Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment, collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
...So what did Dimon call for? Well, he basically said, we need to repair theWestern alliance. We need to bring the Western world, the advanced democracies, above all the United States and Europe, back together in part as a way to stand up against the threat of a rising China. And his proposal for how to do that was to negotiate a free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.
That's quite something. That's a very un-MAGA position to take. You want to bear in mind that, first of all, we're currently under a government of people who do not at all believe in the virtues of free trade. In fact, are extremely hostile to globalism. Certainly don't believe in binding international agreements. Maybe they want agreements that bind other countries, but not them.
And they are also not of the mind that we have a lot of shared values with the democratic governments of Europe. The MAGA position, if anything, is that they like the anti-democratic forces in Europe. J.D. Vance essentially campaigned for Viktor Orban in Hungary. Trump officials have been quite clear that they have sympathy for the AfD in Germany. So if we have common values with some Europeans, the Europeans with whom they have common values are neo-Nazis. And Trump's de facto support for Putin in his invasion of Ukraine has been alarmingly clear over the past two years.
What we're seeing here is Jamie Dimon basically saying that I don't care about any of that. I don't believe that you people are going to be in charge. And I think that we can go back to trying to rebuild bridges to Western Europe.
...the whole brittleness debacle. Within a neural network, the parameter space is enormous and quasi-continuous; the prior is usually chosen for computational convenience rather than genuine belief; and the resulting "95% credible interval" carries no guarantee of actually covering the truth 95% of the time if either the prior or model is off (which in deep learning it usually is to some degree).
...Under normal conditions, the sun's heat and Earth's spin fuel east-to-west trade winds around the tropics, which blow water into a "warm pool" near Indonesia. As this warm pool grows, it builds up energy. "It could be a bit like a coiled spring waiting to emerge," says Richard Allan at the University of Reading, UK.
Every two to seven years, natural chaotic disturbances release that spring. Bursts of westerly winds can blow against and slow the easterly trade winds, allowing swells of warm water to roll across the Pacific Ocean, raising sea levels along the coasts of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. These so-called Kelvin waves indicate that El Niño is coming.
A self-reinforcing cycle called the Bjerknes feedback kicks in. The blob of warm water suppresses the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water that normally makes Peru's anchovy fishery so rich, further warming the surface water. The warm sea heats the air above it and causes it to expand. The resulting fall in atmospheric pressure slows the trade winds down even more, since winds flow from high to low pressure. This allows still more warm water to slosh back into the eastern Pacific.
The swathe of warm water stretching across the tropical Pacific releases trillions of joules of heat energy into the atmosphere, raising worldwide temperatures on top of global warming. This is why scientists expect 2027 to be the hottest year on record. But it also drastically alters weather patterns, bringing drought and wildfires to some areas and storms and flooding to others.
Normally, warm air rises over the warm pool, carrying moisture that falls out in thunderstorms, which is why rainforests flourish in places like Indonesia. Denuded of moisture, this warm, dry air then reaches the top of the troposphere and spreads out to the east and west. It descends over the eastern Pacific and the Horn of Africa, fuelling a belt of such air loops around the tropics called the Walker circulation.
During El Niño, however, the warming of the eastern Pacific moves this upward convection eastward, shifting the entire Walker circulation. Now dry, warm air that was sinking over the Horn of Africa and the eastern Pacific is sinking over Indonesia and the Amazon, encouraging drought and wildfires there. Over eastern Africa, warm air is rising, increasing rainfall and the risk of flooding.
Meanwhile, the warming waters also create a stronger temperature contrast between the tropical and northern Pacific, strengthening the jet stream and bringing more storms and wet weather to the southern US. It can bring storms and rain to the UK as well, in certain circumstances.
Data in Dialogue
An Interactive Atlas of Critical Data Visualization
...The featured work asks how interaction can encourage participation, how visualizations can support sensemaking, and how aesthetics can convey meaning. Some entries open up cultural collections and historical records to new readings. Others trace how conventions for representing data take shape, including tools and textbooks through which these conventions are taught and passed on. There are also entries that question the viability of data visualization altogether.
...Morality, for Trump, is for losers. All life is transactional. Self-interest and self-enrichment usurp all other considerations. No one else matters.
In her new book, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era, Neiman argues that evil "isn't cruelty but something much worse: the ideas that allow cruelty to become ordinary."
...Trump crosses line after line. He declares wars on a whim. He enriches himself and his family in crypto schemes, from which he has made over a billion dollars. He orders assassinations and the kidnapping of heads of state. He uses billions of taxpayer dollars to sustain genocide in Palestine and since January 2025 has provided over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel. He guts government departments designed to lift up the vulnerable and bloats the war budget. He builds rogue paramilitary forces to terrorize citizens and immigrants. He attacks and attempts to censor the news industry.
In short, he does what all who commit evil do.
He fosters a world where nothing is sacred and where democracy and civic virtues do not exist.
...the most common forms of evil arise from the view that only fools believe in anything but their own advantage.
...Once morality is for fools, virtue makes no sense. Once we believe we should grab what we can, even at the expense of those around us, we surrender to evil.
...he has attracted millions of followers who tell us they admire his authenticity. This doesn't mean his followers are deplorable. They may not be evil at all, but in a world where implacable self-interest is usually camouflaged in soft colors, they find his candor refreshing. They have so often heard that people conceal the raw self-interest that really moves things, they're relieved to watch a man who never hides it.
...The moral rot in our society preceded Trump. He is its logical conclusion. He is the apotheosis of a culture where greed, exploitation and self-interest, the core tenets of neoliberalism, are held up as the defining forces of human existence.
...For decades, researchers studying the decision-making process favored models informed by economics, wherein people generally make choices that are grounded in a rational and objective assessment of risk and reward.
But in the late 20th century, this framework was challenged by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The two psychology researchers formulated an alternative concept known as ‘prospect theory', which describes a more complicated set of cognitive biases and other considerations that influence the way people weigh and act on probabilities.
...the concept of developing computational architectures that mirror key features of the brain had been around for decades. Several pioneering researchers had already begun to explore the potential of modeling the reasoning process with such systems, and Griffiths was intrigued by the possibility of tackling cognitive science with computational methods. "I was like, 'Wait a minute, you can use math to describe how minds work?'" he says, "And that was it—I was off on that track."
When Tessa Montague learned about CRISPR, the gene-editing system that was supposed to make it easy to modify any organism, she set her sights on the cuttlefish. The Columbia University neuroscientist dreamed of injecting its embryos with genes that would prompt its neurons to fluoresce as they fired. The flashes would let her track how this tentacled creature's brain controls one of its most striking behaviors: camouflaging itself by copying patterns it perceives in its surroundings onto its skin. Unlike most animals, she says, "cuttlefish can actually tell us what they see."
But modifying the animal was not easy at all. Injecting gene-editing tools into a fertilized egg required peeling away dozens of layers of jelly; developing pincers that squeeze the egg with a precise amount of force; designing a needle with the right angle to pierce its nearly invisible, lens-shaped embryo; and keeping the delicate baby cuttlefish alive once they hatch. "Sometimes I think we've experienced every type of failure possible," Montague says.
...The researchers had one shot to collect eggs from each animal because octopuses only spawn once during their lives. Using ultrasound, they gauged ovary size to predict when an octopus was about to start laying her 500,000 eggs, then analyzed the eggs' color so they could select only the freshest embryos for manipulation—ones that had not yet started to divide.
...The idea builds on fracking: pumping huge volumes of fluid into underground rock layers to fracture them and bring oil, gas, and wastewater back to the surface. It's long been known that those fluids can pick up trace amounts of metals such as lithium and uranium along the way. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of Oklahoma (OU) now want to make that process more selective, adding chemicals to the fluids to dissolve specific minerals from the rock. The team plans to escalate its efforts with 2 years of funding from the Department of Energy's Mine of the Future program, starting this month. This is "precision mining in the subsurface," says Todd Schaef, a chief scientist at PNNL. "We have to go after these low-grade ores."
The concentrations of critical minerals in individual oil and gas reservoirs are minute. But the sheer scale of the U.S. oil patch, with more than 900,000 active wellheads that tap a vast acreage, could compensate. Oil wells could produce up to 500 million tons of critical minerals, assuming mining of 5% of the reservoir volume and 1% recovery of the minerals, the group estimates in a paper published last month in Environmental Science & Technology.
...Now, thanks to technological advances such as automated species detection from audio recordings and analysis of DNA shed into the environment, conservation scientists think it's possible to assemble increasingly comprehensive and up-to-date views of biodiversity across huge landscapes. Last week, a coalition of research organizations, including Ramalho's institute, announced an initiative to test that promise by creating an Amazon-wide, regularly updated picture of what's happening to plant and animal populations as development threatens one of the most species-rich parts of the world.
