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:

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

Researchers secretly experimented on Reddit users with AI-generated comments

“The CMV Mod Team needs to inform the CMV community about an unauthorized experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on CMV users,” the subreddit’s moderators wrote in a lengthy post notifying Redditors about the research. “This experiment deployed AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views.”
#social-media #LLM #reddit - engadget.com

How Troutman Pepper Locke Used Gen AI to Streamline Its Firm Merger Process

The innovation team built an internal website that allowed employees to access a merger-specific instance of Athena, which was trained on communications around the merger such as presentations, FAQs, and resource guides. The site provided a central repository for merger information and a calendar of important events, as well as a chat function that allowed users to ask Athena natural language questions about the process.
#law #LLM - law.com

How media outlets can use games to increase their revenue

But it’s not the only publisher that’s incorporated games into its business strategy. Hundreds of outlets ranging from Morning Brew to The New Yorker utilize a platform called Amuse Labs to build everything from crosswords to sudoku. In a recent interview, co-founder John Temple explained how publishers can leverage games to increase time on site, repeat visits, advertising revenue, and paid subscription conversions.
#quizlab - simonowens.substack.com

Are You Ready For This, Media? Pam Bondi Is A Dumbass

“258 million lives. Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk laced with something else. They don’t know what they’re taking. They think they’re buying a Tylenol, or an Adderall, and a Xanax. And it’s laced with fentanyl and they’re dropping dead. And no longer, because of you, what you’ve done.”
#trump #propaganda - wonkette.com

Wyn Bessent Obituary - Little River, SC

She was a descendant of John Bessent who arrived at Charles Towne Landing in 1672.
#bessent - dignitymemorial.com

Opinion | The White House Tech Bros Owe Their Fortunes to the Research They’re Killing - The New York Times

The geographic centers of venture capital and the industries it has spawned overlap precisely with the locations of our great research universities. Think of Cambridge and Route 128 in Massachusetts (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard), or the stretch from San Jose to San Francisco (Stanford and University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley). This is no accident. It’s why world leaders visit these places to understand how we do it. It is also why Mr. Vance left Ohio for Yale and then high-tailed it to Silicon Valley for a job.
#trump #DOGE - nytimes.com

Scott Bessent Is Doing a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Job | The Nation

Last month, Bessent asserted that Trump’s decision to slap major tariffs on China would not harm US consumers. “China will pay for the tariffs because their business model is exporting their way out of this inflation,” he claimed. “They will eat any tariffs that go on.” Current Issue May 2025 Issue This week, China announced that it would counter Trump’s tariff moves by raising retaliatory duties on US imports to 84 percent. NBC’s report from Hong Kong was headlined: “China is matching Trump tariff for tariff. It has other ways it can strike back, too.” Things have gone so awry that, even as Trump backed off some reciprocal tariffs on Wednesday, he hiked tariffs on Chinese goods to 125 percent.
#China #tariffs #bessent - thenation.com

Retail Traders Are Aggressive Buyers of US Stocks This Year Despite Volatility - Bloomberg

JPMorgan’s data shows that 60% of the inflows from retail traders went to individual stocks, with electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc. and chip giant Nvidia Corp. accounting for nearly half of that, and 40% went to ETFs. Mega-cap technology companies have consistently been retail favorites, with Elon Musk’s Tesla a major beneficiary of the trend.
#USAUSA #trump #etf #tariffs - bloomberg.com

Mnuchin says he's staying at Treasury, defends Trump after classmates' call to resign - CBS News

"We call upon you, as our friend, our classmate, and as a fellow American, to resign in protest of President Trump's support of Nazism and white supremacy. We know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing," the letter read.
#trump #Yale - cbsnews.com

Scent: The Hidden Influence on Friendships

The study found that both initial diplomatic odor judgments and brief visual exposure independently predicted friendship potential ratings following live interactions. More notably, the quality of the live interaction predicted changes in how participants rated the same person’s diplomatic odor afterward, suggesting olfactory associations update based on social experiences. Statistical analysis showed these effects were driven primarily by idiosyncratic preferences (approximately 45-47% of variance) rather than by universal perceiver or target effects. This indicates that personal, unique preferences drive friendship formation more than generally agreed-upon characteristics. The researchers found that diplomatic odor cues may be even more influential than visual cues in predicting live interaction judgments, though they caution against over-interpreting this comparison due to methodological differences between the visual and olfactory judgment conditions.
#friends #smell - studyfinds.org

