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My latest post at Res Extensa, on the importance of gratitude and resilience for building the systems and networks we rely on in times of crisis.

In this latest issue of Res Extensa, I wrote about the need to escape from the passive consumption trap. We wake up, pick up the phone, and wait for algorithms to tell us what to read, watch, and listen to. Our attention is captured by things we didn’t even decide to give it to.

I’m making a conscious effort to return to engaged, active consumption as much as possible. Appreciating. Carefully reading and listening. Choosing specifically what I want to give my attention to.

From the latest issue of Res Extensa: thoughts on Andy Grove’s idea of “modes of control”, from High Output Management:

Thinking about this in the context of my own work, I can map past hardships and bad business decisions to mismatches in environment and mode. As managers, what we most often don’t respect enough is the nature of the CUA factor with a given job, project, or task. This mental framework for thinking about relationships is helpful for selecting the appropriate communication or management mode.

This simple 2x2 is one of the more interesting idea from the book.

An incredible project from Chris Hytha, documenting the gorgeous art deco architecture scattered across the country:

The prosperity of early 20th century America resulted in a boom of skyscrapers that still tower over cities across the country today. Focusing on the character and craftsmanship on display at the top of these landmark buildings in a way that can’t be seen from street level, the Highrises Collection reveals fascinating details and stories of these distinctly American icons.

An example, the Sun Realty Building in Los Angeles:

GPT Researcher is an autonomous agent designed for comprehensive online research on a variety of tasks.

The agent can produce detailed, factual and unbiased research reports, with customization options for focusing on relevant resources, outlines, and lessons. Inspired by the recent Plan-and-Solve and RAG papers, GPT Researcher addresses issues of speed, determinism and reliability, offering a more stable performance and increased speed through parallelized agent work, as opposed to synchronous operations.

I’ve been tinkering around with this tool for doing deeper topic research. It uses the ChatGPT API and GPT-4o to conduct multi-phase agent-based research. Adds sources, citations, and can be directed with specific tuning. Very interesting.

A great interview with AEI’s Yuval Levin ahead of the release of his latest book, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified our Nation — And Could Again.

Yuval is one of the greatest minds we have working today. He brings a particular mixture of sanity, seriousness, gravitas, level-headedness, and dare-I-call-it normalcy to political discussions. His explanation of what the Constitution does (and, importantly, doesn’t do) threads right into the idea of comfort with contradiction:

Would the system empower the small states or the large ones? It would empower both and leave them ever struggling for balance. Would the president be a glorified clerk or an elevated head of state? He would be both, and therefore neither. The few and the many, the city and the country, freedom and order, equality and excellence, representation and administrative efficiency–to each of these stark choices the Constitution says yes, both. And as a result, it creates a regime, a democratic republic, that as the very term suggests, lives in constant tension with itself, yet is capable of extraordinary feats.

When there are no options we can all agree on, go with the system that results in perpetual argument and compromise.

Kevin Kelly:

Because of the circle, no organism is privileged with being above another. A circle has not top. We humans are somewhere in the lineup, but where depends on how you turn the chart. This circle of life also better captures the idea that all living organisms today are equally evolved. By definition, any organism alive today (shown on the outer rim) can boast an unbroken chain of ancestors who have survived the same number of years, 4.5 billions years. The snail, fern, clam and mite have all undergone an equally long path to now. They are all the results of 4.5 billion years of evolution. The fern’s 4.5 billion-year answer to how to survive is to steal energy from the sun; the snail to steal it from the fern; the mite to steal it from the snail, and the deep vent clam, to steal it from the heat of the earth.

Though our intelligence, cellular complexity, or phenotypic traits are far from equal, all organisms alive today are equally evolved. Each species has been down a 4.5 billion-year path that led it to the niche it fills today.

Stuart Buck with a fascinating piece on the seemingly simple but deceivingly hard process of replicating studies. Two labs were collaborating on a breast cancer study, and ran into surprising challenges getting the same results with (what they thought were) the same inputs:

They were frustrated: “Despite using seemingly identical methods, reagents, and specimens, our two laboratories quite reproducibly were unable to replicate each other’s fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) profiles of primary breast cells.”

They tried everything: The instrumentation. The “specific sources of tissues…, media composition, source of serum and additives, tissue processing, and methods of staining cell populations.” The protocols to ensure they were using “identical enzymes, antibodies, and reagents.”

After doing all of this for a year, they were still stumped. So they met in person to “work side by side so we could observe every step of each other’s methods.”

In the end, they figured out that the ONLY reason for their discrepant results was this: The rate of stirring collagenase. At one lab, the tissue was stirred at a rate of 300 to 500 revolutions per minute for six to eight hours. At the other lab, it was stirred at a much more gentle rate of 80 revolutions per minute for 18 to 24 hours.

That was it. That was the one and only difference that explained why Harvard and Berkeley labs were getting such different results from an identical experiment. No one had even thought to mention the rate of stirring, because it seemed so routine and unlikely to matter.

There’s already a replication crisis in research. This shows that even when one is trying really hard to replicate honest research, we can be confounded by intricate minutiae of process and incidental detail. It all matters.

You’ve also gotta read it for the hot dog story.