Antioxidants are widely to be held either good or non-effective. But in some cases they can be bad, in particular promote cancer (in mice) What do we know about R&D spillovers and productivity? From a public policy perspective, our findings indicate that the case for public support for R&D investment (input subsidies) may not be as strong as has been assumed so far. We have established empirically that the direct productivity effect of own R&D is comparable to and usually larger than that of sp…

Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison wrote two months ago a piece in The Atlantic calling for a new discipline, Progress Studies that would be very much applied and focused on improving the human condition. In my previous links post I linked to no less than eight manifestos or responses of some kind that were published some time after the original article, all show some degree of approval of this new proposal. In contrast, Twitter was a snakepit of snide and snark for a few days, with - what seems - mostly anth…

Paper argues that the performance (citations) of a scientific team is highly impacted by the performance (citations) of the weakest performing team member. Preventing the collapse of Civilization, by Jon Blow. He argues software is becoming worse, and that this is masked by ever improving hardware. A Case for Oxidation: Why the Rust programming language is great How does the sensation of touch arise, at a mollecular level? Fujitsu simulates a quantum computer with a classical computer (They built a digital …

Pascal's Wager is an scenario where there is a potential for an infinite reward (heaven) and that overrides every other consideration. Pascal's Mugging is an scenario where the theological considerations are replaced with a more mundane setting, where we are faced with a being who claims to have supernatural powers, that will pay us greatly if we pay them a small sum in advance. I think the earliest example I could find online of this particular case was this 2000 paper from Alex Tabarrok, who presents a s…

Here at Nintil I claimed last year that it is unlikely that there is some new useful fundamental physics coming. When I've made this point in front of an audience, sometimes I've had to clarify myself a lot. I still think it's all mostly addressed in the post itself -, but the topic can do with some extra clarification. In this post I will also point to what I regard as the only candidates I'm aware of for useful fundamental physics Useful fundamental physics Fundamental physics By fundamental physics I mea…

Note: As of 2026-09-08 I have paused this program, so I won't be paying anymore for mistakes found (though you are welcome to comment using the comment function in the blog). This is because I recently left my job and want to have as few obligations as possible, and reviewing incoming correction suggestions takes time and effort, particularly for things that I wrote a while back (having to think what was I thinking back then etc). Nintil aims to be the world's best blog as per my own criteria of what the be…