Links for January 16, 2022

🎟 Theranos Was a Losing Lottery Ticket for Investors — Bloomberg

Speaking of writing fiction in Excel, the Theranos trial is old news now, but Matt Levine has a candid take on the kinds of stories some investors want to hear:

But another theory is: No, those investors really want to be lied to. Those investors are holding a competition of the form “who can sound the most excited and persuasive and crazy when they lie to us,” and they give their money to the winner. They wouldn’t put it quite that way. But what the investors want is a fantasist, a wild-eyed dreamer, a visionary who sees the world not as it is but as it could be.

🍱 The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders: A Tokyo Restaurant Where All the Servers Are People Living with Dementia — Open Culture

A heartwarming story about a Tokyo restaurant created to help raise awareness of dementia:

If you’ve ever been to Japan, you’ll know that in Japanese restaurants, mistakes are not made. And on the off chance that a mistake is made, even a trivial one, the lengths that proprietors will go to make things right with their customers must, in the eyes of a Westerner, be seen to be believed. But as its name suggests, the Tokyo pop-up Restaurant of Mistaken Orders does things a bit differently. “You might think it’s crazy. A restaurant that can’t even get your order right,” says its English introduction page. “All of our servers are people living with dementia. They may, or may not, get your order right.”

And speaking of memory loss, here's a relevant post of mine on the way expectations can be pre-planned resentments.

🖼 Obscenely detailed scan lets you peer at Rembrandt’s Night Watch masterpiece online — The Verge

The Rijksmuseum has released what it claims is the “largest and most detailed photograph of any artwork,” and it’s viewable for free on its website. The scan is of Rembrandt van Rijn’s 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, a roughly 12 by 14 foot painting which is currently the focus of a massive research and restoration project called “Operation Night Watch.”

🐷 A Pig’s Heart Has Been Successfully Transplanted Into a Human for the First Time — Intelligencer

An amazing accomplishment:

Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center transplanted a heart from a genetically modified pig into a human patient with terminal heart disease Friday. It was the first successful pig-to-human heart transplant ever performed and could mark the beginning of a new era for xenotransplantation, offering new hope for the severely ill who face an ever present shortage of organs from human donors.

For more on pigs and art, here's my piece on how replacing pigs bladders with paint tubes helped enable Impressionism.

📺 Some Classic Humor

Funny math (really!):