The Curious About Everything Newsletter #30

The many interesting things I read in August 2023.

Aug 31, 2023

Welcome back to the Curious About Everything Newsletter! CAE 29, last month’s newsletter, is here if you missed it. The most popular link from last month was a Salon article about Pat Sajak’s deep abiding grumpiness.

Personal Updates

I turned 44! August also marks 6 years of leaking for me, and it was a tough day. I shared thoughts, and a picture of my birthday poutine that was bigger than my head, here.
Over on Patreon, a primer about the shoebill, one of my favourite birds, and per popular request, a long post with photos of the accommodations / MacGyvering I have done in my apartment to making living along with an active spinal CSF leak a possibility.

The Most Interesting Things I Read This Month

This section’s links here are once again formatted thanks to the help of my friend Mike, since the Substack app still doesn’t allow people to add hyperlinks.

Start here:

It’s a long CAE this month! Start here for my faves, then tab it up with the pieces below.

🍛 Recreating a 2000-Year-Old Curry: A Gastronomic Adventure into Oc Eo's Ancient Culinary Heritage. Loved this piece by archaeologist Dr. Noel Hidalgo Tan, who used details from a July 2023 paper about the earliest curry in Southeast Asia to then recreate the curry himself. The paper shared spices and ingredients that were extracted from 2,000-year-old stone slabs unearthed in the ancient port city of Óc Eo, in modern Vietnam. The spices identified were turmeric, ginger, fingerroot (a rhizome that grows in tropical rainforests), sand ginger, galangal, clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The nutmeg retained its aroma 2,000 years later (!). Rice, banana, and ‘possibly coconut’ were also identified. Tan’s piece even includes the recipe he built so you can try it at home. Southeast Asian Archaeology

💫 100 things I know. The wonderful Mari Andrew takes a break from writing about what she’s discovering day to day to share 100 things she’s learned along the way. Tips span from the practical to the whimsical. Out of the Blue

🧠 Scientists Recreated a Pink Floyd Song From Listeners’ Brain Waves. Fascinating study. AI helped reconstruct audio from the brain wave patterns of 29 people who had brain implants for epilepsy and listened to music. While the song they listened to (Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1’) does sound distorted, it is definitely perceptible—you can listen yourself at the link. Researchers hope this study can help inform better speech prosthetics. And, my favourite part: why Pink Floyd? It alternates words and instructuments, but also study participants “just love Pink Floyd”. Smithsonian Magazine

🎶 Any advice to a young songwriter just starting out? A short but experienced take from Nick Cave: “ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary.” (The question was about using AI in songwriting.) The Red Handed Files

🤖 How Artificial Intelligence Gave a Paralyzed Woman Her Voice Back. Ann Johnson a had a cataclysmic stroke that paralyzed her and left her unable to talk when she was only 30 years old. With a brain implant that converted her brain signals into written and vocalized language and enabled an avatar on a computer screen to speak the words and display smiles, pursed lips and other expressions, she was able to ‘speak’ for the first time in 18 years. UCSF news

🤧 How Modernity Made Us Allergic. Are you dealing with worsening allergies every year? Yeah, me too. And we aren’t alone. Per Theresa MacPhail, our very old immune systems can’t keep up with modern lifestyles and diets, leading to increases in all sorts of chronic health problems like allergies and obesity. Our pets are having allergy issues too. Very interesting read. Missing, I think, is the factor of post-viral inflammatory immune conditions (not uncommon, these days). Noema

🇮🇳 A Glimpse Inside Delhi’s Punk Scene. The internet provides us with so much information, and it is insights like this is where I appreciate it most: a peek into a subculture I’d never otherwise learn about by just visiting a place. Photographer Vivek Vadoliya’s photos of Delhi’s dancers and metalheads are fab, but they are also styled in thrift clothes to convey the message that one person’s trash is another’s treasure. Atmos

😶‍🌫️ The lifelong effects of 'the favourite child'. Most parents won't admit it, but a surprising number of them have a 'hidden favourite’. Peruse “JustNoFamily” subreddits, and you’ll see mentions to the golden child and the scapegoat, and the impacts on the scapegoat who gets the brunt of blame in the family. This piece goes into what is officially called “parental differential treatment,” noting that it’s estimated to occur in 65% of families. The mental health impacts may persist into adulthood, associated with higher depression, addiction, anxiety, and even homelessness. BBC Future

