NeillFriedman

Have you ever been to Israel? Do you know anything about it? As you attempt to delegitimize it and call for its destruction, are you speaking from personal learned experience, or from what you’ve seen on social media? I was there once. Just over 20 years ago. I visited Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem and other places I don’t remember. I celebrated Rosh Hashana in the home of friends of the friend I was travelling with. They invited a complete stranger into their home to celebrate the new year with them. I saw the road signs there, in Hebrew and Arabic and English. Not just in neighbourhoods with a large Arab population. Everywhere. I saw soldiers walking around with machine guns. My bags were searched when I entered malls. The trunk of my car was opened when I drove into a parking lot. And I felt safe. I met Jews. And Muslims. And Christians. I visited old Jerusalem, and saw the four quarters, where Jews, Muslims, Christians and Armenians coexist side by side. I visited the Bahai gardens, a beautiful site built and maintained by another religion, existing peacefully in Israel. And as I was there, I realized I was in one of the few places in the world, that everyone agrees has existed for thousands of years. I was standing in a land that had meaning for billions of people of many religions. And I realized something else. The Jews were the caretakers of this wonderful place. The historical monuments and places that meant so much to other religions were protected. They were preserved. They were taken care of. They were respected. They were treated with the same reverence regardless of which religion they had meaning for. Where else in the Middle East do you see this? Where else in the world? There’s a lot of talk about what Israel is like and what it’s all about. Israel isn’t perfect. No nation is. Mistakes are made, governments make bad decisions, politicians say awful things. It happens everywhere. But Israel is unique. There’s no other place like it in the world. Just ask anyone who’s been there.

If the science is truly novel, expect resistance not applause.

Pass it on if you feel the same.

We can't win this fight on our own. As Jews, we don't have the numbers. But we're British Jews. It's instilled in us from an early age that the 'British' part always comes first. It's why Jews are considered a success story of assimilation and integration within British society. Please understand, this isn't a war only against Jews. We're just at the front of the queue. It's a war against British values and British way of life. We need all your help.

@doctorinigo Almost like there is some form of supply and demand adjustment happening at a mitochondrial level. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Lactate accumulation is not a sign of failed aerobic metabolism. It is a sign of a mismatch between glycolytic flux and mitochondrial substrate entry and oxidation. During Zone 2 exercise, lactate production increases, but because mitochondrial oxidation keeps pace, pyruvate also rises and the L:P ratio remains relatively stable, typically in the range of 10:1 to 15:1. The redox state is preserved. Glycolysis and mitochondrial oxidation are synchronized. This stability of the L:P ratio during Zone 2 is itself a marker of metabolic health, evidence that the mLOC and the broader lactate shuttle are functioning efficiently.

One of the most brilliant moments of diplomacy in recent history let alone memory. You're going to want to see this.

Yesterday in London, two men ran under the two-hour marathon. Sawe in 1:59:30, Kejelcha in 1:59:41. A barrier that has stood for decades, gone. None of their watch data is on Terra. But 571 other runners on the same streets are, and their data turned up something I wasn't expecting. The spread of the field alone is fascinating. Finish times ranged from sub-2:12 to nearly 7 hours. Heart rates told a counterintuitive story too: sub-3 runners averaged 167 bpm for the entire race, while six-hour finishers averaged 154. But the calorie data is what really jumped out. Garmin and Coros watches agreed on heart rate. They agreed on distance. They disagreed on calories by 12% at the median, and the gap got much worse for slower runners. Here's the part that I think matters: kcal/km should be roughly flat across finish-time bands on the same course on the same day. The fact that one device produces a flat line and the other produces a steep one is a self-contained plausibility check on the calorie algorithm. Calories from a watch are a model output, not a measurement, and the slower you run, the further the model can drift from physiology. This is exactly the kind of question we're tackling at the Terra Research Run Club this Thursday, built to advance our understanding of wearable data in the real world, and ask how well our watches actually capture what's happening. Link for the Research and Run club below @TerraAPI

I've always told my PhD students that a PhD is a marathon and not a sprint. Now that Sabastian Sawe has run the London Marathon in under 2 hours, I'll need to think of something else to tell them.

The Israeli embassy in the US posted this to their social media for their independence day 😂😂😂

A BBC documentary about Jew hate in the UK that fails to mention the BBC and Islam is like a US documentary on the Vietnam war omitting America and communism.

So let me get this straight. The country’s wobbling like a dodgy scaffold in a gale—bills through the roof, services stretched, people grafting harder for less—and Parliament’s latest bright idea is… bringing sex toys into the chamber. You’ve got Samantha Niblett saying it’s about “openness” and education. Openness? We’re wide open already, love—our wallets, our patience, our tolerance—picked clean on a weekly basis. And then Kemi Badenoch steps in, basically asking what the hell we’re doing… and for once you can’t blame her. Because here’s the thing—this isn’t edgy, it’s embarrassing. This isn’t bold, it’s tone deaf. No one sat at home thinking, “Do you know what would really fix Britain? A demonstration kit in the House of Commons.” We don’t need props to explain how things work—we’ve had years of hands-on experience being shafted by policy, promises, and priorities that make absolutely no sense to the people paying for them. And that’s the real punchline, isn’t it? They’ll stand there talking about education and progress while the basics—actual, boring, unsexy basics—are left to rot. Roads, hospitals, policing, cost of living… all the stuff that actually matters? Bit too difficult, that. But this? Oh this they’ve got time for. It’s like watching the band play on while the ship’s taking on water—only now someone’s wheeled in a disco light and called it “forward thinking.” Sort the country out first. Then, and only then, you can start worrying about the extras. Until then, spare us the theatre. We’re not laughing with you… we’re laughing at you.