The project, dubbed Amazon.ia, promises to marry streams of data from dozens of field sites with computer models capable of quickly detecting patterns and extending results across the river basin's 7 million square kilometers.
...A flood of data has helped train more powerful computer models, technical know-how has become more widespread, and more people are concerned about the loss of biodiversity.
Mamirau&a acute; and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia have already built a network of 65 stations in the Amazon that automatically collect audio and images; classify species including insects, mammals, and birds; and quickly upload the results via satellite. The program has been shown to effectively track the Amazonian manatee and endangered river dolphins.
...a concern given the Trump administration's overall approach to research, Clayton says.
"They're worried about [competition from] China, they're desperate to take research out of the research institutions and into the private sector, they may be allowing easier access by the private sector to data." But weakening the Common Rule could come at a price, she says. "Is the gain you're going to get from doing translational research without consent worth it for what it's going to cost in trust?"
... a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology
...ASML, the European manufacturer of semiconductor lithography machines, says that it doesn't actually sell any machines in Europe currently because no new fabs are being built there
via Tooze
...Robert Kanigel wrote about it in his massive (675 page) biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor (he of Taylorism), called The One Best Way. Taylor was considered the first efficiency expert and the creator of scientific management, a field that uses time and motion studies to increase productivity. Before that though, he was a leading cutting tool researcher at Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania. His Taylor curve and Taylor tool life equation are still in use today. Along with Maunsel White, Taylor invented High Speed Steel and introduced it to the world in Paris. In the relatively tiny Bethlehem booth they installed a massive lathe that chucked a 10-foot long solid steel cylinder. They would run their HSS tool for 20 minutes and then take a 10-minute break. French news reported that machine shops of Paris would see metal cut SIX TIMES faster than ever before. Crowds packed the small booth to watch the Taylor-White cutting tools in action and other exhibitors complained about them siphoning off attention. Source: David Barton
Memes are patterns that are imprinted, not into the molecules of the creature, their DNA, but into some more readily changeable part of the body, like connections between nerve cells. Memes are memories, learned skills and crafts, stories, ideas, taken-for-granted assumptions, languages. They are transferable patterns imprinted in a more abstract layer of bodily configurations (as compared to DNA). And they transfer through communication and imitation.
...And metamemes are the fundamental patterns of the memes themselves. The memes don't emerge independently, but in relation to each other. They emerge as functions of larger, more fundamental, overarching metamemes.
...memes are the most fundamental category of history.
...Cultural history must thereby, necessarily, be the history of how all memes emerge, how they struggle, combine, and evolve, and how they steer the world. Because culture consists of memes, whereas genes can only be transferred and experimented with through new generations, through new bodies (with some leeway for epigenetic factors, i.e. how genes are turned on and off during a lifetime), memes can evolve much more quickly and according to another logic entirely. And that logic is culture, and its development is "history". An event is "historical" because it's memetically significant. Events that don't change memes aren't really "historical"
...Memes are like ghosts-of-abstraction that, as it were, possess the biological bodies of their carriers. They emerge through ongoing interactions between human beings, and then take over those same human beings and control the movements of their bodies, shaping very specific patterns of movements of the body. Biologically, I can be a light-skinned homo sapiens with green irises and long legs. Culturally, I can be a Russian-speaking, socialist ballet dancer. Through the medium of my biological body, memes "remote-control" me and make me do pirouettes for the glory of Stalin. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue will move in a specifically Russian manner. I'm a memetic creature as much as I'm a genetic one — just as much as I'm a physical object with a certain mass, speed, and position in space-time. I have emerged on all these levels: physical, biological, and cultural.
Cory Doctorow
...A post-American world is on the horizon. What that world will look like is undecided. The US was always a wildly defective trusted third party, but it retained its status as the world's platform for generations thanks to the absence of credible alternatives. Now — as Mark Carney told the Davos crowd last year — the old system has "ruptured": https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ What will replace the dollar? https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/11/post-dollar-world/#de-dollarization What will replace oil? https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/11/cyber-rights-now/#better-late-than-never What will replace the internet? https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition No one knows. No one can know, because this is all up for grabs. The future isn't something that happens to us. The future is something that we make. And despite the horrible death toll that's locked in by waves of climate shocks –—presided over by the dying, fumbling "drink bleach" guy — it's conceivable that the future we get will be a good one, if not an easy one.
...Today, we are submerged in an ocean of debt. I'm not talking about the (fictional) "national debt" that is just a measure of all the dollars the government has spent into existence without taxing out of existence: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/21/we-can-have-nice-things/#public-funds-not-taxpayer-dollars I'm talking about fiscal debt: the solar we didn't build, the carbon we emitted instead; the rail we didn't build, the wildly inefficient aviation we substituted; the walkable, livable, transit-oriented cities we didn't build, the car-choked disasters we built instead. Oligarchic opposition to universal health-care left us sick, with un- or undertreated illnesses and missed opportunities for prevention that left us with overlapping, population-scale health crises. All of this is debt that must be repaid: we can't walk away from it through bankruptcy. We must build the transit, cities, and systems of care — the infrastructure — our species needs to carry on human civilization. We can't keep hitting snooze on this, lest we are finally awoken by seawater lapping at our pillows. The world we're in today is awful and terrifying. It's awful because of the climate ruptures we're living through. It's terrifying because we didn't just fail to avert this crisis — we did nothing to prepare for it, either.
To millions he was ustad, or master. To others he was the Singing Buddha or the Pavarotti of the East. In London's clubs he might have been the trippiest sample they'd ever heard, and to Jeff Buckley (who sang covers of his songs in concert) Nusrat was Elvis. To Indians like the composer A. R. Rahman (who recorded a pop number with him called "Gurus of Peace") he was an emissary across history's most painful fissures.
...But it isn't simply these words that are meant to bring one closer to God; it is their repetition. In an archetypal composition, "Allah, Muhammad, Chaar Yaar" ("Allah, Muhammad, and their Four Companions"), Nusrat—as is he fondly called by Anglophone audiences—rehearses certain phrases, mixing them with the names of God and his loyal servants. The chorus mimics these sounds over and over, louder and louder, as his words start to change texture, becoming the stippled sediment of a riverbed, then relentless rain, then, as the rhythm quickens, frenzied horses bursting across an open field. Finally his voice shatters into euphoric syllables calling out to the heavens.
...In qawwali audiences are invited to take part in sama, a Sufi practice that seeks a close connection with the divine through music and dance. To appreciate qawwali is not just to marvel at the vocal agility of its performers but to relinquish one's body and surrender to a place beyond language.
...In 1985 [Peter Gabriel] invited Nusrat to perform at the now-historic World of Music, Arts and Dance Festival (WOMAD) on the eastern coast of England. Nusrat opened with an invocation, "Allah Hoo." For several minutes he sang a series of slow, high-pitched declarations in praise of God while his vocal accompanist accented the melody in higher and lower registers. Nusrat's voice kept grasping above itself, almost reaching a shriek, before it dropped to a weightier chant: "Allah hoo hoo hoo, Allah hoo hoo hoo." The harmonium and tabla charged in, and the chorus joined the recitation, clapping along. By the end these jubilant calls had left the air dizzy, and Nusrat's seemingly endless voice lingered even after it had gone quiet.
To our dear friends, family, patrons and foodies,
After 18 unforgettable years, we've made the difficult decision to close Home Kitchen Cafe & Bakery and begin a new chapter in retirement.
This place has always been about more than food. It's been about doing things the right way, every single day. From scratch cooking to genuine hospitality, we set a standard for ourselves and worked hard to live up to it. This is not a post we ever thought we would make, but in today's world, maintaining our level of quality has become increasingly challenging. Like many in our industry, we've faced a growing struggle to find and keep the skilled, dedicated team needed to consistently deliver the experience our customers expect and deserve. Rather than compromise what Home Kitchen Cafe stands for, we feel it's the right time to step away.
To our incredible employees, past and present, you are the heart of this story. Your commitment, resilience, and pride in your work carried us through every busy morning and every demanding season. Quite simply, we would not have made it this far without you.
And to our loyal customers and community, thank you for your unwavering support over the years. You filled our dining room, shared your lives with us, and made this journey deeply meaningful.
We leave with gratitude, pride, and a lifetime of memories, confident that what was built here, in Rockland's North End, will always be something unique and special.
Please stop by in the next 2 weeks as the Cafe and Bakery will remain open through October18.