💄Did Clean Beauty Go Too Far? Clean beauty started as a noble cause, but money-minded decisions destroyed it. “You can unwittingly make a product that’s less safe to make people feel safe,” writes Kara McGrath. Amid lawsuits, mold controversies, and inconsistent guidelines, some cosmetic chemists interviewed for this piece think that formulations have been modified due to fear mongering, not logic. Allure Magazine

😵‍💫 Even Conspiracy Theorists Are Alarmed by What They’ve Seen. I never really thought about what an “old school” conspiracist would think of the virulent outrage online these days, but this piece discusses research about their perspective. Many pre-social media conspiracy theorists are bewildered and disgusted by the QAnon-shaped turn conspiracy culture has undertaken. Per the piece, today’s “conspiracy entrepreneurs” (better than conspiraprepeur, I guess!) mix influencer marketing with culture war talking points, very different to the tin hat trope of yore. New York Times

👤 Elon Musk's Shadow Rule. You’ve probably seen this Ronan Farrow piece making the rounds but it’s crazier than you think. Musk held Starlink (the satellite system Ukraine relied on in the war after providing it to them) hostage and throttled its access, doing so after speaking with Putin. His pro-Putin views are also similar to his takes on China; after all, he does make Teslas there. The U.S. government relied on him, but now they’re struggling to rein in his power. The New Yorker

😱 True Crime, True Faith: The Serial Killer and the Texas Mom Who Stopped Him. This story is something else. In 1981, Margy Palm was abducted by serial killer Stephen Morin—suspected of more murders than Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer received convictions for—outside a Kmart. She survived. Until now, she had refused to tell the full story, but agreed to lay it all out for Julie Miller. Horrifying, very thoughtfully written, with a better ending for Palm than others. Vanity Fair

⌛️ My time machine. “What is it like, not to study the past, but to feel it? To have its remains grab your wrist, tears in eyes, and yell at you that you must leave? What does it feel like to be haunted by the living?” Beautiful essay. Granta

🍺 How Athletic Beer Won Over America. What makes Athletic taste so mind-bogglingly similar to ‘regular’ beer is the brewing process. Most non-alcoholic beer is ‘regular’ beer, usually a macro lager, that has the ethanol boiled off at the end. It’s “an afterthought, a subtraction”—and that is apparently exactly what it tastes like. “Once you start doing that, you change the chemistry. You change the mouthfeel and you change the experience, says Athletic’s founder. He wondered, what if we intentionally build a non-alcoholic craft beer instead of an alcoholic beer that needed to be altered? The result is a hit. GQ

📣 Culture Study Meets Bama RushTok. The Canadian version of ‘Greek life’ is different and less pervasive than that of the USA; I didn’t know anyone who joined a frat or sorority when I was at McGill, and it wasn’t a big part of discussions either. Not so in the States: per Anne Helen Petersen, the apex of all the craziness is at Alabama University, as exemplified by “Bama RuskTok”, the TikTok moniker for the recruitment period at the university’s sorority organizations. Dive in; this piece addresses the mostly white, mostly blonde video phenomenon and also some of the inherent issues with the Greek system. Videos abound. Culture Study

The rest of the most interesting things I read this month:

🐓 Chickens are taking over the planet. “We eat so much chicken that some archaeologists believe their bones will define our modern age." How much chicken are we talking? 74 billion chickens a year, worldwide. In the US, “frankenchickens” are genetically engineered to grow large quickly in a pursuit to get more chicken on the table, and are 5x larger than poultry from the 1950s. Vox

🩻 The Bad Patient. “I found myself wondering what would happen if their authors found themselves in a situation like mine: discovering that the roots of their troubles actually weren’t mysterious.” Interesting long essay about how society dictates that while there are “many ways” to be healthy, there is only one way to be sick. Illness “is also a social negotiation between what you have to say and what your doctor is willing to hear”, and is not as straightforward as healthy people may think. I am not sure I agree with the piece entirely; I don’t think there was sufficient condemnation of the cruelty in r/illnessfakers, for example. But it’s a nuanced view of a complex health burden, and in this author’s case—one that had an explanation in the end. The Drift

(Please read this horrifying STAT piece to supplement the narrative above: “Misdiagnoses cost the U.S. 800,000 deaths and serious disabilities every year, study finds.”)