The first time I was flying to Beirut, the desk officer at London Heathrow asked before checking us in, “have you been to Israel?” We had rehearsed the answer to this question before. But Winston can't lie, so he said yes. I gave him the dirty look. There goes our vacation! "Well, you don't have the stamp on your passports so just make sure you tell the officer in Beirut that you haven't," she intoned. I was stressed out for the next 5 hours, and even more so when we had to face the border officer who, by the grace of God, did not ask us THE question (even though he took our passports to a secondary office for extra checks). Spending time in Beirut, you realize that it's the same Mediterranean light that bathes Tel Aviv; the sea is the same shade of shimmering blue because... well, it's the same sea. In both places, young people spill out of clubs at sunrise, the bass still thumping from rooftops that overlook the same ancient coastline. Both cities pulse with the same Levantine hunger for life: the clink of arak glasses, endless plates of hummus swirled with olive oil, the sudden eruption of dabke or house music that pulls strangers into a circle. Parties start on the rooftops of Gemmayze in Beirut and tumble down into Mar Mikhael’s narrow alleys; in Tel Aviv they begin on the sand at Gordon Beach and migrate to the warehouses of the Florentin district. These are both stylish people who love life, and who love to party. The energy is truly infectious. The accents may differ but something about this weird combination along with a deep sense of rootedness in community and the extended family really underscore how similar they were. And yet, there's been a wall between these two peoples. There are no flights stitching the 45 min hop across the water. No commercial trucks rumbling between the ports. Lebanese law forbids its citizens - inside the country or in the diaspora - from so much as speaking to an Israeli, a rule so absolute that some Lebanese friends of mine who live in Europe still glance over their shoulders before typing a reply to any Israeli even outside the country, whether for business or pleasure. I spent evenings in Beirut listening to Lebanese friends speak of Israelis not as the enemy but as people caught in the same endless loop of fear and longing. Decades of Hezbollah’s shadow have hollowed out parts of Lebanon, turning the south into a garrison and the economy into a ruin. Yet in the cafés of Achrafieh and the mountain villages above the city you hear it more and more: a quiet, exhausted recognition that the real hostage-takers are not across the border but inside it. I keep imagining the day the question at Beirut airport changes. I keep picturing the first flight from Rafic Harari to Ben Gurion. One day the music will be louder than the fear. One day the Lebanese and the Israelis will throw the party the rest of the world has been waiting for. I hope this is the first step:

I genuinely don’t know whether to laugh or lose my mind anymore at this European hypocritical double standards. When it comes to Vladimir Putin, suddenly it’s Churchillian resolve. No compromise. No dialogue. Arm Ukraine to the teeth, sanction everything that moves, wreck your own energy security if necessary - because tyranny must be confronted. Fine. I actually respect the consistency of that … in isolation. But then you turn around and lecture us - us - the Gulf monarchies, Jordan and Israel, about showing restraint with Tehran? About dialogue? About coexistence? Are you serious? For forty years - forty bloody years - this regime has been waging a shadow war across the region. Militias, proxies, sleeper cells, terror networks, destabilizing entire countries - Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen - and threatening the Gulf monarchies, Jordan, and Israel nonstop. This isn’t theoretical. This isn’t abstract. This is lived reality. And yet here come Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and the rest of the European choir, gently advising us to calm down, de-escalate, and - what was it again? - “give diplomacy a chance.” Diplomacy with who, exactly? With a system that has built its entire regional strategy on plausible deniability and proxy terror violence? You were willing to absorb inflation, energy shocks, and political backlash at home to confront Moscow. You made that choice. You said: this is the price of standing up to a tyrant. So don’t come here and tell us - after decades of being on the receiving end - that we should just sit down, smile politely, and “coexist.” Either you believe in confronting tyranny everywhere .. or you don’t. Macron, Starmer, rest of EU leaders and top bureaucrats should just STFU and spare us the self righteous sanctimonious lectures!🤐🤫

@VerminusM Probably surrender.

I wonder: if a heavily armed Belgian militia were firing tens of thousands of rockets into French cities with the explicit goal of destroying France, and the Belgian government refused to do anything about it, what would France do?

Now this right here is how you silence the vile and corrupt UN. Simply incredible from @JustLuai The looks on all their faces are priceless

Well-being is about energetics. You can look fine on the outside & still feel terrible. Medicine studies anatomy. But almost no one studies the system that powers it: mitochondria & bioenergetics. A cadaver can have perfect anatomy — yet it’s dead. Why? Because it lacks energy. Doug Wallace: “The important question is whether your mitochondria are functional or not. You have 10¹⁷ mitochondria, each with ~0.5 volts of membrane potential. The amount of energy in your body right now is the equivalent, as Nick Lane says, of a lightning bolt. The difference between being alive and dead is when that membrane potential collapses. We need to understand that as a central concept of what it is to be healthy and have health and well-being.”

The origins of Toast She: Darling I have just baked you a delicious loaf of fresh bread. He: I am going to slice it up and throw it on the fire. This most likely happened somewhere on the southern tip of the African continent. #springboks #braai

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

Health is not the absence of disease. It’s the presence of energy. @MitoPsychoBio & @niroshajmurugan ofc. champions of this. It’s so fun to view your health & time from an energetic lens. - When I wake up how energetic do I feel? - Which activities give me energy? - Which ones drain me? - At night, how to charge the battery well? Your entire day becomes an exercise in self reflection. And helps you audit for more energy. Brilliant paper from Martin Picard "Why do we care more about disease than health?" linked below for more reading.

Only the Trump can sit next to the Japanese PM and answer a question about why Japan did not get a heads up re the attack on Iran by saying he needed the element of surprise just like you guys did with Pearl Harbour. I literally spat out my coffee.