Category: Misc

From Sheehan Quirke, also known as The Cultural Tutor, comes the story of Vitruvius, one of the most important architects in history:

“What makes Vitruvius so important? During his retirement he wrote something called De Architectura, a comprehensive treatise — part history, part guide — on Greek and Roman architecture. This book is the only surviving architectural treatise from the ancient world. That is to say: without this book we would know far less about Classical Architecture, and would have had to reverse engineer our knowledge of the Five Orders and of Proportion by analysing ancient ruins. Vitruvius’ detailed description of human proportions, which he claimed to be the basis of Classical Architecture, inspired one of history’s most famous drawings: Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.”

He wrote: “For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the dis­tance from the bottom of the chin to the under side of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth.”

From the excellent Why Is This Interesting newsletter comes the story of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, a munitions manufacturer based in Connecticut in 1915 that made artillery shells. With World War I raging in Europe, the company planned to do a brisk business and placed large orders with leading U.S. munitions suppliers. On July 24 of 1915, a German lawyer named Heinrich Albert had his briefcase stolen on the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan. But this was no ordinary snatch and grab — the thief in this case was a US Secret Service agent named Frank Burke, and the contents of the briefcase, which quickly found their way into the hands of U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, revealed that Bridgeport Projectile wasn’t a defense contractor at all, but rather a secret plot created by the German government. As a written account describes it:

“The plan for the Bridgeport Projectile Company, conceived by Heinrich Albert and Franz von Papen and approved by the German general staff, called for the sheer waste of tens of millions of dollars. Bridgeport Projectile was in business merely to keep America’s leading munitions producers too busy to fill genuine orders for the weapons the French and British so desperately needed. The false-front company had ordered five million pounds of gunpowder and two million shell cases with the intention of simply storing them.”

The Bridgeport Projectile episode has been cited by U.S. policymakers as a cautionary tale, an early example of how foreign direct investment in the United States—that is, non-U.S. entities or individuals buying or investing in U.S. companies—can harm U.S. national security. It helped lead to the creation of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews the national security implications of certain foreign investment transactions through the an interagency body comprised of nine executive branch departments and offices and backed by the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Came across this fascinating news in Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten newsletter: a company called Lantern Bioworks has developed a genetically-engineered bacteria similar to the one that causes tooth decay, which is known as streptococcus mutans. It converts sugar into lactic acid, which dissolves the enamel coating on your teeth, leading to cavities. The bio-engineered version doesn’t cause decay because it turns sugar into something else (alcohol, as it turns out, although not enough to get drunk on), and it also has a mild antibiotic property, so it eventually kills off all of the other bacteria in your mouth.

One of the interesting aspects of this invention is that the man who came up with it has been working on it since the mid-1980s. In 1985, Professor Jeffrey Hillman of the University of Florida surveyed the microorganisms on his graduate students’ teeth and found that one had an unusual strain of S. mutans that contained the natural antibiotic, and he spent the next few decades refining it and adding the other features. But when he tried to get FDA approval, they made it almost impossible — they wanted him to do a study with 100 subjects, all of whom had to be age 18-30, with removable dentures.

Eventually, the founder of Lantern Bioworks came across it and licensed it from Hillman. To get around the need for a study of teenagers with dentures, Lantern is going to market the engineered bacteria as a “probiotic,” for which the FDA has lower standards than it does for drugs. Technically, any bacterium which you take in order to change your natural microbiome is a probiotic, and there are already a few genetically-modified probiotics out there that have been approved. Some are almost as creative as Lumina: Zbiotics is a genetically-engineered species of Bacillus that sits in your stomach and supposedly prevents the user from getting a hangover by metabolizing alcohol byproducts.

RIP to the godfather of all quotes https://t.co/1zjovA84Y6 pic.twitter.com/9diXkLULxI

— Batshit Moments in Aussie Politics (@batshit_auspol) December 17, 2023

From Mike Baker for the New York Times: “In the minutes before he boarded an Alaska Airlines flight home, Joseph Emerson, a pilot for the airline, texted his wife and said he missed her. The flight was full, and Emerson was off duty, so he settled into the cockpit jump seat. Then he appeared to grow agitated, the other pilots told the authorities, and suddenly reached up and yanked two fire-suppression handles, which are designed to cut the fuel supply and shut down both engines. In his first interview since the incident, Mr. Emerson said he was overcome with a growing conviction that he was only imagining the journey and needed to take drastic action to bring the dream to an end.”