With sincere thanks, gratitude and love James and Susan
If there were some way to confine pervert glasses to helping people remember names, I'd be all over them. But when it comes to actual, existing pervert-glasses, the main purpose is to covertly capture strangers and shame them. And when (not if) these pervert glasses get hooked up to facial recognition, they will become high-volume doxing factories that will reward the attention-hungry with viral fame. We've built a society that offers infinite rewards to anyone who can put a name — and thus an identity — to anyone caught in public having an argument, picking their nose, slipping on ice, or eating with their mouth open. We're on the verge of democratizing only the worst part of celebrity: the pervasive hovering cameras that are always there to preserve and distribute your failures.
...Today, Bentham's heir is the odious Larry Ellison, the famously secretive billionaire, Trump crony and Oracle founder who goes to enormous lengths to prevent the public from finding out about his personal life. Ellison is also one of the most vocal proponents of mass surveillance. Larry Ellison has repeatedly called for the installation of ubiquitous, AI-backstopped surveillance for every (non-billionaire) person in the world, calling this "supervision": Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on.
The great aspiration of the Human Race is to gain a knowledge of the Reality, the Noumenon behind the phenomenon; but the fact that from infancy we have been accustomed to confine our attention wholly to the objective, believing that to be the reality, has surrounded us with a concrete boundary wall through which we can only at times, with difficulty, get transient glimpses of that which is beyond. It is only in recent years that we have been able to realize that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow or its manifestation in the Physical Universe, and that Time and Space have no existence apart from our physical senses, in short, that they are only the modes or limits under which those senses act or receive their impressions and by which they are necessarily rendered finite.
The difficulty is that our physical senses only perceive the surface of our surroundings, and that we have hitherto been looking at the Woof of Nature as though it were the glass of a window covered with patterns, smudges, flies, &c., comprising all that we call physical phenomena and which, when analyzed in terms of Time and Space, produce the appearance of succession and motion. It requires a keener perception, unbounded by these limitations, to look through the glass at the Reality which is beyond.
...Although we have no words to express, nor indeed minds to grasp, the wonders and glories of that which is behind the Veil, it is possible for some of us to get a glimpse of it through our Window. [...] We have seen that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow; that the Invisible, as distinguished from the Visible, is not in a place apart from the Physical, but is the Reality of which the visible constitutes the boundary lines or planes in our consciousness.
Hugh Blackmer
Wed, Oct 7, 6:04 AM (1 day ago)
to me, Wende, John, Kate, John, Betsy
A Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting Things https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/06/these-are-my-rocks/
We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies, hovering over which is one of the strangest things about being human: preference. How odd to have a strong feeling about a color or an object or a sequence of chords. And yet our preferences are how we sculpt the self from the monolith of the species.
Preference taken to its highest form touches amazement — the glad disbelief that something so personally relevant and rapturous could exist amid the impersonal allness of all there is. One of the most moving things about us, and one of the most felicitous things about being alive together, is that we get to share our amazements. A collection — be it of rocks or vinyl records or facts about the Moon — is a constellation of amazements in the sky of one mind that can light up another with its loveliness, its strangeness, its sheer delight.
...the Iran War is also setting into motion a number of other geopolitical transformations—in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf states, and even further afield. Trump and his Israeli partner-in-crime Benjamin Netanyahu expected a quick war, a tidy regime change in Tehran, and the collapse of its "axis of resistance."
Instead they now face a Pandora's boxful of unintended consequences
Anne Carson
Carson writes that 'words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning.'
The roots of Zoroastrianism date back well into the 2nd millennium BCE. Beginning in the Bronze age in Central Asia, Zoroastrianism went through several distinct phases of development. In antiquity, it was the dominant religion in several successive empires based on Iranian soil (Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian). With the advent of Islam, conditions changed as Zoroastrianism gradually became a minority religion in Iran and emigrant Zoroastrians began to establish settlements along the coast of Gujarat in Western India. Today, small Zoroastrian communities continue to exist in Iran, while a larger number of Zoroastrians are based in India (Mumbai and Gujarat) and Pakistan (Karachi). In India and Pakistan, Zoroastrians, especially those tracing their ancestry back to the medieval immigration, are commonly referred to as Parsis. In addition, the 20th century has seen a growing network of diaspora communities in Britain, Canada, the US, Australia and other parts of the world.
...Among the principal tenets of their religion as formulated by modern Zoroastrians are the virtue of righteousness, the freedom of choice between Good and Evil, individual responsibility, philanthropy and service to humanity. However, due to radically changing historical, geographical and socio-economic environments, Zoroastrian thinkers have time and again also been challenged to reformulate their positions with regard to the contemporary issues of their respective times and places.
...We will examine the rationale underlying the frequently expressed view that Zarathustra, the prophet of Zoroastrianism, was "the world's first proponent of ecology."
...The assumption that the Dēn in theory provides the required spiritual and practical guidance on any kind of matter is amply attested in the work of Zoroastrian theologians of the late Sasanian and early Islamic period (ca. 6th-11th century). As shown by Vevaina (2012), these exegetes regarded the Avesta and particularly its oldest part, the Gāthās, as an "omnisignificant" source, one that is open to various interpretive approaches including those concerned with contemporary issues. The tradition notably ascribes the Gāthās to Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, himself.
...Football—besides being one of our more ubiquitous and unrestrained national entertainments—has also become one of the rare arenas in American life where highly specialized language can flourish without censure. Express an opinion about art in public? You're yucking somebody's yum, and, if you're not careful, you'll get yelled off your soapbox and into a lonely bin labelled "Pretentious," or worse. If a scientist stands behind a lectern and gets in the weeds about, say, food safety, she'd better watch out for a pelting of tomatoes from an impatient crowd.
...football fans have come to tolerate, and even crave, a surprisingly high level of nerdy, insidery talk. During the same game, after a false start called on the Commanders' offense, one of the commentators, the former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce (now, it must be acknowledged, the lucky brother-in-law to Taylor Swift), explained why the chemistry between a backup quarterback and the big guy snapping him the ball might be a bit off kilter. "Yeah, whenever a backup quarterback comes in, everybody's cadence is a little bit different," he said, leaning emphatically on that vividly musical noun. It was an art-critical observation, poetic but also obviously true.
...the human urge toward weird and disproportionately intense tunnelling toward understanding—the urge to gather and share knowledge, wherever it gleams—is hard to suppress. Play the tough guy if you want, but under your nose some fresh exercise in radical dorkery is stealthily blooming.
...We have a society that is superb at turning knowledge of how to do things into recipes that can be taught, into tekhne>, and, yes, on top of
tekhne there rides what Michael Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge", what James Scott calls metis, what Sean Illing calls phronesis—not just doing the thing, but doing the thing in the time, place, and way that makes it useful. And pretty much the only way to learn that is extensive apprenticeship, working and assisting at the elbow of someone who has it.
...OK. So, then, where are we now? What does this mean for me, as I try to make my fall push to figure out what to do with this SubStack thing? Especially in the onrushing world of "AI", which can combine and remix ideas both assisting me and replacing me in a way that was impossible two years ago, and in which a good deal of what I have done has been playing the glass-bead game in a way that machines are now learning to do, in some ways better than I can?
...And this brings me to the Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass-Bead Game. In Hesse's novel, the Castalians spend their lives creating ever-more-elegant syntheses. A theme from Bach is linked to a theorem of Euclid, which is linked to a passage from the I Ching. All of it is gorgeous, all of it is self-referential, strung together like glass beads on a string, and all of it is useful and interesting by virtue of the juxtaposition and the remix. And now there is a machine that has read everything, and that strings beads via juxtaposition and remixing faster than I can, and sometimes more prettily—although I think it has useful and relevant taste only by accident. Not to mention the deep question of whether the glass-bead game is a game worth playing in the first place.
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. ("Whatever inspiration is," one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'")
In a culture that bandaids its fissures with self-righteousness, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to remain undecided, to refuse to mistake for finished the works in progress we are, to remember that our task here is not to be certain but to be true — to our incompleteness, to the open-endedness of life itself, to the unhurried wisdom of the heart.
...having billions of dollars is in no way a reliable predictor that you also possess the wisdom to unilaterally dictate how thousands or millions of other people must live their lives, and that dictatorial power is most the tangible effect of being a billionaire.
Billionaireism is many things, but above all else, it is the power to do whatever *you* want to do, at the expense of whatever *other* people want to do. To be a billionaire is to live a life unthwarted, above the power of your workers, your neighbors, or your government and its laws. It is the right to get high on your own supply. It is the right to live a life in which no one ever calls you on your bullshit.
