Favorites: Spinning Solar Sail, Stable Vows
HPV vaccine works wonders, Apple’s UI raises eyebrows, and monopolized FARS hardware inflates rents.
You can check out the whole thread (cached) for details, but once you see the photo, if you're familiar with those little spinny flags inside a vacuum, it should be comprehensible how this works. They keep it from drifting away from the sun by putting it in a spot where earth's gravity keeps it from floating away. And the idea is it spins up until it’s just about to rip itself apart.
You think that's bleak, look at demographic stats from the time, 40% of kids died before they were 5 years old. Here's the dril tweet.
There have been other examples of bad UI in the iOS 26 betas, but somehow this is the one that got to me. It’s really ugly looking. Here’s an example of unreadable selection states. Just look at this playback bar. Gruber quips that it’s like these designers don’t actually use the apps they’re working on. Marco Arment goes further: does Dye’s design team even use computers? He argues they should ship the iPhones 17 with last year’s OS, iOS 26 won’t be ready in time. Siracusa thinks everyone’s going to be sharing links about how to turn off this look after it goes live.
For a variety of reasons, the change probably isn't as drastic (cached) as this graph makes it look, the real transition has been agricultural work transitioning to service work (cached). To be clear, they’re not making less stuff, obviously they’re making far more, they’re just getting better at automation.
Flotsam and Jetsam
• Marriages in the United States are on a trajectory to be much more stable than previous decades. Divorce rates are almost as low as in the 1950s. No clear cause in the thread, but there are a lot of graphs. (src)(cached)
• The HPV vaccine is pretty much magical in how effective it's been at wiping out cervical cancer, a short thread. Did you know the guy who figured out the connection got a Nobel prize? (src)(cached)
• Thread with details about FARS, a fire safety mandate that's driving up apartment construction costs by $7k per unit despite the device very rarely being used in fires. It's controlled by a single monopoly, but also, if it doesn't actually reduce risk much, why are we doing it? There are much better things that can be done to improve safety for $7k per unit. (src)(cached)
• More progress in combining GLP-1 inhibitors with other drugs to ensure patients lose only fat, not muscle. This newest one from Eli Lilly looks like a winner in phase 2 trials. (src)(cached)
Longer Reads
– Article in nature: genetically edited mosquitoes with a self-replicating mutation that makes them incapable of transmiting malaria. Incredible. (src)(cached)
– Jerome Powell has done a great job in his time as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and now Trump is standing next to him while lying about cost overruns for building renovations at the Fed's headquarters. (src)(cached)
– Old soviet joke about central banks. I did a few minutes of research and I think this really does date back to the 80s, but I'm not certain. (src)(cached)
– NYC has added microphones to their cameras in order to ticket loud cars. Josh Barro would prefer the cars be destroyed, but this is a reasonable compromise. (src)(cached)
– Really great test prompt from Ethan Mollick, it amounts to “make a cool looking starship control panel in JavaScript”. He’s got examples from many different models along with historical versions of the query. (src)(cached)
– Should Psych 101 be a weeder class? Discussion of how things would be better if humanities courses actually failed people. Did you know math majors tended to have higher SAT scores for reading and writing than English majors? (src)(cached)
– Microsoft says to US congressmen “Don’t worry, we’re not required to comply with the PRC national security laws” but of course they say that, the law in question requires that they lie about colluding with the CCP. Ars Technica reports that Microsoft was using employees in china (cached) to manage US Military systems. Seems bad! (src)(cached)
– Tom Lehrer died at the age of 97. Here's one of my favorites of his songs: The Elements (src)(cached)