P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #271

Shark gives ‘virgin birth’ to miracle baby in all-female tank. Not actually a miracle, as some species can just …. do this. But nobody knew this species was one of them! “The baby shark was born to a mother that has spent the last decade in an aquarium with no male.” | learn more

They were Twentysomethings with a lot of time on their hands and nothing better to do. Einstein, Newton, Copernicus… “An interesting pattern recurs across the careers of great scientists, Dwarkesh Patel notes, an annus mirabilis (miracle year) in which they make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two…” | learn more

The surprisingly solid mathematical case of the tin foil hat gun prepper. “I am not a prepper. But I know a few. Some of the ones I do know are smart. They may not be doing as deep an analysis as I present here, on a mathematical level, but the smart ones are definitely doing it at a subconscious level.” | learn more

The blue trees at Pease park. There were enough trees painted blue at this city park that I had to look up why. “Presented by Pease Park Conservancy & H-E-B, The Blue Trees by Konstantin Dimopoulos can now be found in Pease Park. This environmental art installation helps us visualize what we might lose through deforestation.” | learn more

Neuroscience, leadership, and the SCARF model. This article is pushing me to think about leadership through a different lens. “…  In other words, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water. The SCARF model … captures the common factors that can activate a reward or threat response in social situations.” | learn more

Software is now a foundational part of modern biotechnology. This is the fourth and final part of the “What’s different” series. It has been a very interesting read. It paints a picture of an exciting time for humanity. One excerpt that really grabbed me about AI and the power of data: “They reflected on the fact that the inability to use math and first-principles thinking to derive elegant and general laws of natural language didn’t prevent them from using Web-scale data and machine learning to create a highly accurate translation system.” | learn more

In praise of Bitcoin. This is from Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory. If you know who that is, you can probably guess this isn’t a boring read. “The value-deniers, like the Zoom crowd the other night, think I’m agreeing with them when I say that Bitcoin is art. I’m not. The true-believers think I’m trolling them when I say that Bitcoin is art. I’m not.” | learn more

Stablecoin mechanisms and use cases. Patrick McKenzie (aka patio11) reluctantly talks about cryptocurrency. “In principle, you could use stablecoins as money, like how you use deposits as money. Stablecoins are not used like money; rather than facilitating almost the entire diversity of transactions in the economy, they are overwhelmingly used for a few niche use cases.” | learn more

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