Medley 123: Shampoo, Memory, Venmo, Betting, Fluoride, Bible Questions...
Hello from Austin! I’m excited to be back, and found a ton of great stuff for you last week.
New Article : "Two Years with No Shampoo: My Results, and How to Quit it Yourself” this is a more detailed follow up on my no shampoo article I posted a year and a half ago. It’s now been two years since I stopped using shampoo, and my hair feels and looks great.
New Cast : This week on Made You Think, Neil and I dug into “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Josh Foer. It’s a fantastic book about Josh’s journey to become the US National Memory Champion in one year, and how we can all develop better memories ourselves.
New Notes : This week I added my notes on “Food of the Gods” by Terence McKenna. It’s about the history of humanity’s relationship with plants and psychedelics, how our modern drugs have been influenced by politics and power, and how we might get back to some of our more natural roots.
If you use Venmo, you should know that all of your transactions are public by default. Which means anyone can look up all your transfers and their descriptions, and even make inferences about your life from them. I particularly enjoyed the drug dealer story and the lovers stories.
This site for placing bets on startup launched last week. It’s still very early, but I love the idea of having a place to publicly put some skin in the game for Silicon Valley predictions. Could easily be expanded to other arenas, too (politics in particular).
Contrary to popular belief, humans aren’t bad at smelling, we may be as good as dogs and other mammals. We just don’t use it nearly as much anymore, and a myth was invented in the 1800s that we were bad smellers and its stuck till today.
Since Amazon has become one of the largest search engines in the world, some companies are programmatically creating products to fit all possible search queries. Which is how you end up with phone cases that have stock photos of a guy jerking off, an old man in a diaper, and a wall suction dildo. It’s a pretty similar phenomenon to people creating massive numbers of pages for every keyword permutation in the early days of Google — I imagine Amazon will have to make a lot of the same SEO fixes Google did to combat these kinds of products.
After I published my “no shampoo” article earlier this week, someone reached out and mentioned toothpaste as another good one to look at. It seems that fluoride might negatively impact sex hormones in both men and women, so I think I’m going to try making this DIY toothpaste from Mikhaila Peterson.
Stats on the distribution of Democrats and Republicans in academia are remarkably skewed towards Democrats, especially in liberal arts. Since tenure and PhDs are granted by other faculty members and leaders in a given field, I wonder how much of this is a positive reinforcement loop where one group of ideologies gets entrenched and then slowly starts decreasing the influence of competing idea sets. I imagine it would be almost impossible to publish something conservative leaning at Williams where the Democrat to Republican faculty ratio is 132:1.
There was a particularly interesting discussion on reddit this week about how to reconcile inconsistencies in the Bible while still believing in it. The conversations that evolved around that topic were fun to read, if you read them generously, it’s not hard to see how a “smart, rational person” could still believe in God and Christianity (or other religion).
Have a great week!
Nat