Calibrated 25’s: the new gold?
For adjustable dumbbells: Well, yes.

Using the same plates for barbells and dumbbells is the most elegant solution here, IMHO.

Many who are criticizing Brad Holmes for passing on Mike McDaniel and hiring Drew Petzing are putting too much stock in a Yale History degree and too little stock in a Middlebury Econ degree with a minor in Math and Philosophy.

What kind of blasphemer would make such a chart? Me. 🤷‍♂️

I feel like Methuseleh: As recently as when I was born, China generated less electricity than Canada

#China #Geopolitics #Data #Statistics #History #Economics

With most of the major pro sports markets, the Big Ten is the juggernaut in the paid era of college sports.

#Indiana #BigTen #Cignetti #economics #NationalChampionship

Why do people defend mythological heuristics instead of accepting knowledge and logic?

If knowledge and logic are normally distributed, then at the median, raising the baseline while maintaining ordering feels like work without payoff.

#rubegoldberg #mousetrap #gametheory #socialpsychology

A Costco hot dog at the local tractor pull is nice, but I learned at a young age that America can’t compete with China’s soft power. When I was a kid, we went to the Cincinnati Zoo and waited in line all day for five minutes at the panda exhibit.

In the age of AI, how dated does the SETI project seem now?

If ideological skew in academia is a correctable problem, why haven’t conservative institutions successfully corrected it, despite decades of funding and effort?

And if it isn’t correctable, what does that imply about the epistemic footing of conservative politics?

America has a gift for normalizing dysfunction.

It’s easier to argue about “freedom” than to care whether basic services, like transportation and education, are funded commensurately with other countries.

As-is, we are light years away from entertaining the trolley car problem on multiple fronts…

Two plausible utopias:

1) Universal civil service
2) Markets settled by intellectual duels

“Time is money.”

Well, time is not just lived economically; it is lived narratively. And whoever shapes the narrative shapes the temporal experience of a society.

graphic: the experience of deterministic vs. stochastic time in Soviet socialist states vs. Western capitalist societies (see alt text)

SAT 2025: When consistency becomes a puzzle under fragmented epistemic identities

I don’t agree with Marx as a system, but he belongs to a line of thinking I studied and still engage with analytically.

A volunteer project I took on during the 2020 election cycle: I built and funded a small canvassing and materials distribution setup, built and maintained a website to support Chicago-area volunteer efforts, and attended a campaign-run two-day organizer seminar and coordinated with the campaign.

Battleground State Participation in the NYC Mayoral Election

I took a look at out-of-state participation in the NYC mayoral race after reading a recent article by @chicago.suntimes.com about Chicago-area donations to the contest.

Happy holidays!