2026-03-25
we follow
Free Radicals podcast has an interesting interview with Michael Ringel on his view that aging is largely an evolved process. Personally, while I find his theory to be largely compelling, it seems to me the implication is less that evolution has hidden away the mechanism for living forever, than that it was never given a proper reason to try to fix the fact that we age. Which means that we won’t be able to simply make use of existing methods that have been hidden away, but will also have to identify and then fix any remaining issues by ourselves. As a particular example, it’s plausible that we will be use epigenetic reprogramming to rejuvenate aged cells, since after all that works for zygotes, but then presumably there are reasons that only around half of all sperm are viable, and only a tenth of those are “normal”.
Niko McCarty on how “good ideas are cheap”, the lesson learned from his recent “fast biology bounties” program soliciting ideas for improving biology web-lab methods.
Tommy Blanchard with another excellent discussion1, this time with Lance Bush on his anti-realist views on morality.
Naomi Kanakia has an effort-post ostensibly about effortposting, but which is actually more about the somewhat uneasy and disjointed relationship between the literary worlds of the magazines and the blogosphere. Synthethized Sunsets has a relevant interview with Cairo Smith discussing his novel Scenebux, on contemporary internet culture, as an example of topical and timely writing. It’s interesting to consider the dismissal of blogs, scenes, and genre with the accusation that they’re giving up on the goal of timelessness, given that literary culture is and always has been also just another niche. Nowadays magazine writing, despite it’s imprimatur as mainstream media, is actually as niche as it gets, which is why no one is even bothering anymore to pretend they’re interested in reading contemporary autofiction. The East Coast still controls the system, but they’ve long since lost their monopoly over what gets to be considered “universal”.
Anton Howe has an interesting piece on the Scottish financial system as a major factor in Scottish economic overperformance through the industrial revolution, although it’s not clear to me if he’s reading the directionality correctly. To me, if the Scottish banks were the first to offer overdrafts, then this presumably speaks more as to the nature of their customers than anything else; even more so given that the default of the Virginia planters apparently did not produce bank failures through cascading defaults. Actually, it would be more surprising to me if the Glasgow merchant networks, built under the trust-expanding system of a Dutch-inspired partnership structure and Calvinist cultural framework, failed to perform similarly well to those of Amsterdam.
Lauren Gilbert progress linkthread.
So much so that I listen to them even though he hasn’t set up an RSS feed, which means I can’t consume them as a podcast.