Mike Minded

Is the Correlation Between Hypertrophy and Strength Gains Stronger Than We Realized?

Greg Nuckols analyzes a Marques et al. study suggesting that the correlation between hypertrophy and strength gains may be stronger than prior research indicated, because earlier studies relied on between-participant statistics that obscured within-individual relationships. He clarifies that while hypertrophy likely contributes more to strength than previously thought, the apparent correlation is inflated by methodology,…

Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

Maria Popova’s Orion essay traces how fungi were long overlooked by Western taxonomy despite being the symbiotic substrate that brought plant life onto land. Weaving Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, her mother’s foraging, and mycorrhizal science, she frames fungi as organisms of polar powers and underground interdependence that resist the human urge to sort life into…

The Four Noble Truths of Travel

A travel writer recounts a Varanasi encounter with a sadhu who reframes impermanence: suffering comes not from change itself but from wanting things to stay fixed. The author then maps the Buddha’s four noble truths onto travel, arguing that journeys are inherently uncomfortable, that clinging to expectations (favorite restaurants, empty museums) compounds the discomfort, and…

Some of the last Neanderthals were surprisingly genetically diverse

New genomic analysis of 27 late Neanderthal remains from Belgium and France reveals these northwestern populations were more genetically diverse and well-connected than previously assumed, contradicting the inbreeding-as-extinction narrative drawn from Siberian samples. The study suggests regional Neanderthal groups had very different population histories, and curiously shows no modern human gene flow into these Neanderthals…

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Maria Popova explores Viktor Frankl’s rediscovered 1946 lectures, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, delivered eleven months after his liberation from Auschwitz. Frankl rejects both nihilistic pessimism and naive optimism, arguing that meaning is found through individual moral choice and ‘sober activism.’ He insists that what remains when everything is stripped away is the…

Why Does Everyone Hate AI?

Paul Krugman argues that public hostility toward AI—evidenced by booed commencement speeches and Pew surveys showing net-negative sentiment—breaks from the historically optimistic American response to new tech. He attributes the backlash to AI companies’ own apocalyptic marketing, forced adoption at work and in consumer products like Google search, visible datacenter costs, eroded trust in tech,…

Norman Rockwell people-watched in the West Wing lobby. Now those sketches are on public display

Norman Rockwell’s four 1940s sketches ‘So You Want to See the President!’ depicting people waiting in the West Wing lobby during WWII are going on public display for the first time. The White House Historical Association paid over $7 million to acquire them after a family ownership dispute led to their auction. Rockwell created the…

Pluralistic: Jailbreaking isn’t theft (25 Jun 2026)

Cory Doctorow argues that jailbreaking devices isn’t IP theft but a legitimate response to US Big Tech’s extraction, especially as Canada’s anticircumvention laws (passed for a now-broken US trade promise) prevent Canadian businesses from competing. He frames real digital sovereignty as the ability to escape kill-switches, app store taxes, and ad-tech rigging by reclaiming the…

Lost books by ancient philosophers recovered from ‘unreadable’ scrolls

Researchers using the Vesuvius Challenge have used AI and high-resolution 3D scans to virtually unwrap carbonised Herculaneum scrolls without physically damaging them, recovering 1.5 metres of previously unreadable text. The recovered text appears to include lost Stoic philosophy possibly authored by Chrysippus, plus a new book by Philodemus, opening the door to decades of further…

Blogging can just be stating the obvious

Jim Nielsen riffs on a John Gruber post about user-hostile web popups, using it to make a meta point about blogging: often the best posts simply state what seems obvious but no one is saying out loud. The value isn’t novelty but the willingness to name a pattern others have normalized, with receipts. Teaching: •…