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@JohnyNoProblems @cremieuxrecueil The older cadaver-derived HGH used to give people prion disorders. Tall people do generally die younger than short people (more cells to get cancer, cardiovascular strain).

@cremieuxrecueil There is data that shows consistent use of HGH reduces life expectancy by quite a bit. I'm not an expert on this by any means but it's definitely worth looking into if your gonna do it.

Everyone should wake up to this trend. In the West, rich people are making their kids taller. In the East, this is catching on as a general trend for status-maxxing parents.

@OneFineJay Tree of Heaven is quite repulsive, as well. Not invasive, but quite horrifying, is Florida's own manchineel tree, so poisonous that standing under it during rainfall will give you blisters.

Bradford Pear. The correct answer at all types is the demonic tree from the ninth circle of hell, the Bradford Pear

@politicalmath The problem is, from what I've heard, Wright's houses really are not very liveable. Roofs leak, not enough storage, structural problems. He wasn't interested in anything but the aesthetic side.

1) I need this house. Please someone give me $1.2 million dollars so I can have it 2) What happened that we don't have any modern frank lloyd wrights? Why did his system for building beautiful, livable houses not become a norm for American builders? x.com/zoeloveshouses…

@lymanstoneky I tried to find a source for this without success. For all that nicotine is an insecticide, the inhalation of one cigarette's worth, spread out over an entire human body, does not seem like very much.

Wait, is this a lowkey explanation for the rise in tick borne illnesses?!?!?!?!?

@AntigoneJournal Emperor Claudius's works on Etruscan history & language. Manetho's Aegyptica. Anything non-Homer from the Epic Cycle The missing volumes of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita

If any Greek or Latin text could be found in the unread Herculaneum scrolls, what would make you happiest for the world to rediscover?

@dmdebruijn The fundamental problem with this framing is that the most attractive way to do #3 is with lazy rivers, daily housekeeping, plush sports stadiums, gourmet meals, and an absolute minimum of work, while using someone else's money to make it happen.

The US university needs to accomplish three things all at once 1) produce excellence that shapes a career; 2) allow students to stand on their own intellectual feet; and just as importantly, 3) provide young people with a time of life that’ll be memorable, formative, significant. It very often is a life time memory, a thing that shapes a person’s identity, sometimes entire communities through sports etc, builds social links, and is quite often something people think of as *the* best choice they’ll have made. That’s not a bit of accounting to the quickest “skill set acquisition”.

This stuff always ignores that Americans like to go to college. Being at college is a phase of life. They’re not trying to rush in and out. That doesn’t mean there cannot be quick programs. But US colleges do not primarily “allocate students to employer needs”, or whatever.

@joeybeastmarket What's the source for this?

The average tick would die of nicotine poisoning if you smoked one cigarette before it bit you. Make sure to take a drag every few minutes on a hike. It’s for your health. You likely only have 6 months of this being effective before nicotine resistant ticks are accidentally released from the national laboratory for preventing ticks from developing nicotine resistance

Legalized sports betting has been a catastrophe. Recognizing this is kind of the price of entry for me to take your sense of how society works at all seriously.

@winexviv Nigeria last participated in 2021, not 2019, but the result was poor. Best result was in 2012, with a 67/100, easily beating all the African nations besides South Africa.

The last time Nigeria participated in the International Maths Olympiad (IMO) was in 2019. The government's reason then was that it was not important enough. The actual funding required is less than the cost of a brand new Hilux. This is the most prestigious academic competition in the world, and our children have been deprived of participation for years. Education has been pushed to the back seat for a long time, while illiteracy has been elevated. This needs to stop now!

@QiaochuYuan @mndl_nyc @ryanstvnsn It's making something of a comeback now, in part because switching to offline work is a way to make cheating via AI more difficult.

@mndl_nyc @ryanstvnsn woof. the idea that cursive is or might already be, like, only something historians study is certainly something

