Week of May 19, 2025
Our kids came home from college last week. Among the many stories, a recent dinner conversation turned into a compare and contrast of nudity-related events on each son's campus. Our younger son's school features a naked donut run at the end of each semester. The event celebrates "freedom, body positivity, and spontaneity" through nude students delivering donut holes to their fellow students preparing for finals. Our older son's school has fewer organized "naked events." However, he noted that his campus improv comedy group made a naked spaghetti western video in which students removed clothing to the theme song from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - a decidedly more judgy commentary on body positivity, to be sure.
Naked donut run:
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2022/10/its-so-brown-nudity-controversy-body-positivity-on-campus
and
donut vs. doughnut
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/donut-doughnut/
P.S. I am traveling for the next two weekends. The next issue of the newsletter will be June 9.
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No podcast version this week.
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Science and Technology Trends
Some astounding gene editing news published last week: "Baby Is Healed [from a lethal genetic mutation] With World's First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment [developed specifically for the baby in the 6 months after birth]." Real "bespoke" gene editing in a real human in 2025.
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/15/health/gene-editing-personalized-rare-disorders.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H08.m30o.W52aFGgpJbyM&smid=url-share
and
New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2504747
and
Summary of NEJM article
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b180fd65-876b-482b-a4eb-2411d20704d6
Researchers at Columbia University examined if kissing can transfer gluten in couples where one partner has Celiac disease, and the other does not. Observations included: 1) There is some, but minimal, gluten transfer via kissing (after the non-celiac partner consumes gluten). 2) The amounts are small and likely clinically insignificant. 3) Drinking water after eating gluten-containing food reduces the amount of gluten transfer when kissing.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/can-sharing-kiss-lead-gluten-transfer-2025a1000ass
Anti- Anti-Science Articles of Note
Over the last week, I read several discussions about combined, complex logical fallacies permeating the science media:
- Representatives from government scientific agencies either overtly or implicitly state false information in media outlets (argument from authority).
- Media outlets do not rigorously challenge or fact-check government officials. (This fallacy is implied truth through framing - i.e., "if it is on TV, it must be true").
- Presenting opposing views on an issue as balanced or equal, even when one of the views is false (false equivalency).
- Arguing a claim is true since it hasn't been proven false (appeal to ignorance).
Here are some of the better examples:
- Revisionist History Podcast: The RFK Problem, in which fact-checking the data in RFK's book demonstrates numerous unchecked inaccuracies and biases. https://spotify.link/j2m7DF9JqTb
- Revisionist History Podcast: where Malcolm Gladwell analyzes Joe Rogan's interview style, demonstrating Rogan is a willfully uncritical interviewer, thereby lending legitimacy to his guest's assertions, even when they are misrepresenting facts. https://spotify.link/XytNHN8JqTb
- A 30-second Instagram reel demonstrating what fact-checking misrepresented science looks like: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DH4YY03BBLc/
- How fallacies (such as appeal to authority, framing, and appeal to ignorance) play out in non-entertainment media: "Earlier this month, an apparent policy change appeared in a statement to the Washington Post in which an HHS spokesperson told the paper that "All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials before licensure -- a radical departure from past practices." The statement confused [health] experts who said that vaccines aimed at new pathogens have always been tested this way." from https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/115588 original article: https://wapo.st/4dn42Ni
Living with AI
Clay Shirky, vice provost for AI and technology in education at New York University, describes how AI tools have fundamentally disrupted education by decoupling the connection between student learning and academic output.
https://smry.ai/https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-ai-enhancing-education-or-replacing-it
and AI Summary of the editorial
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/488d401c-de44-4282-8a6f-e52ae4d0297d
Related: How to construct "AI Resistant" assignments. https://nmu.edu/ctl/creating-ai-resistant-assignments-activities-and-assessments-designing-out
Meta supports a robust AI research program, and scrolling through their publications offers a fascinating snapshot of how foundational AI functionality is evolving, from computer vision to training conversational LLMs and ensuring AI agents are secure.
https://ai.meta.com/results/?amp%3Bsort_by=most_recent&content_types%5B0%5D=publication
One example that caught my attention is this paper on novel AI models for interpreting fMRI data (re-generating images from functional MRI pictures of brain blood flow). I did not realize the current challenges in this space and how new models may improve the speed and accuracy of generating images.
https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/dynadiff-single-stage-decoding-of-images-from-continuously-evolving-fmri/
Don't forget to use your LLM to summarize and evaluate the research:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4bf5cb6e-3c6d-4017-82a5-f8178a1512aa
Infographics
Scriptwriters so often kill off the characters played by actor Sean Bean (Ned Stark, Boromir, and many other roles) that infographics and on-screen death rate calculations (1 Sean Bean death for every 1.24 years of his career between 1986 and 2015) tabulate Bean's unusual casting patterns.
https://deadlyspoiler.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sean-bean-image.png
from
https://deadlyspoiler.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/the-death-of-eddard-stark-as-a-narrative-special-effect/
Things I learned this week
The "Talking Tree" project uses environmental sensors and AI to allow people to converse with a 200-year-old London Plane tree at Trinity College Dublin. The technology collects data on the tree's bioelectrical signals, soil conditions, air quality, and environmental factors and then uses AI to translate this information into understandable human language. You need to watch the video. On the one hand, this is cool - especially the James Cameron/Avatar-style goal of seeing if one can read the "network" signals of trees. On the other hand, giving the tree an Irish accent amuses me. It tracks that all trees have an Irish accent, right?
https://www.rte.ie/news/2025/0418/1508163-talking-tree-project-dublin/
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr381wq09lc
For those of us who grew up in the 80s with a love of large, component-based stereos and multi-speaker surround sound setups, the Jekcklin Float Headphones (head speakers, really) engender desire and a bit of tech awe. The same headphones elicit a strong "WTF?!!?" from my kids' generation. You can buy a pair on eBay.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/jecklin-float-electrostatic-headphones
and
https://www.jecklin-float.com/index.php/en/jecklin-float-models/jecklin-float-the-original-float
and
https://www.ebay.com/itm/167320242836
AI art of the week
(A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, now using ChatGPT to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and make the images).
The LLMs got hung up on naked college students, so I had to generate ideas this week.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Iuz9Rlh90nWD0OoqtXi6y6-k8fpFiY-F/view
"Create a vibrant Pop Art illustration in the style of Andy Warhol, featuring a four-panel grid (2x2 layout). In each panel, depict the same woman with short dark blue hair and sunglasses, smiling and wearing large donut-shaped headphones. Above her head in each panel, include a stylized cartoon tree emitting signal waves toward the headphones, symbolizing whimsical AI communication from nature. Each panel should have a bold, contrasting background color (yellow, pink, green, and blue). Use halftone textures, thick black outlines, and high-contrast coloring typical of classic pop art."
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COVID rates were down to 1 in 206 people in the U.S. last week, the lowest since 2023.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
Relive all the thrills and excitement - The What Adam is Reading Archive
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/
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