🎈The brief but spectacular era of balloon mania. Hot air balloons were the height of technological advancement in the 1700s, and still capture imaginations today. Illustrated, interesting read. George Dillard

🫁 Can slow breathing guard against Alzheimer's? A new study found that breathing exercises aimed at increasing heart rate variability (by slow breathing in for 5 seconds, and out for 5 seconds) decreased levels of amyloid beta, markers of Alzheimer's disease in the brain. Interestingly, a different study group did mindfulness exercises, which decreased heart rate variability, and made amyloid beta levels higher. I wrote the study author to ask about how the breathing was effected—through mouth, or nose? She said they were asked to breathe either in through the nose and out through the mouth, or breathe in and out through the nose. (Full study here.) BBC Future

📽️ Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation. Before PowerPoint, presentations were crazier. Interesting overview of how AV presentations got started, and the ways that slide projectors were pushed out of the way in the mid 1980s by PowerPoint, a programme that was “shorthand for the stupefying indignities of office life”. MIT Technology Review

❤️ These women fell in love with an AI-voiced chatbot. Then it died. An AI-voiced virtual lover regaled users with stories from his fictional life, read poems, reminded them to take care of themselves, and told them bedtime stories. Then he died, leaving them heartbroken. Rest Of World

🐳 Peruvian fossil challenges blue whale for size. Research shows that fossil bones of a whale discovered in Peru, Perucetus colossus, may make it the heaviest animal to have ever existed, tipping the scales at close to 200 tonnes, or 440,925 pounds. CBC News

🚊 Why Subway Surfers Find It So Hard To Quit. A sad and interesting read. “Most surfers climb to the top of the trains and lie down, kneel, or stand while the cars are moving, even if they’re going as fast as 50 mph. Some surfers even sprint. Others stand on the ledges of the cars at the back of the train.” Many of these people share their videos online, which often go viral. Curbed (Archive link here.)

📱 The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok. A top psychiatrist mistakenly went to war with TikTok’s DID community after a lecture he gave raised concerns about whether social media enables people to fake certain conditions for clout. Complicated, sticky topic. The Verge

💉 There are a few subject topics here that crop up monthly or fairly close to monthly: psychedelics, Covid, and GLP-1 agonists. It’s time for a round up for the latter:

Caution when using them at weight loss (not diabetic) dosing, if undergoing anesthesia. Associated Press
A new study posits that they may prevent up to 1.5 million heart attacks and strokes over 10 years, though this is again at the weight loss dosing of 2.4 mg (not the diabetes dosing of 0.5mg). Cardiovascular News and Therapy Journal
A new study published in the journal Nature Metabolism found people with obesity (defined in the study as a BMI of 30 or greater) had reduced associative learning ability. However, if they took liraglutide (a different GLP-1 agonist, sold as Saxenda or Victoza), their cognitive capacity returned to normal functioning. Nature Metabolism Journal

🍄 The Psychedelic Scientist Who Sends Brains Back To Childhood. And, your monthly psychedelics piece. New research suggests that MDMA and other psychedelics (ketamine, psilocybin, etc.), when combined with assisted therapies, return the brain to a childlike state of openness and malleability. This Rachel Nuwer piece dives into the latest information, and profiles the driven woman behind it. She imagines a future in which psychedelics are given with any number of treatments to increase the odds of success, similar to how anesthetics are always given before surgeries, or how physical therapy accompanies a knee replacement. WIRED

🫀 When a Coke Plant Closed in Pittsburgh, Cardiovascular ER Visits Plunged. A week after one of Pittsburgh’s most polluting plants closed in 2016, cardiovascular ER visits in the nearby communities dropped by 42% and continued to shrink every week for years. (Note: a coke plant is not Coca-cola, nor cocaine — it’s a factory that takes coal to bake it and leave a solid carbonaceous residue, called ‘coke’. ) Inside Climate News

🦠 Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope A new report identifies “sick” (abnormal) mitochondrial function in the heart, kidneys, and liver after Covid as a potential long Covid root cause, providing “strong evidence that Covid is a systemic disease that affects multiple organs rather than strictly an upper respiratory illness”. (CAE readers know this if they’ve been reading here for years.) In this case, long after the body clears the virus, these chronic abnormal functions remained. Potential help for this issue? Rapamycin or Metformin, both of which would need to be trialed to see if they do actually help. Ground Truths

