Does eating more protein burn more calories?

Peter Attia in peterattiamd.com:

When it comes to fat loss, most of us need all the help we can get. With the modern American lifestyle being largely sedentary and characterized by easy access to highly palatable, energy-dense foods, it can be very difficult to maintain the calorie deficit necessary to lose fat and keep it off. Whether or not a calorie deficit is achieved is determined by the difference between total energy in and total energy out. Assessing the “energy in” side of the equation is straightforward—add up the energy content of all food consumed. However, the “energy out” side is more complicated and much more difficult to accurately measure, as it varies by body composition, activity level, age, sex, and various other factors.

One component of total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is the energy required to digest and metabolize food, termed the “thermic effect of food,” or “diet-induced thermogenesis” (DIT). DIT can account for ~10% of total energy expenditure, but some foods require greater energy input to digest and metabolize than others. Among macronutrients, protein is by far the least efficient source of energy—roughly 25% of the available energy in protein is expended just metabolizing it, which is more than double the amount of available energy required by carbohydrate, fat, or alcohol metabolism.1,2 This raises the question: can we leverage higher protein intakes to increase total energy expenditure enough to make a meaningful difference for fat loss?

More here.

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Sunday Poem

Hour Children

This hour,
children.

Rubble children.
Falling beneath

children falling
children.

Afternoon children
with shadows

for swings.
Evening children

with cold
for pillows.

Moon
in the yew tree

children
without trees.

by Caprice Garvin
from Rattle Magazine

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Friday, October 31, 2025

Edgar Allan Poe: A Life

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found in my library. But beyond the author of The Raven, who was Poe? One man who can tell me is Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Penn State DuBois campus of Pennsylvania State University. When this biography was published back in March, I made a mental note to revisit it for Halloween. Though my background is in biology, Kopley fortunately wants to provide for a broad readership, including “the general reader, the aficionado, and the scholar”, the goal being to “get as close to Poe as I can for as many readers as I can” (p. 4). Thus, for the last 21 days, I have immersed myself in this detailed and deeply researched biography to read of a life that was both captivating and tragic.

More here.

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Signs of introspection in large language models

From the website of Anthropic:

Have you ever asked an AI model what’s on its mind? Or to explain how it came up with its responses? Models will sometimes answer questions like these, but it’s hard to know what to make of their answers. Can AI systems really introspect—that is, can they consider their own thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible-sounding answers when they’re asked to do so?

Understanding whether AI systems can truly introspect has important implications for their transparency and reliability. If models can accurately report on their own internal mechanisms, this could help us understand their reasoning and debug behavioral issues. Beyond these immediate practical considerations, probing for high-level cognitive capabilities like introspection can shape our understanding of what these systems are and how they work. Using interpretability techniques, we’ve started to investigate this question scientifically, and found some surprising results.

More here.

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Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas

Isaac Ariail Reed at The Hedgehog Review:

As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing.

More here.

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Carlo Rovelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality

Zack Savitsky in Quanta Magazine:

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize their vision but also to gauge distances(opens a new tab) to objects — compensating for their limited binocular vision. “It’s all perspectival,” he said.

A theoretical physicist affiliated with Aix-Marseille University, Rovelli studies how we perceive reality from our limited vantage point. His research is wide-ranging, running the gamut from quantum information to black holes, and often delves into the history and philosophy of science. In the late 1980s, he helped develop a theory called loop quantum gravity that aims to describe the quantum underpinnings of space and time. A decade later, he proposed a new “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes so far as to suggest that there is no objective reality whatsoever, only perspectives on reality — be they a physicist’s or a pigeon’s.

More here.

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On The Last Days Of Gene Hackman

Joy Williams at Harper’s Magazine:

Gene Hackman was Popeye Doyle, the Reverend Scott, Lex Luthor, Royal Tenenbaum. He was Little Bill Daggett and John Herod. He was a senator and a president. He was Harry Caul and Harry Moseby and Max Millan and Norman Dale. He made sixty-six movies, sixty-seven if you count his uncredited voice of God in the forgettable Two of a Kind. (God had nothing meaningful to say.) He didn’t do death in most of them, but in the ones he did, his end was very awful. He dropped into a burning pit of fire in The Poseidon Adventure. His head was blown off by Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, and Sharon Stone terminated him in a gunfight with a shot to the eye in The Quick and the Dead. As president of the United States, he was stabbed in the heart with a letter opener by a septuagenarian cuckold. He was shredded by bullets in Bonnie and Clyde, and it doesn’t look good when he’s machine-gunned from a floatplane and collapses bleeding on a fishing boat at the end of Night Moves—the boat going round and round in circles on an empty sea.