more scattered thoughts from 5 hours at the met - i think i didn't have some kind of maturity prerequisite for caring about museums before a few years ago or so. based on some stuff @ryanstvnsn said i tried thinking about the material history of each object, the way a person or people in a specific historical period had to make do with the materials and tools they had to put huge amounts of effort into creating these beautiful lasting things that people cared enough about to preserve until they ended up at the museum. trying to treat each object as a portal into the past. which i guess is the point of museums? but i don't think anyone had explained this to me before. like there was a sort of skill here i was missing - plus something that wasn't exactly a missing skill but some sort of missing sense of history as being all one thing that is connected, and connected to the present, and to things in my direct experience. one of the earliest versions of this that i tweeted about way back when it was kind of blowing my mind was seeing the trend of apocalyptic weapons in miyazaki movies as downstream of his experience being bombed as a kid in WWII. it's kind of obvious now but growing up i operated under this incredibly firm separation between reality and fiction that left me kind of confused about where ideas in fiction even came from - the met having areas themed after specific kinds of objects like "weapons" and "musical instruments" was extremely cool and made me curious whether there are museums that have themed sections like "sex toys" or "pornography" - the overhead lighting meant there was a lot of glare on a lot of the paintings (which were beautiful and frequently surprised me) in a way that felt like they slightly messed up the intended effect and i'm very curious what lighting conditions 17th-century dutch paintings or whatever were intended to be viewed under. i wanted to see them by the light of a fireplace or candle. @kendrictonn what's the deal with this - seeing gorgeous arabic calligraphy made me feel robbed by using boring fonts to write english. what a joy it would be to be able to write in a way that was visually beautiful in addition to the beauty of the meaning of the words. and in praise of god no less! getting to get really up close to the brushstrokes and seeing how beautiful and confident they were, the level of skill and dedication and time and effort it must've taken to get there; very very cool - anyway art is cool and based i might try to find a museum or something back home now

@lymanstoneky Moldova is much poorer and even more corrupt than Romania and has ongoing border disputes. I can see why they want to merge, but I'm dubious about the benefit to Romania, itself.

Honestly, yes, this is a good idea.

@argyriou15 @sentientist I saw someone work through the numbers to show that Pol Pot's wiping out nearly all the educated people in Cambodia just shifted IQ by just a couple of points, at most, which on the one hand, is not a lot, but on the other hand, it really did make a change.

@sentientist Gusev offers an example of a failure to even shift the distribution in the intended direction with Nazi efforts to sterilize or kill schizophrenics. Does he have the facts wrong? If not, is there an explanation for why that happened?

This is a semantic game. When Sasha says “breed out” he means literal total eradication. It's true, you cannot breed out criminality. But the substantive claim is not “eradicate the trait.” It is “select against a trait and shift its population distribution.” Domesticating wolves into dogs did not eradicate aggression, but we would all prefer to live in a society of dogs compared to wolves. 🧵

@growing_daniel Increasing the crime rates for high income women is in no way a violation of the principle of equity.

Kind of a dolezal situation here

@DorisHamley @kautzmania @FreddyLA7 What do you think of Texas German? As an American, I could understand it far more easily than any other version. youtube.com/watch?v=1_dH40…

@jeffreyb @kautzmania @FreddyLA7 I agree with you. Very old “Pfälzer” dialect with English words mixed. I think I only understand a lot because it’s very similar to my grandma’s dialect she used to speak, which many of those words got lost over decades, replaced and forgotten. (she was born early 1900)

We just saw our first Amish people!!!! They were coming toward us in a horse-drawn buggy. Such a cool moment. I don’t want to record them without their permission, so you’ll have to trust me on this one.

@kautzmania @FreddyLA7 It's said to be difficult, unless you're from the Palatinate.

@FreddyLA7 You could speak Deutsch and probably understand one another somewhat well. Very cool.

@StatiSense "The slave trade affected all of us" says the guy from the Gonja, whose ancestors made a quite a lot of money from it.

UN VOTE ON THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE (2026) 🌍 In March 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.48, declaring the trafficking and enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity.” 🗳️ HOW 193 UN MEMBER STATES VOTED ✅ YES — 123 countries ❌ NO — 3 countries ⚪ ABSTAINED — 52 countries 🗳️ DID NOT VOTE — 15 countries WHAT THE NUMBERS REVEAL The vote highlights growing international recognition of the transatlantic slave trade’s enduring historical significance and its impact on contemporary discussions around justice and reparations. #Statisense (UN General Assembly Resolution A/80/L.48, UN News)

@OldHollowTree youtube.com/watch?v=PYtXuB…

May I offer you a bag of BEES?!

@OneFineJay @CrankyFed The only historical exception I can think of is the Soviet Union, but, to the sorrow of sports broadcasters eager for ratings, it is no longer around.

@CrankyFed We are not in a sports rivalry with any other country, but for every sport there is a country that thinks they’re in a rivalry with us. Very much like the parasocial relationship between Maryland and Duke in the early 2000s

Are there any other countries America has fierce athletic rivalries with that we know nothing about? A memo or something would be nice

@xlr8harder Bringing back a more serious non-college math track would be useful. The kids who get As in Ap Calc, but then get placed into middle school math at UC Davis, would have been better served by it.

i think the world would be better if we prioritized statistics in high school math instruction.

@godblesstoto This may explain Starmer's otherwise inexplicable resignation.

Larry the cat is 19 years old. It's a well known custom in this country that when the Number 10 resident cat dies, the Prime Minister at the time must also be cremated and buried with the body. I very much hope this tradition is respected.