Association Between Alcohol Consumption, Cognitive Abilities, and Neuropathologic Changes | Neurology

Compared with participants who never consumed alcohol, moderate (odds ratio [OR] 1.60, 95% CI 1.19–2.15, p = 0.001), heavy (OR 2.33, 95% CI 1.50–3.63, p < 0.001), and former heavy (OR 1.89, 95% CI 1.41–2.54, p < 0.001) alcohol consumptions were associated with hyaline arteriolosclerosis while only heavy (OR 1.41, 95% CI 1.10–2.30, p = 0.012) and former heavy (OR 1.31, 95% CI 1.02–1.68, p = 0.029) alcohol consumptions were associated with neurofibrillary tangles. Former heavy drinking was associated with a lower brain mass ratio (β −4.45, 95% CI −8.55 to −0.35, p = 0.033) and worse cognitive abilities (β 1.31, 95% CI 0.54–2.09, p < 0.001). The association between impaired cognitive abilities and alcohol consumption was fully mediated by hyaline arteriolosclerosis (β 0.13, 95% CI 0.02–0.22, p = 0.012).
#brain #alcohol #Alzheimers - neurology.org

Inflammation May Be the Link Between Chronic Pain and Depression < Yale School of Medicine

Almost 30% of people worldwide suffer from a chronic pain condition such as lower back pain and migraines, and one in three of these patients also report co-existing pain conditions. Now, a new study published in Science Advances shows that a person’s risk of depression increases alongside the number of places in the body in which they experience pain. Furthermore, inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein (a protein produced by the liver in response to inflammation) help explain the association between pain and depression. This finding suggests that the mechanisms underlying chronic pain and depression may be driven by systemic inflammation, the researchers say. “Pain isn’t only physical,” says Dustin Scheinost, PhD, associate professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), and the study’s principal investigator. “Our study adds to the evidence that physical conditions can have mental health consequences.”
#depression #inflamation #pain - medicine.yale.edu

Opinion | The Maps That Show That City vs. Country Is Not Our Political Fault Line - The New York Times

In fact, only two regional cultures consistently exhibit urban-rural vote splitting, and together they account for just 15 percent of the population. Only in the Midlands has the split been a stark one. While urban Midlanders preferred Democrats by between six and 18 points in the three elections, their rural counterparts voted Republican by 15.2, then 22.6 and finally a blistering 40.8 in 2016. As in Yankeedom, this dramatic Trump surge among rural voters had an outsize effect on the Electoral College outcome. Nor should cities be assumed to be reliable bastions of Democratic support. The core counties of major metropolitan areas, including Phoenix, Jacksonville, Fla., and Virginia Beach — and lots of smaller ones, like Boise, Idaho; Colorado Springs; Mobile, Ala.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Wichita, Kan. — went Republican in all of these presidential elections. Notably, not one of them is in Yankeedom, the Left Coast or New Netherland, even though those nations account for nearly 30 percent of the United States population. Look at counties within medium-size metros — those with a population of between 250,000 and one million. Instead of being blue strongholds, such counties in four of the “nations” — Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Far West and New France — voted for Republicans in all three contests, and those in the Midlands did the same in the latter two. Yet in the reliably “blue” nations, this same county type supported Democrats. Collectively, the very biggest core metro counties do vote Democratic in every nation, but by margins that vary enormously, from nine to 20 points in most “red” regions to 40- and 60-point landslides in “blue” ones.
#USAUSA #politics #cities #cosmopolitan - nytimes.com

Bessent Is Wrong About Banks Saving Treasuries - Bloomberg

When senior politicians start talking about technicalities of obscure financial regulations on mainstream TV you can be sure something is up. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did just that in the middle of the US bond market selloff last Wednesday, a few hours before President Trump postponed most of his Liberation Day tariffs. Bessent was talking to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Wednesday morning when he bought up plans for deregulation, claiming they’d be very powerful. “Part of the deregulation that’s coming in the banking industry will be changing what’s called the Supplementary Leverage Ratio, which will allow banks to buy more Treasuries without a big capital charge,” he said. “So I would expect that we will have created a new buyer for Treasury securities, a larger more durable buyer.”
#USAUSA #interst-rates #bessent - bloomberg.com

