Why the Number 0 was Banned for 1500 years—Up and Atom →
h/t Joseph Kimball
David Ludwig: Not 'Calories In Minus Calories Out Causes Weight Gain,’ but ‘Weight Gain Causes Calories In Minus Calories Out’ →
For more on these topics, see my bibliographic post “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.”
Miles's Tweetstorm of Favorite Passages from Noah Smith's Review of Brad DeLong's book ‘Slouching Towards Utopia’
https://twitter.com/mileskimball/status/1602332992231378945
Global Population Density—Visual Capitalist
h/t Brad DeLong
How Can Professors Do Writing Assignments in the Era of ChatGPT?—Daniel Herman →
One idea I had was to have students write down the instructions they gave to ChatGPT, then the ChatGPT output and then critique the ChatGPT output. This raises the question: Can ChatGPT “critique” its own output as a second round thing?
The Bulk of Agricultural Land is Currently Devoted to Not-So-Healthy Crops
Hat tip to Brad DeLong for this graphic
Grain is a huge fraction of US agriculture by land area. In general, grain has quite a high insulin index and so tends to lead to obesity in those who are genetically vulnerable—which is most people. See “Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon” and “Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid.” Oil is another big use for agricultural land.
Notes:
Oats have one of the lower insulin indexes among grains.
Among oils, sunflower oil, canola oil (=rapeseed oil) and peanut oil have a higher ratio of monounsaturated to polyunsaturated fat than soybean oil or corn oil. (See the table here.) There is a greater consensus for monounsaturated fat being healthy than for polyunsaturated fat being healthy.
See more links on diet and health in “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.”
Creative AIs—Derek Thompson →
As a tenured professor only 10 years away from retirement, I am not worried about my own job. What I liked about this article was being pointed to DALL-E-2 and Consensus. I tried them out. They seem useful.
Miles's Tweetstorm on Interpersonal Comparison of Utility
https://twitter.com/mileskimball/status/1597969384982515712
Building an Affordable House
In “Why Housing is So Expensive” I write:
There are two big reasons why housing is so expensive. The first is the obstacles put in the way of building new housing in many of the most desirable cities to live in. …
… [second] there has been no real improvement in productivity in construction in the last 50 years.
The book Building an Affordable House, by Fernando Pages Ruiz, and its review by Brian Potter in his blog Construction Physics, gives a sense of what the possibility frontier is for low construction and how far typical construction is from that possibility frontier.
A Rundown of the New Weight-Loss Drugs →
Note: semaglutide will go off-patent in 2032, so these drugs won’t always be super-expensive.