Fascinating video portrait by @neoexplains of Kowloon Walled City.
It tracks the rise and fall of Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith, rightly considered the most densely populated place on earth, with at its peak at least 1.2 *million* people per km²:
https://aeon.co/videos/the-rise-and-fall-of-kowloon-walled-city-hong-kongs-infamous-urban-monolith
Cultural evolution was probably a key to human success—humans accomplished in a few hundred thousand years what otherwise would have required tens of millions, because we didn’t have to wait an entire generation to adapt via natural selection:
Flow has become widely misunderstood as being about optimum *performance*.
That misses the point, writes Scott Barry Kaufman—it is about optimum *experience* (which may indirectly lead to great performance):
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beautiful-minds/202606/reclaiming-the-true-meaning-of-flow
True beauty vs true prettiness
Research by Doran suggests words like ‘beautiful’ have a dual character—descriptive *and* normative—while ‘pretty’ does not (no need to be beautiful to have a beautiful soul; no ‘pretty soul’):
https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/66/2/271/8300535?login=false
At best, zigging along with everyone else means competing for a tiny slice of a fixed commodity market.
At worst, it means enabling a race to the bottom that leaves everyone worse off:
Why would a human trying to find his way put his trust in ChatGPT rather than in Google Maps?
There’s something of a con artist in our friendly chatbots:
https://timharford.com/2026/06/chatbots-make-stuff-up-why-do-we-believe-them-anyway/
Handig weetje: een stevige vloek kan ons typisch 10% extra kracht leveren.
Maar onze reserves zijn nog veel groter. Hoe boren we die aan?
Mijn @apache_be stukje, Geef me kracht!, over hoe we onze ingebouwde limieten bewust of onbewust omzeilen:
New research, using brain scans of foetuses at 30-33 weeks, suggests the size of the superior temporal gyrus—the region most directly involved in processing sounds and words—predicts how many words a toddler will know at age 24-36 months:
The vaccine that was three vaccines
The shingles vaccine turns out not just to prevent shingles, but also markedly lowers the risk of dementia and might even slow aging itself:
Switching between standard and daylight saving time twice a year is problematic.
But settling one one system all year round also has problems—political *and* scientific:
https://www.popsci.com/science/permanent-daylight-saving-time-video/
