Links

💊 The Rise & Fall of Silk Road — Wired

In the early 2010s, the Silk Road was an illicit marketplace on the dark web offering a wide range of drugs.

After evading the FBI for years, the site's mastermind was unmasked with a simple Google search.

To access Silk Road you needed special cryptographic software. Combining an anonymous interface with traceless payments in the digital currency bitcoin, the site allowed thousands of drug dealers and nearly 1 million eager worldwide customers to find each other—and their drugs of choice—in the familiar realm of ecommerce. For a brief time, from 2011 to 2013, it was a wild success. In that relatively short span, Silk Road managed to rack up (depending on how you count) more than $1 billion in sales.

📖 I Have to Believe This Book Cured My Pain — NY Times

Juno DeMelo discovered that journaling was the solution to her chronic pain. And she's not alone:

Let me rewind a bit. For more than a decade, I had a near-constant throbbing in my left piriformis, a small muscle deep in the butt. I tried treating it with physical therapy, ultrasound and Botox injections. At one point, I even considered surgery to cut the muscle in half in order to decompress the sciatic nerve that runs underneath.

Then, in 2011, I picked up a library copy of the 1991 best seller “Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection.” It claimed that, in order to distract the sufferer from repressed anxiety, anger or feelings of inferiority, the brain creates pain in the neck, shoulders, back and butt by decreasing blood flow to the muscles and nerves.

And more:

🥔 How the Potato Chip Took Over America — Smithsonian Magazine

🐶 Dogs Can Distinguish Speech from Gibberish—and Tell Spanish from Hungarian — Scientific American

🚇 Sinking 1,000 NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned — Fast Company

📺 A Little Circus

Michael Davis is a brilliant comedic juggler:

🧠 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence — Wait But Why

Tim Urban's multi-part essay on artificial intelligence has informed a lot of my own writing about technology, particularly this week's post "Humility in the Face of Progress."

His core argument, that progress compounds, invites readers to have the kind of humility I wrote about.

This pattern—human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a faster rate than less advanced societies—because they’re more advanced.

🎧 Choose Carefully — Hidden Brain

Shankar Vedantam explores the subconscious factors that contribute to the decisions we make. If you liked my post on defaulting to progress, this is for you:

All of us make choices all the time, and we may think we’re making those choices freely. But psychologist Eric Johnson says there’s an architecture behind the way choices are presented to us, and this invisible architecture can influence decisions both large and small.

🃏 A Fun History Game

A new online game pulls random Wikipedia entries and asks you to place them in order. Link

Via Kottke.org

🐦 Tweets

@visakanv, who I quoted in yesterday's post, shares a great video of Vic Wooten discussing practicing recovering from wrong notes. A great complement to my post on the subject.

And I couldn't resist sharing this amazing squid:

🎟 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!):

🎧 Spotify listening trends are eerily correlated with the market’s highs and lows — FastCompany

Last year, a group of researches examined patterns in music sentiment pulled from aggregated Spotify data. Their findings suggest that these listening trends can predict market movements:

Linking our sentiment measure with the stock markets, we find that higher music sentiment is associated with higher returns to a country’s stock market during the same week. It also leads to lower returns the next week, suggesting the initial reaction was a temporary one driven by sentiment.

♟ The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving — ESPN

Sitting still and playing chess at the grandmaster level in a tournament setting is extremly physically demanding:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

(Emphasis mine)

🪄 Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History — Defunctland

Speaking of Queuing Theory, there is an art to making lines feel shorter to wait in. Disney is an expert at this, and the YouTube channel Defunctland gives us a fascinating and comprehensive look into how Disney's strategy for managing its crowded theme park queues has changed over time.

Thanks to my friend Jim for sharing this with me.

🐦 Relevant Tweets

And if you liked yesterday's optical illusion, here's another mind-bending video:

Have a great week,
John

💼 Generation Work-From-Home May Never Recover — The Atlantic

To have a job without a workplace, you must build an office of the mind. Structure, routine, focus, socialization, networking, stress relief—their creation is almost entirely up to you, alone in a spare bedroom or on your couch, where your laptop might vie for attention at any given moment with your pets or kids. If the coffeepot runs dry, there is no one to blame but yourself.