Billionaires aspire to live a one-sided libertarian fantasy in which they have the unlimited right to do whatever they want, and *you* have the right to do whatever they tell you to do.
There has always been a group of people who refused to acknowledge that other people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to pursue their own goals rather than theirs. We call most of those people "toddlers" and devote sizable social effort to helping them outgrow this belief. Billionaires, on the other hand, command resources that allow *them* to devote sizable effort to getting *us* to acknowledge that *they* should be able to tell *us* what to do.
This is why billionaires love neoclassical economics, with its doctrine of “revealed preferences,” which holds that the only true way to understand someone's preferences is to ignore what they *say* and only pay attention to what they *do*. It's a belief that can only be adopted by people who suffer the self-inflicted neurological injury you get from doing an economics degree, which renders the victim incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power.
...We let the most greedy, most ruthless people among us pursue their toddler's quest for an unthwarted life to the expense of any semblance of competent administration, and now we are *fucked*. That's why people are so angry about AI: there's nothing wrong with the idea of automating some tasks through advanced statistical techniques, but the reason so much of the world's scarce resources have been allocated to the AI buildout is that billionaires are infinitely horny for a technology that will let them sideline expertise in favor of money
...Krill meal is used as feed for aquaculture, pets and ornamental fish, among others. While some nations use krill meal as an additional food source for their people, human use of krill products is primarily through dietary supplements containing oils that are extracted from krill.
...Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, is a principal food source for penguins, seals, whales, seabirds and fish. But krill are not distributed evenly across the Southern Ocean: They gather in dense, patchy groups in particular locations. They are most numerous in the waters off the Antarctic Peninsula stretching into the Scotia Sea.
Breeding penguins and seals depend on high concentrations of krill found relatively close to their colonies because they must repeatedly return to those colonies to feed their young. If they don't find krill nearby, they can't go much farther into the ocean to seek alternative prey without risking their young starving on the shore. More than 30 years of observations from the Antarctic Peninsula show why this concentration of krill matters.
...Baleen whales are more mobile, but they depend on exceptionally dense krill patches to make feeding worthwhile and often congregate in the same productive hot spots. There is growing concern around the overlap between the krill fishery and important feeding grounds of the recovering fin whale population.
...The concentration of fishing comes as the overall ecosystem is becoming more vulnerable as a result of climate change. The Antarctic Peninsula and Scotia Sea are among the fastest-warming places on the planet.
Decreased sea ice cover, changing wind patterns and warming ocean temperatures are already altering krill habitat and the Southern Ocean food web.
'People forgot I existed: Audrey Niffenegger on taking 14 years to write a sequel to The Time Traveler's Wife in Guardian
Language change may be studied by tracking linguistic variant frequencies through space and time. Observed frequencies may be viewed as realisations of a statistical field. We first set out an efficient cross validated method for inferring the empirical field — the variant frequency distribution estimated directly from data --— in our case, high resolution surveys from 20th century USA. We then derive a model of the statistical field, assuming that individuals diffuse locally, periodically migrate, and copy one another based on a form of replicator dynamics involving both bias and linguistic accommodation. We infer model parameters by comparing changes in model and empirical fields. Our inferences demonstrate that spatial linguistic patterns can be rapidly destroyed by migration but that accommodation can create them, protect them, and in combination with diffusion, produce partially predictable pattern dynamics. The results provide the strongest evidence yet for surface tension driven phase ordering in human dialects. We quantify the model's forecasting ability up to a time horizon of twenty five years using the Kullback-Leibler divergence between forecasts and observations.
11x26
Warren Ellis:
What is the point of all this? For me, it's about getting off screens and selecting tools with intention: tactile ones that are a physical and aesthetic pleasure to use. I like using a good pen. I like working on paper. I like writing notes to the future that I will discover in the archive box in a few years. Will graphite pencil marks survive years of archiving? God knows. I generally use archival quality pens.
Everything I do starts in a notebook. For me, it's the only way to fly. And, honestly? With the internet gone dead and the digital space polluted by AI and people talking about AI all the fucking time? Paper is where I want to live now. It's where I started, and it's where I'll end.
...And the human enterprise is the center about which what matters spins as we modern techno-industrialized humans are front and center of the show, the meaning of it all, just a little lower than the gods and goddesses themselves. And nobody made us godlike. We Odysseans did it all ourselves with all due comfort and support of Penelopeans.
...If you think that the solution to our polycrises is to vote against the Odysseans (those who look/act like Odysseus or Sun Wukong and are proud of it) and vote for Odysseans (including Penelopeans as Odyssean wannabes) who dress themselves in the finest of sheep's clothing, then you are an a system serving political animal (and Anthropocene enthusiast even if you pretend not to be).
...The earliest semblance of the spice trade began in the Middle East as far back as 2000 BC, though it didn't fully take root until the Silk Road connected China to the Eastern Mediterranean around 130 BC. At the same time, black pepper from the southwestern edge of India reached Egypt and the Red Sea by ship. Spice slowly trickled into Europe, though it wasn't until around 1100 AD that Venetian merchants began heavily importing spice into the continent.
Because spice had to be transported either by camel along the Silk Road or by ship from India, the known spices of the time were incredibly expensive. A Roman "pound" (slightly over 11 ounces) of long seed black pepper cost the average Roman soldier two weeks of wages. Needless to say, most spices were for the rich and powerful. This meant average European citizens relied on cheap, easy-to-grow seasonings like garlic mustard. In many ways, garlic mustard was a commoner's seasoning.
President Donald Trump's second term has left the Declaration of Independence and Constitution on life support.
He openly and notoriously proclaims that the sole constraint on his power is his moral conscience — not the Constitution, not the law, not the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump's impeachable lawlessness has become a way of life at the White House.
Signs of a midterm blue wave are everywhere, and yet it would be journalistic malpractice not to attach some nervous caveats to any prediction. Polls are sketchy. Campaigns have never been more subject to the desires of the wealthy. What is more, the President of the United States has the impulse control of a toddler, though most toddlers have neither the authority nor the inclination to spark an insurrection, destabilize the Western alliance, live-stream an execution, or threaten to end "a whole civilization." We are subjected daily to the caprices of a mind both unregulated and amoral. As Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the Commander-in-Chief is "fascist to the core." You may prefer milder terminology. Fine. But, after a decade defined by Donald Trump's unceasing presence, a growing percentage of the American electorate appears to recognize the uniqueness of this President and the mayhem that he has instigated from the Oval Office.
We are, collectively, on guard against undue optimism. Still, if the coming election does result in a blue wave, Trump will be faced with the fact of his diminishment. The rest of us will be faced with the wreckage.
Before August Sander and Diane Arbus and Olan Mills, before Facetune and duck face, there were two: a shoeshine boy and his client, captured by Louis Daguerre on the Boulevard du Temple in 1838, in what is thought to be the first photograph to depict human beings. The bootblack squats beside a chest containing the tools of his trade. The patron stands, hands clasped behind his back, with a foot perched on the box.
Green's Dictionary of Slang (GDoS) was launched online on 12 October 2016. I cannot say that this made much of a splash beyond a minuscule and immediate few. The print edition had been published six years earlier, and had I not called in every figurative debt I could find so as to obtain its reviews (and why not thank once more those who conjured up so many kind words in its favour), would have slipped on stage virtually unseen. As it was, amazon, as only they would be capable of doing, shrank its substantial price to something a least worth considering, and it momentarily topped the three niche charts for which it was eligible.
Now its digital incarnation is ten years old. I have no idea how many times it has been consulted, nor by how many individuals or institutions. What I do know is that never a day passes without me loading it up and, via screen or printed page, setting out to see what slang — new, chronologically necessary (I go for a citation per anglophone country per decade and when useful add alternative spellings and other tweaks) can be added to the mountain of the anglophone varieties of what I have long categorised as 'the counter-language'.
As of this update, the dictionary now offers 57,993 entries; the full count of senses/definitions runs to 148,118 and includes derivatives, compounds and phrases, and the illustrative citations number 662,483. This specific update has added 3,529 such examples, and they have generated 264 new slang terms and given earlier 'predates' for the 'first recorded use' of 300.
...the two related facts that a) our IT systems are poorly constructed and indifferently maintained; and b) the people who are supposed to be fixing this keep making it worse.
The worst culprits here are governments, though the private sector is also terrible (in truth, our cybersecurity nightmare is something of a private-public partnership from hell). Governments are deeply compromised when it comes to digital security because they have an irreconcilable conflict of interest: on the one hand, they want to defend their countries' administrative systems, firms and households from digital attacks. But on the other hand, they really want to be able to launch attacks on their adversaries, both foreign and domestic.
