2025-10-01 04:35:42
In case you missed it — we were on the Clearer Thinking podcast with Spencer Greenberg, talking about cybernetics, psychology, and philosophy of science. Check it out: Episode 281: A new paradigm for psychology research (with Slime Mold Time Mold)
The Syndrome of the Ultra-fit:
…it should be evident that there is a whole army of regulatory systems in place that detect caloric flux. It is incredibly difficult if not impossible to outsmart these systems over long periods of time
Also:
The best strategy I have found is reverse-dieting. Increasing caloric intake by 100kcal per week. In my early twenties, I reverse-dieted my way from 2000kcal to 2500kcal over the course of 5 weeks. Interestingly, I have gained no to minimal amounts of fat but started to feel more vital.
I have seen something similar a number of times – individuals who had been undereating for a long time gradually increase their caloric intake over the span of a couple of weeks. And despite eating e.g., 25% more than before, they gain no to minimal amounts of fat.
So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes
It USED to be that when a scientist discovered something important, like finding the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of a mosquito, thereby demonstrating that mosquitos transmit the disease, you would write a poem about it and send it to your wife:
Neurons Gone Wild via The Seeds of Science
A Naturalistic Court Discussion from 1685
Butlerian-Jihad-coded: (though of course we disagree with the obesity metaphor) Are we living in a stupidogenic society?
Aella doing the kind of basic due diligence we need more of: Birth Control Myths Vs Data
People often ask us how to get started in science. Here’s a great example: My first palaeo paper is 20 years old today!
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence; it just isn’t proof
2025-09-01 01:25:17
New Substack to watch, on diverse and outlier science: Reinvent Science
And here’s an example of what they’re talking about: Lay research on turtles, and the evolution of scholarly journals (see also the comments!)
We get a shout-out in The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy. A question we’ve pondered for some time:
Today I apply this insight to Western philosophy, in service of a question which I’ve been trying to answer for years on this blog: why does no one talk about cybernetics anymore?
Also: How do we live with each other?
How does the phthalates get into the beef? Some findings here: We tested Radius beef for plastic chemicals
“Last week, I had an unusually vivid dream about writing a book review for ACX. When I woke up, I remembered the review almost word-for-word. In some sense this is a best case scenario – write posts in my sleep, and spend my waking hours relaxing on the beach – but unfortunately the book I was reviewing doesn’t exist and most of what I say about it doesn’t make sense. Still, I’m posting the review here as a subscriber-only feature.” Dream Book Review: The Deal With Trauma (paywalled)
What Does It Mean To Be Thirsty? (h/t MY)
Satiety Graphed & The Horsemen of Obesity
High salt recruits aversive taste pathways
As late as 1813, people were saying that eating potatoes causes leprosy (h/t Adam Mastroianni)
A Time-Series Analysis of my Girlfriends Mood Swings, Behavioral Conditioning Methods to Stop my Boyfriend from Playing The Witcher 3, and The Bark Defense: A 99.999% Successful Method for Keeping Emily Safe from Strangers and Garbage Trucks — all these and more curiosities from the Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology, the “premium source for made up science”.
2025-07-30 09:59:32
In case you missed it — we were on a podcast, spreading the good word about cybernetics! Check it out here: Two Psychologists Four Beers Episode 121: A New Paradigm for Psychology?
Also making waves this month in our piece for Asimov Press: What Makes a Mature Science
Relatedly, see this piece of video game journalism for more examples of good mechanical thinking.
New in self-experiments: Microdosing Willpower
Also new in self-experiments: My 9-week unprocessed food self-experiment
Stories of spontaneously-combusting scissors shared on on r/chemistry (h/t JasonKPargin)
From friend-of-the-blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: Did journal articles survive the last ten years?
A PNG image of a bird can be reproduced by an adult Starling: I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird
I say, I say, I say! How many palaeontologists does it take to write a paper? Twenty-four (if it’s in Nature)! Another one from Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. Can’t resist quoting the main points in full:
Cards on the table, I find it very hard to believe that twenty-four people all made substantial contributions to this paper — substantial enough to be listed as authors.
