iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

A favorite John Searle meme, in his memory

A human approaches a woman at her desk and says hello in Chinese. She says, “Aww, you’re sentient.” A computer approaches the same woman and says hello in Chinese. She looks panicked, picks up her phone, and says, “Hello, John Searle?!”

Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

A little bit of good news: NIH has caught up with previous years' funding levels. Their staff deserves tremendous respect.

A chart showing value of NIH grants over calendar months by year. The 2025 level initially lagged far below previous years, but has now caught up to the average.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Waymo data from 95M miles finds an 80% reduction in injurious crashes and, esp. noteworthy, a 92% reduction in pedestrian injuries. There should be some real moral urgency behind the wide-spread implementation of self-driving cars (and I mean good systems like Waymo's, not Tesla's FSD).

Text from Waymo's safety report: "91% fewer serious injury or worse crashes. 79% fewer airbag deployment crashes. 80% fewer injury-causing crashes. 92% fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries. 78% fewer cyclist crashes with injuries. 89% fewer motorcycle crashes with injuries."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

Cat tax, in case you’re curious

Two tuxedo cats and a gray and white cow cat look expectantly at the viewer. They are spaced far apart because they all loathe each other. There is a small, cat-sized couch in the foreground.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

There’s a kind of dove in DC that I never see on the ground level, but which often visits my office on the eighth floor. I love these little guys, and it always makes me happy when they hang out on the sill.

Two small, elegant birds stand side by side on a window sill, on the other side of the window from the photographer.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

This is such a perverse result. NDP got more votes than Bloc Québécois but has 1/3rd of BQ’s seats.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

I’m Nathaniel. I’m a health economist, and I live in DC with three cats and one other human. Currently thinking and writing a lot about the lessons of the semaglutide shortage of the past 3 years. Here’s a pic of two of the cats (rare to capture them all together).

Two tuxedo cats sitting together on a blanket. One cat is fluffy, the other is silky.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Claude isn't very good at converting poses to ASCII art. I was trying to convert screenshots into ASCII art that might've been more convenient for Apple Notes and... well, ended up just keeping the screenshots.

A conversation with Claude. The poster asks Claude to replicate in ASCII art a screenshot of a woman with one arm curled up and the other curled down. Claude instead makes a person with their arms crossed in front of them.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

The etymology of the word “delirium”

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Crews starting to remove the BLM mural on 16th St in DC today

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

From Ursula Le Guin's "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be" (bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.e...)

A quote from Ursula K. LeGuin: "Lévi-Strauss suggests that to combine the hot and the
cold is to transfer mechanical operational modes to machines while retaining organic modes for humanity. Mechanical process; biological rhythm. A kind of superspeed electronic yang train, in whose yin pullmans and dining cars life is serene and the rose on the table does not even tremble."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

It's as important ever to affirm the importance of an open society.

A quote from Matthew Rose's article, "Leo Strauss and the Closed Society": "By the “closed society” [Strauss] didn’t mean non-Western cultures, pre-Enlightenment thought, or even undemocratic polities. The closed society represented a perennial moral possibility, whose roots are found in every human soul and whose demands must be confronted by every human community. In its most common expression, the closed society levels a familiar accusation: that the open society is immoral, or at least amoral, because it jeopardizes the very possibility of living a virtuous life."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 16/01/2025

From this excellent article: meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-wor...

Quote that reads: "Cultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings — which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product. Whether you drink Corona or Heineken or Budweiser "says" something about you. But you aren't in control of that message; it just sits there, out in the world, having been imprinted on the broader culture by an ad campaign. It's then up to you to decide whether you want to align yourself with it."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

From this excellent piece by Rob Henderson about the work of Eric Hoffer on mass movements: www.robkhenderson.com/p/without-be...

Quote from an article reading, "Mass movements that are good at what they do make previously content individuals frustrated and further frustrate their adherents while pretending to advance the movement. This means that the strongest mass movements are inevitably going to be the ones that are the best at not delivering the goods. Any movement that actually advances the interests of its frustrated supporters will make them less frustrated. Hence, they’ll stop being members."

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

From Chwe’s “Rational Ritual”:

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

My musical year in review. I was in Chicago for the first time in September, and so I listened obsessively to "Rehearsing My Choir," which tells the story of the Friedbergers' grandmother growing up and raising a family there. It mentions many Chicago landmarks, so I had fun tracking down a few.

Top artists by month in Apple Music: Jan/Feb Eberhard Weber, March Jean Rondeau, April Miles Davis, May Sam Gendel, June Charli xcx, July Total Blue, August Andy Stott, September The Fiery Furnaces, October Eartheater, November Amnesia Scanner.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Soooo I was pretty sleepy last night

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

Google's GenChess experiment is too fun. It generates chess sets based on different themes. A few of my favorites below. labs.google/genchess

A wooden chess piece in the shape of a giraffe from the neck up with a decorative collar near its head

A matte black plinth with a black stoat, standing on its hind legs and looking curiously. The stoat wears a golden crown.

An opalescent crown with a pearly bottle of lotion in the middle

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

The AMA amplified a baffling study of long COVID prevalence just last week. The rates being reported in these estimates far exceed diagnosis rates even for the clinicians who diagnose it most intensively.

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

I finished reading William Poundstone’s “Rock Breaks Scissors” (does this count as nominative determinism?). It was decent. Here are a few things I’m taking away from it.

A blue book cover featuring a fist crushing a pair of scissors

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Another addition to my collection of miniature DC architecture — the Washington monument and WW2 memorial

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Another one you might enjoy, from Texas State University

Brutalist library featuring two giant columns that look kinda like walrus tusks

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Asimov imagined futures in which robots and time travelers were our “adults,” both with terrible consequences. Hanson proposes a kind of corporate paternalism. The rub is that the concept of “adulthood” generally converges to a vision of low-variance, low-risk life.

A quote from Robin Hanson’s article, “Who Should Be Our ‘Adults’?”: ‘A common “libertarian” vision is to treat all fully grown humans as “adults” in this sense. But in fact such humans have usually not been full trusted, free, or responsible. Among foragers, the band as a whole, discussing together, was more of an “adult”, trusted to limit the behavior of band members. Later on, during the farmer/herder era, family clans were more the “adults”, held responsible for member behavior and able to limit those individuals. Larger nations and empires have also been treated by the world as “adults”, free to choose and to be destroyed.’

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

Happy birthday to this sassy floof! Nine years of Nina. How time flies.

A medium-hair tuxedo cat with big green eyes sitting on the arm of an office chair, looking extremely stately

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Nathaniel Hendrix @nhendrix.bsky.social · 12/11/2024

Just finished Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize,” a history of oil from the 1850s (when it was mostly used to make kerosene for lighting) through the mid-‘90s. Seeing history through the lens of oil made so many things fall into place for me.

Book cover of Yergin’s “The Prize.” It’s all black with some lettering in flames.

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