America's affluent top decile — the 10% of richest Americans — do the majority of America's shopping, a phenomenon that has only been accelerated by America's precipitous slide into oligarchy, which has exhausted the savings and the credit-card limits and the home equity of the majority of Americans, who increasingly can't afford to buy anything: https://dreamagainusa.org/
If you want to sell things in America, you must sell them in the place where the top decile shops, and that's Amazon. For merchants, that is an incredibly expensive proposition: 51-60% of every dollar you spend with an independent merchant on Amazon is claimed by Amazon through junk fees, listing fees, commissions, processing fees and other scams
...I puzzle it out to-day that my parents had simply said to themselves, in serious concern, that I read too many novels, or at least read them too attentively—that was the vice; as also that they had by the contagion of their good faith got me in a manner to agree with them; since I could almost always enter, to the gain of "horizon" but too often to the perversion of experience, into any view of my real interests, so-called, that was presented to me with a dazzling assurance. I didn't consider certainly that I was so forming my mind, and was doubtless curious to see whether it mightn't, by a process flourishing in other applications, get to some extent formed. It wasn't, I think, till I felt the rapture of that method's arrest that I knew how grotesquely little it had done for me. And yet I bore it afterwards no malice—resorting again to that early fatalistic philosophy of which the general sense was that almost anything, however disagreeable, had been worth while; so unable was I to claim that it hadn't involved impressions. I positively felt the impressional harvest rather rich, little as any item of it might have passed at the time for the sort of thing one exhibits as a trophy of learning. My small exhibition was all for myself and consisted on the whole but of a dusty, spotty, ugly picture—I took it for ugly well-nigh to the pitch of the sinister. Its being a picture at all—and I clung to that—came from the personal and material facts of the place, where I was the only scholar of English speech, since my companions, with a Genevese predominance, were variously polyglot. They wondered, I couldn't doubt, what I was doing among them, and what lost lamb, almost audibly bleating, I had been charged to figure. Yet I remember no crude chaff, no very free relation of any one with any one, no high pitch, still less any low descent, of young pleasantry or irony; our manners must have been remarkably formed, and our general tone was that of a man-of-the-world discretion, or at the worst of a certain small bourgeois circumspection. The dread in the Genevese of having definitely to "know" strangers and thereby be at costs for any sort of hospitality to them comes back to me as written clear; not less than their being of two sorts or societies, sons of the townspeople pure and simple and sons of the local aristocracy perched in certain of the fine old houses of the Cité and enjoying a background of sturdily-seated lakeside villas and deeply umbrageous campagnes. I remember thinking the difference of type, complexion and general allure between these groups more marked, to all the senses, than any "social distinction" I had yet encountered. But the great thing was that I could so simplify our enclosing scene itself, round it in and make it compose—the dark, the dreary Institution, squeezed into a tall, dim, stony-faced and stony-hearted house at the very top of the Cité and directly in the rear of the Cathedral, portions of the apse of which seem to me to have straggled above or protruded toward it, with other odd extraneous masses than itself pressing still nearer. This simplification, quite luxuriously for my young mind, was to mere mean blackness of an old-world sordid order. I recognised rich blackness in other connections, but this was somehow of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy; sordid and strong was what I had from the first felt the place, though urging myself always to rub off history from its stones, and suffering thus, after a fashion, by the fact that with history it ought to be interesting and that I ought to know just how and why it was. For that, I think, was ever both the burden and the joy—the complication, I mean, of interest, and the sense, in the midst of the ugly and the melancholy, that queer crooked silent corners behind cathedrals wrought in their way for one, did something, while one haunted them, to the imagination and the taste; and that so, once more, since the generalisation had become a habit with me, I couldn't, seeing and feeling these things, really believe I had picked up nothing.
...Overheated coral polyps often eject their algal companions, leading to "bleaching" that can starve and even kill the coral. The El Niño summer could provide a critical test for coral inoculated with experimental symbiotic algae bred for heat tolerance. "We expect this is going to be one of the first serious opportunities to assess the efficacy of that intervention," says Matthew Nitschke, a coral biologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Because radiocarbon readings depend on how the atmosphere and oceans circulate the isotope around the planet, researchers must calibrate dates from the Northern and Southern hemispheres differently. Air from both hemispheres mixes over the Andes, however, so atmospheric scientists are helping archaeologists create bespoke calibration curves for major Inca sites.
...below ˜10 g of body mass, flapping flight is more energetically favorable than soaring flight. However, many species that rely exclusively on flapping flight have a much higher body mass. Obligate flappers may adjust their behavior to alleviate flight costs. For example, many small songbirds, but also relatively large woodpeckers, use bounding flight. This flight mode consists in alternate phases of wing beats and ballistic body glides that create an undulating trajectory, in which the optimal frequency of muscle contraction during the flapping phase and the reduction in drag caused by folding wings during the ballistic phase interact in complex ways. Waders, ducks, geese, and terns often fly in formations. Flock members position themselves sideways relative to each other, which enables them to soar within the wingtip vortex generated by the bird in front. Another energysaving behavior is to fly close to a water surface, making use of the so-called ground effect that increases lift and reduces drag.
...The promise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize science does not yet rest on a firm legal footing. Scientific AI applications rely on foundation models trained on books, images, and other material beyond scientific publications. In the United States, more than 100 active lawsuits are testing the legality of such training, which will shape the potential impact of AI on science
...To build foundation models, neural networks must feed on vast amounts of data, including many copyrighted works. If courts decide that training generative-AI models on copyright-protected, humanauthored works is illegal, liability risks for all developers and users of these models would increase dramatically, although noncommercial developers and users would be less vulnerable than commercial developers and users. AI developers, including many scientific laboratories, have been counting on the "fair use" doctrine of US copyright law to avoid liability for training on these works. Fair use is intended to promote freedom of expression and creativity by allowing unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations—including, in many cases, research, teaching, and commentary, but also more broadly where enforcing copyright protections would stifle rather than advance copyright's goal of encouraging the production of new works. So far, AI developers' reliance on fair use has been mostly vindicated. Two federal courts have ruled that using copyrighted works to train generative-AI models is fair use. But the fight is far from over.
...In the United States, more than 100 active lawsuits are testing the legality of such training, which will shape the potential impact of AI on science. The judge in one case suggested that copyright owners could prevail if they could show that outputs of generative-AI systems were likely to cause harm not to specific works owned by the plaintiffs—the usual harm at issue in copyright lawsuits—but to entire markets for human-authored works. This article explores conceptual difficulties raised by this "market dilution" theory and argues that whether market dilution exists is an empirical question. If it does exist in some contexts, legislatures, not courts, may be the better forum to address it.
...Throughout the book, Harper maintains his focus on humanity's need to feed itself and our quest to do so with more efficiency and fairness, arguing that this impulse has been perhaps overly successful. We have gotten so good at procuring food that the human population doubled between 1750 and 1900. It kept going up, of course, reaching 4 billion by 1974 and 8 billion by 2022. "Humans and our domesticated animals now account for about 94 percent of all terrestrial mammal mass on Earth, leaving only about 6 percent for all wild species," he writes. How long can this go on?
...At least 79,000 tonnes of plastic accumulate in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch alone, with abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear accounting for up to 46% of that mass (2). Offshore oil and gas activities (3), which supply feedstocks for plastic production, also disturb deep-sea ecosystems. At the cellular level, plastic leachates and additives impair the photosynthetic efficiency and abundance of marine microbial primary producers (4), the base of the ocean food web, with direct implication for the biodiversity outcomes that the treaty seeks to protect.
...This century is a golden age of exoplanetography. Back in 1990 there were zero tentatively identified exoplanets. But the advent of orbiting telescopes with significant light gathering power (most famously, the Hubble Space Telescope which launched that year) has shown us that not only are solar systems with multiple planets quite common, but that our own solar system is that weird kid in the corner of the playground who nobody wants to hang out with: there is an absolute zoo of exoplanet types out there.
...Exoplanets are identified by perturbations they induce in the light curve emitted by their primary, either because they pass in front of the star or cause it to wobble slightly as the massive object orbits around its centre of mass. The consequence of having a bunch of infrared telescopes outside the atmosphere is that the count of known exoplanets as of October 2026 hit 6,445 confirmed in 4,834 planetary systems, of which 1,070 solar systems contain more than one planet. And this is only scratching the surface: to be detectable in this way, an exoplanet needs to be very massive and orbit very close-—a Hot Jupiter. So of course Hot Jupiters are what we have mostly found so far.
a form of online advertising that uses a grid of thumbnails and captions to drive traffic to other sites and webpages. This form of advertising is often associated with low-quality clickbait links and articles.
