Links from (late) Summer 2023

Bacterial eyeballs and medieval puns

Oct 15, 2023

The father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, asked to be mummified after his death, “in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought”. He argued that everybody should do the same, on purely utilitarian grounds. Among other things, it eliminates the need for paintings, resulting in increased utility. Now that’s Effective Altruism I can get behind.

An 800 year old prayer book that's decorated with puns.

A bias I didn’t know I had: people tend to wrongly assume that, in areas they know little about, things have been improving over time.

Funny shit I found while researching the sexual dimorphism piece: Possible sedative effect of seminal fluid, the one sex theory, and weird Anglerfish sex. See also, parabiosis. Also, “Sneaky Fucker theory” was coined by the John Maynard Smith, an authority in the field – making it an official technical term.

What income inequality looks like before and after redistribution through taxes, by country. As usual, it’s more fun if you make predictions before looking at the data.

High school who-hooks-up-with-who gossip done right:

One of my first posts was about how we intuitively use a logarithmic scale to represent numbers in our heads, and the distortions that ensue. Baretto-Garcia et al propose that this is the reason behind risk aversion.

Broke: survey a sample of psychology undergrads. Woke: survey a sample of LLMs. This sounds like an exciting way for randos like you and me to test our hot takes about human behaviour (full text).

Algorithms to calculate Fibonacci numbers are cool.

Yet another GWAS on educational attainment and other cognitive measurements. This one looks deeply into rare variants (up to 1/100,000 people) and finds a few that have an enormous effect. We’ve all seen this kind of studies countless times before – the interesting bit this time is that they identified a potentially good drug target.

Your mom was right again: THC might have a causal effect on schizophrenia, after all. The authors recommend not smoking weed in adolescence/early adulthood, before the brain is fully developed.

The spherical cyanobacterium Synechocystis uses its own cell as a tiny camera to detect light and swim in that direction.