tesla’s Elon Musk smokes weed on Joe Rogan podcast, havoc ensues - Vox — ust as the dust had settled in Elon Musk’s will-he-won’t-he take Tesla private drama, the electric car company ran into a new set of troubles. Much of the turmoil was driven by the chief executive himself. Here’s what happened: On Tuesday, BuzzFeed News published emails from Musk doubling down on his insistence that one of the Thai cave rescuers was indeed a pedophile who had moved to Thailand to take a child bride. (The rescuer has denied all of this, and Musk previously apologized for the accusation back in June.) Then on Thursday, Musk appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast for a two-hour conversation in which he smoked what Rogan said was marijuana and drank whiskey. On Friday, two of Tesla’s top executives resigned. The US Air Force, which has multiple contracts with Musk’s SpaceX, reportedly began looking into Musk’s marijuana use, because it’s prohibited for someone with a government security clearance. The Air Force denied there’s an investigation and said it needs to determine “the facts and the appropriate process to handle the situation.”
• Elon Musk Accused of Bitcoin Market Manipulation By Top Economist | Tom's Hardware — Just last week, news broke that Tesla had purchased $1.5-billion in Bitcoin to 'maximize returns on cash,' and somewhat unsurprisingly, eyebrows are being raised. As reported by Markets Insider, Economist Nouriel Roubini is accusing Elon Musk of market manipulation and stating that the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) should investigate. The basis of Roubini's accusations stems from Elon Musk's tweets. Roubini accuses Elon of using his Twitter platform to pump up the price.
• Elon Musk on SNL: The controversy, explained - Vox — Elon Musk — Tesla CEO, SpaceX man, and one of the richest people in the world — is hosting Saturday Night Live on Saturday night. As always when it comes to Elon Musk, his immense power and wealth have combined with his seemingly complete lack of self-awareness to create the perfect storm of something to be mad about for a bit. A handful of SNL cast members have expressed their irritation, and the show has reportedly made clear to all cast members that they’re allowed to skip out on Musk’s episode if they like.

Links:

• Sci-Hub - Wikipedia — Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books, without regard to copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.
• Defining Aggregators – Stratechery by Ben Thompson — Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are the endgame of Aggregation Theory.
• Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw : Nature News & Comment — I worry about sloppiness in biomedical research: too many published results are true only under narrow conditions, or cannot be reproduced at all. The causes are diverse, but what I see as the biggest culprit is hardly discussed. Like the proverbial boiled frog that failed to leap from a slowly warming pot of water, biomedical researchers are stuck in a system in which the amount of data and number of claims in individual papers has gradually risen over decades. Moreover, the goal of a paper seems to have shifted from validating specific conclusions to making the broadest possible assertions. The danger is that papers are increasingly like grand mansions of straw, rather than sturdy houses of brick.
• Alexey Guzey — I work on building New Science and I spend the majority of my time thinking how to make life sciences research better and what the future of academia looks like. If you’re reading this and you do anything biology-related at all, I would love to talk to you and would especially appreciate you getting in touch.

Links:

• The Internet of Beefs — If you participate in online public life, you cannot entirely avoid the Internet of Beefs. It is too big, too ubiquitous, and too widely distributed and connected across platforms. To continue operating in public spaces without being drawn into the conflict, you have to build an arsenal of passive-aggressive behaviors like subtweeting, ghosting, blocking, and muting — all while ignoring beef-only thinkers calling you out furiously as dishonorable and cowardly, and trying to bait you into active aggression.
• Milošev blog – Brnjičari, globusari, ravnozemljaši i ostali borci na internet frontovima — Zadivljuje me bogatstvo srpskog jezika. Nakon “brnjičara” — kako oni koji se kategorički protive nošenju maski nazivaju one koji ih nose — pre par dana saznao sam za “globusare”, fantastičnu izvedenicu koju “ravnozemljaši” — predivne li složenice — koriste da opišu ostatak svog ravnog sveta. Lepe reči za ružnu stvarnost: srpski ratovi kultura žestoki su bar koliko i američki, sa kojima imaju previše dodirnih tačaka.

Links:

• Critical Thinking isn't Just a Process - Insight — One of the things I noticed throughout the past year has been that a lot of my friends who had grown up in authoritarian or poor countries had a much easier time adjusting to our new pandemic reality. My childhood was intermittently full of shortages of various things. We developed a corresponding reflex for stocking up on things when they were available, anticipating what might be gone soon. That was quite useful for the pandemic. So was trying to read between the lines of official statements—what was said and what was not, who was sitting with whom on the TV, and evaluating what the rumor networks brought in. It turns out those are really useful skills when authorities are lying at all levels.
• In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics - Slow Boring — But even more so, social media incentivizes the wrong kind of reading. Today you read someone from a rival school of thought in order to find the paragraph or sentence that, when pulled out of context and paired with a witty Twitter quip, will garner you lots of little hearts. I’m as guilty of doing this as anyone. A lot of very smart people have poured a lot of time and energy into making you want to collect those little hearts.
• Twitter acquires Revue email newsletter service - The Verge — Twitter is acquiring Revue, an email service that lets writers publish newsletters. The move allows Twitter to capitalize on its user base of writers, journalists, and publications that regularly use the service to reach readers and grow their audiences.
• Lindy effect - Wikipedia — The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time.
• Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect | Loricism Wiki | Fandom — The Gell-Mann Effect, also called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect describes the phenomenon of an expert believing news articles on topics outside of their field of expertise even after acknowledging that articles written in the same publication that are within the expert's field of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.

Links:

• Mewing — John Mew (born 1928) is a British orthodontist and the creator of "orthotropics", an unconventional and controversial method claimed to be able to guide facial growth. The practice of "mewing", a form of do-it-yourself oral posture training, is named after him.
• Vibram | Vibram FiveFingers Shoes, Furoshiki, & More
• Born to Run (McDougall book) - Wikipedia — Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, is a 2009 best-selling ethnography written by the American author and journalist Christopher McDougall. The book has sold over three million copies.
• Henry David Thoreau - Wikipedia — Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.
• Transcendentalism - Wikipedia — Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the eastern United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent.
• Why Do We Love Henry David Thoreau? | The New Yorker — The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. It is true that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But “Walden” is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.
• Midnight in Paris (2011) - IMDb — While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
• 'Framing Britney Spears’: The Long Fight to ‘Free Britney’ - The New York Times — Britney Spears hasn’t been able to fully live her own life for 13 years, stuck in a court-sanctioned conservatorship. A new documentary by The New York Times examines what the public might not know about the pop star’s court battle with her father for control of her estate.
• Google Translate: Watershed — Vododelnica, vodomeđa
• Priključenija 21: Deca