Big Ball of Mud, an essay on why software systems end up being ones, and why that's to be expected given real world constraints. (h/ Andy Matuschak)
Very high-molecular weight hyaluronan in naked mole rats is thought of as one of the keys to them being almost immune to cancer. New study tests if cultivating mouse and human cells with that added substance has protective effects (Against senescence) and it does, even when it suppresses gene p53 which is a tumor suppressor.
How doctors broke the US healthcare …
If you've been following Nintil -or been moderately curious1- you have probably come across claims that Science is broken in some way or another, that we live in an era of scientific stagnation, or some horror stories about researchers spending their lives applying for grants and not doing research. Here's a reading list that you may find interesting to navigate this conversation. Each piece includes a brief fragment from the source that describes its content. This is not intended to be a collection of ever…
A bunch of startup ideas, go build them or something. May actually be bad ideas, these are all just quick thoughts.
Automated notetaking: Take speech-to-text and recent advances in automated summarization, perhaps peppered with some hand-coded rules around entity recognition and you have an app that automatically takes notes for you.
Good: People seem to like taking notes
Bad: Potentially anyone could replicate the core tech? Also maybe it's not enough for this to be 90% good but 99% for adoption. Howeve…
Suppose you want to solve a problem. When problem-solving one can be in one of two states: Stuck or exploring paths forward. A path forward is a potential solution that might work but we are not sure so we need to do extra work to assess if that's the right way. In science this may be akin to "regular science" or 1 to N science or something like that.
This post is about the process of going from being stuck to having a path forward. This would be breakthrough science or 0 to 1 science. Of course i…
The puzzle of sleep
Sleep may seem paradoxical: Being inactive for a third of the day, in humans, means reduced chances to acquire resources or mate; plus it increases the odds of being preyed on, especially in our evolutionary past. Moreover, we also know that in our own case sleep is hard to avoid: Being awake for too long makes us tired and we progressively lose cognitive faculties, plus the more we stay awake the stronger there is of a drive to fall asleep, to the point it overrides the will not to. Eve…
SSC's posts on Amish healthcare (and the problems of employer-provided insurance)
Related, Vinad Prasad on cancer and medical ethics. Various interesting things: most cancer drugs don't pass a cost-benefit analysis, lots of cancer drugs get through the FDA with shoddy trials (And probably don't work at all), and this is all driven by the fact that Medicare will pay whatever the drug maker asks for (With social pressure being the only limit!), and likewise insurance companies will insulate people from the co…