dynomight · Jul 2023 · conspiracy Claim: Per kilometer driven down the road, electric cars create more particulate air pollution than gas cars. That’s ignoring all other emissions and anything that happens at a power plant or during manufacturing. Sounds odd, but the argument is pretty simple:…

Two nights ago, I deleted everything. Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever…

Profiles When Mary Mallon cooked, people became ill and sometimes died. Health officials came after her repeatedly, and repeatedly she tried to escape. January 19, 1935 Mary Mallon was known and dreaded a generation ago as Typhoid Mary, America’s first identified carrier of typhoid bacilli. She was…

Open Questions For many people, A.I. may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end. June 17, 2025 Photograph by Balarama Heller You’re reading Open Questions, Joshua Rothman’s weekly column exploring what it means to be human. What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t…

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” — Donald Trump’s second inaugural address, Jan. 20 In a sense, you gotta hand it to Donald Trump. America’s 45th and 47th president — and first…

Some notes: I will be in SF next week, and am co-hosting this event with the wonderful convoke.bio from 6:30pm-8:30pm on June 24th. Location TBD, but it will be in SF! You should come! Also, I very bravely chatted with Endpoints News a few days back about AI in the life-sciences. Finally, extremely…

Amazing! Incredible! Unbelievable! Eyeglasses that let you see through clothes. The secrets to super-human strength. Scary seven-foot tall ghosts that do your bidding. All of this could be yours for a dollar or two. At least, that’s what vintage comic-book ads would have you believe. Six years ago,…

Caine is nine years old, lives in LA, and built his own arcade out of cardboard boxes in the back of his father’s auto parts store. You’ve go to watch until at least 3:10 when he explains how to check the validity of the “Fun Pass” using the calculators located on the front of each game. So so so…

Selten sorgt eine Verordnung in IT-Kreisen für so viel Aufsehen wie jene zum Bundes­gesetz zur Überwachung des Post- und Fernmelde­verkehrs. Doch die Verordnung, zu der die Vernehmlassung gestern Dienstag endete, ist auch alles andere als gewöhnlich. Das zeigt sich nicht nur daran, dass der bei…

At the tip of Brittany’s wild, wet Côtes-d’Armor peninsula is the village of Plougrescant. Beyond that, butting right out into the sea, lies Yvinec island, a tiny outcrop intermittently accessible depending on tides via a rock-studded expanse of dunes and seaweed. To get there I have taken two…

Do you have a balanced news diet? Go to https://ground.news/KiN to see reporting from a variety of sources and perspectives around the world. Subscribe for 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan through our link. Support us by becoming a Patron and get access to exclusive content:…

dynomight · updated Aug 2022 · science conspiracy Question: Should you drink acetone? Answer: No. But, out of interest, what if you did? This question is asked repeatedly on the web, with with many answers smugly stating that even tiny amounts of acetone will instantly kill you, you idiot. But they…

For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths—and revealed the limits of limitless disclosure. — Meg Bernhard In the early aughts, Frank Warren ran a medical document delivery business in Germantown, Maryland. It was a monotonous job, involving daily trips to government…

Gute Eltern schimpfen nie, gönnen sich Auszeiten und begleiten ihr Kind bindungsorientiert. Solche Überzeugungen sind nicht nur arrogant, sie grenzen auch viele aus, schreibt Autorin Nora Imlau. Text: Nora Imlau Bild: Adobe Stock Vorurteile haben wir alle, und der meisten sind wir uns nicht bewusst.…

I’ve seen plenty of weird computer bugs in my time, but nothing quite like what Peter Onion discovered in February 2015. He was proudly photographing his brand new Raspberry Pi 2 when something bizarre happened—every time his camera flash went off, his Pi instantly powered down. At first, Peter…

The former Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, Kan.Credit...Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times The Great Read How did a successful, financially sophisticated banker gamble his community’s money away? The former Heartland Tri-State Bank in Elkhart, Kan.Credit...Benjamin Rasmussen for The New…

by Ploum on 2025-02-27 I’ve written extensively, in French, about my quest to break my "connection addiction" by doing what I called "disconnections". At first, it was only doing three months without major news media and social networks. Then I tried to do one full year where I would only connect…

The following sentence applies regardless of when you read this: A famous man has recently been accused of doing sexual things to a woman (or many women) without consent. At the time of this writing, it was a politician's "groping" scandal but next time it'll be unwanted dick pics a powerful man…

In the summer of 1961, Osamu Shimomura sat alone in a rowboat on the Puget Sound, surrounded by thousands of glowing jellyfish. A marine biologist and chemist, he often sought out such quiet moments to reflect on his experimental failures. For two weeks, he had been struggling to isolate the…

The German Empire was founded in 1871, following Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Although a fledgling political nation, Germany was already renowned for its scientific genius. Many discoveries — from microscopy to organic chemistry — came from German scientists working in a period of…

As I climb into my little twin sized bed in my small RV trailer on a patch of undeveloped deep rural land in the Central New York highlands, exhausted from my 6 hours of doordash driving to make less than 200$ that day, I check my emails one last time for the night: no responses from the 745th…

Human Written by a human [0] Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. You would not walk through the streets of this world and hear music or laughter or children playing; no, all you…

Das Verhältnis zwischen der Schweiz und den USA ist angespannt. Während sich Bundes­rätinnen und Diplomaten bemühen, den wirtschaftlichen Druck aus Übersee – insbesondere im Zollbereich – abzufedern, wächst in der Bundes­verwaltung die Skepsis gegenüber der Abhängigkeit von amerikanischen…

Modest Beginnings At the height of the Cold War, only a handful of nations possessed the capacity to launch rockets into space. Among them were the world's foremost superpowers of the time: the United States of America (USA), and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Then there was Lebanon, a…

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” With a sly grin that I’d soon come to recognize, Paul Ginsparg quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather. Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell University and a certified MacArthur genius, may have little in common with Al Pacino’s mafia…

Illustrations by Ben Smith By James Somers The keeper of a university’s lab animals stumbles onto an extraordinary secret. For his mice the “sun” happened to rise between two and three in the morning, and so he, too, built his day around the artificial lights—even though increasingly this routine…

“Email has largely stayed the same,” wrote Gmail product manager Aakash Shaney in 2019, while the web rapidly evolved around it. No more. Google’s AMP for email meant “your emails can stay up to date” and “you can easily take action directly from the message itself.” Four years earlier, the search…

The silliest cause for a nuclear disaster There are enormous benefits to be had using nuclear materials in many areas of science, engineering, and medicine. But there are enormous costs as well, many of which we might not be aware of if we don’t make it a habit to read obscure government…

[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in early 2020, but…you know how that particular story turned out. I’m picking it back up again now because I’ve had…

Scrolling on our phones is killing us. This is a statement of fact that needs no citation (besides, research isn’t really my thing). The massive suck of our phones and the never-ending, algorithmically-driven internet has been covered at greater length by better-informed writers. We all know our…

Twitter was so many things. Elon Musk killed Twitter. First, he did it figuratively: firing most employees, destabilizing it as a technology and a business, leaving the platform virtually unusable for those who remained. Then, he killed it literally: renaming it X, giving Twitter a final ending…