...So Trump has an incentive to do something, anything, that might shake up this election. Attacking Iran would probably lead to an even bigger Republican defeat, but it might, just might, rally Trump's base enough to change the outcome. True, a president who cared at all about what is good for America wouldn't pursue disastrous policies for the slim chance of saving his own political skin. But this is, after all, Trump we're talking about.
...So will Trump resume the bombing of Iran before the midterms? Obviously I don't know, but Pape is surely right that normal political logic, under which a deeply unpopular president would avoid resuming a deeply unpopular war, no longer applies. And anyone who believes that Trump will become more cautious, more moderate in the aftermath of midterm defeat just doesn't understand the new political reality. The truth is that political bankruptcy will free Trump to pursue his true desires. And those desires are horrifying.
Surveillance data about audiences is a kind of ambient vapor floating around websites and places and payments that has to be condensed through a heroic and expensive effort that gives power to whichever company can muster the capital and infrastructure to do so. Meanwhile, information about the content of publishers' offerings is already refined into ingots that are already in publishers' own possession.
...Trump can only exist in scripted reality: a tabloid villain or a game show fake tycoon or a president run by backers who use him as a bulldozer for their ambitions. Trump poses as a risk-taker, but he hates the unpredictable. Every verdict is prearranged. As he ages, technofascists have created the ultimate sedative for his psyche: artificial reality, forced upon everyone through digital dependency. As a result, Trump rules over a cadaver-like US political culture: ten years of predictability masked as chaos.
...Working code is now trivial to write, and the world of the future (to the extent that we can imagine it) is one where custom software becomes too cheap to meter. The pendulum may swing away from our current paradigm of centrally managed, locked-down devices back to something that resembles the primordial Internet, a heterogenous collection of vibe- and slop-coded God-knows-what glued together with AI magic. Why even install an operating system for your phone when your local Claude can build a perfectly tailored software suite for you that runs on the bare metal? Finding bugs in all this software, meanwhile, is becoming easy. This part of the AI revolution is well-publicized, with rogue agents breaking out of their various sandboxes, leaving cryptic notes for each other on the internet, and terrifying the living. AI is clearly adept at finding weaknesses in software in a way that rivals the best humans, and because this task is easy to train on, AI should reach superhuman hacking ability within a year or two (if it hasn't already).
...For a roach or rat to survive in the human world, it needs access to the three necessities of life: dark corners, drainpipes, and trash heaps. I think we can agree that the Internet is full of all three.
A dark corner in this metaphor is any place where it is easy to hide and hard to search—think vast thickets of memory, petabytes of storage, bloated binaries, and the innumerable caches and buffers (from the hardware level on up) that make up the modern Internet.
Drainpipes are any links that enable travel between constituent parts of the built environment, both to find new resources and to escape when the going gets heavy. In a world of networked devices, this is a low bar to clear. Any connection big enough for a piece of software to hop across can serve this function; even low-bandwidth bluetooth links are probably enough to transmit software pests.
Finally, there are trash heaps, mountains of consumable resources left sitting out unprotected. This pretty much defines the networked world, where at any given moment most memory, CPU and bandwidth sits idle, especially on the highly capable devices we all carry in our pocket.
From the point of view of small, self-perpetuating software pests, this is a rich and completely undefended landscape. What has been missing up to now is the element of natural selection. But the networked environment may have become diverse enough to support it.
This was Neil Postman in 1985, long before Zoom — or for that matter, the internet — was really a thing. "In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, authenticity and celebrity."
...ghostly particles called neutrinos. These are the tiniest fragments of reality we know of, so fleeting that they barely exist at all. Studying them has already overturned some of our most basic assumptions about the universe — and there are good reasons to think they hold the key to some of its deepest remaining secrets. "Neutrino mass provides us with the only particle physics evidence that the standard model of particle physics is incomplete," says physicist Silvia Pascoli at the University of Bologna, Italy.
...Neutrinos barely interact with anything — trillions of them pass through your body every second. Yet we know they have a very, very small mass. This mass seems to manifest in strange ways, however, and we aren't even sure how they get it. If we pull at this thread, might the mysteries of the standard model begin to unravel?
The first hint of neutrinos' strangeness arose in another underground site: a gold mine in South Dakota. There, in the late 1960s, physicist Raymond Davis Jr. filled a huge tank with a chlorine-containing cleaning fluid to measure neutrinos streaming towards Earth from the sun. Like nearly all neutrino detectors, it was buried to screen out other particles, which would be blocked by the rock, while the neutrinos would pass through. Occasionally, a neutrino would strike a chlorine atom in the tank, transforming it into radioactive argon-37 that Davis could then count. But when he ran the numbers, there was a problem: around two-thirds of the neutrinos physicists had expected never showed up.
...we now know that, like the other matter particles in the standard model, neutrinos come in three types, called flavours. There is the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. "Why nature is made like this, we have no idea, but that's what we observe," says Pascoli.
Then, around the year 2000, physicists at other neutrino experiments discovered that neutrinos have an additional peculiarity. As they travel, they can change from one flavour into another, a metamorphosis known as neutrino oscillation. An electron neutrino, the kind produced in the sun, might arrive at Earth as a muon or tau neutrino.
...another weird neutrino property. The oscillation is possible only because the three flavours don't each correspond to a distinct mass. An electron neutrino isn't simply lighter or heavier than a muon neutrino; none of the flavours has a single, well-defined mass. Instead, there are three neutrino "mass states", and each is a strange quantum mixture of all three flavours at once. As they travel through space, the balance between these masses — and therefore the flavour we observe — changes. But what exact values make up that mixture still elude us.
...The disparity between the mass of an electron and a neutrino is roughly the difference between a fully loaded station wagon and a single playing card. For physicists, this vast gulf raises the question of whether neutrinos acquire their mass in a different way from other matter particles, whose masses arise through their interaction with the Higgs boson.
...JUNO's centrepiece is a vast acrylic sphere filled with 20,000 tonnes of a special fluid called a scintillator. About 53 kilometres away, the Yangjiang and Taishan nuclear power plants continuously produce a powerful and very clean stream of electron antineutrinos — the antimatter partners to electron neutrinos. A fraction of the antineutrinos are piped to JUNO, and when one interacts with the scintillator fluid, it produces a tiny flash. Thousands of spherical, golden orbs are positioned around the edges of the sphere to amplify these flashes.
...There could also be one final curtain call for JUNO. The hope is that it will run long enough to catch an extremely rare event: a star exploding somewhere in our galaxy. "The reason we want to have a 30-year lifetime is exactly for the supernova neutrinos," says Yifang Wang, JUNO's director. "We want to wait for one explosion."
When a massive star collapses, neutrinos escape from its core before light can fight its way out. As such, a burst of supernova neutrinos detected on Earth would give us an extraordinary glimpse of the star's final moments and a fresh way to test our theories of how supernovae form. Plus, if the collapsing core is massive enough to form a black hole, the torrent of neutrinos could suddenly stop. Physicists would, in effect, watch the signal from the dying star switch off at the moment the black hole forms. "If a supernova goes off, that would be the physics result of the century," says Pascoli.
...global interdependence is threat rather than promise. What we call the "chokepoint view" predominates: a vision of the world as an interconnected system across which a grand strategic game is being played, in which great powers interests lie in ensuring that they control as many chokepoints as possible, while denying them to their adversaries.
The chokepoint view is unsurprisingly compatible with the Trump administration's understanding of the global economy as a system "that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." But it also worked quite nicely for the Biden administration, which often sought to deploy chokepoints for good, and sometimes seemed to have difficulty realizing that others might be unconvinced of their legitimacy.
And it fits with Xi's worldview too — providing possible means to protect China against foreign economic coercion, while positioning China to deploy such coercion at scale against other countries to achieve its interests.
The one major economic power that continues to have problems with chokepoints is the European Union. It is still attached to old way of doing things. More immediately, its particular blend of national and supranational competences hampers it from building up chokepoint power.
The problem, then, is that powers look at this world of chokepoints in terms of what it means for their own individual power position. From each power's particular perspective, it might seem that chokepoint-maxxing (while minning your adversaries' capabilities), is the best way forward. But individual strategies can have some highly unfortunate collective dynamics, leading to what David Bulman and Matt Ferchen have independently dubbed 'the economic security dilemma.'
Rain DeGray
...This is a way of life that is slowly, ever so slowly but undeniably, ending. The abandoned houses stack up. The bloodlines end, or the children move elsewhere, to places where it is easier to get jobs and fresh sushi on a Wednesday night. The chapter is turning, and the people still here can see it. And they are furious.
