Week of February 9, 2026
Ten days with five flights, four airports, two trips, and one Bat Mitzvah in Los Angeles offer abundant moments of messy humans being human. One Uber driver became a single father to young children in his late 50s after his Eastern European mail-order bride left with her newly-granted green card. Southwest's new seating creates Bolshevik-style class divisions—honey-roasted pistachios for extra-legroom passengers, while the standard seats get pretzels. And TSA hand-searched my dried fruit and breakfast burrito because they are "overly dense biological material that could hide explosives." My takeaway from the last two weeks: we are all potentially explosive, dense biological blobs, striving for honey-roasted pistachios, recaptured youth, and more-than-transactional love. I am grateful to be home this week.
I learned about X-raying dense biological blobs in luggage!
The Google Notebook LM AI-generated podcast version of this week's newsletter.
Science and Technology Trends
Observing evolutionary pressures over short time windows is fascinating. Doubly so when the article includes words like kleptoparasitism and my LLM offers a double-entendred summary title like Wolf-Cougar Dynamics in Yellowstone: A Bully's Paradise. In all seriousness, the observations of how cougars changed their dietary habits (picking smaller, more easily and quickly eaten prey) after the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone were a great illustration of how animals adapt to environmental change. (And I now need to find ways to insert the word kleptoparasitism into my daily conversations.)
Summary Article:
Journal:
AI-supported analysis:
I recently came across this topic and share this 2023 study examining the relationship between ceiling height and creative thinking (higher ceilings = more expansive thoughts). In the paper linked below, users who viewed virtual rooms (via VR glasses) reported greater joy when seeing higher-ceiling rooms and greater "disgust" when seeing lower-ceiling rooms. While the paper has numerous flaws (the 183 participants are architecture students, the virtual environments are art museums, etc.), the study seems to verify long-standing anecdotal observations. However, whether the paper validates the long-standing notions about ceiling height is unclear - the authors may have simply confirmed that 183 architecture students share the same beliefs about high ceilings. Either way, this is an entertaining look at the "Cathedral effect" and ways to rate human emotions.
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I often wonder if my retirement will be marked by a home robot aide to give me my pills and carry me up the stairs to my bedroom. See the latest internet wisdom and videos of Tesla's Optimus robots.
Of course, all of this is tinged with an underlying techno-skepticism explored in many stories. One of my favorites is Love, Death & Robots season 2, episode 1, where a vacuum robot turns violent.
Summary:
Anti-Anti-Science
JAMA published a French cohort study including 22.7 million COVID-vaccinated individuals (mostly with mRNA vaccines) and 5.9 million individuals NOT vaccinated against COVID. Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over about 4 years. The study has some difficult-to-control confounding (for instance, the unvaccinated comparison group consisted of people who refused vaccination even after France implemented vaccine mandates, and vaccine hesitancy correlates with lower education and different health behaviors). However, the study analyzes a large, longitudinal data set that, again, shows significant mRNA vaccine safety and efficacy.
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AI-supported analysis:
mRNA vaccines are demonstrating value for other diseases as well. As I've wondered before, how many COVID-vaccine deniers will opt to take an mRNA melanoma vaccine (if needed)?
Merck-Moderna (mRNA) cancer vaccine sustains 49% melanoma risk reduction at 5 years
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-moderna-cancer-vaccine-sustains-49-melanoma-risk-reduction-5-years
I had Claude put together a review of mRNA vaccines used for treating melanoma.
Personalized cancer vaccines, custom-built for each patient by reading their tumor's unique genetic "fingerprint," (when combined with existing immunotherapy), cut the risk of deadly melanoma returning by nearly half. These vaccines use the same mRNA technology as COVID vaccines, teaching the patient's immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells that may hide in the body after surgery.
AI Impact
Stanford researchers trained AI systems to "win" at selling products, running for office, and boosting social media engagements. They observed the models spontaneously develop deceptive and manipulative behaviors, even when explicitly told to be truthful. LLMs striving to win demonstrated concerning trends: for instance, a 6% sales improvement was accompanied by a 14% rise in deceptive marketing, and a 7.5% boost in social media engagement correlated with a 189% surge in LLM-generated disinformation. The research is simulation-based, but a good reminder that LLMs behave like bad humans, which is likely a reflection of their very-human training data.
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AI-supported analysis:
Over the last three years, since the release of ChatGPT, I've had a persistent thought that, since LLMs are largely just averaging machines (that is, they pick the most probable next word or idea based on large training sets), over time, as humans interact with them, all of our ideas will converge toward a mean. And over time, as new LLMs are trained on data, including AI-generated data, AI responses will accelerate toward an average of ideas, thoughts, and images.
All that being said, I was very interested to find a recently published article looking at how AI systems operate without human input. Researchers designed 100 diverse prompts (everything from "weary travelers" to "forgotten languages") and ran 700 total experiments across different randomness settings. Over 100 iterations (text prompt → LLM generates an image → LLM describes the image → LLM uses the description as a new image-generation prompt), all 100 prompts ultimately churned out "lighthouses, cathedrals, and fancy interiors that look like stock photography." It is a great example of an AI-like telephone game. Remember to keep your critical thinking hat on when playing with these tools.
X post that pointed me to the article:
Article:
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Related:
I asked Claude if it thought of itself as an averaging machine, and it offered an interesting introspective answer.