Bessent Says Treasury Has Big Toolkit If Needed for Bonds - Bloomberg

“We are a long way” from needing to take action, he said. But “we have a big toolkit that we can roll out” if so. Included in that toolkit is the department’s buyback program for older securities, Bessent said. “We could up the buybacks if we wanted.”
#trump #inflation #interst-rates #bessent - bloomberg.com

The Bookseller - Comment - The tragedy of tariffs

I have concluded that the US policies of currency depreciation, defunding of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), attempted elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the imposition of fines on Columbia and other universities, the dismantling of the Department of Education (DOE), and much else are not fair and, specifically, have created a potential loss of 20% of authors’ earnings from US sales. Reluctantly, I have been forced to raise the prices of all Mensch titles in the US. A 20% increase would clearly damage unit sales significantly and thus I have restricted myself to an average 10% increase across the range. These increases will have immediate effect. Prices in all other territories, including Canada, China, Australia, Mexico, the EU and the UK, have been frozen.
#adbiblio #booksellers - thebookseller.com

A visual guide to the elected officials who fly Christian nationalist flags at the Capitol – Baptist News Global

It’s interesting to note how Americans responded to the changing nature of the swastika during and after World War II. An archived article from The New York Times dated June 11, 1938, announced that New York Hospital was removing two swastikas from its 335-foot chimney and replacing them with crosses because the symbol no longer pointed toward well-being. “Sometimes the meaning behind a symbol becomes so horrifying that the symbol must be retired from use.” “More than 100 anonymous donors contributed $1,000 for the alteration, which is being made in response to numerous complaints that the swastika has taken on a new meaning since the pre-Hitler days when the chimney was designed and constructed,” the article explained. “The two swastikas, which were built into the east and west faces of the chimney as age-old symbols of human welfare, are being converted into Greek crosses to conform with those on the north and south faces.”
#USAUSA #fascism - baptistnews.com

Trump Reminisces About the 'Great Hannibal Lecter'

They used to go crazy when I talked about when I talk about Hannibal Lecter. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. Right? Silence of the Lambs. The fake news would say, “Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.” He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border. He’s actually not. But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, “We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.” The great Hannibal Lecter. He was uh, he was a very important force. But the press would go absolutely crazy if I mentioned Hannibal Lecter’s name because they say he’s a fictional character. No, but it was making the point and the point is they’re emptying mental institutions and insane asylums. Not anymore they’re not.
#trump #dementia - mediaite.com

Notable & Quotable: Robert Bartley on Trade Balance Fictions - WSJ

In fact, the United States ran a trade deficit in nearly all of its first 100 years, and ran surpluses in the midst of the Great Depression. A trade deficit is typical of rapidly growing economies, which require a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, and provide investment opportunities to balance the equation. Indeed, under the accounting identity, investment inflows must be balanced with a deficit on the trade account. The mystery is why we even collect these figures; if we kept similar statistics for Manhattan Island, Park Avenue could lay awake at night worrying about its trade deficit.
#USAUSA #trump #tariffs #trade-balance - wsj.com

The manufactured nostalgia of Trump’s tariffs

From the 1950s through the 1970s, for example, Black men and white men in the U.S. were employed in manufacturing at roughly similar rates. Yet, the average white man working the industry was paid substantially more than his Black counterpart — a difference of more than $10,000 a year in today’s dollars. On top of those wage differences, Black families also faced further discrimination in access to education, low-cost mortgages, and rapidly growing suburban neighborhoods.
#USAUSA #racism #tariffs - msnbc.com

Do smartphones and social media really harm teens’ mental health?

To try and make sense of the conflicting literature, researchers have done dozens of reviews analysing many studies together, again with varying results. Many have found relatively weak associations and small effects of these technologies on mental health. One 2020 analysis3 of more than 80 reviews concluded that there was, on average, a “negative but very small” association between adolescents’ use of digital technology, and social media in particular, and psychological well-being. A 2024 literature review4 by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level”. It’s also unclear in some studies, say Odgers and some other researchers, which comes first: whether social media causes depression, for instance, or whether young people who are depressed are more likely to spend time on social media. “We might have the arrow pointing in the wrong direction,” Odgers says.
#depression #social-media #causality - nature.com

Transcript: What Does Trump See in Putin? - Fiona Hill – The Singju Post

There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully. Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to kind of see how he will react. And the translation, you know, smooths over all of that. That context is obviously missing and he doesn’t do a readout afterwards. And, you know, we heard, for example, that Witkow spent several hours one on one with Putin.
#trump #Russia #putin #translation - singjupost.com