henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

Recent quotes:

How giving up alcohol made me appreciate wine more

Finding sobriety didn’t end my relationship with alcohol, it fundamentally changed it. It took me a couple of months to engage with wine professionally again, tasting and spitting instead of seeking the end goal of intoxication. Even now, I tend to avoid large tastings and limit the number of wines I explore in one sitting. But the greatest change was of intention with the process: tasting to understand and explore the flavours, stories and nuances of each wine.  I began to discover a new clarity. Those little edges that had once felt softened suddenly had greater definition. Minerality shimmered with more purity, and heady aromatics haunted with newfound intensity. It became less about identifying red or black cherries, and more about appreciating the details that give each wine its own character. I often talk with our team about the circular notion of “purpose and presence” and how relevant this is when tasting wine – and in sobriety it has never felt more relevant. The purpose of tasting creates presence. And the presence gives purpose back to tasting. The more present you are, the more detail you notice; the more detail you notice, the more present you become.
#alcohol #wine #presence - ft.com

France Will Never Be Enough for the People Desecrating It - The Atlantic

These past weeks of pandemonium have driven home for me that no society, not even a society as generous and in many ways enlightened as France’s, can make life sweet enough for angry young men. Nihilists of the kind we’ve seen flood the streets of France from coast to coast will never uphold their end of the social contract, no matter how beautifully it is drafted. This is the essence of Tocqueville’s famous paradox: As societies become more equal—and few societies strive to be more egalitarian than France, thanks to heavy taxation of the rich and a generous social safety net—any perceived or remaining inequalities become intolerable.
#inequality #france #Atlantic - theatlantic.com

Risk-Taking Spikes Before Alcohol Bingeing - Neuroscience News

Elevated Mixed Risk: Participants who exhibited heightened risk-taking during mixed gambling tasks (scenarios involving potential gains and losses) significantly escalated their alcohol consumption the following month. Altered Loss Sensitivity: Lower risk-taking in purely loss-avoidance contexts similarly heralded an upcoming increase in drinking. Reduced Information Sampling: When participants showed decreased information sampling biases—making choices impulsively before gathering adequate evidence—their alcohol intake climbed in the subsequent month.
#alcohol #mobile #games #risk - neurosciencenews.com

Scientists uncover a simple breathing exercise that can induce an altered state of consciousness | Daily Mail Online

One of the most common techniques, used by almost half of the participants in the trial, is something called Conscious Connected Breathing. This uses 'uninterrupted high ventilation breathwork' without any breath holds or pauses for extended periods of time, Dr Fincham explains. The core technique is circular breathing, a method often used by trumpet or flute players to hold extremely long notes. Expert practitioners claim that this method allows them to enter altered states of consciousness, cause shifts in their physiology, and even treat various mental and physical conditions. Although there haven't been any head–to–head trials between psychedelics and breathwork, scientists have drawn parallels between the types of mental states both induce.
#paleotherapy #breath - dailymail.com

The next ayahuasca? Gabon fights to protect sacred plant from US drug companies | Plants | The Guardian

Not every dose of ibogaine abroad comes from Gabonese iboga. The molecule can be made semi-synthetically from voacangine, found in the related African tree Voacanga africana. But the iboga root bark is particularly in demand for ceremonial use, and for the manufacture of extracts containing several of its alkaloids.
#paleotherapy #test #iboga - theguardian.com

Collaborative Overload

According to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more
#collaboration #culture #meetings - hbr.org

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times

Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’
#empathy #teams - nytimes.com

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.
#empathy #teams - nytimes.com

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times

Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).
#collaboration #teams - nytimes.com

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team - The New York Times

One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.
#racery #teams #belonging - nytimes.com

Sense of belonging in hybrid work settings - ScienceDirect

work isolation negatively impacted both the quality and frequency of interpersonal communication, suggesting that workplace isolation potentially endangers effective communication and information-sharing in remote settings.
#racery #belonging #remote - sciencedirect.com

Sense of belonging in hybrid work settings - ScienceDirect

All people share fundamental psychological needs for belongingness, love, and care (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The quality of interpersonal relationships shapes people's overall sense of fulfillment and happiness. In the work domain, the human need for belonging is fulfilled when the individual feels connected, respected, trusted, and socially supported in the work community, has a sense of membership, and experiences connectedness in relation to peers and supervisors at work. Satisfactory workplace relationships exist when there is an equilibrium between the expected and actual quality and quantity of relationships individuals have at work (Wright & Silard, 2021). According to Colbert et al. (2016), high-quality work relationships not only provide instrumental benefits like task assistance or career advancement, but opportunities for connecting with others in the form of positive emotions, friendship or companionship, and caring for and assisting others.
#racery #belonging #remote - sciencedirect.com

Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky | Integrative and Comparative Biology | Oxford Academic

Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky.
#Twitter #science #bluesky - academic.oup.com

systems strengthen... or weaken?

