We’ve been hacking at psychology for 200 years, without much progress. We can't cure depression, we don’t know why rats like running on wheels, and we don’t know why when you’re sick, sometimes you feel too hot and too cold at the same time.

Maybe we're doing it wrong. (🧵) People have been doing psychology since the 1860s, but we're not much closer today than when we started. So what's holding us back?

We think the problem lies in just a few assumptions that people have been holding the whole time, totally unaware that they’re holding ‘em.

There are lots of ways to die.

To avoid biting the dust, many things need to be juuuust right. If you get too hot or too cold, you die. If you don’t eat enough, you die. If you make too much blood, too little blood, if you [other thing], if you [third thing], dead dead dead. It’s a miracle that organisms pull this off.

How do they do it? Easy: they make thermostats.

slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/13/the…

Time for a story about how when you heat things up, they almost always get bigger. Take almost anything, heat it up, and it gets bigger. Heat it up enough, it melts and becomes a liquid. Heat it up even more, it becomes a gas, and takes up even more space. Or, cool it down, it contracts and becomes smaller again.

slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/02/06/the…

For @threadapalooza — 100 tweets about 100 scientists (and closely-related philosophers and mathematicians) in approximately chronological order (Inspired by @DefenderOfBasic learning about Mary Somerville:)

https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1861815730108248086

Let's say you're eating a twinkie. How much lithium is in that twinkie? How much lithium is in your food in general? Turns out this is harder to answer than you might think. Lithium at clinical doses (50-300 mg/day) is a powerful sedative with lots of nasty side effects.

Many effects also show up for subclinical doses (1-50 mg/day), and even trace doses (< 1 mg/day) seem to have some effects.

So you might want to know how much is in your food.

Many years since we've done such an exemplary study.

That's right, the first potato diet analysis is out!

slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/los… Do be warned that this post is about 25,000 words long, with many many figures and images. So if you have questions or comments, we strongly encourage you to read it and see if we address it in the post

That said, here's some topline results!

Thread for live-ish updates on the potato diet community trial

https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1520080192781561856

79 people have filled out the signup form

some of them are waiting a couple days / couple weeks to start but several dozen have been recording data

Ok we also got into the @midjourney beta, time to have some FUN with IMAGES

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1507472761589223430

@midjourney landscape 🌊🎾

if this describes you and you want help getting started, DM us!

https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1486870216260808707

Maybe we need a term for this, something better than "gentle[wo]man scholars"? Open to suggestions / brainstorming

Scurvy — what does it teach us about diseases of deficiency? what does it teach us about concepts? and what does it teach us about nightmarish graft chimera citrus plants?

slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/27/lik…

@erikphoel recently argued for a new way of doing futurism — look at the nascent trends of today and project them into the future

We liked this approach so much we decided to try it ourselves. Our predictions for 2050:

slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/01/pre… @erikphoel This seemed like a fun topic for collaboration, so we invited a bunch of other bloggers to make their own predictions off of Hoel's model. Here they are!

Hey remember "produced water", that extremely salty, lithium-rich, often radioactive brine created as a side effect of oil and gas extraction?

Turns out in some places they're using this brine to irrigate crops!

modernfarmer.com/2017/08/safe-o… One report says, "For over 25 years, [oilfield produced water] has been blended with surface water and used for irrigation in the Cawelo Water District of Kern County, as permitted by California Water Board policy."

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-c… The first mystery is the epidemic itself. For most of history, the obesity rate was about 1%, even for people who had all the food they wanted. Today, many countries are 40% obese or more. Even in lean countries like Italy, France, and Sweden, the obesity rate is around 20%.

A thread rating the root systems of various plants: Carum carvi (Caraway)
- good depth for little plant
- slightly thin
5/10