Writing this from sunny Barcelona after I ate an ungodly amount of food. Naturally, our first item today is a guide on how not to die from a heart disease.

Don’t Die of Heart Disease

Last year, I went for a checkup, and the doctor flagged my high cholesterol. Seemed unusual — I'm not eating that badly. Did another test after following a diet, and it barely budged. Since that moment, I've been taking statins, magical pills that force my liver to work better. Most likely, I'm genetically predisposed to high LDL.

People don't really die from old age. If you even get old, you will most likely die from cancer or heart disease. Some part of it is outside of your control, but you can still improve your odds. This article dives into the cardiovascular conditions, what you need to be wary of, and what you can do if nothing else works (well, statins).

Do a checkup and a lipid panel; note your LDL, and adjust accordingly: Mediterranean diet, strength and cardio training, quality sleep, no smoking, and minimal alcohol.

Why You Can't Remember Being a Baby

I think my oldest memory is around 4 years old, but there are only a few. Most are way later, around 7. We know that babies can form memories and remember things months later.

This video explains that rapid neuron growth in the hippocampus overwrites the neural circuits holding those memories. And since babies lack the sense of self and language, their experiences can't be encoded in a lasting, retrievable way.

Your brain was too busy building itself into who you’d become, and that process required demolishing the early records.

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it really began

The two earliest forms of writing that we know are Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Some scientists believe that the Proto-Elamite may have been the forgotten third writing system that emerged in ancient Iran. It was used on clay tablets for economic records, but may also have made a surprising leap toward representing speech itself. Then it vanished, leaving one of the earliest writing systems still largely undeciphered.

One thing that fascinates me in linguistics: practically all the most widely used alphabets and writing systems in the world descend from a single source.

That source is the Phoenician script, which emerged 1000BC and became one of the first alphabetical writing systems. The Phoenician script gave rise to Aramaic writing (Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian alphabets, among others), Greek (from which Latin and Cyrillic descended), and a whole range of writing systems that are little known to us or now extinct.

At the same time, we don’t know for certain where the Phoenician script itself came from. Some link it to Egyptian hieroglyphs and their cursive alphabet; others find similar elements in writing systems from the Sinai Peninsula, Syria, or Lebanon.

And this script traveled very far!. For example, most writing systems in Southeast Asia descended from Brahmi, a now-forgotten syllabic script. While in India it’s considered a fully independent invention, specialists worldwide link the Brahmi script to the Aramaic script.

But if that’s the case, then through Brahmi, Phoenician script reaches all the way to Devanagari, the so-called Mongolian square script — and even to the Korean syllabic alphabet.

The idea of an alphabet itself, though quite innovative, arose independently on several occasions. But as it happened, nearly all the systems that survived to our time descend from an ancient people who lived in the territory of modern-day Lebanon.

Ancient humans only evolved language once, but why?

And since we're on that topic of the language.

Homo sapiens emerged roughly 300,000 years ago in Africa. That we know. We don't know if they had languages and scientists place it anytime from 50,000 years ago to 1.7 million years ago (with Homo Erectus).

The first range coincides with the “behavioral revolution” seen in symbolic art, complex tools, and long-distance trade networks. But some scientists insist our bodies were already adapted to talking when we appeared.

Halupedia

Halupedia is a fake Wikipedia where every entry is invented only when someone visits it. It mimics the original — layout, citations, random article button, reader count — but the entire universe underneath is entirely hallucinated with articles like “The ministry of slightly wrong maps” or “the society for the prevention of unnecessary Tuesdays”.