Hi! I’m Alex Beal. You can read more about me at [my main website](http://www.usrsb.in/about.html) or my [twitter](https://twitter.com/beala).
This website is full of selected notes published from my [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) vault. This is an experiment reducing publishing friction. The notes here are less polished than my essays, but I can publish them at a much higher rate.
Where should you start? Check out my daily links
- [[2024-08-13]]: Making a toaster from scratch, my self-typing typewriter, and another famous experiment from early psychology bites the dust.
- [[2024-08-11]]: A good YouTube channel on nutrition. No really! Spencer likes it, too.
- [[Daily Links/2024-05-30|2024-05-30]]: I, for one, would like to avoid a war with China. And wait why is Texas bussing migrants to Denver and NY?
- [[2023-08-06]]: Retractable charging cables are nice and uhh is dentistry real?
- [[2023-08-05]]: Shkreli trolling for good. Alan Watts was (apparently) a troubled soul. Natália defends the scientific consensus.
- [[2023-08-03]]: About those famous heart transplant photos. Crooked honesty experts. A list of generic questions for interacting with doctors.
- [[2023-07-26]]: Compulsive eating, compulsive daydreaming, and imaginary friends.
- [[2023-07-20]]: Neopets during the Dot Com boom, and Comic Sans for coding.
- [[2023-07-17]]: RIP Harry Frankfurt, the history of contract law, and GPS satellites doing strange things.
- [[2023-07-15]]: Drums and simulations.
- [[2023-07-14]]: Tattoos and lost nazi weather stations.
- [[2023-07-12]]: emacs, and a new cavity prevention technology.
- [[2023-07-06]]: Through hiking documentaries on YouTube.
- [[2023-07-05]]: YouTube videos on hobby tunneling and how to have good conversations.
- [[2023-06-23]]: The psychedelics conference in Denver and Decent Espresso's new group head parts.
- [[2023-05-27]]: Colonoscopies are extremely painful, but don't worry, you won't remember.
- [[2023-05-09]]: Sigma Nutrition on the link between saturated fat and heart disease. My notes on The Hungry Brain.
- [[2023-05-08]]: I continue down the Kevin Hall rabbit hole with a metabolic ward study on low fat vs keto, and two articles on UPFs.
- [[2023-05-07]]: Diving into that study on ultra processed foods.
- [[2023-05-06]]: A paper defending Health at Every Size. [[Stephan Guyenet]] offers a hypothesis about the obesity epidemic: we're too good at satisfying our preferences.
- [[2023-05-04]]: Who is the mysterious rat maze researcher Feynman mentions in his 1975 speech?
- [[2023-05-02]]: A popular benchmark used to evaluate how good LLMs are at generating code was routinely missing bugs. *Anti-Diet*, a book promoting Health At Every Size ideas, gets a critical review.
- [[2023-04-30]]: Altitude Brewing in Denver sells magic mushroom spores. I pick out the best step stool for toddlers.
- [[2023-04-29]]: It's easy to teach children perfect pitch, but is it an asset or a liability? That VA study on Long COVID is probably biased. Meal replacements can increase weight loss in low calorie diets.
- [[2023-04-28]]: According to an IGM survey, many economists think the AI hype is real. An adversarial collaboration on sexism and the academy tries to sort fact from fiction.
- [[2023-04-26]]: Is Less Wrong a cult? A study proposing that a decline in *basal* metabolic rate could explain the obesity epidemic. Internet theories about cholesterol and statins are debunked.
- [[2022-02-06]]: Thoughts on the habits of highly effective people.
Other notes I'm proud of:
- My [[Roe v Wade Prediction]] was a long running prediction that turned out to be prescient.
- [[Geiger Counter]] contains write ups of some fun experiments I ran.
- The [[China Shock]] page is fairly polished (as far as notes go).
- The Podcasts directory contains summaries of podcast episodes, [[2023-04-29#Generate Podcast Summaries with GPT|mostly generated with GPT]].