1. Research Spotlight: Resistance Training Boosts Your Antioxidant System More Than Vitamin D Supplementation by Greg Nuckols at Stronger by Science. It’s not just Vitamin D that influences your endogenous antioxidant system — exercise plays an important role too. This 2021 study suggests that with resistance training you can improve the functioning of your endogenous antioxidant system better than supplementing with vitamin D3, even if your vitamin D levels are rather low.
  2. Daily Step Count and All-Cause Mortality: A Dose-Response Meta-analysis of Prospective Cohort Studies by Jayedi et al. (2021). Seven studies were included in the meta-analysis (28,141 participants and 175,370 total years). The result: All-cause mortality was about 12% lower per 1,000 steps per day. While keeping correlation ≠ causation in mind (and these step difference suggest drastically different lifestyles, it is interesting to note that walking 2,700 steps per day was associated with a 3x greater risk of all-cause mortality than walking 16,000 steps per day.
  3. EE380 Talk by David Rosenthal. The co-founder of Nvidia spoke at Stanford’s EE380 about his thoughts on crypto. A scathing review, but with a lot of meat to it.
  4. Artist Uses AI to Perfectly Fake 70s Science Fiction Pulp Covers by Peter Kirn at CDM. “Perfectly” is up for debate, I suppose, but these covers definitely capture the spirit of that time. AI seems to be perfectly suited for such a task — mixing a splash of uncanny into the overall colour pattern and aesthetic of 70s sci-fi.
  5. Great Products Do Less, But Better by Fabricio Teixeira for UXDesign.cc. Many things in product management seem quite obvious, but are yet hard to achieve. Example: Don’t let your product become bloated. It helps to occasionaly ask: “If I were to start building my product from scratch, which 3 features would I include in it, today?”
  6. AI-synthesized Faces Are Indistinguishable From Real Faces and More Trustworthy by Nightingale and Farid (2022). Artificially generated faces have crossed the uncanny valley — a recent paper finds that they’re not just indistinguishable, but also more trustworthy than real human faces. Perhaps because synthesized faces tend to look more like average faces, which are seen as more trustworthy. Importantly, this paper went beyond the standard use of white male faces.
  7. Money Stuff: Nobody Wants Russian Assets by Matt Levine at Bloomberg. The most interesting and excellently written part is about the anarchistic dream of crypto vs. the reality, where blocking Russian crypto assets is in the hand of a select few exchanges. “In crypto philosophy, intermediaries are not supposed to be noble and libertarian; they are supposed to be unable to stop you.”
  8. Heuristics That Almost Always Work by Slate Alexander at Astral Codex Ten. On the efficiency of rocks 🙂 When a simple rule is right most of the time (“the vulcano will not erupt”) heuristics are so hard to beat that experts themselves might be tempted to secretly rely on them.
  9. Yuval Noah Harari Argues That What’s at Stake in Ukraine is the Direction of Human History by Yuval Noah Harari for The Economist. “The decline of war didn’t result from a divine miracle or from a change in the laws of nature. It resulted from humans making better choices. It is arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation. Unfortunately, the fact that it stems from human choice also means that it is reversible.”
  10. What Makes Group Decisions Go Wrong. And Right by Joshua Holden at Nautilus. Researchers at the Santa Fe modeled that make group decisions successful and unsuccessful. Major elements are whether the participants are individual learners or social learners (basing their decisions on others), and how often social learners update their decisions.