The Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs and Mice”) is a comic epic parody of the Iliad and a good source of names for your pet mice. Like Artepibulus, “he who lies in wait for bread”.
Greek etymology rabbithole also led us to troglodyte, which ultimately means, “hole, I get into”:
From Latin trōglodyta (“cave dwelling people”), from Ancient Greek τρωγλοδύτης (trōglodútēs, “one who dwells in holes”), from τρώγλη (trṓglē, “hole”) + δύω (dúō, “I get into”).
Crawfish help reveal the impact of lithium pollution
The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes
You can’t send a person into space too fast, because they will turn to goo. But many other things can be sent to space fast without becoming goo. This is the premise behind Longshot Space, “a hypersonic launch startup” that will use big guns to send things that are not people to space. Longshot please hire us to write your marketing we promise we will use the word “goo” at least once a sentence.
Alice Maz – the xunzi as the basis of a metarational ruling ideology
Defender – Anatomy of an internet argument:
There’s a misconception that good faith discussion only happens in close-knit communities like LessWrong or HackerNews. The reality I’m looking at here is that ~everyone on the internet is rational AND is arguing in good faith. If it doesn’t look that way, it’s because you’re speaking different languages.
Adam Mastroianni has announced the winners of his Blog Extravaganza, go read! We are especially fond of the first-place winner, We’re not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon. And the second-place winner, The Best Antibiotic for Acne is Non-Prescription, “a real scientific report of a self-experiment” that “begins with a criminal confession”.
Here’s a very happy replication of JD Stillwater’s 2012 “I Put a Toaster in the Dishwasher” experiment we featured in our previous links post. Click through for the results, but here are the methods:
It may be fine to put a toaster in a dishwasher, despite everyone with a shred of common sense “knowing” that’s a bad idea. I was skeptical, but I thought I’d try it since my toaster is very cheap, very old and very dirty. As I added the dishwasher tab and chose a cycle, I was praying that I wasn’t about to fall prey to a 12-year-old prank.
The Secret to Designing Mysterious Games
Henrik Karlsson – Becoming perceptive:
When Maslow showed his subjects paintings, people who struggled to self-actualize would typically label what they saw (“It is a Picasso”) whereas the self-actualized would describe the concrete details of the painting they had before them (“There is an interesting tension between the yellows and the blues here”).
NBC News – Scientists studying ‘Parkinson’s belt’ believe disease is linked to chemicals (h/t Adam Weis)
Dynomight – Nursing doubts: Is breastfeeding good?
Maxwell Tabarrok – How the FAA Is Keeping Flying Cars in Science Fiction
1999 review of James Scott’s book, Seeing like a State
Unusual thread about math. Not sure of its accuracy but we’re interested in any argument based on the premise, “you’re a victim of a 2300 year old error in metaphysics”.