loosing faith, the path to immortality & monowheels
CC#28- how to be successful, how to build and off-grid solar system & how to spice up your email signature
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🕊 How I Lost My Faith
The personal story of a woman who grew up in a strict, religious community but converted to atheism during her college times.
Nearly-nineteen, sitting there in that dorm room, I could feel my faith slipping away from my fingertips, and it was like trying to avoid a car crash in slow motion. No, no no no. I scrambled for answers, but all the ones I had studied so well suddenly seemed far away. I cried out to God to save me, because I couldn’t do it myself. It was a desperate, last plea to my beautiful savior and friend, and the silence I got back was utter despair.
The life I had known died right there. The way I knew the world – my education, my society, my purpose, my understanding of ethical behavior, of sex, obedience, submission, logic, origin of the universe – all of it crumbled around me and I suddenly knew nothing.
A review of a controversial life scientist’s book on aging and what we can do about it. While I am lacking the necessary knowledge to assess the likelihood of his claims being true, if only some of his ideas are somewhat working, this would be a whole game changer.
Sinclair’s own theory offers a simpler option. He starts with a puzzling observation: babies are very young [citation needed]. If a 70 year old man marries a 40 year old woman and has a baby, that baby will start off at zero years old, just like everyone else. Even more interesting, if you clone a 70 year old man, the clone start at zero years old.
This challenges the DNA theory of aging. A 70 year old’s skin cells have undergone seventy years of DNA damage, and sure enough the 70-year-old has weak, wrinkled skin. But if you transfer the skin cell DNA to an egg, inseminate the egg, and turn it into a baby, that baby is just as young as all the other babies. So DNA damage can’t be the whole story.
What could be an almost insurmountable problem for cells in a mature animal, but trivially vanishes when you clone a cell into an embryo?
Sinclair’s answer is epigenetics.
🌟 How To Be Successful
Old but gold - an impressive collection of thoughtful advice on how to create something important. Pick and choose whatever you need to get some new projects started in 2022.
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up wanting the latter.
Here are 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success. Everything here is easier to do once you’ve already reached a baseline degree of success (through privilege or effort) and want to put in the work to turn that into outlier success. [1] But much of it applies to anyone.
Food for Thought.
💩 Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the messaging app Signal, wrote an essay on Web3. While not being entirely contra, he is definitely taking a more critical angle than the average Twitter user and discusses some potential problems with the technical infrastructure that powers blockchain technology - a refreshing & interesting read in a time where everyone just seems to be all bullish about crypto.
🕳 The Opposite of Loneliness - a piece written by Yale student Marina Keegan for her graduation ceremony. She died in a car accident only days later. She was 22.
≠ While overall life expectancy at birth has been rising in the U.S. (and already bounced back from its COVID-induced reduction in 2020) the differences in life expectancy between states has been rising as well- according to a new paper this seems to be mainly driven by ‘deaths of despair’ (i.e. suicide, drug poisoning, and alcohol-induced causes).
Random Stuff.
🏍 Around 1930 people experimented with so-called “Monowheels” as alternative modes of transport. Due to a couple of disadvantages such as bad stability, difficulty of steering or impeded view, it never really caught on. Nevertheless, quite fascinating to look at the efforts that engineers made to build this futuristic looking vehicles.
📧 What’s your email signature? If you wanna spice it up in 2022, here is the secret to powerful email signatures
☀ Learn how to build an off-grid solar power system - no experience necessary
My Update.
Taking it slowly after a great week of skiing holidays and new year celebrations but looking forward to getting some new projects started in 2022!
Still in Austria for another week as Europe seems to have gone back to fully remote mode, then heading back to Copenhagen.