Complaints about Buddhist monks being just thugs and bandits are a pretty persistent theme in 16th century Japanese writing, to the point where you see a lot of admiration for the Jesuits specifically for being actually pious and ascetic.

Why We Are Better Off Than a Century Ago Our ancestors built grand public systems to conquer hunger, thirst, darkness, and squalor. That progress can be lost if we forget it.

For a yr, I've been working on a series for The New Atlantis about the vast systems that underlie our lives. Our ancestors built them up over decades to fend off hunger, thirst, darkness and disease. But too few of us know about them—and they're all at risk. The conclusion is now available online:

Tattoo ink induces inflammation in the draining lymph node and alters the immune response to vaccination | PNAS Despite safety concerns regarding the toxicity of tattoo ink, no studies have reported the consequences of tattooing on the immune response. In thi...

New @pnas.org
"This work represents the most extensive study to
date regarding the effect of tattoo ink on the immune response and raises serious health concerns associated with the tattooing" including reduced response to Covid vaccination
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The soup in question

yeah the dynamics around network effects and payment models are really tricky. I have some hope that regulations about protocols will someday make it feasible to have a large scale social network that isn't driven by ads.

check out Kagi for the first, and well you're on the second atm if you use the following tab

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, accord...

The numbers vary from study to study but hundreds of thousands of people have died because of Elon Musk and Marco Rubio illegally disbanding USAID — a body count on par with the first eight years of the Syrian civil war — In just seven months. It’s mass death that is simply unfathomable in scale.

In Search of Van Halen's Brown M&Ms Contract riders and the meaning of a modern pop star

* You know how Van Halen had a contract rider demanding bowls of M&Ms with the brown ones removed?

They later claimed that was all a test to make sure venues were reading their contracts. Clever!

BUT WAIT, that claim itself is actually false. I fact-checked it.

Snack Stack exclusive:

The continuation on the negative half of the plane is insane.

Also one of the most annoying off by one examples I can think of.

she's really let herself off the hook

both of these should be true about a bloody mary anyway

one hopes it becomes a real engineering discipline before that, but signs aren't looking up

seems like an easy fix for the US to just adopt the sensible EU regs! bsky.app/profile/bubb...

They're genetic determinists first, racists second.

Of course not, but centering the effect on land price and not *the actual cost of housing* is regressive. I'd bet the price *per sq ft of residential space* decreased substantially in the studied area.

Passive solar heating! On a building that probably doesn't really need heating?

trufflehog pixel art from the repo. there's a key and a little hog

o o o, o-auth-y

Is this really trying to claim that when you upzone, the only effect that matters for affordability is the one on *land prices* and not households?

Parking is the most directly relevant example, since you sometimes do actually have to pay directly, rather than implicitly.

@gork.it is that true?

Engagement KPIs have been responsible for infinite scroll UI traps, RecSys radicalization spirals, public shame brigades, and basically every modern ailment novel to the past decade. At some point, you have to recognize that the problem isn't any one technology, it's the metric.

So if you're of a mind to write some hardboiled Bronze Age detective stories, have your detective be a priest partnered up with a divine statue who the priest is taking around the city to find the criminals. Have the two of them go into the worst taverns in the city & the docks, busting heads, etc.

Its interesting that no one really talks about the fact they also took down the existing extremely good team that looked for cost improvements

honestly surprised that number isn't zero; even 1% feels impossibly high.

Why pay for influence agents when Elon could just create a market economy for it.

I bought two weeks ago

A histogram of bus stop distance spacing in three cities. Toronto and NYC have noticeably closer spacing than Prague. NYC is interestingly bimodal with a peak at about 150 meters and another one at 225 meters.

Bus stop spacing distribution in New York City, Toronto, and Prague.

"No," I said. "I was your defense attorney, remember? [Name] was the prosecutor."

"That's impossible," said Client. "You told me the truth the whole time. [Name] lied on my name nonstop. Only defense attorneys do that. I've watched Law and Order.

Jupiter, but if it had more spots