Kickoff For 13 October, 2025
Some time back, I mentioned that I was considering a paid weekly letter. That's still under consideration, and that letter might even be crafted in collaboration with a friend. Due to various circumstances, if that is to happen it won't be until sometime in 2026. I'll keep you posted.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Digital resurrection: fascination and fear over the rise of the deathbot — Is this ghoulish, desperate, or the next seemingly logical step in dealing with grief and remembering those who've passed? It's a tough question, the answer to which will be different from person to person.
From the article:
[T]he deathbot industry raises profound questions for ethicists and theologians. The interest in digital resurrection may be a consequence of “traditional religious belief fading, but those deeper longings for transcendence, for life after death, for the permanence of love are redirected towards technological solutions”
Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is? — A fascinating look at the concept of time and how we both conceive of and perceive it. Maybe Ford Prefect was right about time being an illusion ...
From the article:
We have to calibrate our internal clocks, our internal timers, with external “objective” time. If your circadian clock is off, or out of phase, with external time, then you have jet lag. On shorter time scales, everything we’re doing is sort of calibrating our ability to tell time and match it with the objective world.
The Great Unbalding — Finally, a hair loss treatment that might actually work, and one that a certain online community is very excited about. When it comes to my thinning hair, I'm content to let nature take its course and to embrace my inner Sir Patrick Stewart.
From the article:
But for those losing hair now, even a three-year wait might feel unbearable. None of the scientists behind PP405 are bald themselves — suspiciously, everyone at Pelage, in fact, has a beautiful head of hair — but they’ve come to appreciate how deeply the condition can affect people. The three main researchers have been inundated with emails from strangers begging to join upcoming trials.
“Why Are We Funding This?” — A good explanation of how scientific research works and how different streams of research can dovetail to come up with something big. And, sadly, a reminder that a sizeable portion of the general public doesn't understand how science works.
From the article:
Undoubtedly there were many funded projects that didn’t lead to these breakthroughs. That is the nature of problem-solving: Some possible approaches work, some do not. We therefore need to attack problems from many different angles, knowing that some approaches will fail, and some will sound silly when presented out of context.