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Walter Murch’s Letter to His Grandchildren About Earth’s History is an entertaining story of our Earth that touches on birds, dinosaurs, plants, evolution, humans and eventually fossil fuels. Here are my 11 takeaways: Birds inherited super efficient lungs from dinosaurs. But why? The story starts with plants migrating from ocean to land and then needing to deal with gravity. Land plants evolved lignin to address gravity. During this Carboniferous age, lignin couldn’t be decomposed. So the decay of lignin (hydrocarbons) produced an oxygen surge. Eventually, a mushroom spore evolved a special enzyme that could dissolve lignin. Oxidizing lignin used up a lot of oxygen and killed 95% of life on Earth. Dinosaurs (probably the predecessors to dinosaurs) evolved super efficient lung systems to compensate for the reduced oxygen. Millions of years later, humans found burning fossilized lignin releases lots of energy. Humans have fossil fuels due to nature’s inability to breakdown lignin. Humans are burning fossil fuels 500,000X faster than they were deposited. The lack of the mushroom spore with the special enzyme and fossil fuels being the result of an inability to breakdown lignin is interesting. However, it still appears to be up for debate. ...

What’s the need? The key need is to be able to quickly export highlights from articles bookmarked in Instapaper at the command-line. What’s the approach? The approach is to leverage the Instapaper API to quickly extract the highlights from a bookmarked article into a text stream. What are the benefits? Leveraging Instapaper’s programmatic API makes exporting highlights effortless. Generating a text stream means this output can be piped to other tools or apps and manipulated in an infinite number of ways. ...

In Ronald Purser’s The mindfulness conspiracy (The Guardian), he writes about a fascinating perspective on the mindfulness genre. Here are my 6 takeaways from the article: Mindfulness says paying closer attention to the present resolves our suffering. Mindfulness has been stripped of the accompanying teachings e.g. attachment to self, compassion. Mindfulness advocates are unwittingly supporting the capitalistic monetisation of our attention which mindfulness purportedly solves. Mindfulness attempts to deal with the symptoms (lack of focused attention) without addressing the cause (monetisation of our attention). Mindfulness reframes troubles as the result of individual action rather than systemic conditions. Neoliberalism wants pure market logic and mindfulness says “okay, here’s how you can focus on competing so you don’t think too hard about the social and political conditions that brought about the suffering.” See also Neutralizing social Darwinism Mindfulness of emotions and feelings

The 6 key components of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine are the cap, 5’-UTR, signal peptide, spike protein, 3’-UTR and a poly-A tail. The cap makes the vaccine mRNA look legitimate. The 5’-UTR helps with immune system evasion and translation. The signal peptide says this protein should exit via the endoplasmic reticulum (just like SARS-CoV-2). The spike protein is almost identical to the SARS-CoV-2 spike except for 2 proline substitutions. The 3’-UTR is chosen for RNA stability and expression. The poly-A tail protects the mRNA from degradation. See also Reverse engineering the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine

In Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, Bert Hubert breaks down the mechanism and key components of the BioNTech/Pfizer RNA vaccine. Here are the key ideas I took away from this fantastic article: The mRNA vaccine encodes the SARS-CoV-2 spike which generates an immune response. mRNA is fragile and must be stored in deep freeze. The vaccine consists of 6 high-level components. See also Zanny Minton Beddoes interviews Bill Gates about COVID-19

BJ Fogg’s video Information -> Action Fallacy opened my eyes to why giving people better information won’t reliably change their behavior. Here are the 4 key takeaways: The fallacy is that giving people better information leads to attitude change which then leads to behavior change. Better information doesn’t reliably lead to attitude change. Attitude change doesn’t reliably lead to behavior change. Changing behavior more reliably leads to attitude change. See also The constitution of knowledge Judging truth External links BJ Fogg | Tiny Habits

Readme Driven Development written by Tom Preston-Werner in 2010 is a timeless post about using a README to scope a project and collaborate with others. Here are the 4 key ideas I got from the post: Your README is the most important document in your codebase. So write your README first. A README constrains you to single file which makes it a short, light-weight and not-too-precise introduction to your code. A README helps with discussion and collaboration. See also Weekly incremental value

Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge (National Affairs) opened my eyes to how we know what we know. Here are the top 10 points I got from his article: Social epistemology is about our public understanding of objective reality. Reality-making was decentralized away from authoritarian control. This decentralized community relies on free speech and social testing. Decentralizing our understanding of reality gives us freedom of thought. The decentralized community must agree on how objective reality is proven (and can disagree on everything else). Disinformation tries to tear down socially validated reality. The epistemic honor code says that objective truth exists, truth-finding should be impersonal, credentials matter and knowledge should always be tested. Disinformation became weaponized (Russia election interference), profitable (social media) and impossible to ignore (top politicians cannot be ignored). Creating knowledge is a professional, structured and disciplined process. Institutions that create knowledge should be fixed not disregarded and thrown out. See also Information-action fallacy How disinformation hacks your brain Judging truth Wanna bet?

Here are the key insights I took from chapter 1 of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Resulting is the tendency to say a decision was good when the result is good. Chess involves very little luck so it’s not a good model of life. Poker is the sum of decision quality and luck. Our lives are the sum of decision quality and luck. A few outcomes is not enough to measure decision quality. A great decision is the result of a great process. When a less likely outcome happens, it doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Similarly, when a more likely outcome happens, it doesn’t mean we’re right. See also Wanna bet?

Here are my key takeaways from chapter 2 of Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Everything is a bet. Skill in life is learning to be better belief calibrator. Our default is to believe what we hear. We generally process information by altering our interpretation to fit our beliefs. Motivated reasoning is when a belief is lodged and remains unchallenged. Fake news is a planted false story that is meant to amplify existing beliefs. Disinformation has some truth with powerful spin. Being smarter, more aware or better with data doesn’t help overcome bias. View the world through lens of “wanna bet?” Communicating uncertainty advances knowledge and invites dialogue. See also The constitution of knowledge Life is poker, not chess Judging truth How disinformation hacks your brain