#AcademicRunPlaylist - 1/14/25

It was absolutely freezing today, and while staving off frostbite I was able to listen to some talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Yuval Shany on the three generations of digital human rights and the challenges of regulating transnational digital platforms at the UCL Faculty of Laws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M1GCjNyP_k

Next was a great talk by Jeremy Bailenson on what VR is and isn't good for the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. If you haven't seen Bailenson talk before, this is an excellent summary of much of his recent work and is well worth you time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkCeozkNcbo

Last was "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human" by Richard Wrangham, who convincingly demonstrates how strange human biology and eating habits have become - we have extremely small mouths relative to our closest relatives, we spend a shockingly small amount of time chewing, etc. This book argues that these evolutionary changes were most likely brought about by the adoption of cooking, working through alternative hypotheses and systematically dismantling them. By combining archaeological, anthropological, chemical, and experimental evidence, by the end of this book one gets a comprehensive view of the factors that drove humans to the state we're in today. Highly recommend https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-wrangham/catching-fire/9780465020416/