]]>In theory, there are several reasons for thinking that children's mental health might improve, at least temporarily, as a result of the pandemic lockdown. These include a reduction in the stress of school; increased time to play and in other ways pursue their own interests; and increased time with parents, who themselves may have more time and motivation to interact with and support their children emotionally than they had before.
]]>Rather than build apartments, developers will build 15 story parking structures. Each parking spot will come with power so you can live in your shitty electric van or a conex box tiny house.
This will become the new, modern variation of trailer parks. The parking spots will still cost 2/3rds of your income. If your van doesn't have a toilet and shower, there's a public toilet and shower on level 1 that costs $10 per 15 minutes. Everyone who lives in these places will work 6 gig economy jobs and have a master's degree.
It used to be that if researchers needed obese rats for a study, they would just add fat to normal rodent chow. But it turns out that it takes a long time for rats to become obese on this diet. A breakthrough occurred one day when a graduate student happened to put a rat onto a bench where another student had left a half-finished bowl of Froot Loops. Rats are usually cautious around new foods, but in this case the rat wandered over and began scarfing down the brightly-colored cereal.
The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of "palatable supermarket food".... Sure enough, on this diet the rats gained weight at unprecedented speed.... When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the "cafeteria" diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight. Something is making them eat more.
The authors argue that some environmental contaminant is throwing off our lipostat, our inner sense of how much to eat to maintain a healthy weight. The reason highly processed foods cause obesity, is not because of their nutritional profile, but because the more processed a food is, the more chance there is for the contaminant to get in. That's also why obesity is correlated with low altitude: "Environmental contaminants build up as water flows downhill and are in much higher concentrations as you approach sea level."
Conclusion: the most likely contaminant is either a class of chemicals called PFAS, or lithium.
I experienced several incidents of this kind which, I must now admit, I left out of my books on Yukaghir animism, as they posed a real danger to my theoretical agenda of taking indigenous animism seriously. One time, for example, an old hunting leader was making an offering to his helping-spirit, which is customary before an upcoming hunt. However, while throwing tobacco, tea, and vodka into the fire, he shouted, "Give me prey, you bitch!" Everyone present doubled up with laugher.
More anthropology: Rethinking cities, from the ground up. The article is hard to summarize, but the basic idea is that ancient hunter-gatherers were not that different from us, in terms of their social connections. There were extended families, who also belonged to diffuse large groups that shared a cultural identity.
It is not the case that small societies became large societies, which led to more conflict. Both scales were always there, and conflict was always possible. A lot of early cities were peaceful and egalitarian. This leaves us with a hard question: why are recent large systems so repressive? The good news is, it's not because they're large.
More urbanism: How to Build a Small Town in Texas. This is a careful and ambitious thought experiment about designing a town for 3000 people, on 82 acres (33 hectares), that is not dependent on the grid, has no cars within city limits, and is nice to live in.
And 99.2 Percent of All U.S. Covid Deaths Are Unvaccinated. I don't like the way the blue tribe media has been framing this: "Those poor deluded red-tribers. If only we can show them that the vaccine is good for them, we can save them from themselves."We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole.
The best guess for the number of plausible compounds up to molecular weight 500... is around 1060. That is a number that the human mind is not well equipped to handle. That collection, assembled into compound vials at, say, 10mg per vial, would exceed the amount of ordinary matter in the entire universe.
Acousto-electric devices reveal new road to miniaturizing wireless tech. A lot of the stuff that computers are now doing with electrons, could be done better with sound waves. Maybe this could save the internet, if we had to rebuild the entire information-processing infrastructure from the ground up, using sound computers, and later, quantum computers. And each rebuilding would force a re-simplification.
Simple, solar-powered water desalination "could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area." It looks like it could also be done on a small scale, which is better politically, because everyone could desalinate their own water instead of depending on a centralized institution for their survival.
Michelin Puts Puffy Sails on Cargo Ships. "The project joins a growing fleet of wind-assisted propulsion initiatives around the world."
Even lower tech, a video about a Tree House Bicycle Elevator.
And Fluid Paint is a cool browser-based paint program.