P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #354

Welcome to 2024!

my story 🚀

First day of the year, first family visit to our local coffee shop

i’ve been thinking 💭

Where has all the chocolate chip ice cream gone? For some reason, I have been looking in grocery store freezers across the country for chocolate chip ice cream. It’s almost never there, seemingly replaced throughout by mint chocolate chip. I had always considered it as a mainstay flavor. Clearly, I was wrong. I consulted an expert in the ice cream business (who happens to be a P.S. subscriber): “My guess: Vanilla + Chocolate Chips isn't an incremental consumer to Vanilla. It's still too basic.” While I was googling, I realized I’m not the first one to notice the missing flavor. But the list of people who care does not seem long enough to drive a revival. Someday, I will tell my kids that, “When I was your age, we had classic flavors like Chocolate Chip available in every grocer’s freezer.” If you have questions for our resident ice cream expert, send them my way.

fun facts 🙌

The oceans are way more crowded than we thought. “Advances in AI and satellite imagery allowed researchers to create the clearest picture yet of human activity at sea, revealing clandestine fishing activity and a boom in offshore energy development.” ~ learn more

If you can spend $20k on a watch, why not on a mobile phone? You might remember VERTU, the first luxury phone brand. “Vertu is the brainchild of the Italian Frank Nuovo, former chief designer at Nokia. He proposed and presented the luxury concept to Nokia's board, who eventually accepted it in late 1998.” The technology was not special, but the prices were. ~ learn more

Literacy rate by country 2024. There are 10 countries, mostly in central Africa, that still have a literacy rate below 50%. Chad ranks the lowest at 27%. The female literacy rate in Chad is even worse at 18.2%. But on the bright side, remember that a hundred years ago the global picture was much bleaker. ~ learn more

oh, chicago 🏆

Someone finally invented a hot dog croissant. “The limited-edition pastry, a collab between Daisies and The Wieners Circle, launched Tuesday after a series of video teasers starring Daisies’ pastry chef and some famously foul-mouthed Wieners Circle staffers.” ~ learn more

oh, austin 🤠

TechCrunch journalist @bayareawriter thinks Austin is losing its luster. The story is about the startup accelerator TechStars shutting down its Austin program after the person who was running it stepped down. The implication that extrapolates to the city is funny. This paragraph is excellent fodder for eyerolling: “One venture investor who wished to remain anonymous recently made the move from Austin to California. He declined to comment further.” ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Rosie the Robot from Jetsons is coming soon. At least that’s what this robot makes me believe. In autonomous mode it can cook and serve shrimp, call and take an elevator, and store a large pot in a two-door cabinet. With a teleoperator, it can do laundry, vacuum, water plants, load an unload a dishwasher and more. Maybe we’re just a bit of training away from the housekeeping robot! ~ learn more

Genetically modified bacteria to prevent tooth decay. “Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past (you should still brush for backup and cosmetic reasons).” ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

You don’t always need lawyers. Southwest Airlines and Stevens Aviation once settled a trademark question with a CEO-to-CEO arm wrestling match. It resulted in a ton of free PR for both. “While most companies would settle the dispute the conventional way—by calling in the lawyers and burning through ungodly amounts of cash litigating it—the Stevens executive wondered if Southwest might be open to a lighthearted duel. The gutsy marketer suggested the companies’ respective CEOs settle things with a winner-take-all arm-wrestling competition—with the “victor” earning the rights to the slogan.” ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

The first potato riffs report. “Eating a diet of nothing but potatoes (or almost nothing but potatoes) causes quick, effortless weight loss for many people. … Why the hell does this happen? Well, there are many theories. To help get a sense of which theories are plausible, try to find some boundary conditions, or just more randomly explore the diet-space, we decided to run a Potato Diet Riff Trial.” ~ learn more

N1.tools. A simple software tool to support self-experimentation. “If you're curious or skeptical about the effectiveness of supplements and activities, n1.tools provides structured experiments, simple data entry, and an easy-to-interpret dashboard with relevant statistics to help you figure out what really works for you.” ~ learn more

Why glucose spikes aren’t always bad. This is a thorough and trustworthy article from the Nutrisense content team. “As you gain insight into what factors impact your glucose levels through the day, you might be wondering more about glucose spikes. What counts as a glucose spike? And are all glucose spikes bad? How can you know? In this article, we’ll be exploring these questions and many others related to the science of glucose fluctuations, or glycemic variability (GV).” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Is Dr. Bronner’s the last corporation with a soul? That’s the title of this GQ post. The author admires the company, as you might imagine. “Emanuel, who possessed no advanced degree but was undeterred in adopting a physician’s title, founded Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps in the late 1940s, in large part because he wanted to broadcast his ideas about unifying the human race, and his All-One dicta are still printed on the brand’s soap-bottle labels.” ~ learn more

under the microscope 🔬

Rare study on identical twins confirms vegan diet’s broad health boost. “Stanford University recruited 22 sets of identical twins who had grown up together, and who reported similar present-day lifestyles, for this eight-week meal-plan-controlled trial, in an effort to provide more robust data to support the existing body of evidence.” ~ learn more

thoughts of food 🍔

The surprising reason there are so many Thai restaurants in America. According to the data in this article, there’s about 1 Mexican restaurant for every 666 Mexican-Americans in the US. Meanwhile, there’s 1 Thai restaurant for every 56 Thai-Americans. What explains this 10x difference in restaurant prevalence? The Thai Government. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

The tragic belief in “degrowth”. This was published as a commentary in Nature. It’s titled “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help.” My opinion is that there’s clearly no requirement to understand economics before submitting for publication. One of their ideas: “This requires cancelling unfair and unpayable debts of low- and middle-income countries, curbing unequal exchange in international trade and creating conditions for productive capacity to be reoriented towards achieving social objectives.” ~ learn more

thanks for reading!