Week of February 23,2026
My online fitness program gives me a per-workout rank that factors in weight, reps, and intensity. My Audible, X, meditation, and credit monitoring apps all provide metrics on logins, clicks, listens, and streaks. On a recent flight home (during the 30 minutes of laptop-free time near landing, completing another leg toward my next airline tier), I was struck by the sheer ubiquity of data colonizing my life. Somewhere along the way, I became a precisely ranked competitor in contests I never signed up for, pitted against strangers I have no reason to trust. All of this leaves me wondering:
Who are my fellow denominators?
Are they upright citizens, or do they achieve numerator status by gaming the stats?
At least I am not alone; a Wall Street Journal piece last week discussed "sleep shaming" and the new social dynamics of judging people for their sleep performance metrics. At least my yearly Spotify Wrapped is visible only to me and confirms I've been listening to the same 90's alt rock since college.
Administrative things:
- Over the next two weekends, we will be visiting our son, who is studying abroad. Updates may be sporadic.
- I am aware that links to external resources (such as Claude summaries) may be blocked. If you want me to send the newsletter to an alternate email address, let me know.
The Google Notebook LM AI-generated podcast version of this week's newsletter.
Science and Technology Trends
Several loyal readers sent this Science article discussing research from Stanford in which an intranasal vaccine protected mice against a wide range of respiratory illnesses (SARS-CoV-2, bacteria, and allergens) for at least 3 months. The protection works by persistent T cells "training" lung macrophages to respond faster and more effectively to future infections, hinting at a "universal vaccine" that doesn't rely on matching specific pathogen proteins. "The new vaccine doesn't try to mimic any part of a pathogen; instead, it mimics the signals that immune cells use to communicate with each other during an infection. This novel strategy integrates the two branches of immunity — innate and adaptive — creating a feedback loop that sustains a broad immune response."
This is neither an mRNA nor a protein vaccine, but rather a biochemical signaling molecule. It demonstrates how much more we have to learn about biology.
Journal article: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260
Stanford news release: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/02/universal-vaccine.html
AI-supported analysis: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/442ed616-b6dd-4fdb-93fd-c7fc19339d63
The "f" and "v" sounds (labiodental frictive consonants) became much easier for homosapiens to pronounce about 4000 years ago, as our ancestors' diets shifted to a softer, cooked omnivorous diet. Over time, the broader, domesticated diet of farming societies selected for individuals with smaller lower jaws, giving adults an overbite more typical of children. This overbite comes with trade-offs (shorter lower jaws contributes to impacted wisdom teeth, more teeth crowding, and a higher likelihood of cavities) and the ability to more easily pronounce v's and f's, including the F-word, the most versatile word in the English language. I, for one, am f'ing grateful that we are no longer hunter-gatherers. Bread and F-words are both gifts.
Article about the article:
Research article:
An f-word-filled AI-supported analysis:
The late 20th-century philosopher George Carlin on the F word:
A recent BMJ editorial discusses that many people taking GLP-1s (Ozempic, Wegovy) live in relative food deserts. Thus, a portion of GLP1 users may be malnourished if their appetites are suppressed and they can only access high-carbohydrate, low-nutrient foods.
This topic came to my attention from a loyal reader, who sent me an article from People Magazine (which I have always thought would make a better title for a medical journal than for a celebrity fluff piece). People's article is overly anchored on the possible re-emergence of scurvy (the vitamin C deficiency disease most commonly associated with 18th-century sailors). However, I note the editorial speaks more broadly about nutritional deficiencies and does not perseverate on actual scurvy.
The editorial that sparked the GLP-1 scurvy scare:
AI-supported analysis:
Related: very loyal readers may recall the Things I Learned article from July 2023 on the history of Dr. James Lind, who conducted the first multi-arm, placebo-controlled clinical trial in the 1750s and discovered that limes cured scurvy. The resulting British Navy's citrus ration is the reason British sailors were called limeys.
Anti-Anti-Science
Some thoughts take time to mature, and the FDA/Moderna battle over the mRNA flu vaccine is a great example of evolving nuance. Dr. Anish Koka is a private practice cardiologist from Philadelphia who is very active on social media but consistently posts anti-pharma comments. His Substack dissects the FDA's initial refusal to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine (a decision reversed last week; it will now move forward) and is a great example of how genuinely complex these issues are.
The pharma approval process is expensive, complicated, and clearly subject to gaming. Koka's core point is striking: Moderna compared its new mRNA vaccine not against the stronger flu shots that are actually recommended for older adults, but against the weaker standard option. Compared to the standard dose flu vaccine, Moderna's vaccine produced four times the side-effect burden: 200 per 1,000 reporting flu-like symptoms (versus 50 for the standard flu vaccine); 20 per 1,000 with activity-limiting reactions (versus 5 for the standard flu vaccine). Koka writes, "That's four times the side effect burden for essentially the same efficacy — meaning a meaningful minority of recipients experienced something that looked a lot like the illness the vaccine was supposed to prevent."
When legitimate scientific concerns get weaponized by anti-vaccine and anti-mRNA advocates, we lose the ability to have honest conversations. Koka's data points are real, but he feels like an epistemic purist, leaning toward "letting perfect be the enemy of good." And comments like his are used by people with an outsized, bad-faith voice at the table. The result is chaos: legitimate side-effect signals become anti-vax ammunition, and everyone loses the ability to reason in good faith about vaccine tradeoffs.