Yet none of these Hollywood executions could hold a candle to the real thing, a departure so circumstantial, grotesque, and profoundly lonely that one could only think that Death had lost her marbles with this one.

more here.

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The silicon cell

Mitch Leslie in Science:

A human cell swarms with trillions of molecules, including some 42 million proteins and a plethora of carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids. Crowded with organelles and other structures, the cell boasts an intricate organization that makes baroque architecture seem plain. Its cytoplasm is a frenzied chemical lab, with molecules continuously reacting, rearranging, and reshaping. In the nucleus, thousands of genes are constantly switching on and off to turn the seeming chaos into concerted actions that help the cell survive and reproduce.

This complexity is more than the human mind can yet fully understand or predict. But many researchers think artificial intelligence (AI), with its prodigious ability to assimilate and process information, might be up to the task. More than 2 decades ago researchers started to build systems of equations meant to simulate some of the cell’s workings. Now, they have progressed to AI-driven replicas that, like the large language models taking business and popular culture by storm, ingest vast amounts of data to learn on their own. ChatGPT’s attention-grabbing debut nearly 3 years ago inspired the virtual cell builders. “People want this kind of moment for biology,” says 
Kasia Kedzierska, an AI research scientist at the 
Allen Institute.

More here.

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Friday Poem

Morning Song of a Fan

a flock of black birds bursts across
the gray sky above a late fall dawn, then
splits in two like a pair of receivers heading
for opposite sidelines

I’m not much of a defender this morning.
let everything score – let the last roses kick
field goals, let the tall, wide-shouldered deodars
plunge over the horizon again and again
watch how in the far pits the sturdy clouds
hunker down against the blitzing light
while perky pyracanthas strut their orangey stuff 

already there is traffic noise as some fans
have left the game before it’s over, yet nobody loses
it’s like that moment at a great stadium when
you’re going off to the john or to get a beer
and you pause on the cold gritty concrete to hear 

the vast, informing silence that coaches everything

by Nils Peterson
10/20/25

 

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The Simplest Argument For Veganism

Bentham’s Bulldog at Bentham’s Newsletter:

Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chickens were chained up in a cage too small to move, inhaling the feces of those above them. Those chickens, you learned, had been debeaked, meaning their beak had been sliced off with a hot knife, without anesthetic. This probably felt like having their nose cut off.

When his egg-laying hens produced a baby male chick, he would drop it into a shredder because it was useless. He’d force the pigs to give birth in a little concrete cell too small to turn around in, and would kill them by forcing them into a gas chamber. Over decades, he’d genetically engineered the chickens to be so large that they could barely move, and the full weight of their bloated bodies was thus constantly pressed against the metal of the cage. And sometimes, to produce more chickens, he’d hold the female chickens down and inject them with semen from male chickens.

It seems like he is doing something evil! He should stop. Probably you would not return to his house of horrors. More likely, you’d call the police.

But here’s a plausible principle: if it’s wrong to do something, then it’s wrong to pay other people to do it.

more here.

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Thursday, October 30, 2025

The Psychology of “Portnoy”: On the Making of Philip Roth’s Groundbreaking Novel

Steven J. Zipperstein at Literary Hub:

Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sport, as well as the highbrow Partisan Review. Indeed, it was there, in that mainstay of the New York intelligentsia, that Roth signaled his departure from the magazine’s austere norms with the chapter entitled “Whacking Off.” Solotaroff’s new paperback journal New American Review ran two excerpted chapters of the novel, the first almost two years before the book’s appearance, the second numbering no fewer than twenty-eight thousand words.