By developing systems that help us make sense of our past, we strengthen the same cognitive muscles that help us interpret complex signals in our professional work. A recent personal example made this especially clear to me. When I needed to create documentation for a medication I'm taking, my doctor simply told me to keep track of intake and effects - without providing much structure for how to do this effectively. Rather than improvising a haphazard approach or avoiding the task entirely, I developed a structured template in collaboration with Claude. I created a project in Obsidian to house this template and the resulting data.
#memory #whichworksbest #wispr - thenew.igorschwarzmann.com

The Shape of Memory to Come – Experiments on holding the unrecorded

I've been experimenting with transforming my Obsidian vault into a personal retrieval-augmented generation system (RAG)—a searchable database of my thoughts I can query and connect with new ideas. Remarkably, Markdown, a format I've used for over a decade, is now central to modern AI systems. The same simple text format powering tools like iA Writer is foundational to sophisticated memory systems.
#memory #wispr - thenew.igorschwarzmann.com

The Shape of Memory to Come – Experiments on holding the unrecorded

The convenience of digital documentation thus paradoxically increases the difficulty of recalling undocumented moments, reinforcing the feeling that "if it's not archived digitally, it didn't happen."
#memory #wispr - thenew.igorschwarzmann.com

The Shape of Memory to Come – Experiments on holding the unrecorded

in an age dominated by automation and algorithmic curation, memory isn't merely about recalling past events—it's a matter of existential importance. Digital platforms increasingly externalize aspects of our identities, and consciously shaping how we preserve and recall experiences becomes vital. Controlling memory means controlling our narratives, which directly shapes the meanings we derive from our lives.
#memory #wispr - thenew.igorschwarzmann.com

Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary | Science Advances

We study vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.
#LLM #research - science.org

Science - Isocapnic Respiratory Muscle Trainer

m. This improvement allows you to move a greater volume of air through your lungs, positively impacting your breathing throughout the day. As a result, you can breathe deeper and slower, optimizing the benefits of your respiratory muscle training. By addressing respiratory complications through such training, you’ll improve your overall respiratory outcomes and facilitate more effective rehabilitation. Respiratory muscle training is particularly beneficial for you if you have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as your respiratory muscle strength and endurance play a crucial role in your rehabilitation.
#n-of-1 #apnea - isocapnic.com

Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama on Trump’s Campaign Trail - The New York Times

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
#adderall #ketamine #musk - nytimes.com

The Agentic Web and Original Sin – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quantity, and the ratio matters: a publication with 1 valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will more easily earn subscriptions than one with 3 valuable articles and 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects. Yet all too many local newspapers, built for an ad-based business model that calls for daily content to wrap around ads, spend their limited resources churning out daily filler even though those ads no longer exist.
#subscription #quizlab #substack - stratechery.com

Inside the Discord Community Developing Its Own Hair Loss Drugs

HairDAO has turned self-experimentation by its DIY hair loss scientists into research being run in conjunction with people like Dr. Claire Higgins, a researcher at Imperial College London, as well as at its own lab. And, ultimately, into products sold via Anagen. It also sells an original shampoo formula called FolliCool for $49.95 per 200 ml bottle.  “The best hair loss researchers are basically anons on the internet,” Bakst said on a recent podcast appearance. “Of the four studies that we've run at universities, two of the four were fully designed by anons in our Discord server. And then, now that we have our own lab, all the studies we're running there are designed by anons in our Discord server.”
#social-media #mediumismedicine - 404media.co

Boosting Klotho Protein Slows Aging and Enhances Health - Neuroscience News

The protein Klotho (KL) has emerged as a promising anti-aging molecule due to its pleiotropic actions modulating insulin, insulin-like growth factor-1, and Wnt signaling pathways and reducing inflammatory and oxidative stress.
#aging #longevity #neurogenesis #klotho - neurosciencenews.com

Thanks to DOGE, Gumroad’s founder has a second job with the VA - Fast Company

Now that he’s there, he says he finds himself surrounded by people who “love their jobs,” who came to the government with a sense of mission driving their work. “In a sense, that makes the DOGE agenda a little bit more complicated, because if half the government took [a buyout offer], then we wouldn’t have to do much more,” he says, implying software can replace departing employees. “We’d just basically use software to plug holes. But that’s not what’s happening.” Lavingia’s skills with automation, which have helped keep Gumroad lean, are what he hopes to bring to the VA. But when it comes down to it, what he’s found is a machine that largely functions, though it doesn’t make decisions as fast as a startup might. “I would say the culture shock is mostly a lot of meetings, not a lot of decisions,” he says. “But honestly, it’s kind of fine—because the government works. It’s not as inefficient as I was expecting, to be honest. I was hoping for more easy wins.”
#trump #DOGE - fastcompany.com

Conservative Kevin Williamson Slams 'Socialist' Donald Trump

“Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism,” he continued. “Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to ‘scientific’ principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an ass of exceptional asininity.”
#trump #communism - mediaite.com

Women’s Brains on Alcohol: Insight into the Science of Sex-Based Risks < Yale School of Medicine

As result, when a woman and a man of the same age and weight drink the same amount at the same rate, the woman will experience a greater BAC. “Let’s say they’re both 150 pounds and 48 years old, and they consume three drinks in two hours,” McKee says. “The man will be significantly under the legal drinking limit for driving, and the woman will be over the legal drinking limit—just because of this difference in how alcohol is metabolized.”
#alcohol - medicine.yale.edu