Links for Autumn 2024

Last time I mentioned how the US army secretly sprayed bacteria over the city of San Francisco in the 1950s, so this time it seems appropriate to mention the next logical step: the Bat Bomb, a big bomb that releases a thousand live bats, each of them carrying a little incendiary bomb. The plan was to drop this over Japan during WWII, before the US army came up with an even better idea.

(Honourable mentions: Idaho’s 1948 Beaver Drop, the UK’s 1960 Operation Cat Drop, and Harald Hardrada setting a Sicilian city on fire with incendiary birds in the 11th century.)

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Also, North Korea is apparently attaching trash bags to balloons and sending them to South Korea.

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One treatment for Parkinson's disease involves implanting an electrode deep in the brain, requiring the patient to stay awake during the surgery. Batten et al. used this opportunity to have patients play microeconomics games while directly measuring dopamine and serotonin levels, so they could observe how these neurotransmitters track reward and social context when people make decisions.

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Cyanobacteria have a seasonal cycle: they modify their membrane in preparation for the winter. I wonder how this mechanism evolved, since the lifetime of an individual cyanobacterium is much shorter than a year.

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If you liked my Mariotte Bottle post, you’ll like this video by Steve Mould where he replicates the insanely complicated siphon system that automates British public restrooms:

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More progress on reading people’s minds using fMRI. Sometimes people worry that, in the future, the government will use those kind of technology to read their thoughts, and the usual response is “This requires you to remain immobile in a car-sized fMRI scanner for some time, so you’d probably notice.”

– except neuroscience researchers often make their data public, and we have online repositories of fMRI datasets from previous experiments. Wouldn’t it be funny if we could download the supplementary data from all the old fMRI studies and retroactively read what the participants were thinking during the experiment?

(I once spent 45 minutes in an fMRI scanner for some neuroscience study. If the data ever gets published, I hereby declare that whatever I was thinking that day was a joke and I was thinking it ironically.)

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Impress your neoreactionary friends by cooking a Futurist meal from the Italian Futurist cookbook! Written by F. T. Marinetti in 1932, it advocates for the abolition of pasta, considered weak and degenerate. Instead, you should try futurist recipes like the carneplastico or the aerovivenda. It also contains tips about how to decorate your restaurant with aluminium and chrome pipes.

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“Let’s say you’re a production coordinator and you call a writer and tell him you need some bits about a sandwich being cooked with lava, seems harmless. Except now Tyler (head of creative) has no idea what his writer is working on and worse doesn’t know that’s an option when he directs the video. […] Wlli later finds out about it and assumes tyler approved the bit and starts planning on how to make lava and then wastes 3 days making lava until tyler catches wind and then tyler askes her why she is making lava and she has no idea and everyone is confused. This is what happens when you don’t follow proper communication lines.”

This is from the onboarding guide MrBeast gives to his employees, along with more insight about how to get shit done.

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Weird creature of the season: Aureispirae are big bacteria that stick to smaller bacteria “just like flypaper”, then grab them by the flagella with a little hook, insert a kind of straw into them and suck out their vital essence. Thanks to Lien et al., we now have breathtaking electron microscope images of this abomination:

Paywall-free preprint

Wholesale wikipedias

United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff

Alexamenos graffito

Roadkill cuisine

Muhammad’s eclipse

Gee-haw whammy diddle (warning: contains equations)

List of replicas

Music

Jean Langlais, Huit Pièces Modales for pipe organ (1956)