Jay Leno owns a car that will run on almost any fuel, including tequila and perfume

From Lianne Turner for CNN: “Among the cars that Jay Leno has collected is a Chrysler Turbine car, of which only 50 were built in the early 1960s, which could run on any fuel except leaded gasoline. “When they drove it to Mexico it drove on tequila, when they took it out to France they burned Chanel No. 5 – any liquid that you could burn with oxygen you could run this car on,” said Leno. “It is essentially a jet engine. But when this car came out in the early 60s nobody really cared about alternative fuels because fuel cost 26 cents per gallon. It was extremely expensive to produce and it wasn’t really that much faster than a V8 and it would have cost a lot more to produce.”

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Continue reading “The pilot accused of trying crash a plane tells his story”

When the AI takes over I'll be executed because I'll still be laughing at the "salmon in a river" prompt response pic.twitter.com/RyqeC0uE8Z

— Nikolaj🍦🇺🇦 (@nikicaga) January 6, 2024

A poem by Leila Chatti, which I found via Matt Bogle’s excellent newsletter Pome:

After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says You deserve that which has happened to you. It says I see what you do with your long, terrene hands. Maundering through the banalities of my life, it follows, speaking, as if from a frosty bag of peas in the freezer aisle, speaking, while I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor, trying to love a man. Its speech is disquieting company, but company nonetheless—a TV left on and turned low. It desperately wants my attention but is polite, which is its defining weakness. Sometimes I catch it stirring out of the corner of my eye—a glint at the end of my cat’s whiskers, a spangle on the ceiling of indiscernible source. More often, though, it looks like me, only a little off, like my reflection in the pregnant belly of a spoon. In fact, when I speak to it, I use my own name. I’m not sure if it minds. It repeats instead its refrain. It says God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.After a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says You deserve that which has happened to you. It says I see what you do with your long, terrene hands. Maundering through the banalities of my life, it follows, speaking, as if from a frosty bag of peas in the freezer aisle, speaking, while I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor, trying to love a man. Its speech is disquieting company, but company nonetheless—a TV left on and turned low. It desperately wants my attention but is polite, which is its defining weakness. Sometimes I catch it stirring out of the corner of my eye—a glint at the end of my cat’s whiskers, a spangle on the ceiling of indiscernible source. More often, though, it looks like me, only a little off, like my reflection in the pregnant belly of a spoon. In fact, when I speak to it, I use my own name. I’m not sure if it minds. It repeats instead its refrain. It says God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.

From Guan Yang in Why Is This Interesting: “The Most Serene Republic of Venice (726-1797) was a major commercial and maritime power. In addition to the famous lagoon city in Northeastern Italy, Venice ruled territories and islands stretching all the way down to Crete. Venice’s head of state was the Doge, or Doxe in Venetian (not the shiba inu based meme, or the related cryptocurrency). The doge was chosen with rules first adopted in 1268 and used, with few changes, until the last election in 1789.

Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine, and the nine elected forty-five. These forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. Election required at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.

Neither papal conclave nor the system used to select the president of the United States can hold a candle to this harebrained scheme. So why did the Venetians make it so complicated, and why did the system survive so long? The standard explanation for the complex selection procedure is that it prevented powerful families from applying undue pressure to elect their preferred candidates without majority support. (Being doge was quite costly, and the powers of the office were later curtailed, so some powerful men tried to avoid election, using the same tricks used to get elected.)”

(From Robin Sloan) There’s a great bit from Robert MacFarlane’s book Old Ways, in which he writes that a wise man “told me once about how [Charles] Darwin had constructed a sandy path which looped through the woods and fields around his house at Downe, in Kent. It was while walking this path daily that Darwin did much of his thinking, and he came to refer to it as the “Sandwalk” or the thinking path. Sometimes he would pile a series of flints in a rough cairn at the start of the path, and knock one away with his walking stick after completing each circuit. He came to be able to anticipate, [the wise man] explained, a “three-flint problem” or a “four-flint problem”, reliably quantifying the time it would take to solve an intellectual puzzle in terms of distance walked.”

(via Kottke.org) Market researcher Clotaire Rapaille was interviewed for an episode of Frontline on advertising and marketing back in 2003, and he talked about the differences in how the French and Americans think about cheese:

For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn’t understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.