Mike Minded

Sony is removing 551 StudioCanal titles from UK PlayStation customers’ libraries due to expired licensing agreements, with no refunds offered. The incident highlights that digital ‘purchases’ are actually long-term licenses that can be revoked when distribution rights expire, not permanent ownership. Teaching: • Use this as a metaphor for practice ownership: students don’t ‘own’ a…

Researchers discovered that Arc, a protein normally involved in neuron communication, helps toxic Tau protein spread between brain cells in Alzheimer’s disease by packaging it into extracellular vesicles. Arc has a dual role: it helps diseased neurons expel excess Tau (protective), but this allows the toxic protein to enter and corrupt healthy neurons (harmful). The…

A systematic review of five randomized controlled trials found mixed evidence on whether creatine supplementation helps with depression. Two studies showed significant benefits when combined with antidepressants or cognitive behavioral therapy, while three found no effect. Researchers suggest creatine may support brain energy metabolism and neurotransmitter function, but the evidence is too limited and inconsistent…

Bhikkhu Bodhi examines Buddhist accounts of sudden awakening amid crisis—Kisagotami’s grief, Patacara’s catastrophic losses, Siha’s despair—arguing that these stories reveal a second track to liberation alongside gradual training. He suggests that the involuntary stripping away of all reference points, the exposure to groundlessness, can catalyze realization when conditions ripen. Teaching: • Use the concept of…

A reflection on workshops teaching Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints Thinking Tools, framing them as common-sense reasoning made systematic and repeatable even under emotional duress or frustration. The five tools (Current Reality Tree, Evaporating Cloud, Future Reality Tree, Prerequisite Tree, Transition Tree) mirror thinking processes people already use informally but rarely apply consistently when stuck or…

Paul Erdős introduced the probabilistic method in 1947, proving certain mathematical objects (like clique-free networks) exist by showing random selection yields them with nonzero probability—without constructing them directly. For 80 years, progress on diagonal Ramsey numbers stalled until three mathematicians used high-dimensional sphere geometry to correlate edge colorings, breaking the deadlock by making randomness more…

Maria Popova uses Vonnegut’s long, painful marriage to Jane Cox as a meditation on the hardest equation in life: when to keep trying and when to stop. She frames the question through an Andean image of treeline—the precise point where conditions turn inhospitable to growth—and traces how Vonnegut measured a failing relationship by duration rather…

L.M. Sacasas memorializes David Cayley, the Canadian broadcaster and interpreter of Ivan Illich who died at 81. The essay celebrates Cayley’s generosity and uses his death as occasion to reflect on Illich’s claim that hospitality and friendship are the ground of hope and political life, illustrated by a 12th-century letter from Hugh of St. Victor…

Scott Alexander reviews the Metaculus Democracy Threat Index, a crowdsourced forecasting tool that aggregates 153 questions about US democratic health to produce a transparent, less expert-dependent alternative to traditional democracy indices. He weighs its strengths (transparency, finer-grained probabilistic estimates, resistance to ideological capture) against vulnerabilities like crowd attack, superforecaster manipulation, and question-selection bias. Teaching: •…