📆 Is the Four-Day Workweek Finally Within Our Grasp? — NY Times

To paraphrase William Gibson, the four-day week is already here for most companies,” said Mr. Pang, an organizational strategy consultant in Menlo Park, Calif. “It’s buried under a whole bunch of rubble of outmoded practices and bad meetings. Once you clear that stuff away, then it turns out the four-day week is well within your grasp.”‌

☮️ 11 Years After Trying to Kill Each Other, a Marine and a Talib Meet Again — NY Times

An extraordinary story about a US marine who recently met with a Taliban commander he once fought against:

The rifle was a familiar tool, once an extension of myself and always within arms reach. But now that it was no longer needed, it was little more than a mass of plastic and steel, and it had no bearing on how I interacted with Marja and Mr. Gulab. He was no longer an enemy but a man sitting on the floor, pondering his next sentence. He wasn’t fighting in a war that seemed like it would never end. And neither was I.

He had won his war. I had lost mine.

🐦 Relevant Tweets

Speaking of The Fermi paradox:

🕹 The Great Online Game — Not Boring

Packy McCormick's essay on how the internet has become an infinite game with real-world rewards fundamentally changed how I think about the internet. It's one of my favorite essays:

The Great Online Game is an infinite video game that plays out constantly across the internet. It uses many of the mechanics of a video game, but removes the boundaries.

[...]

The Game rewards community and cooperation over individualism and competition. You get points for being curious, sharing, and helping with no expectation of reciprocation. By increasing your surface area, you’re opening yourself up to serendipity. For good actors, the Game has nearly unlimited upside, and practically no downside.

🔭 Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins — NY Times

NASA successfully launched the Hubble telescope's successor yesterday, which will allow us to see infrared light from distant parts of the universe. Expectations for the telescope are high, because this light will let us see objects that are much older and farther away.

There are only a few times in the history of a species when it gains the know-how, the audacity and the tools to greatly advance the interrogation of its origins. Humanity is at such a moment, astronomers say.

🐦 Two tweets for the new year:

But if you are setting resolutions, a reminder that tiny gains compound in ways that are hard to imagine up front:

🪲 Get Back — Disney+

I'm only halfway through Peter Jackson's three part documentary series on The Beatles, but I can barely put it down. Culled from 60 hours of archival footage, any randomly selected ten minute segment of the documentary would've gone viral on its own, and the entire series clocks in at just under eight hours.

The intimacy of the footage is captivating, and Jackson employs a light touch in how it's presented. There's no narration, just occasional supplementary text and images to provide context to the scenes that unfold.

It's a must-watch for anyone engaged in any kind of creative work. The messiness of the creative process is on full display, and the band's conflict, infectious playfulness, and brilliant music combine to form this cultural gem and insightful look at the bestselling band of all time.

"The Beatles: Get Back" is a three-part documentary series that takes audiences back in time to the band's intimate recording sessions during a pivotal moment in music history. The documentary showcases the warmth, camaraderie and creative genius that defined the legacy of the iconic foursome, compiled from over 60 hours of unseen footage shot in January 1969 (by Michael Lindsay-Hogg) and more than 150 hours of unheard audio, all of which has been brilliantly restored. Jackson is the only person in 50 years to have been given access to these private film archives.

You can dive straight into the full series on Disney+ or start with the following clip. This is what a #1 hit single being born looks like:

👃 How Long Does a Loss of Smell and Taste Last After Coronavirus? — Prevention.com

Did you know that smell training is a thing? I'm just getting over COVID-19, and the temporary loss of taste and smell was unsettling. For folks who have trouble regaining their smell, there are research-backed exercises they can do to improve it.

(As an aside, COVID-19 left me bedridden for days, even as a healthy, young, fully vaccinated person with no underlying conditions. If you have access to booster shots, go get yours!)

