2014-09-19

Notes.

I'm on a mission against personality types. This week's target: the Type A and Type B Personality theory, which was originally proposed in the 50s by a pair of cardiologists studying the risk of coronary heart disease. They showed that "Type A" people had higher rates of heart disease, but later work revealed that those studies were largely funded by Philip Morris, presumably to distract the (now obvious) links between CHD and smoking.

But my feelings about personality types in general are broader. From a personal email I wrote this week:

I'm really wary of Myers-Briggs. Partly because it's just *really* unreliable, and partly because by categorizing yourself into a type, you encourage confirmation bias into that type. The initial fib is fine, I guess (sometimes you just need a foil) but the confirmation bias effects can be destructive, and I think you owe it to your future self to not negatively impact your freedom of decision.

Pathing.

• Uber drivers in NYC are striking, demanding higher pay.
• Zelda, advice columnist to the NSA.
• Trying to scare teens away from taking drugs doesn't seem to work.
• Lithium's effects as a neuroprotectant are pretty powerful. Areas with high (natural) lithium contents in the water have lower rates of suicide, homicide, and rape.
• The North Korean government banned wifi at all foreign embassies within the country.

Building.

• A short video profile of a retired Spanish engineer who builds pretty incredible miniature motors by hand.
• Tesla's gigafactory will be net energy zero, but its unclear how.
• Google is open sourcing a tool to infer causation from correlations. The original intent was to understand the effectiveness of paid ads, but (unsurprisingly) the potential applications are myriad.
• A really cool bioreactive food label that uses gelatin to accurately display food decay - instead of just printing an expiration date.
• Inside China's fracking boom.

Logistics.

• Some really interesting text analysis on the titles that people proposed for their SXSW talks. Sign me up for "How to make an exponential age of gifs," please!
• So, that brown rice article from a couple weeks ago. I know, the guy was kinda a crock. But the nutritional effects of phytic acid are really interesting. Basically, phytic acid is common in bran and seeds, and has a strong binding affinity to important minerals, and when it binds to them it makes them far less absorbable in the intestines. Its effects can be mitigated by soaking the grains in an acid, or sprouting them. The net result is that although whole grains do contain more nutrients, they aren't absorbed into your body unless you put some work into breaking down that phytic acid.
• There are remarkably few curse words in the Japanese language.
• The benefits of using dogs to forage truffles.
• Will someone in San Francisco try to send me something via shyp.com? This is a serious question - it looks kinda cool. I'll pay, and it'll be fun.

Reflecting.

• Benedict Evans dissects Amazon's revenues and (lack of aggregate) profits.
• Spotify is claiming that its Australia launch resulted in a 20% reduction in BitTorrent traffic.
• The caffeine gene in coffee is *not* related to the caffeine genes in tea and chocolate.
• "A second notorious Thiel charity is the Seasteading Institute, which he co-founded in 2008 with the aim of launching floating cities outside the reach of existing governments. In our conversations, however, Thiel spoke of this project almost in the past tense, noting that “it’s quite hard to do, both technologically and culturally.”"

Stuff that doesn't fit into my dumb/arbitrary categories.

• Whistled languages.
• Crested Butte, Colorado = a Bud Light ad (literally).

And.

19th century Neapolitan street cuisine (and other things) in
Nicola Twilley's new podcast.