Counter to predictions, dyads interacting in an uninviting, uncomfortable, and unappealing environment experienced levels of interpersonal closeness and romantic interest comparable to those interacting in an inviting, comfortable, and appealing environment

I’ve never actually used a dating app — the algorithm that matched my wife and me was the university housing lottery, which put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000.

Infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. This has been known since the 1870s, when the German mathematician Georg Cantor proved that the set of real numbers (all the numbers on the number line) is larger than the set of whole numbers, even though both sets are infinite. […] Two new notions of infinity challenge a long-standing plan to define the mathematical universe.

Bats don’t get cancer, now scientists think they know the reason

You can make jet fuel from palm oil. It doesn’t even need to be fresh. You can take palm oil, put it in a deep fryer, use it to make french fries, reuse it again and again until it becomes gross and the fries taste bad, and then take the used oil and sell it to a refiner to make jet fuel. Also works with olive oil, soybean oil, lots of cooking oils. This is a very nice fact about the world! You can get jet fuel without (1) drilling for oil or (2) cutting down forests to create dedicated agricultural land just for the jet fuel. […] energy companies and airlines, at least in Europe, want to demonstrate that they are environmentally sustainable. So finding an environmentally sustainable way to make jet fuel is worth a lot of money to them. Therefore they will pay a lot of money for used cooking oil (or “UCO”). […] It turns out that restaurants, street food stalls and home cooks in Malaysia — which is “among the world’s leading suppliers of both UCO and virgin palm oil” — will pay less for fresh cooking oil than the international market will pay for used cooking oil. Fresh cooking oil is more useful to cooks than used cooking oil (it tastes better), but it is less useful to refiners and airlines than used cooking oil (it doesn’t reduce their carbon impact). Also fresh cooking oil is subsidized by the government in Malaysia. […] So if you run a restaurant, you can buy fresh cooking oil for about $0.60 (USD), use it to fry food a few times, and then sell it to a refiner for $1. […] A source at a leading Malaysian UCO supplier to companies including Repsol told The Straits Times that some UCO collectors and restaurants are committing fraud by providing oil that does not qualify as used, although it is difficult to prove.

every day the same again | June 24th, 2025