Links and Thoughts (February '25)
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1. Masks all the way down…
What does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! (Nietzsche)
2. Oink
The demon which spawneth from this most unholy porcine union:
2. Public Service Announcement:
The true metaphysicians are found among the debauchees. It is by extenuating, by martyrizing our senses that we realize our nothingness, the abyss our frolics conceal for a moment. (Emil Cioran)
4. Be the change we need
5. We could be so much more free
6. This haunting “glitch in the matrix” story from an old reddit post:
My last semester at a certain college I was assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive (note: he was 325 lbs, I was 120 lbs), while unconscious on the ground I lived a different life.
I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.
I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but... just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.
I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany.... the lamp is not real.... the house is not real, my wife, my kids... none of that is real... the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper, it was still inverted dimensions, it took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain.... a fucking shit ton of pain... the first words I said were "I'm missing teeth" and opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn't know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused.
At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car, I was still confused.
I was taken to the hospital by the cop (seems he didn't want to wait for the ambulance to arrive) and give CT scans and shit..
I went through about 3 years of horrid depression, I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision, he is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says.
“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
(Cioran)
7. Writing advice from David Bentley Hart:
All these vapidly doctrinaire injunctions – urging you to write only plain declarative sentences stripped of modifiers and composed solely of words familiar to the average ten-year-old and demanding that you always prefer charcoal-gray to sumptuous purple – are expressions of everything spiritually deadening about late modernity and its banausic values. They reflect an epoch in which the mysterious, the evocative, and the beautifully elliptical have been systematically suppressed and nearly extinguished in the name of the efficient, the practical, the mechanical, and the starkly unambiguous – in short, in the name of everything that makes existence uninviting and life boring. They are reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences. Learn to detest all of these things and you will be a better writer for having done so.
8. Hokusai (1760-1849):
From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.
9. The pixel art of niftymonki
10. THEY TRADED LUKA FUCKING DONČIĆ TO THE GODDAMN LAKERS
The Kentucky meat shower was an incident occurring for a period of several minutes between 11 a.m. and 12 p.m. on March 3, 1876, where what appeared to be chunks of red meat fell from the sky in a 100-by-50-yard area near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. There exist several explanations (from blood rain to vulture ejecta) as to how this occurred and what the “meat” was.
On March 3, 1876, a farmer’s wife, Mrs. Crouch, was making soap on her porch when she reported seeing a piece of meat fall from the sky. She said she was 40 steps from her house when the meat started to slap the ground. Mrs. Crouch and her husband believed the event was a sign from God.
Most of the pieces of meat were approximately 2 by 2 inches (5 cm × 5 cm); at least one was 4 by 4 inches (10 cm × 10 cm). The meat appeared to be beef, but according to the first report in Scientific American, two men who tasted it judged it to be lamb or deer. Writing in the Sanitarian, Leopold Brandeis identified the substance as Nostoc, a type of cyanobacteria. Brandeis gave the meat sample to the Newark Scientific Association for further analysis, leading to a letter from Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton appearing in the Medical Record and stating the meat had been identified as lung tissue from either a horse or a human infant, “the structure of the organ in these two cases being almost identical.” The composition of this sample was backed up by further analysis, with two samples of the meat being identified as lung tissue, three as muscle, and two as cartilage.
In 2024, the Bath County History Museum opened an exhibit for the Kentucky meat shower, showcasing a preserved piece from the event.
12. ICYMI: “All the affairs of the King’s domain are safe and sound”
A faint buzzing taints the silence, the sound of flies festering a rotting corpse. The birds here are drunken and strange. There is a blurring at the edges if you look closely, a distortion in the geometry. There are trees that are not trees. There are people that are not people. Automatons, phantoms, wraiths. The bank teller winked at me, a savage glint in her dead black eyes.
I dream only of conveyor belts, endless conveyor belts.
13. The achingly beautiful piano music of Hania Rani
Other favorites: Woven Song, Malasana
14. As some of you know, I am the founder and head editor of Seeds of Science. As a part of our ongoing efforts to support independent researchers and promote creativity and diversity of thought in science, we recently launched a subscription revenue sharing program for our Substack (TLDR—we will distribute our yearly proceeds to the authors whom we feature on the Best of Science Blogging feed).
I don’t ask for much—in fact, I don’t ask for anything; Secretorum is a labor of love and of hate; I don’t want my pure and innocent blogging tainted by your filthy money. But if you enjoy whatever the fuck it is I do here and would like to support my work, I do ask that you please consider a subscription to the SoS Substack.
But why science blogging, you ask. I am convinced that the idea or insight which leads to the next Copernican-level revolution will come not from a peer-reviewed article in Nature or Science, but from a stoned speculation or flight of fancy shared in a humble blog post.
Academic science is dead, has been for some time now; the activists and middle managers who pass for “scientists” these days are constitutionally incapable of producing anything beyond piddling incremental advances.
Rather often, I go to a research talk and feel drowned in data. Some speakers seem to think they must unleash a tsunami of data if they are to be taken seriously. The framing is neglected, along with why the data are being collected; what hypotheses are being tested; what ideas are emerging. Researchers seem reluctant to come to biological conclusions or present new ideas. The same occurs in written publications. It is as if speculation about what the data might mean and the discussion of ideas are not quite ‘proper’.
I have a different view: description and data collection are necessary but insufficient. Ideas, even tentative ones, are also needed, along with the recognition that ideas will change as facts and arguments accumulate. Why are researchers holding back on ideas? Perhaps they are worried about proposing an idea that turns out to be wrong, because that might damage their chances of getting promotion or funding.
—“Biology must generate ideas as well as data” (Nurse, 2021, in Nature)
Only those not yet ground down by the academic machine—the students, the amateurs, the alchemists, the mystics—are still capable of revolutionary thought.
I think really good science doesn’t come from hard work. The striking advances come from people on the fringes, being playful. (Kary Mullis)
Recent SoS Best of Science Blogging posts:
“IQ discourse is increasingly unhinged” by Erik Hoel
“An Innovation Agenda for Addiction” by CASPR and IFP
“Maybe it's just YOUR testosterone that’s low” by Eryney Marrogi
“Genetically edited mosquitoes haven't scaled yet. Why?” by Eryney Marrogi
“What factors allow societies to survive a crisis?” by Florian Jehn
“Scientific Charlatans and Where to Find Them” by Konstantin Asimonov
“The Eve Theory of Consciousness” by Andrew Cutler
“The invincible human moth” by Erik Hoel
“Homo sapiens vampiris” by Peter Watts
“Fictional parasites very different from our own” by Abhishaike Mahajan
You inspired me to start making my own link posts. Thanks bud!
This is what I call strong link game. Thanks