By the time it was published in January 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was tipped as a phenomenal bestseller. The Washington Post predicted that, for a long time to come, “we will judge our friends by what they say” about Portnoy. Quoting lines from the novel, the Houston Chronicle said—barely a week after its appearance—had already become “a national sport.” Few if any matched Albert Goldman’s excitement, writing in Life: “A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s,” declared Goldman, “Portnoy is destined at the Christological age of 33 to take upon himself all the sins of the sexually obsessed modern man and expiate them in a tragicomic crucifixion.”

More here.

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Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve weather forecasting

Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

The potential for AI to improve weather forecasting and climate modelling (which also takes a long time and uses a lot of energy) has been known for several years now.3 AI models have been tested for one- and two-week forecasts with promising results.4 Scientists will often need to wait weeks for a complex, high-resolution climate model to run; AI might be able to do this hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster.

But a huge trial in India this year has taken a huge step forward. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture partnered with teams of scientists from the Human-Centred Weather Forecasts Initiative, the University of Chicago, California, Berkeley, Bombay, Bangalore, and others.

They sent weekly AI-powered forecasts about the monsoon to 38 million farmers across 13 states in India. These AI forecasts predicted changes in the monsoon that all other ones missed. The forecasts of the timing of the monsoon were sent up to four weeks in advance of its arrival; conventional physics-based modelling usually can’t do it more than five days in advance.

More here.

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Rethinking nuclear

Edward A. Friedman at the Oxford University Press blog:

As someone who has spent decades studying the evolution of nuclear energy, I’ve seen its emergence as a promising transformative technology, its stagnation as a consequence of dramatic accidents and its current re-emergence as a potential solution to the challenges of global warming.

While the issues of global warming and sustainable energy strategies are among the most consequential in today’s society, it is difficult to find objective sources that elucidate these topics. Discourse on this subject is often positioned at one or another polemical extreme. Further complicating the flow of objective information is the involvement of advocates of vested interests as seen in the lobbying efforts of the coal, gas and oil industries. My goal has been to present nuclear energy’s potential role in a sustainable energy future—alongside renewables like wind and solar—without ideological baggage.

An additional hurdle that must be overcome in dealing with the pros and cons of nuclear energy is the psychological context in which fear of nuclear weapons and of radiation impedes rational analysis.

More here.

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Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us

Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.

The parallel with Copernicus turns out to be apt. Before Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo, people assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the Earth, and justifiably so—that’s how it appears to us when we look up at the sky. It took a lot of close observation and ingenious reasoning for astronomers to understand that this was a trick of perspective, and that in fact it is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Similarly, it is natural for human beings to assume that the way the world appears to us—extended in three dimensions, constantly moving from the past into the future, changing as its different elements interact—is the way it really is. But, Kant maintained, this is also a trick of perspective. Space and time do not exist objectively, only subjectively, as forms of our experience. He wrote that it is “from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc.”

more here.

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The Best New TV Shows of October 2025

Judy Berman in Time Magazine:

Horror is ubiquitous on TV at this time of year, and those of us who love a good scare—myself very much included—usually look forward to it. Unfortunately, October 2025’s selection of IP expansions (IT: Welcome to Derry, Anne Rice’s Talamasca) and true crime murdersploitation left me mostly cold. You will find one worthwhile serial-killer story among this month’s highlights, though—plus a thriller with the deceptively spooky title Down Cemetery Road, a docudrama that resurrects Margaret Thatcher, an in-depth profile of a filmmaker who stares into the darkness of the human soul, and a dispatch from the delightfully unhinged brain of Tim Robinson.

Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV)

It’s always fascinating to see one great artist consider another. Over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, Martin Scorsese has directed essential documentaries on so many luminaries: Bob Dylanthe Rolling Stonesthe Beatlesthe BandElia KazanFran Lebowitz, and the list goes on. Now, Rebecca Miller—the filmmaker, novelist, daughter of Arthur Miller, and wife of two-time Scorsese leading man Daniel Day-Lewis—has turned her lens on Marty, in an excellent five-part docuseries rightly framed as a “portrait.” It’s immediately clear that Miller was the ideal director for this project, wise about both the psychological toll of uncompromising artistry and the pain artists so often inflict on the people who love them.

More here.

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