Sunday Superposition is an end-of-the-week collection of stuff I find interesting.
Video of the week
I struggle with an addiction to junk food (aka UPFs or ultra-processed foods) and so I’m on a perpetual quest to scare myself out of buying this stuff. But I may have found a better angle than fear: indignation.
The people who create and market UPFs engineer them to be consumed to excess, claims “the Junk Food Doctor,” Chris van Tulleken. That’s how food corporations make money for their shareholders.
I had a buddy who worked as a food scientist, and he explained that corporations hire people like him to create foods to be hyper-palatable. They want their products to taste extremely good so that you’ll eat a lot of them. Well, okay, we say to ourselves, I just won’t eat a lot of them. And, yeah, if you look at nutritional labels, the stated calories and fat and sugar content don’t seem that bad—until you realize how laughably unreasonable their recommended “serving sizes” are. Does anyone open a 2 oz. bag of potato chips and eat just the recommended 1 oz. serving? Please. And that “sharing size” bag of M&Ms? The only people I’m sharing that thing with are me, myself, and I.
Here’s an unpleasant truth. If you’re eating multiple servings of several different UPFs, as most Americans are, most of your diet is comprised of non-food.
From the interview (watch the whole thing):
“Food is substance that you eat for nourishment … and these products are developed to generate financialized growth for institutional investors. They're not made by people who love you, who want to nourish you, and so I don't think it meets what I think is a useful cultural definition of food. I think it's very useful to not think of them as food.”
Ugh.
Superposition smorgasbord
Mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, proposed that quantum mechanics might offer a physical explanation for the origin of consciousness. However, physics experiments designed to test the physical “collapse” model of quantum probability waves inadvertently kind of demolished that idea. [Quanta Magazine: “Experiments Spell Doom for Decades-Old Explanation of Quantum Weirdness”]
We all tend to overestimate our goodness and our abilities. So, why do most of us underestimate our social appeal? We think everyone else is having more fun than we are, because the outliers in our social groups get the most attention. [Rob Henderson’s Newsletter: “The Friendship Paradox and the Illusion of Loneliness”]
The late astronomer Carl Sagan once said, if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. A Stanford physicist may get us one step closer to this universal apple pie by attempting to create the first ingredient—space-time—in the lab. [New Scientist: “The physicist trying to make space-time from scratch”]