Hi there, friend.

Apologies for missing last week. Caught some bug that really knocked me out for ~24 hours. No, it wasn’t COVID. 😊

Here are this week’s 6:

Alex Smith (a quarterback) was drafted #1 overall by the San Francisco 49ers in 2005. While he was never quite the star the #1 draft pick is “supposed” to be, he was always a steady game manager, doing what was needed to help his team win.

In November 2018, Alex, now the quarterback for the (then-called) Washington Redskins suffered a gruesome compound fracture of both bones in his lower leg. It’s brutal to watch.

As an aside, check out all the bizarre coincidences between Joe Theismann (a Redskins QB who also broke his leg) and Alex Smith’s injuries here.

Alex nearly lost his leg from the injury and was at risk of dying at one point. Long story short, Alex made an incredible recovery & comeback, managing to return to the football field last year.

Alex recently gave a TED talk, diving deep into his injury, recovery, and how he dealt with the fear the injury brought. It’s a great talk with a universal message of overcoming self-doubt and fear.

Poet.so takes any tweet and makes it look beautiful, allowing you to customize and download it as an image. It’s totally free, unlike every other tool like this I’ve come across.

Here’s an example:

SpaceX and NASA teamed up to launch a spacecraft at an asteroid with the expressed purpose of crashing into it to knock it off its trajectory. Don’t worry: this asteroid isn’t on the path to hit earth; it’s just a test mission.

The spacecraft won’t reach the asteroid for almost a year, and scientists should ascertain shortly after that if the plans were successful.

If that doesn’t work, we’ll probably have to hire oil drillers to help us out whenever the real one comes along.

This tweet thread on the color techniques was the deep dive I didn’t know I needed.

Read if you love Bond or the subtlety of colors in film. Fascinating.

On November 5th of this year, Pfizer (via an independent board) decided to end the trials for its antiviral pill Paxlovid prematurely out of ethical concerns. Paxlovid was expressly designed to combat an active COVID-19 infection and showed a reduction in hospitalization & death of 89%.

The aforementioned ethical concerns were triggered because the drug was so amazingly effective and should move forward with approval for public use ASAP.

This post lays out the ridiculous paradox we find ourselves in right now. Here’s an extended quote, but I encourage you to read the whole piece.

“The trial was stopped due to ‘ethical considerations’ for being too effective. You see, we live in a world in which:

We are now >1 month since this trial was cut short. A new variant is causing significant worldwide concern, and a considerable winter wave of cases is beginning. Do you know what might be nice to have right now? THE SUPER-EFFECTIVE PILL SITTING ON SHELVES.

What’s maybe even more frustrating to me: this is just okay with us. There is open disdain for individuals who choose not to be vaccinated, but this is orders of magnitude more impactful, yet we…just don’t care.

What if you or someone you loved contracted COVID and died in the next few weeks, despite an effective treatment sitting on shelves waiting for bureaucrats to approve it?

Our institutions are still failing us.

As suggested in the piece above:

This piece from Astral Star Codex (aka Scott Alexander) also wades through the paradox of this indecision. Absolutely worth a read.

From the Very Important News™ filings, pressure is mounting for Kellog’s to either clear the air or pay up about what’s in frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts.

From the Wall Street Journal:

I hope if successful, it will be possible to claim damages in the form of free Pop-Tarts.

That’s it for this week. If you found anything useful or fun, let me know! And if you have any suggestions, shoot them my way. 😊 See you next week!