kowboy

[kowboy @koryshipp]

@elonmusk Excellent. Can I join the effort? Or the rocket endeavor 🫡

[Ski Life @powderski]

I had a crazy client today:

My head was splitting this morning. Too many spicy margs at the Moose.

My client is "Brad." Private equity, NYC. He shows up late, yelling at his assistant on the phone, and snaps his fingers at me to carry his skis. He’s wearing a heated vest and brand new Kastles, but is already complaining about the grooming report before we even made it out!!!

First thing he says to me: "I didn't hire you for pizza-french-fry bullshit. I ski Chamonix and Aspen. I’m paying for line cutting and steep terrain. Do not mollycoddle me or I’m getting you fired."

He then proceeded to make a really gross comment about the teenage girl working the lift ticket scanner. Just a total piece of shit.

We pack into the Tram. Big Red is crowded. Brad is literally shoving locals with his elbows to get a window spot. He turns to me and says, loud enough for the whole car to hear, "So, do you have a real job in the summer or do you just mooch off unemployment?"

We get to the top of Rendezvous. Visibility is garbage.

"Alright Brad," I say. "You said you want the steeps? You said don't baby you?"

"Give me the scariest thing on this hill,"

I lead him straight to the edge of Corbet’s Couloir.

"This is the entrance," I yell over the wind. "Since you ski Chamonix, this should be a warm-up."

He looks over the cornice. It’s a 20-foot freefall into a 40-degree chute (particularly icy today).

"Where's the ramp?" he asks.

"Ramp's for tourists, Brad. You said no mollycoddling."

I don't wait. I hop turn, send the drop, stick the landing in the soft stuff, and rip giant GS turns all the way down to the Tensleep traverse.

I stop and look up. Through the fog, I see a red speck frozen at the lip. He’s side-stepping back up the ridge and blocking the drop-in for three Teton Gravity Research guys who are filming. They are screaming at him.

I skied straight to the Village Cafe. I’m currently on my third slice of pizza and drinking a pitcher of PB while writing this.

Hope you've having a powder day - JH is great at the moment, despite some rude clients!

Corbet's Couloir pic attached

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

This is hilarious

[Dr. Rhonda Patrick @foundmyfitness]

Combining exercise with sauna sessions enhances cardiorespiratory fitness, a key indicator of longevity, more effectively than exercise alone.

Recent research from the lab of @LaukkanenJari has shown that 15 minutes of sauna use after exercise 3x per week improves VO2 max more than exercise alone after eight weeks.

There were also greater improvements in blood pressure and total cholesterol levels when sauna was combined with exercise.

Dr. Laukkanen's lab stands at the forefront of research, delving into the impacts of both acute and long-term sauna use on human health. Here is their recent study:
https://t.co/szJXtl7opR

[Dr. Rhonda Patrick @foundmyfitness]

A new study reveals bottled water contains up to 100 more microplastic particles than previously estimated.

Utilizing advanced techniques, researchers found that popular water brands contain an average of 240,000 microplastic particles per liter, a count that's 10 - 100 times higher than past estimates.

Notably, 90% of these plastics are tiny nanoplastics, so small they can penetrate human cells and tissues and even cross the blood-brain barrier, potentially impacting human health.

This raises an important question: Might simply drinking tap water be a healthier choice?

https://t.co/4xhbQJ27Ig

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

There is a US corporation that has a $50B balance sheet, generates a 10% ROIC (~$5B of income per year) but has also convinced the US Government that:

a) it shouldn’t pay taxes and should be treated as a non profit

b) despite making billions more than necessary to cover costs, only spends the government mandated non-profit minimum of what it makes every year, creating an artificial $1.5B deficit

c) then asks the US government for help and gets $1.5B of taxpayer dollars every year to cover the gap that they could cover by themselves but chooses not to

d) while getting government funding, has been accused and found guilty by tue Supreme Court of systemic racial discrimination towards minority groups

This corporation is called the Harvard Corporation.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

History is, largely, fake.

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

Heroes look like @elonmusk. They risk their own capital and that of those who voluntarily contributed it, in ambitious projects, without violence, toward grand human achievement.

Villains look like @SenWarren. They steal other peoples' capital to force their opinions on those who disagree, rely on violence to achieve their ends, and when successful, retard the ascent of humanity.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

How to reduce antisemitism on campus:

In 2018, Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) warned that "we all live on campus now." He described the identitarianism that had captured elite schools, and he correctly predicted that it would soon spread beyond campus and change society in ways that make liberal democracy more difficult:

"When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole."