They feel forgotten, left behind and ignored. They are in the deep country, and what pours into their houses through their televisions are an endless stream of people with more resources and options. The wealthy accumulate an embarrassment of riches, more than could be spent in a dozen lifetimes, and the class divide deepens. And in the middle of it, is me, with a fervent compulsion to document this rapidly changing chapter of American life. I feel a higher calling to do so. A yearlong nature photography project has grown into something so much bigger.
I am sliding into photojournalism, with a bone deep compulsion to document what I see. This needs to not be lost. I believe this as an act of faith. But what are the moral and ethical implications of documenting what I see around me, when the people around me are, rather strongly, resistant to being documented? When they feel like I am being a voyeur to their pain and suffering? Do you NOT document, don't discuss it and let it all slowly dissolve? Let the chapter turn over to the next page where we are all paying six thousand dollars a month to live in a closet in the cities, quietly eating our overpriced sushi and binging on yet another reality show while the billionaires become trillionaires?
... two kinds of data centers, one built under failing regulatory capture (the US model) and the other built under central political control (the Asian model). And the latter isn't really a lifeboat (or choice of lifeboats) for the former.
...a chip is, in fact, a functional city for a population of busy electrons. They buzz about, flying our airplanes, powering the stock market, and, increasingly, thinking on our behalf. Unlike rockets, which are produced in relatively meagre quantities, microchips are stamped out by the billion.
...The original computers were essentially thickets of light bulbs. The basic logic of computing is that practically any set of instructions can be executed by an interconnected constellation of switches that can be turned on and off. Those first computers, developed during the Second World War, evoked the basement warehouses of a chandelier wholesaler. They required a platoon of soldiers to race around replacing bulbs as they burned out. In theory, these devices could accomplish tasks of great complexity. In practice, even a relatively basic job might result in a cairn of charred copper and broken glass.
After the war, at Bell Labs, the physicist William Shockley and two colleagues invented a switch that was smaller, faster, and didn't explode. The transistor, as it was called, exploited the peculiar disposition of a kind of element known as a semiconductor: it could be flipped on to conduct electricity, the way a metal would, and it could be turned off to block the current, like glass. The little gizmo earned its inventors a Nobel Prize and almost immediately improved lives. The portable transistor radio, which appeared just in time for Christmas in 1954, became a consumer blockbuster. The computers of the future would no longer need to be enormous things that caught on fire. Their potential seemed limitless.
There was, however, a devilish obstacle. Computing relies on circuits, or transistors that have been wired together with other electrical components. The cleverness of a circuit depends on two factors: how many transistors it contains and how densely they are interconnected. Transistors, unlike light bulbs, could be added to circuit designs in promiscuous quantities. Unfortunately, they still needed to be soldered together by hand. This process took time and money and tended to be flaky. One little miswiring could ruin everything. As circuits got larger, the difficulty of the interconnective task increased exponentially. This was called the "tyranny of numbers," and it was demoralizing. By the nineteen-fifties, we knew that getting to the moon would require computer guidance. A circuit that could do it, with ten million components, could be sketched on paper. But no one could actually build it.
...Tiny droplets of the molten tin are fired out of a cannon into a vacuum chamber, where they are shot—sixty thousand times a second—by unerring lasers. When the tin fog is ignited, the explosion produces a plasma fifty times hotter than the surface of the sun. The process, in other words, commences with the industrial production of miniature supernovas. These supernovas emit EUV that must be collected by Zeiss's mirrors, which cannot function if their surface is marred by even a nanometre of tin debris. The only way to keep the mirrors pristine is to pump a continuous hurricane of hydrogen gas into the supernova's blast radius. The gathered light ricochets through a hall of mirrors before it is bounced onto the blueprint of the chip. Making this happen a single time took decades of research. The profitability of ASML's customers relies on it happening near-flawlessly twenty-four hours a day. Recurrent shutdowns, it's not much of an exaggeration to say, would derail the global economy.
...In 1993, a young Taiwanese American named Jensen Huang had an idea for a specialized graphics chip, or G.P.U., to intensify the video-game experience, and founded Nvidia. It wasn't long before design mishaps drove Nvidia to the brink of bankruptcy. Huang sent a personal letter to Chang, and got a call at his office a week later. (The story, in Stephen Witt's "The Thinking Machine," is that Huang yelled, "Everybody shut the fuck up—I've got Morris Chang on the phone.") T.S.M.C. took a chance on his prototype. The specialized architecture of Nvidia's chips turned out to be ideally suited to the development of A.I. In the meantime, Apple developed a novel chip for mobile devices and eventually asked T.S.M.C. to make it. The result was every generation of iPhone that has been produced since 2014.
...The catch, in the American attempt to make chips at home rather than overseas, is that chips aren't really made anywhere at all. A chip can cross international borders more than seventy times before it's shipped to a customer. T.S.M.C.'s part begins with silicon wafers, but these have their own far-flung prehistory. Leading-edge semiconductor-grade polysilicon must be purified to “eleven nines” (99.999999999 per cent), which only a handful of specialized companies—based in Michigan, Germany, and Japan—are poised to do. These silicon chunks are melted in bespoke crucibles made of the world's purest quartz, virtually all of which is mined from a solitary deposit in the mountains of North Carolina. This process, which generates perfectly crystalline silicon ingots to be sliced like fragile metallic salamis into thin wafers, is entrusted largely to one firm in Taiwan and two in Japan. Most of the steps along this chain are controlled by monopolies or duopolies. This isn't because of market manipulation. It's because each endeavor is so esoteric, so formidable, and so crucial that it makes sense for all the available expertise to be concentrated in one or two nexuses.
...The semiconductor supply chain is a planetary superorganism with its own ecology. It's not like a plant that can be casually repotted.
...Globalization has become tainted in our eyes, as if it necessarily constitutes a zero-sum enterprise. And its mercenary form—which is also its most common form—has indeed inflicted harm. But the global semiconductor supply chain reflects an alternative pathway. It has united its participants in the pursuit of something profoundly difficult that could not have been achieved in the absence of intercontinental solidarity.
...Wikipedia—a text of thirty billion words, in three hundred languages—is the greatest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled. It is also, as Richard Cooke writes, "an escapee from a parallel universe, a refugee of the internet as it should have been." ...It went online in January, 2001
...Wikis—or modular, collectively edited websites—preceded Wikipedia. They were invented by Ward Cunningham, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, who wanted to assemble a community history of programming ideas. His project touched off a "Jurassic wiki period" of similar experiments. It was Larry Sanger, whom Wales had hired to oversee Nupedia, who hit on the idea of building a wiki encyclopedia, though the two men dispute the exact details. (Sanger later left Wikipedia, and has criticized it in conservative media outlets.)
...Wikipedia has two main factions—the "Inclusionists" and the "Deletionists"—and their schism centers on how big the encyclopedia ought to be. The former held sway in the early days, but, around 2007, a year after English-language Wikipedia hit its millionth article, "a 'Soup Nazi' culture" set in "almost overnight." Even Wales—affectionately known as the WikiPope, and studiously neutral about the schism—ran afoul of these "hanging judges," who deleted his stub about a popular Cape Town restaurant. Nowadays, articles "nominated for deletion" have a sixty-five-per-cent conviction rate. The encyclopedia continued to grow, but its number of active editors hit a ceiling in 2007, and hasn't recovered since.
...Quantum mechanics says an electron occupies a range of possible locations until it is measured (think Schrödinger's cat). The electron is not simply a particle, but also a wave existing as a superposition of possible states.
Concepts like this are abstract, a little trippy and quintessentially quantum. They require one to set aside their intuition and accept that, at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, strange things happen.
When zooming out to the scale of biological entities and systems, however, this quantum strangeness tends to get drowned out. Biological environments are notoriously warm, wet and noisy, the opposite of what is usually required for true quantum effects to exist. Molecules are quantum mechanical in isolation, but the more complex a system gets, the more obscured those effects become. To put it plainly: scientists generally don't need quantum mechanics to predict and understand how life works.
Or do they? Are there biological processes whose behavior we cannot fully explain without quantum effects? Research in bacteria and beyond suggests the answer might be yes.
...Translated almost always as "illusion." And "illusion," in the Western vocabulary, means "unreal." "False." "Deception." "That which does not exist."
And when Māyā is translated as "illusion," when Māyā is identified with "unreal," when Māyā is reduced to "false," the entire teaching of Vedānta is inverted. What was depth becomes negation. What was vision becomes escape. What was recognition becomes rejection.