Smell training is the process of exposing yourself to various strong smells over a period of time in hopes that it will help bring back your sense of smell or, at least, improve it. “We have a very specific guide for how to do this based on literature that’s been published,” Dr. Holbrook explains.

🐦 Two tweets about Chicago

No matter where you live, you'll find that both of these tweets are truly inspirational:

📱 Springboard: The Secret History of the First Real Smartphone — The Verge

Though the iPhone is widely considered the first modern smartphone, one company had many of the ideas that would eventually come to life in our pocket computers . . . ten years too early.

This 30 minute documentary is a fascinating exploration of the company that was once one of the fastest growing businesses in American history.

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures.

🦠 Could Covid Lead to Progress? — NY Times

It’s important to remember that mRNA vaccines were a promising, if unproven, line of inquiry for years before the pandemic hit; no one could say for sure that they even worked. But now BioNTech has announced that it’s ramping up development of a malaria vaccine using messenger RNA as the delivery mechanism, and Moderna and partners announced that they’re beginning trials of two mRNA candidate vaccines against H.I.V. Malaria kills roughly 400,000 people a year, H.I.V. nearly a million, and both diseases disproportionately affect the young. If the successful mass rollout of the Covid vaccines winds up accelerating the timeline for these other vaccines, the impact on human life will be enormous.

🧁 The Pastry A.I. That Learned to Fight Cancer — New Yorker

A Japanese system for identifying pastries in 2012 paved the way for much more. Computers have only recently learned how to see, and their ability to do so is really based on their ability to learn from large data sets:

AlexNet was a neural network, “deep” because its simulated neurons were arranged in many layers. As the network was shown new images, it guessed what was in them; inevitably, it was wrong, but after each guess it was made to adjust the connections between its layers of neurons, until it learned to output a label matching the one that researchers provided.

[. . .]

Deep learning had been around for years, but was thought impractical. AlexNet showed that the technique could be used to solve real-world problems, while still running quickly on cheap computers. Today, virtually every A.I. system you’ve heard of—Siri, AlphaGo, Google Translate—depends on the technique.

🐦 A Mindblowing Tweet

🪄 Becoming a Magician — Autotranslucence

It's hard to pull a single representative quote from this beautiful essay. The author weaves together personal anecdotes with the idea that magic is a metaphor for personal growth.

Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

[. . .]

The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick I described above is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.

🌐 Weeklypedia

Weeklypedia is "a digest of the most-edited Wikipedia articles and discussions from the last week." It's an interesting snapshot of what's trending on the internet, with fewer of the click-baity topics that tend to take over on other sites. Link

🐦 A Relevant Tweet

Speaking of committing to things enough for them to take off:

😷 Reading the mind with a mask? Improvement in reading the mind in the eyes during the COVID-19 pandemic — PubMed

Spending more time relying on reading people's eyes to gauge their emotions enhances your ability to do so. Our brains are extremely adaptable:

These results suggest that in addition to individual's interest and motivation in understanding other's mental state, continuous everyday experiences can result in an improved capacity for reading mental and emotional states by looking into individuals' eyes.

Via @AdamMGrant

☢️ Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change? — New Yorker

Speaking of not committing fully enough to an initiative, nuclear fusion has been stuck with limited funding for decades, despite its promises. The U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration estimated that the low end of funding for nuclear fusion (about $1 billion per year) would lead to fusion never being a viable technology. That's roughly what's been spent, so for years, cheap and relatively safe energy has seemed just around the corner.

Fission is when an atom—most commonly uranium or plutonium—breaks in two. Fission generates waste that remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years; in contrast, the little bit of waste that fusion generates remains radioactive for only a few decades. Fission is pretty powerful, as evidenced by atomic bombs; fusion is much, much more powerful.

[...]

The process of fusion sounds dangerous to a layperson—a sun in a magnetic bottle?—but it is easier to extinguish than a match.

🐦 A Useful Tweet

A great reminder on the importance of compounding:

Keep going.

— @visualizevalue