So what are they all doing there? I can only surmise that the four or five legitimate authors all invited their friends along for the ride, on the basis that “he needs a Nature paper for his postdoc applications”.
And the tragedy of it is, they’re not wrong.
Many universities — most? Maybe even all? — do indeed recruit people to postdocs and permanent positions in part on whether they have a paper in Nature or Science. Even if their role is as seventeenth or eighteenth of twenty-four, and they actually did little or nothing towards the science. I have been told flatly by people in positions of influence that candidates without the Nature or Science stamp are likely to be filtered out of the recruitment process at Step Zero, and never even have their papers read, let alone make it to interview.
And for as long as that is true, it would be negligent of lab leaders not to slip their own grad-students, and any other students they know and like, into the authorship of such a paper if it happens to come their way.
What does this mean for the aspiring palaeontologist? It means that his or her most rational strategy for landing a job is to socially cultivate as many lab leaders as possible, especially those who work in strata likely to turn up preserved soft tissue, and hope to get in on a Nature or Science paper — so that their job applications get through to the stage where their actual work might get some scrutiny.
Can we all agree that this is idiotic?
How did it all get this way? Part of the puzzle from Asterisk: The Origin of the Research University
James Heathers has finally gotten funding for his work on scientific error detection. See his Substack post about it or check out this piece in Nature.
You can link to any text on any page. (h/t dynomight)
ExFatLoss does an ex_kempner review: CICO and FO. Most interesting part to us:
Coming back to the rice diet was very easy for her. Despite only weighing 115lbs total to my ~230-240lbs, she lasted much longer on the diet than me. In fact, I spoke to her today and she is STILL on the diet (I’m 6 days into the next experiment.)
This is so bizarre to me. I have about 80lbs just of body fat on me, which is 70% of Coconut’s entire body weight. How come that I can’t seem to access this body fat and am getting starvation psychosis on day 6, when a skinny lady half my size can subsist on this extreme level of caloric restriction for weeks?
We also liked this one for its micronutrient skepticism, and for the discussion of hunger drives: Book review: The End of Craving
2025-06-30 04:52:32
Cartoons Hate Her tests the internet’s current favorite question: Do Women Have to Lie About Their Jobs to Get More Hinge Matches? Results are sadly paywalled but otherwise it’s a great effort, more of this please!
This blog post is ostensibly about AI, but it’s also one of the most lucid descriptions of academic incentives we’ve ever seen. Especially given how short it is. Highly recommended: Thoughts on the AI 2027 discourse
We know how to fix peer review (Part 2)
The things we are most afraid of are already happening, and will continue to get worse. It feels counter intuitive, but we’re holding tightly onto the feeling of control, and safety, and that is ITSELF what is putting us in danger & making things worse.
Tyler Ransom: Diet Trials of the first half of 2025 (Potato diet success; Honey riff failure)
John Lawrence Aspden tries a sort of potato diet: Ex150ish-fruit-and-chips
So on the 31st of May I ate a load of chips (steak fries US readers), two potatoes cut into thick oblongs and shallow-fried in butter.
And since then I’ve been eating such things pretty regularly, to the point where I’ve got a bit sick of them, which wasn’t a mental state I knew existed. Sometimes I have made them with yams instead.
I’ve have to raw-dawg a plain can of sardines in water as my only breakfast item daily to keep my brain from oozing out of my eye sockets (h/t @E_III_R) — post seems to have been deleted but here’s an archive.
Thrilled to see this, and kudos to Astera for having the guts to do what everyone else in their heart knows they should: Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough
The headline is so catchy that it seems like it can’t possibly replicate, and yet: Glass bottles found to contain more microplastics than plastic bottles
Optimizing tea: An N=4 experiment
« Untold Stories » are Sherlock Holmes investigations mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories but never published. For example:
When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894 I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin- an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of them unite so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes, not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.
— Dr. Watson.
2025-06-19 04:14:35
In the beginning, scientific articles were just letters. Eventually Henry Oldenburg started pulling some of these letters together and printing them as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first scientific journal. In continuance of this hallowed tradition, here at SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD we occasionally publish our own correspondence as a new generation of philosophical transactions.
