P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #332
Bye for now, Chicago!
my story 🚀
🌆 We finished our summer trip to Chicago with a bang at Lollapalooza 2023!
fun facts 🙌
The greatest scam ever written. “How a Montreal copywriter swindled victims out of $200 million by pretending to be a legendary psychic.” ~ learn more
Why did it take psychedelics so long to become popular? “As the historian David Courtwright notes in his book Forces of Habit, the past five centuries have been profoundly shaped by the rise of several drugs which have one big thing in common: they became global commodities during the early modern period.” ~ learn more
Criminals views on crime. “People imprisoned/convicted ever and respondents arrested last year are similarly concerned with crime as the general public and overwhelming majority of them say too little is been done to stop it.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Vial: reimagining clinical trials. “Vial is inventing new technology with the goal of reducing the cost of clinical trials by an order of magnitude. … For the first time, Vial is providing a glimpse into Act II: Battery Bio. Building on its substantial cost advantage in trial execution, Vial is venturing into the world of full-stack drug discovery.” This reads a bit like a sales pitch, but I think the author (who has no disclosed relationship with the company) is just excited! ~ learn more
Too much extrapolation. “There are two types of common discontinuities in AI. One is when performance jumps much more than expected - e.g. you double the amount of data you have but triple the performance of the output from that. The other is when you max out on one technique and need an entirely new approach to keep making progress.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Reality is very weird and you need to be prepared for that. Scurvy is a horrible and dangerous disease that results from a vitamin C deficiency. Mostly, it afflicted sailors who ate only preserved food for months at sea. The cure was repeatedly discovered and lost over time. This article builds on that story to make a very impactful point about our world’s weirdness. ~ learn more
The carrot problem. Instead of admitting that a new kind of radar allowed British WW2 pilots to shoot down their German adversaries at night, “they invented a propaganda campaign that claimed their pilots had developed exceptional eyesight by eating "an excess of carrots." Unfortunately we are often on the receiving end of this sort of misinformation. ~ learn more
How to do hard things. Casey Rosengren describes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and how it helped him to approach the stress and uncertainty of entrepreneurship in a new way. “At a high-level, ACT (pronounced "act" not "A-C-T") looks at how our thoughts influence our behavior, and offers tools for debugging when our minds get us stuck.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
The internet’s richest fitness resource is a site from 1999. An ode to ExRx.net. After reading this I checked it out, reading about the most common weight training mistakes. ~ learn more
retail therapy 💸
Siting bank branches. “The ideal branch is in an upper middle-class neighborhood on a corner of Main Street and Main Street.” Thinking back to the first bank account I ever had, it was at the corner of the nearest major streets to my childhood home. There’s still a bank branch there, though it’s certainly not the same bank. ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Can neural stimulation zap addiction? “This type of brain-zapping therapy, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), has shown encouraging results in clinical trials involving chronic users of cocaine, alcohol, heroin, methamphetamine, and cannabis. Regulators in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Israel have already authorized the treatment as an aid for cigarette smokers hoping to kick the habit.” ~ learn more
New material made of DNA and glass is lighter and stronger than steel. “For the given density, our material is the strongest known," Seok-Woo Lee, a materials scientist at the University of Connecticut and coauthor of a resulting study published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, said in a statement.” ~ learn more
teaching the kids 👩🏫
Estimating individual guidance counselors’ effects on educational attainment. “Counselors vary substantially in their effectiveness at increasing high school graduation and college attendance, selectivity, and persistence. Counselor effects on educational attainment are similar in magnitude to teacher effects, but they flow through improved information and assistance more than cognitive or non-cognitive skill development.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
What’s next for the moon? “Robots—and then humans—are going back to the lunar surface. Here’s what they’ll be doing.” ~ learn more
The US will be first country to pay for direct carbon capture. “The effort will be managed by the Department of Energy and will initially have a budget in the tens of millions…” ~ learn more