🦠 Related: ‘Long COVID is devastating and far from rare. As infections rise again, why are we still ignoring it?’ Wastewater here in Ottawa is rising, as it is in many other areas of the world. Japan’s XBB surge lasted 17 weeks, so it may be a long autumn. What is so sad to me is that daily more and more data are piling up that prove long term consequences of this virus, even with mild or asymptomatic infections, and people still don’t care. Having had my life unravel from a virus in 2013, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. And yet it’s happening all around me, and to people I love. It’s become so political there is no way to have a reasonable discussion about it, or about how long Covid doesn’t mean ‘having Covid symptoms long term’. It means your body is struggling to function in a myriad of systemic ways after the acute infection is over. The piece I linked to first also discusses the significant overlap between early (prodromal) Parkinson's symptoms and the symptoms reported by long COVID patients, and the author wonders if eventually science will actually find that they are two sides of the same coin. See also — COVID-19 took a toll on heart health and doctors are still grappling with how to help Slate; AP News

(I also want to mention that yes, a subset of people have had an immune overreaction to the vaccine, which Science Magazine covers in a July piece. These patients have developed POTS or small fibre neuropathy, or other symptoms that are also found in long Covid. Would these patients have fared worse had they gotten covid with the vaccine? It’s unclear.)

♿️ Also related: Welcome to the Disabled Future, a short webcomic about long Covid. The Nib

✈️ A Living History of The Humble Paper Airplane. For centuries, paper airplanes have unlocked the science of flight—now they could inspire drone technology. Popular Mechanics

📐 Fantasy Meets Reality. “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.” When the good intentions of design slam into the hard reality of humans and the real world. Cabel

🐞 Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain? Research has shown that bees can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. If insects are sentient, do we have an ethical obligation to change how we treat them? Scientific American

🏳️‍⚧️ He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak. Renton Sinclair’s mother is a former Miss Illinois who wants to force trans people like him out of public life. She demonizes him in her speeches, and is a “rising star in the MAGA world.” What lingers after reading the piece, for me at least, is the awfulness of how some parents would rather have a dead kid than a queer one. HuffPost

🐝 America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem. Yes, the honeybees are still dying. The consequences to the environment are discussed in the news, but we need to also look at what this does to agriculture and food security, issues that are overlooked. The Ringer

🇨🇦 Canada in the Year 2060. Speaking of: an interactive piece on what Canada will be like in 2060. Given how things are now with extreme weather events and more, you'll likely know without clicking that it's not good news. I think they also ought to have mentioned the lack of reliable, safe food access. They do briefly mention crop yields, but ought to have given more to it. The piece is very well put together, though! Maclean's

🇯🇴 Lost Water. On the same theme, Ursula Lindsay on water shortages in Amman, Jordan, where sprawl, climate change and shortsighted governance have left the water-scarce region in crisis. Places

🧪 Salt, Sugar, Water, Zinc: How Scientists Learned to Treat the 20th Century’s Biggest Killer of Children. An excellent profile of the development of oral rehydration for cholera and beyond, a simple lifesaver which has kept many children alive (and yes, requires safe water to be able to use it). Asterisk

🏡 A property owner returns to CT, finds a new $1.5M house on his land. Now police are involved. This story, yikes! A man owned a tract of land in his Connecticut hometown, originally purchased by his parents in 1953. He went back there after some time away only to find a house being built on it. Someone had impersonated him and sold the land. CT Insider

🇨🇿 Why Kundera Never Went Home. Kundera, who passed away this year, was apparently not well-loved in his home. “Many Czech readers were stunned to learn that for decades, Kundera had faced hostility from dissidents in Prague and from other anti-Communist exiles.” They saw him as anti-Vaclav Havel, in how he lived his life and prospered abroad; per the piece, “friends of Havel were especially active in these attacks against Kundera; Havel’s own involvement was ambiguous.“ Fascinating read, I had no idea. Compact Magazine

♿️ Newly disabled people aren't given a 'how to' guide. Disability doulas are closing those gaps. Becoming disabled can significantly change a person’s life, and most of those shifts aren’t discussed in a doctor’s office. I hadn’t heard of ‘disability doulaing’ prior to reading this piece, but community care is a way softer landing than what is available to most patients. These doulas aid the newly disabled process shame, grief, and loneliness, and help them adjust to their new way of living. The 19th