Today’s correspondence is from a husband and wife who wish to remain anonymous. This account has been lightly edited for clarity, but what appears below is otherwise the original report as we received it.
The potato diet has mostly been used for weight loss, but it’s also notable for involving mostly one food and being close to nutritionally complete, which means you can use it as an elimination diet to study things like food triggers. We’ve been interested in this idea for a long time, and we find this case study particularly compelling because it’s a rare example of someone doing just that!
Since around 2018, K had been suffering from stomach pain, bloating, gas, and chronic constipation. Chronic constipation worsened after two pregnancies, so K sought medical intervention again in Feb 2025. K was prescribed medication (Linzess) to treat the constipation, which initially improved symptoms but was unreliable and had unpleasant side effects. She had been on that medication for 1 month before starting the potato diet.
Family and friends were bewildered to hear our plan, warning us of muscle loss and blood sugar problems since potatoes are ‘bad’.
Her initial goal was to lose 5-10 pounds from a starting BMI of 23.4 and test out the claims we read online about the diet. K actually joked, “wouldn’t it be funny if this diet fixes my stomach problems?”
We started the diet on 21MAR2025. The first two and a half days were 100% potato for both of us. Morale was suffering by the afternoon of day 3, so we caved and had a potato-heavy dinner with our kids. Afterwards, we agreed to eat only potatoes until dinner so we could still have a normal family meal time. We did make sure potatoes featured heavily in the weekly meal plan.
Within a week, K noticed improved symptoms and regularity without any medication. Initially, she thought she might have a lactose intolerance, so she switched to lactose-free milk and quit the potato diet once we reached the end of our planned testing window.
Back on a regular diet (but still avoiding lactose), K’s symptoms came back worse, with constant stomach aches and bloating. K realized that she had unintentionally been on a low-FODMAP diet while on the potato diet and decided to do intolerance testing.
Her methodology for intolerance testing follows:
Incorporating lots of potatoes allowed K to test out food groups while still eating a well-balanced diet. The culprit for K is fructans from wheat, which is why cutting out daily servings of wheat has made her symptoms disappear.
K is finishing FODMAP testing (still a couple more groups to go), but has had reliable relief from all symptoms without any meds. Potatoes are a regular addition to meals these days.
Below is the blank version of the log she used.
2025-05-30 21:00:31
Finding the Best Sleep Tracker
Environmental allergies are curable? (Sublingual immunotherapy)
Is Australian Sunscreen ACTUALLY stronger than Asian Sunscreen? I put them to the test!
Join the Big Taping Truth Trial / Let’s Find Out If Mouth Taping Actually Works
Dynomight: My 16-month theanine self-experiment
Oh my dear f*cking gawd it worked. The damn coke and French fries worked – Annals of Reddit Migraine Cures (more study needed)
“8 months later and we now have HUMAN GRADE horseade bucket”
China Might Have Moved Too Fast on Lithium Production
The Church FAQ — “A few years ago, we bought a church building. Since then, every time I mention it online and/or on social media, someone always responds, “wait, you bought a church, what” and then asks some standard questions. At this point it makes good sense to offer up a Church FAQ to answer some of those most common questions. Let’s begin!”
Flipping the switch on far-UVC (h/t Matt)
Serious Music — “A new paper in Science Robotics reports a device that Schumann would have jumped at the chance to try: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand.”
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week: If you believe in “Artificial Intelligence”, take five minutes to ask it about stuff you know well
The hardest working font in Manhattan
The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing
Brighter: The World’s Brightest Floor Lamp
In Which I Declare War On Beloved Entertainer Bo Burnham
“boiled eggs suck because yolk and white are best cooked at diff. temperatures”:
> Nature paper figures out how to cook eggs evenly by duty-cycling the temperature of water between 30°C and 100°C every 2 mins, derived from a model of heat transfer between yolk and white
> @sdamico implements the paper using his stoves that can hold water steady at 30°C and 100°C
