Kurt Ostwald's Grosstadt-Dokumente: Hammer, Salten, Hirschfeld, Winter

Here is the German Wikipedia article which links to some of the scans of individual volumes in German libraries.

I wandered into this domain because of the Austrian journalist and city sociologist Max Winter.

In addition to Hirschfeld the sexologist, there are also the works of Hammer, who was interested as a doctor in collection biographies from the prostitutes he had controlled for sexually transmitted diseases.

• Band 23. Wilhelm Hammer: Zehn Lebensläufe Berliner Kontrollmädchen [1905], urn:nbn:de:kobv:109-1-6389955, digitalisiert von: Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, 2014.

Living long versus living Well

There has been some counter-intuitive publishing in the medical field since the summer of 2025 that I only know became aware of.  

On the one hand, new cohort studies showed that even 150min/wk of moderate physical activity are strongly correlated with increasing life expectancy. [Liao et al., Journal of the American Heart Association April 2025 in ScienceDaily] [Ren et al. Dual-Cohort study May 2025]

On the other hand, to avoid age-related dementia, one needs to achieve in excess of 300min/wk moderate physical activity in order to change one's outcomes. [Wang et al 2025]

Admittedly, this is mostly a fail at the policy level. It makes no sense to spur people to live longer if they are going to suffer from dementia then, which is not only a horrifying experience for the individual, but traumatizing to their loved ones and incredibly expensive for socialized medicine. 

Laika and Thermodynamics

This is one of these posts where I just pulled together a list of articles that I read.

• I was recommended Mark Ward's excellent reconstruction of the Space programs, Astronautix. It was intriguing to learn that the Russians were thwarted by their manufacturing capacity and competitive design principles and ended up blowing their launch pad to smithereens with the N2 17 days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. [MegaProjects]
• In this context I also looked into the sad demise of Laika, who supposedly lived for several days until she fell asleep for lack of oxygen, but in reality succumbed to heat exhaustion and dehydration under significant distress. [Geno Productions]
• I was also recommended David Wolpert's statistical mechanics paper on the thermodynamics of computation, originally published 2019, but reworked to Version 3 in 2025. [ArXiv]