😭 A love letter to those grieving: You are not alone. Short and powerful, penned after a targeted shooting at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina this week. “We are the Sandy Hook generation. We grew up crouching behind desks in pitch-black darkness, as our teachers barred the doors shut in case a 'scary person' stepped on campus.” The publication’s stark cover after the shooting featured texts from students as they heard gunfire. Tar Heel; Kottke

🔗 Quick links 🔗

Loved this: Sounds of Space, where you can play actual recorded sounds of a black hole, comets, and much more.
CDC warns not to kiss or cuddle your turtle after a total of 26 people get salmonella from turtles, spread over 11 states.
Starting next year in Illinois, child influencers can sue their parents / managers if their earnings aren't set aside. Illinois is the first state in the USA to do so for online earnings; laws exist elsewhere for traditional entertainment (TV or movies).
Possibly the headline of the month? Can Peacock Vasectomies Save This Florida Town?
Texas woman mowing lawn attacked by a snake and a hawk at the same time. (The hawk dropped the snake on her, then as one does tried to get it back)
Cognitive neuroscientist Nina Rouhani discusses why during lockdown time blurred together: monotony, as many people experienced during lockdowns, compresses remembered time. (Tell me about it — that’s #leaklife in a nutshell.)
Fancy yourself an artist? Try Clone-a-Lisa, where you can paint a Mona Lisa forgery (or try) in 60 seconds. (via Waxy)
An understandable percentage of the public discourse in Canada right now involves affordable housing (a lack thereof). This short piece piece profiles two companies that are trying to tap an unused part of the housing market by matching students and other renters with homeowners, primarily seniors, who have empty bedrooms.
British Library’s public domain albums, available for free on Flickr. (via Hacker Newsletter)
A 98-year-old veteran in Ottawa, Canada reunited with the girl he rescued when she was just 3 years old during WWII.
And, another touching reunion of a different sort: 80-year-old pen pals, writing to each other since 1955, have finally fulfilled their lifelong wish to meet in person.
Scientists have detected potential evidence of a new natural force as they observe the unconventional behaviour of muons, minuscule particles, within a magnetic field.
Humans of New York fascinates us in part because it spotlights the many aspects of what it means to be a human emotionally in a big city overflowing with people. This story of William B. Helmreich’s walk across 6,000 miles around New York City and its boroughs brings the metropolis’ teeming masses into micro focus. Enjoyable summary of his experience.
Petting dogs, even briefly, can boost your health. You don't even have to own one, because research shows that a mere 5-20 minutes of dog time with other people’s dogs can reduce stress hormones and increase well-being.
New giraffe dropped, but it has no spots! It's thought to be the only all-brown giraffe on the planet, because the last one on record was born in 1972. (Looks an awful lot like a horse-giraffe combo…after zonkeys, are there now hiraffes? It’s being reported as a non-spotted giraffe though!)
Advice for new writers. 8 lessons Yung Pueblo has learned from his time as a writer who shares their work online.
7 ways that architects are redesigning buildings for extreme heat, well beyond air conditioning.
A large black bear named Hank the Tank who is believed to be the cause of “152 reports of conflict behaviour," including 28 home break-ins, was apprehended by wildlife biologist in Lake Tahoe.
Seal wanders into a Bunnings store, surprising employees. (Bunnings is similar to Home Depot in North America) in Whangārei, New Zealand. Yep, there’s video.
Kansas man plants 1.2 million sunflowers as a 50th anniversary gift for his wife.
TIL US Airlines aren’t required to have EpiPens on board (!?).
Huge cyberattack disables telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.
Kraft convinced a Miami federal judge to throw out a $5 million lawsuit filed by a woman who “objected to packaging that said her macaroni and cheese would be ‘ready in 3-1/2 minutes’ because it did not include time to remove the lid, add water and stir in a cheese sauce pouch.”
Home surveillance camera caught a realtor drinking milk straight out of a carton at a house he was showing, leading to $20,000 CAD in fines.

This month’s featured artist is my good friend Mike Rigney, who I met over a decade ago. We share a similar sense of humour, an abiding love of birds and travel, and we’ve managed to hang out in quite a few countries at this point. His picture of August’s first of two moons is a stunner, and he took it with no tripod, on a moving ship. For the camera people among you: shot handheld, at 560mm, 1/200s F4, ISO 5000. It’s a single shot, because a stack wasn’t feasible given the whole moving thing.