1: My spam filter has gone rogue and is blocking lots of important messages from real people. If you sent me something important and I haven’t responded, sorry, it’s probably in spam (though still with a medium amount of probability on “I am incompetent and just forgot to reply”). As a temporary measure, I’ve told my spam filter to let through anything that has the phrase “This is a genuine nonspam message”, so include that if you want to be sure.

2: ACX Grants recipient Trevor Klee writes:

Things are progressing much faster on all fronts since we got the ACX grant. We’re almost finished with computer modeling of our phase 1 trials, and are moving onto designing the phase 1 trial to answer the unanswered questions from our modeling. After that, we’ll go bring our plans to the FDA for final approval. We’ve also doubled our team size, from 1 person + consultants to…. 2 people + consultants! I’ve been joined by a COO, Ken Kashkin, who has an enormous wealth of experience developing drugs on both the corporate and the research side. Most recently, he was COO of Chromocell, a ~100 person biotech company with >$30 million in revenue. Finally, we’ve raised about half of what we need for our minimum viable phase 1, but we’re still looking for more. Ideally, we’d like to raise about $500k additional funds. If you’re someone who’s excited by the idea of better, safer drugs for autoimmune diseases, a rapid march to the clinic, and an ambitious plan to take on neurodegeneration, please reach out to trevor@highwaypharm.com .

Usual caveats about “never invest in early-stage bio unless you have lots of experience and know exactly what you’re doing” presumably apply.

3: I’m running an experiment with letting conditional prediction markets decide which books I’ll review. I’ve opened a bunch of play money Manifold markets trying to predict how many “likes” I would get by reviewing Nixonland, Whither Socialism, Penelope’s Dream Of Twenty Geese, The Search For The Perfect Health System, something by Rene Girard, The Power Of The Powerless, or A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis. I don’t promise to definitely review whichever one gets the highest percent chance, but it will probably affect my decision. I realize there are many ways this could go wrong, which is why I’m describing it as an “experiment” - still, predict if you want!

4: Thanks to everyone who reported comments (remember, you can do this through the menu you get when you click the three dots at the bottom of a comment). I’ve permabanned Carl Cohen, Johnny Fakename, Ormond, and M. Gage, given warnings (50% of a ban) to Akhorahil, given minor warnings (25 - 33% of a ban) to Naked Emperor, and given trivial warnings (1% of a ban) to Cassander and jstr. If you want to appeal any decision, please write up your argument, start a conditional prediction market on whether I’ll agree that your appeal was worth my time to read (include your argument in the market description and subsidize it with an ante of at least M100 or equivalent on some other site), wait a week, and if the prediction market is higher than 25% then you can send me an email with a link to the market and argument and I’ll look at it.

5: Sorry, Austin meetup location has unexpectedly changed to Moontower Cider Company, 1916 Tillery St, Austin, TX 78723. I’ll post this more prominently later this week, but I wanted to post it here too so people have more of a warning.