Koka's Substack is worth the read as an opinion piece. Make sure to read the comments, with many valid counterarguments. I've also linked an AI-assisted breakdown that summarizes his arguments alongside their limitations.
AI-assisted Analysis: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/bfdb9ee8-9ea6-4313-948b-98af4f99376a
Last week, the President placed phosphate and glyphosate (the active ingredient in commercial weed killers) under the Defense Production Act, shielding manufacturers from lawsuits and court orders. After RFK Jr. endorsed this action, MAHA supporters (the same people who've spent years demanding cleaner food and less chemical exposure) found themselves awkwardly aligned with the environmental left in opposing a decision made by an administration they largely support. Politics, as always, makes strange bedfellows. Someone needs to greenlight this as a reality show: TradWives and Hippie Chicks Road Trip.
The underlying science here is unsettled, but high-quality data demonstrates an increasingly strong association between glyphosate exposure and illness in both animals and humans. The legitimate policy questions, how to balance industrial, military, and economic needs against environmental and health impact, deserve more time and space. This executive immunity forecloses that debate.
Kaiser Family Foundation Health News summary of sources about the story:
Review of and list of studies of glyphosate impact on animal and human health:
Shakespeare variations and the origin of the quote "politics makes strange bedfellows."
AI Impact
AI Agents can now be underwritten for "malpractice" resulting in business disruption or loss. Eleven Labs, maker of call center and related voice agents, announced their use of the AI Underwriting Company (AIUC). "AIUC-1 certification was built to address the AI risks that keep enterprises from deploying agents at scale - hallucinations, unauthorized actions, data leakage, security vulnerabilities. It is grounded in technical testing and requires a guardrail to prevent real-world incidents. Leading insurers are so confident in this certification-based approach that they're offering AI-specific financial coverage to those who earn it. Eleven Labs is the first company to prove this model works at scale." Insurability is an interesting reflection of perceived value. Indemnifying AI seems lucrative - like selling jeans and pickaxes to the gold miners in 1840s California.
and
Wired covered the emerging gig-economy of agents who need embodied humans to complete tasks in the real world. "On February 1, the paradigm shifted: AI bots are creating jobs. Now, 518,284 humans are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman. There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do." I checked - there are no rentable people in my area for the moment.
and
Attention toilet company investors - Toto, the Japanese toilet manufacturer, has seen its stock price surge after some analysts noted that its expertise in toilet manufacturing (essentially precision ceramics) extends to various aspects of microchip manufacturing, which is seeing an enormous increase in demand due to AI. It is a fascinating look at how AI, material science, and engineering overlap with seemingly mundane industries and services.
AI-supported analysis:
Things I learned this week
I did not think I was going to find anything quite as entertaining as the sport of competitive Finnish hobby horsing (see the July 2024 Things I Learned section:https://www.whatadamisreading.com/2024/07/what-adam-is-reading-week-of-7-1-24.html). But the gods of absurdity and the internet delivered Hobby Motocross, where humans (not hired by AI agents) choose to hold motocross bike handlebars while running an actual motocross obstacle course. One must watch the video to capture the spirit of the event:
More on this "sport."
I am late to this 2018 article, but it is interesting nonetheless. Researchers found, through genetic sequencing, that octopuses have a nearly identical version of the human brain receptor that MDMA (ecstasy) binds to. So, like all curious scientists, they dosed 4 octopuses with ecstasy and observed the normally antisocial creatures become markedly friendlier (including tentacle-touching and non-aggressive closeness), suggesting that the neurochemical wiring for social behavior is far more preserved despite a 500-million-year-old evolutionary branch point between cephalopods and humans. The study has flaws (low sample size, non-blinded observers, etc.), but I think we can conclude that MDMA-ed octopuses would enjoy raves as much as humans do (friendly tentacle touching to music is a pan-species behavior).
Journal Article
Article
AI-Supported Analysis
Related: Of course, a broader scan of the research paints a more nuanced picture of MDMA's impact on animals. Here is an LLM review of the literature and data, by animal type (TL;DR don't give your rat or squirrel a lot of ecstasy): https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4fa22d7a-83da-4661-be93-117af250d61a
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 an LLM to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and generate images with different LLMs.
A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, and an exercise to see how various LLMs interpret the prompt. I use an LLM to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and generate images with different LLMs.
A tall Roman triumphal column in the style of Trajan's Column, with spiraling narrative relief panels winding from base to summit. Base panel: toga-clad figures wearing fitness tracker wristbands, staring at glowing leaderboard scrolls, competing anxiously against each other. First spiral: an underwater bioluminescent rave scene where octopuses with dilated pupils touch tentacles joyfully, one octopus DJs from a stone booth, and Roman citizens in togas dance alongside them. Second spiral: two factions of Roman matrons — one group in traditional dress, one in flowing hippie robes — face each other across a stone table, both pointing furiously at a central scroll labeled "GLYPHOSATE." Third spiral: Roman gladiators running a chaotic obstacle course while clutching motocross handlebars, confused spectators watching from a Colosseum. Summit: a single octopus wearing a Roman laurel wreath, one tentacle raised triumphantly, another holding a glowing fitness tracker. Style: detailed pen-and-ink satirical illustration in the style of a 19th-century editorial cartoon, sepia tones with occasional jewel-color accents, Latin caption banners beneath each panel.
Gemini
Grok
ChatGPT
Perplexity
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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