James Pitt

it's really remarkable how random popular books can influence presidents: a lot of the us pandemic preparedness stuff was in place before covid because george w bush read a trade book about the spanish flu in his reading competition with karl rove

@alottaprophit @GenHeres123 @yhdistyminen “While Democratic boys and girls have expressed roughly the same desire to graduate from college since 2002, Republican high school students have significantly less interest in higher education than they did twenty years ago.” themissingdatadepot.substack.com/p/the-politica…

You dont know any conservatives to make that assessment. There are no fewer conservatives enrolling in college than 40’year ago. But universities are less likely to accept white males and have actively created a hostile learning environment for conservatives…and slowly people have chosen to find new fields which reward hard work and innovation. That is NOT what academia rewards.

Rather than come up with policies that can compete in the free marketplace of ideas and attract smart people, conservatives demand affirmative action

Billions of years ago, a rogue, Pluto-like body nearly slammed into Neptune. Most of Neptune's satellites were shattered or scattered in the melee. But a new study indicates there was one survivor: a wayward moon named Nereid. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

heterosexual tiktok posting is a constant pendulum swinging between “my big strong man guides me everywhere and I get to turn my brain off” and “my husband doesn’t know the difference between a pomegranate and a red onion”

On the current status of particle physics and the prospect of further discoveries: quantamagazine.org/is-particle-ph…

insane 2020's sideplot of the 764/O9A distrubuted neo-nazi internet cult causing like a dozen mass shootings by children all over the globe and never really breaking into mainstream consciousness

Every escalator has a big red stop button. If you see someone caught in it, hit it. For the love of God, stop the machine if it’s eating someone.

The media line that “there’s no treatment for this species of Ebola” is very unhelpful for general audiences because it naturalizes African deaths. There is no specific treatment, yes, but with supportive treatment available in all rich countries, case fatality is near 0%.

I'm fascinated by efforts to make animals (or parts thereof) photosynthetic. For the latest attempt, published last week, researchers took thylakoids from plant chloroplasts (the little membranes that carry photosystem I and II proteins) and inserted them into the eyes of mice. Specifically, they gave the animals eye drops containing the thylakoids twice a day for five days. The thylakoids went into corneal cells (apparently they are small enough that the cells endocytose them?) and did photosynthesis, making NADPH and ATP from light. This isn't a gene therapy, though; the eye cells cannot make more of these plant enzymes, and so the photosynthesis only happens for about 8 hours before the enzymes are destroyed. Why do this in the eye? One reason is that light doesn't penetrate tissue deeply; maybe a millimeter. Therefore, the eye is one of the few parts of the body that actually gets light exposure. It is also -- maybe equally important -- immune privileged, meaning these plant proteins don't trigger an inflammatory reaction (which would likely happen in other tissues). I'm not sure this paper has any real utility, at least not clinically. The authors say that it does (to help treat corneal injuries, for example) but I think it's just expected for authors to make up claims like this to get published in CNS journals. The more interesting reason to read this paper, I think, is just that it shows light can be used as a direct "metabolic input" in mammalian cells. You can use light to make energy molecules and NADPH, which can then be used by the cell's normal pathways. This isn't the first paper to do stuff like this, either. There is a rich history of (temporary) photosynthetic animals! In 2011, Christina Agapakis & co. injected living cyanobacteria into zebrafish embryos, and it worked. (No developmental impact on the fish.) In 2024, a Japanese team put chloroplasts from red algae into Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, and the chloroplasts apparently survived and did photosynthesis for two days. Biotechnologists have a great ability to harness GENES taken from nature to build useful tools and therapies. We can sequence the natural world, collect genes in databases, and use tools like AlphaFold to figure out what they code for. But our ability to harness entire organelles -- structures crafted over millions of years of evolution, which perform functions that cannot be matched by genes alone -- is severely limited. Animal photosynthesis, and pursuits thereof, might be a useful way to start closing this gap.

basically every form of anything has that problem, the simpsons is now written by people whose only background is in watching the simpsons, snl with snl, star wars with star wars, pop music with pop music

@MagnusPharao i admire this translation deeply as a work of art and a work of profound spiritual insight but i also feel like you should be shot it's a very difficult emotion to describe

It turns out that flying squirrels live in most of the continental US, but you almost never see them because they are 100% nocturnal. I learned this recently because as I knocked down a dead tree in my backyard a family of squirrels flew out and I thought I was going insane.

Want to learn infographic design? Our new data visualization specialist, Manuel Bortoletti, does fantastic diagrams, geospatial visualizations and graphs. He's teaching a two-week course in June in New York. I'd highly recommend it. Details here: coopertype.org/events/advance…

@EricMartin24 @yhdistyminen @DobsonBugnuts Half of fertilized eggs *naturally* die before implantation! If someone genuinely believed life began at conception, they would be interested in saving those “lives.” No one is.

@yhdistyminen @DobsonBugnuts And permitting the operation of fertility clinics which, inevitably, result in a dozen or so embryos that get discarded. But if those are each human lives, how can this process be tolerated

One reason this conversation blew up is that, when I suggested that most pro-lifers do not actually believe abortion is murder, PoliMath assumed I was mocking them or tarnishing them as "evil" rather than making a neutral observation. He could not model my mind.

@Cashin986 @TheProperPen @politicalmath Refusing to stop a plague to conserve resources. Invading Iran due to perceived superiority.

@TheProperPen @politicalmath In that regard they are truly like Nazis. Refusing to retreat, regroup, and counter. Refusing to stop the holocaust to conserve resources. Invading the USSR due to a perceived superiority. Completely beholden to their beliefs, ramifications be damned. Left = Nazi

It's funny that this conversation came from a discussion about how liberals have absolutely no theory of mind for conservatives and are incapable of empathy for conservative thought this is such a great example of that

We know most anti-abortion supporters don't believe abortion is murder because most of them do not support punishing women who have abortions as murderers. No state that bans abortion treats women who have abortions as murderers (or, in fact, as criminals at all). And every time a bill to do so is offered, it dies without ever even coming to a vote. That would not happen if most opponents of abortion genuinely believe it is the moral equivalent of infanticide.

I remember on r/fivethirtyeight there was some discussion about backing up the data but I’m not sure where it went

Very cool new GMO: the Philippines just approved a high-iron variety of rice that could provide 30-50% of the recommended daily allowance of iron. About a quarter of people around the world are anemic, mostly in developing countries isaaa.org/kc/cropbiotech…

@DrWalnuts11 Congratulate her on it and see if she responds in a “hey I wanna see you” way vs a “we are adults who think well of each other” way?