In Sullivan's most recent post, he shows the direct causal path between campus identitarianism and the new wave of campus antisemitism:

"Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying. If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified."

https://t.co/McUKeVm8B2

In other words: The only way to end antisemitism on campus is to end the identitarianism. Don't be satisfied by a university president who promises a new center or commission on antisemitism. It won't have much effect on campus culture as long as a critical mass of students (5-10%?) are taught to see everything through oppressor/victim glasses, in which "punching up" is virtuous, even when the punching is not metaphorical.

And if these new centers try to incorporate Jews as a new victim class, as some of them will, it will just make things worse, and it will harm Jewish students. Young people who embrace identitarianism become disempowered, depressed, and difficult to work with.

Sullivan's prescription is much more challenging than just endowing another center:

"End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept."

Whether or not you agree with all of these measures, I think Sullivan's insight is the key to getting this right: Antisemitism will sprout wherever the soil supports it. It always has, it always will. The spores are everywhere, especially in the age of TikTok. The cure is to change the properties of the soil, not just to plant a new center for the study of antisemitism in soil that is fertile ground for antisemitism.

I expect that the Ivies will implement only superficial measures, to placate donors. But please don't give up on the entire higher ed sector. The cultural revolution that swept across the academy in 2015-2016 may have met its Waterloo last Tuesday, in that congressional hearing room. Now is the time to support schools that break from the pack, under bold leadership. Now is the time to support organizations that are supporting reforms and reformers.

The outlook for higher ed is dark right now, and trust in the sector continues to fall. But I am excited by the new possibilities for major change that have opened up in the last week.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

The wrong way for the elite universities to dig themselves out their reputational hole: restrict speech even more. Instead:
1. Clear & coherent free speech policy.
2. Institutional neutrality: Universities are forums, not protagonists.
3. Force prohibited: No more heckler's vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.
4. Disempower DEI bureaucrats, responsible to no one, who have turned campuses into laughingstocks.
5. Viewpoint diversity: Discourage political & intellectual monocultures (including hard-left/PoMo/"intersectional").

[Dr. Rhonda Patrick @foundmyfitness]

Exercise and weight loss can outclass medication entirely when it comes to preventing type 2 diabetes.

Exercise plus modest weight loss decreased the incidence of diabetes by 58%, outperforming the prescription drug metformin (reducing incidence only 31%).

In the following segment, Dr. Martin Gibala (@gibalama) discusses how high-intensity interval training so profoundly affects the ability for muscle to transport and utilize glucose that trial participants often have to reduce their medication.

[Tivadar Danka @TivadarDanka]

The Japanese multiplication method makes everybody feel "I wish they taught math like this in school."

It's not just a cute visual tool: it illuminates how and why long multiplication works.

Here is the full story.

[Lawrence H. Summers @LHSummers]

The important test for elite colleges in this era is their overall contribution to opportunity in America.

No more legacy admissions.

No more special admissions for people who've been coached extensively to be good at aristocratic sports.

Expand their class sizes so that more can benefit from what they bring and not defining their greatness by just how exclusive they are.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I recently made two major behavior changes:

1. Reduced alcohol consumption 90%
2. Started running 6x per week

I got blood panels before and after.

The tests had a feature that compares your results-based “Inner Age” to your actual age.

Result: 8 years younger in 8 months 🤯

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

American Naturalist used to be a great journal. Very sad. How could they sink so low?
https://t.co/XTcGpxEPfK

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Phrase of the day: Anachronistic Sanctimony;
accusing ancient individuals or groups of violating today's ethical norms; more generally flowing values, beliefs, and standards backward in time.

[Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab]

This week I learned from a sleep expert @UCLA that if we go to sleep 1-2hrs later than usual we get none (zero) of the normal in-sleep bolus of growth hormone that night, regardless if we sleep in. In other words, keeping regular to-sleep times is as important as sleep duration.

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

Most popular websites since 1993…

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

Unbelievable footage captured by tourists. Avalanche from the Tian Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan…

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

An insane photo from Kharkiv, Ukraine today. Two police officers looking at a fragment pile of Russian rockets that hit Ukraine's second largest city. h/t @alexbakus #Kharkiv #Ukraine️ #ArmUkraineNow #RussianWarCrimes