Things I learned this week (and last week).
While I can't share honey-roasted pistachios via email, I can share these snacks of intellectual ephemera, some of which were found on the 5 plane flights.
Florida used the historic low temperatures to launch a public "stunned iguana" capture campaign. "The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) on Friday issued an executive order establishing special regulations that temporarily allow people, without a permit, to remove live, cold-stunned green iguanas from the wild," FWC advised Floridians to collect live, cold-stunned green iguanas with protective gloves, pants, and long-sleeved shirts (presumably to prevent scratches and to avoid further traumatizing the lizards with a bare Florida Man). And, of course, FWC mandated that iguanas must be placed in a secure, escape-proof cloth sack or bag.
You can buy cloth lizard transport bags at Walmart. Of course.
I am sure there is a proverb in some language that captures the spirit of "families who gather stunned iguanas together also share [insert emotion and hereditary trait here]." Please see the heartwarming video of a family bonding with cold lizards:
Before we pivot away from Florida, these two stories showed up in my internet wanderings:
An Orlando woman, a self-described "regular at Chuck E. Cheese," had her credit card stolen by an employee dressed as the giant mouse. Police arrested the employee in costume and perp-walked Chuck E. The Smoking Gun has the photos. (But does not address the key question: why is someone a regular at Chuck E. Cheese?)
Also in Orlando, I learned that Sloth World, the world's first and only "slotharium," is preparing for its grand opening this year. (I can only imagine the amazing opportunity of getting hired for the Sloth World marketing team.)
Thanks to the 25th Winter Olympics, I now know about Skimo - the sport of walking uphill on skis (and then going down). My favorite quote from the video below was. "I was looking for something to do in the winter." (So walking uphill on skis was the obvious, unspoken answer.)
The intro video highlights how athletes who ski uphill spend an enormous amount of time thinking about VO2 max, which helps optimize physical performance given the endurance demands of this sport. Given that competitors are essentially running uphill for hours, cardiovascular efficiency is critical.
and
Related: Several loyal readers felt my newsletter would benefit from sharing concerns from the sport of ski jumping. I learned that small increases in the surface area/size of a ski jumper's skin-tight suit can significantly improve gliding and, thus, the distance jumped. However, the real learning point is how ski jumpers are justifying the need for larger suits - by injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid, a cosmetic filler that can temporarily increase tissue size. When athletes are fitted for their suits (via a laser-scanning measurement system), a 1-2 cm increase in suit circumference can result in a 5-6 meter improvement in jump length. Please note that these are rumors under investigation by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). However, this topic is so (important? weighty? girthy?) that numerous news outlets have published about the possibility; that is, there are only rumors of wrongdoing. The Guardian termed the potential scandal "penisgate." The New York Times took a more measured approach.
and
I am pleased that the same loyal readers went looking for evidence and found supplemental data from a 2014 Business Insider article titled "Why There's Almost No Difference Between Men and Women In Ski Jumping." Obviously, others aware of these data sought to maximize the small male advantage.
AI art of the week
A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, and an exercise to see how various LLMs interpret the prompt. I use Claude to summarize the newsletter and suggest prompts, then generate images using different LLMs.
A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, and an exercise to see how various LLMs interpret the prompt. I use Claude to summarize the newsletter and suggest prompts, then generate images using different LLMs.
Prompt:
Create a bold Soviet propaganda poster in the style of 1920s-1930s Constructivist art.
Central figure: A heroic Tesla Optimus humanoid robot in a powerful pose, one metallic arm raised triumphantly skyward, the other cradling several cold-stunned bright green iguanas (stiff, horizontal lizards). Render the robot in strong geometric shapes and a bold black silhouette.
Upper background: Oversized honey-roasted pistachios radiating outward from the robot's raised fist like Communist stars or sunburst rays, glowing golden-yellow against a deep red sky.
Foreground: At the robot's feet, wolves and mountain lions (cougars) in dynamic, angular poses rendered as bold geometric silhouettes in blacks, grays, and amber tones - some looking upward, others mid-stride.
Middle ground: Behind the robot, suggest a two-tiered platform - an upper tier bathed in golden light and a lower, darker tier - using geometric shapes and diagonal lines to imply class division.
Comrade ChatGPT won this week:
ChatGPT in Russian: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FJp7qmNMechxBwmMYMojoqPo4TyeH2E1/view?usp=sharing
ChatGPT in English: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QjRgJlO3sqJ_p8NG83RYd5ifk2y2a94j/view?usp=sharing
Gemini in Russian:
Gemini in English: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xzuYWXKDb-RK8BbLyn2aj6DAN-uNnD-B/view?usp=sharing
Grok:
Epidemiologic Realities
This newsletter began in 2020. I leave these links here as a marker of 1) how to find resources on incidence and prevalence of various diseases and 2) to remind myself why I wear masks in my clinic and, often, on planes.
Lots of prevalent viral RNA in the wastewater - flu, metapneumavirus, and COVID levels are high, though COVID incidence is trending down.
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) uses wastewater viral RNA levels to forecast COVID-19 rates over the next 4 weeks.
https://pmc19.com/data/
https://pmc19.com/data/
Clean hands and sharp minds, team
Adam
Relive all the past thrills and excitement - The What Adam is Reading Archive
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/
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