From FiveThirtyEight’s article, What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money?, discussing the results of the MINCOME experiment in Canada in the 1970s where families received a basic income, no strings attached:

Families receiving MINCOME had fewer hospitalizations, accidents and injuries, Forget found. Mental health hospitalizations fell dramatically. And the high school completion rate ticked up during the years of the experiment, with 16-to-18-year-old boys, in particular, more likely to finish school. Younger adolescent girls were less likely to give birth before age 25, and when they did, they had fewer kids.

The program brought most recipients above Canada’s poverty line. And the employment effects in Dauphin were modest. “For primary earners — those with full-time jobs — there was virtually no decline” in work, Forget said. “Nobody was quitting their jobs.” Cash from the government eased families’ economic anxiety, allowing them to invest in their health and plan over a longer horizon.

The idea of a basic income (instead of means tested “welfare”) is gaining traction. Several countries (Canada, Finland, Switzerland, Kenya, etc) are planning modern experiments of their own. Politics and logistics aside, how else will our economies function when much of the conventional labor force is inevitably replaced by machines?

The popular press has been all over a new study out of McMaster University in PLOS One that demonstrated that 1 minute of intense exercise in the midst of 10 minutes of lesser activity had similar cardiovascular benefits to 45 minutes of moderate exercise (in otherwise sedentary men).

The major novel finding from the present study was that 12 weeks of SIT in previously inactive men improved insulin sensitivity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and skeletal muscle mitochondrial content to the same extent as MICT, despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and training time commitment. SIT involved 1 minute of intense intermittent exercise, within a time commitment of 10 minutes per session, whereas MICT consisted of 50 minutes of continuous exercise at a moderate pace.

Which is neat, but the press headlines are all about the 1 minute part. Sadly. I would love to be convinced that exactly 1 minute of high knees could assuage my guilt of being sedentary and loving Cinnabon. But it’s not a 1-minute workout. It’s a ten-minute workout of which 1 minute hurts. That’s actually longer than the 7-min workout (app) that made the circuit a couple years ago.

This does dovetail nicely with this rundown in Vox summarizing the research demonstrating that, overall, exercise doesn’t help you lose much weight. This comes up all the time, and people are wrong about this all the time. Exercise is fantastic for you in so many ways, but its benefits aren’t primarily related to weight loss.

One 2009 study shows that people seemed to increase their food intake after exercise — either because they thought they burned off a lot of calories or because they were hungrier. Another review of studies from 2012 found people generally overestimated how much energy exercise burned and ate more when they worked out.

The popularization of nutritional science in general has led to a number of pervasive myths due to a conflation of correlation and causation (as well as bad science), like how millions of people still think that eating breakfast will magically make you skinnier.1As opposed to the findings of the actual observational study, which noted that people who ate breakfast tended to be of lower weight

The overestimation of weight loss due to exercise is so pervasive in part because it’s so ostensibly logical. Exercise burns calories, therefore I should lose weight if I exercise. But even ignoring the hormonal and behavior/consumption reactions to exercise that can erase the calorie losses, I always just tell people the same thing when it comes to weight loss in the real world:

What you eat matters more. Which takes longer, eating the Cinnabon, or working it off?

The “Shrink” episode of Radiolab was fascinating: we thought viruses were all small, but that was a consequence of the method we used to first discover them. But now we know better, and there are some giant viruses out there, some even bigger than bacteria and large enough to get their own viruses.

From Bloomberg, an interactive infographic that looks at interprofessional marriage from the 2014 US Census.

Female doctors, whether gay or straight, tend to marry other doctors.

Straight male doctors also marry doctors, but they’re almost as likely to marry nurses or schoolteachers. According to the census data, gay male doctors most commonly marry nurses.

From section 57.10 of the updated service terms for Amazon’s popular AWS service (emphasis mine):

Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

From Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Doomsday Invention” in The New Yorker, a profile of philosopher of Nick Bostrom and discussion of the (highly dangerous) future of artificial intelligence:

He stopped and looked ahead. “What I want to avoid is to think from our parochial 2015 view—from my own limited life experience, my own limited brain—and super-confidentially postulate what is the best form for civilization a billion years from now, when you could have brains the size of planets and billion-year life spans. It seems unlikely that we will figure out some detailed blueprint for utopia. What if the great apes had asked whether they should evolve into Homo sapiens—pros and cons—and they had listed, on the pro side, ‘Oh, we could have a lot of bananas if we became human’? Well, we can have unlimited bananas now, but there is more to the human condition than that.”

Long, but well worth the read.