May & Jun '25

Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?

Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent disabilities. This ranks it among the deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, alongside better-known ailments such as typhus and cholera.

The average cost of antivenom alone in sub-Saharan Africa was $124 in 2010, a steep price to pay for the 40 percent of sub-Saharan Africans who live on less than $1.90 per day. And that doesn’t even include the cost of the care or facilities. A survey of 129 Bangladeshi snakebite victims found that over 40 percent had to take out loans to meet the costs.

Will Jesus Christ return in 2025?

Time value of money: The Yes people are betting that, later this year, their counterparties (the No betters) will want cash (to bet on other markets), and so will sell out of their No positions at a higher price.

[3blue1brown] Video: But what is quantum computing?

Follow up video: Where my explanation of Grover’s algorithm failed.

Book Review: The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz.

Okay, but now imagine that you live in a globe-spanning hyper-empire that has ushered in an era of incomparable peace and prosperity. Can you imagine somebody like Napoleon or Alexander or Genghis Khan joining the US Army today? Like, the army with all the powerpoint slides and DEI consultants? It’s inconceivable. Laughable, even… The answer is startups.

Eau de vagina & Eau de homme.

Participants stood 4.4 inches closer on average to the female experimenter if she had applied the vab (p=0.1041).

Heart rates increased 1.2 bpm after the 10-second hug in the control group, and increased 9.0 bpm in the vab group (p=0.0596).

Females stood about 4 inches closer to males who were wearing either ball sweat (p=0.0109) or semen (p=0.0682) compared to the control substance.

Math team and other horrible things you do to get into Stanford.

It’s terrible to contemplate, even now. Competitive math was just one piece of it. We started school at 8 and went until 4:30. Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. I did debate team and jazz piano, student journalism and improv, extra science and math classes on weekends. None of it meant anything. Each activity was like the last, one box ticked after the next, each school day starting when it was still dark out and only ending when it was dark again, every hour blended together into some kind of gray resume goo.

The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds before moving onto the next perfectly interchangeable application from some other straight-A tryhard.

100 years to solve an integral.

The integral of sec(x) is well known to any beginners calculus student. Yet this integral was once a major outstanding maths problem. It was first introduced by Geradus Mercator who needed it to make his famous map in 1569. He couldn’t find it and used an approximation instead. The exact solution was found accidentally 86 years later without calculus in 1645.

Making American milk safe.

But even once it was established that milk could carry dangerous diseases, there was resistance to its widespread pasteurization. In the US, take-up faced strong medical opposition from doctors, particularly pediatricians, who argued that the heating process might be making milk less nutritious and that clean, raw milk was best for infants.

Straus’s great project was to familiarize Americans with pasteurized milk by making it widely available to them at loss-making prices, putting to bed fears that it was an inferior product through easy access and familiarity.

Testing AI’s GeoGuessr genius and highlights from the comments.

You can find the benchmarks for different LLMs here: GeoBench

o3 got it right: this is Tianducheng, China.

Alexander goes west (A Silly Counterfactual).

Alexander’s soldiers expect to be paid and they expect to be paid in silver coins. Alexander was already substantially in debt when he took the throne (Philip II’s conquest of Greece was expensive), so he needs conquest to pay and he needs it to pay in silver. And here he has a problem because in the 330s and 320s, the Romans barely use coinage at all, and what physical ‘money’ they have is mostly in bronze.

The rise & fall of Australian nationalism.

Apple turnover.

“Don’t try to make money. Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow. Folks in the C-suite will try to tell you that these two goals are perfectly aligned—that making great products is part of being a profitable company. But they mean it in the same way that Frosted Flakes is part of a complete breakfast.”

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.

Book Review: Cambridge Latin course unit 1.

Like Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon movie (or any number of novels I won’t name here), a good idea executed poorly is often worse than never doing it at all — because now no one else can do it.

Spanish neutrality during WW2.

Spain’s monthly fuel demand of fifty thousand tons could be supplied in just ten tanker ships. When two tankers bound for Santander and Bilbao were detained in the port of Houston, the effect on the Spanish fuel stock was immediate and substantial. The American “embargo” which was more a slowdown than a total blockade terrified Francoist officials. U.S. companies supplied Spain’s entire oil supply, and domestic stocks covered no more than one month, after which the transport system, the fishing fleet, and agricultural production would grind to a halt.

Brain freeze.

So I prepared a sample for an electron micrograph. What I saw devastated me. The brain was shredded. Not only were the synapses ruined, the entire structure was riddled with holes.

Ashkenazi Nazis & the founding of Israel.

Herzl was LARPing as a Prussian noble. He loved Wagner, duelling, and German culture. He feared that this vulgar “Yid” would make his assimilation into this culture impossible. No matter how un-Jewish or un-Yiddish he became, Germans would always associate him with Eastern Jews. The only way to remove the stigma of this association was to remove the Yid from Europe. A Jewish state would quarantine Eastern Jews from their Western brethren, and anti-semitism would disappear with the disappearance of that which provoked it (i.e., the Yid). In other words, Zionism would eliminate the last barrier to Jewish assimilation.

Britain arrests > 1000 people a month for online posting.