Front Stage Exit

Illustration from the cover of Mr. Muscles #22 (1956, Maurice Whitman). Photos from Pexels. If you look at Google’s Ngram Viewer, the word “bro” took off in 2010.

Drawing based on cover of Dynamic Comics #11 (1944, Gus Ricca) and photo of Ed Fury and Jackie Coey (1953, Los Angeles Times archives) The irony of skeptics is that, as much as they like to point out when claims don’t have sufficient evidence, skeptics often don’t have any evidence of their own to counter those claims. Get ready for wall-to-wall skepticism as the peptide industry takes off over the next year. The sector will move faster than clinical trials ever could.

Me in 2023, with the biggest drawing I’ve ever made. (Photo: Iris Sagitta) I haven’t sent anything out over this list for about a month. But that’s all for good reasons! I started looking for work actively in late May. Then a really ideal job opening popped up and I went after it as hard as I could. And, what do you know? I got it. So, as of a couple weeks ago, I’m on staff at Pirate Wires. I’m their new fellow devoted to the interaction between artificial intelligence and philosophy.

There’s a cute Austrian restaurant in South Brooklyn called Werkstatt. I have only been there once. They had a photo of Bob Dylan up on the wall. It wasn’t an album cover or a concert photo. It was just a snapshot of a young Bob Dylan, leaning against some cool 70s car. It happened to be sitting opposite me the time I went, and, when I saw it, a thought arose unbidden from somewhere far back in my mind. I thought: “That guy doesn’t have a cell phone and he doesn’t have email.

UPDATE (May 14 2:50 PM ET) — Clarity passed the Senate Banking Committee, by a 15-9 vote (which means that a number of Senators didn’t vote). Cortez-Masto voted against it, saying in a statement, that it wasn’t helpful enough for victims or prosecutors going after the criminals that target them.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -55:16 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Whenever some big change hits the world, the conversation goes the same way: People on the frontier dive in and pat each other on the back for seeing the future (mistakes get made). The mainstream rolls its eyes, clutches its pearls, wrings its hands and says “tsk, tsk, tsk” (opportunities get missed). Eventually Matthew Yglesias and Scott Alexander write very long posts about them.

Image based on Porter ChemCraft chemistry set marketing. I’m calling it: Peptide self-experimentation will be the next gigantic story. In fact, it already is. Ozempic and the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have been the biggest development in health of my lifetime — they are basically the artificial intelligence of medicine. The New York Times reported yesterday that the FDA will lift its ban on 14 popular peptides any day. That lid is bopping and bouncing as the brew boils beneath.

From my Earth Day 2011 comic. It was Earth Day this week. Earth Day is personally important to me, for reasons I might talk about another time. Once upon a time I used to send out a comic to people I knew every Earth Day. It was a lot of work so I haven’t done it for years, but here’s an excerpt from one of those old comics. This week I started a new feature on Front Stage Exit: Backstage. Backstage will be roughly daily (Mon - Fri), with quick takes on topics in crypto, media, health and the news.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -52:35 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. When a fix gets engineered for securing crypto assets against quantum computers, that’s when the real work will begin. In this podcast, we deal with the part of the post-quantum roadmap that no one dwells on and I suspect will be the most important: the migration from old, quantum insecure addresses to the bigger, bulkier addresses that actually can stand up to quantum computation.

Back in the bad old days of crypto trading, when there were hardly enough buyers and sellers out there to repopulate an American ghost town, a once major exchange called Poloniex had a feature called the “troll box.” In the troll box, users could discuss their trades and their perspectives on trading with each other. As one redditor described it, “It lo…