...The difference between "false" and "appearance," between "unreal" and "that which makes appear," between "illusion and Māyā, is the difference between escape and freedom. Between negation and recognition. Between the abandonment of the world and the understanding of the world.
...But the content, the narrative, the story that the mind tells about the experience, is appearance. Not "false," but appearance. Not "unreal," but construction. Not "lie," but projection.
...Māyā, as the narrative, does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be seen. It does not need to be denied. It needs to be recognized. It does not need to be fought. It needs to be understood.
...Over the course of two years, Norfleet met with photo studio heads, reviewed thousands upon thousands of negatives, and carted her finds — ultimately more than 20,000 images — back to Harvard in the trunk of her car (or in a suitcase on an airplane).
Now, half a century later, a selection of her finds is on display at the Harvard Art Museums in an exhibition titled "The Way We Never Were: The American Professional Photographers Collection."
(there's a Spotify playlist of 50s and early 60s popular music to accompany the gallery show)
There is something happening to young people these days that is the result of a trend in present practices of some kind.
If this trend is not checked, there will be bad consequences in the future as those young people age, because they will behave unlike previous generations or will lack highly necessary skills or orientations that previous generations have possessed.
These bad consequences are already posing a serious crisis right this minute.
It's #3 where the fallacy comes down, because the bad consequences are not perceived in the actions of the young, but at a wider social scale or in the actions of people who are much older. Meaning, the trend that is being warned against is either not new at all or it is not the cause of the concerning consequences.
...I think if you're really going to argue that there's been a general decrease in competency and merit in critical professions, especially political leadership, you might as well just throw down and say it's the people in their 70s and 80s that are the issue. There you go, that's where standards went out the window, back in 1972. Or maybe it was the GI Bill that did it, letting all those new people without the proper vetting into the ivory tower.
At this point, a canny argument against grade inflation is going to recalibrate and say "No, a rising tide of incompetence due to the meaningless of grades as a signal of ability or achievement hasn't happened yet, but it is about to happen, it is what we're trying to prevent." Excuse me if that does nothing at all to stir my concern. In a moment where it's not even clear that there are going to be doctors and lawyers and professors and scientists and mathematicians and generals in fifty years, worrying about the quality of the pipeline in any area of human accomplishment seems pretty dubious. (If I were going to worry thus, I also wouldn't worry about grades, I'd worry about the use of generative AI.)
...is that what proper allocation of merit looks like? A health care system controlled by insurance agents, a legal profession being made steadily irrelevant by money, private equity firms annihilating vast swathes of the functioning economy, research fields drowning in junk publications and replication crises? A huge increase in wealth inequality?
23x26
A subway stop in NYC. Two girders made up of odd shaped metal subsections extend platform to roof, wrapped in rubber numbers and zebra striped yellow and white tape. They taper to a huge screw at the bottom which is inserted into a broad flat metal foot, giving the whole thing an iron-giant-chicken-foot vibe. It does not in any way seem great or indicative of a robust and forward-looking attention to public infrastructure.
Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.
...the risks that arise from the interactions of AI with people and institutions. AI safety needs to be addressed at the level of the human-AI system, not the AI model alone.
The stakes are high. People are already embedded in systems that derive capabilities and behaviors from human interactions with AI. AI is influencing which medical treatments people pursue, where companies invest, how cities optimize civil infrastructure, and even how countries approach national security. Humans are no longer thinking alone but in a continuous feedback loop with AI—they are not external to the system. As society becomes increasingly dependent upon AI systems, a kill switch cannot by itself serve as a viable or sustainable safety feature.
...Instead of treating an AI model as a device that passes an initial test and is never checked again, regulators need to consider how AI performs in the real world alongside human users and how a system's permissions are continually monitored and adjusted on the basis of demonstrated reliability over time. This means developing safety protocols that shift from static guardrails to dynamic evaluation, and from AI models alone to the full human-AI system.
...For AI, however, hopping between fields can be a breeze. Researchers highlighted that ability earlier this month with the release of 36 preprints produced with a suite of AI tools called BootLoops. The so-called harness can be used with any large language model (LLM), such as Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT. And in just 3 months, researchers used Claude outfitted with BootLoops to crosspollinate at a massive scale, spotting—and solving—problems in seemingly unrelated fields that share the same mathematical structures. The resulting papers range widely, from figuring out the age of sunspots to attempting to decipher a medieval manuscript.
In essence, BootLoops "kept noticing the same pattern: many fields have problems that a technique from mathematics, physics, or computer science would solve outright if anyone knew it existed," Matthew Schwartz, a physicist at Harvard University and visiting researcher at Anthropic who developed the tools, wrote in a 1 October blog post unveiling the preprints.
...The military shared Hall A with others. In the early 1960s, CIA launched a plot— ultimately scuttled—to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro by contaminating a box of his cigars with BoNT. Around the same time, a military researcher took a Hall A subculture with him when he moved to the University of Wisconsin and shared it with a Californian ophthalmologist, who began to conduct monkey experiments to see whether BoNT could relax eye muscles, in hopes of finding treatments for misaligned eyes, a condition called strabismus. "This really is a swords into plowshares type of story," says microbiologist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University (NAU), the new study's first author.
In the 1980s, U.K. microbiologist Andy Pickett and others, working with drug companies, found that tiny doses of BoNT—mere billionths of a gram— produced by descendants of Hall A could treat strabismus in humans. In 1989, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the purified toxin as a treatment for that disease and eyelid spasms. The drug, now made by a few dozen companies, became widely known by the trade name Botox after it was found to temporarily paralyze facial muscles that create lines around the eyes, forehead, and nose.
...For decades, experiments and computer simulations of Earth's inner core, an alien world of solid iron some 5000 kilometers below the surface, suggested the iron atoms there form close-packed hexagons. But word of the new result has quietly roiled the small community of inner-core researchers. If the structure is instead what is commonly called bodycentered cubic (BCC), it could change how heat is conducted, altering when in geological history the inner core began to solidify and how heat and elements were released into the molten outer core. Those processes affect how the outer core churns, powering the dynamo that generates Earth's magnetic field. "If the structure is different, then the properties will be different," says Shuai Zhang, a high-pressure researcher at the University of Rochester.
...The core confrontation in baseball is between a pitcher and a batter, but there's another important player in that drama—the home plate umpire, who decides in a split second whether an unswung pitch is a strike or a ball. Players and managers in the past could not, officially, challenge the ump's decision. But that didn't stop grown adults from swearing, wildly gesticulating, and acting like spoiled children when they disagreed with a call, risking ejection from the game. Given that three strikes end a batter's turn and four balls wins them a walk to first base, the stakes are high.
Even umps knew calls were regularly missed—19 in one 2022 game made especially memorable by a star slugger's temper tantrum over the incorrect calls. So MLB has turned to an ABS system made by Hawk-Eye Innovations that uses five cameras around the baseball field to check the umpire's calls. For an industry that grosses $12 billion a year, with games, careers, and more billions in bets riding on the fate of pitches, the system has to be near-perfect. "People ask, 'We know you use Hawk-Eye to grade the umpires, but who grades Hawk-Eye?'" says electrical engineer Clay Nunnally, a baseball scientist at MLB. "WSU grades Hawk-Eye." With MLB's ABS system, a pitcher, catcher, or batter can now challenge an umpire's call of a ball or strike by tapping the top of his helmet or cap within 2 seconds. A few seconds later, the pitch's trajectory appears in slow motion on the stadium's jumbotron, showing the precise location of the baseball when it crossed the halfway point of home plate (see graphic, p. 376). Teams start games with just two challenges, which are only retained if calls are overturned.
...Like a metronome, Earth has experienced ice ages on predictable "beats" driven by its planetary orbit around the Sun over the past 2 million years (1). However, future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions could place a decisive end to this cycle, forestalling the next ice age for hundreds of thousands of years (2). On page 455 of this issue, Young et al. (3) report the history of Barnes Ice Cap in northeastern Canada in response to natural and anthropogenic climate changes over the past 4000 years. The ice cap is the last remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a massive continental glacier that once covered nearly 30% of North America during the peak glacial period. The study suggests the glacier began to grow 2000 years ago but started losing ice by 1960 because of preindustrial global warming, likely signaling the end of the next ice age.
...Surface exposure dating, which is a commonly applied method in alpine terrains (6), determines the duration of time when a rock surface was exposed to the atmosphere and cosmic radiation. Uncovered rocks interact with the cosmic rays, creating a steady buildup of rare isotopes, such as beryllium-10 (10Be), at known rates. Young et al. measured the 10Be isotope in both bedrock surfaces that have been newly exposed by the retreating ice and the surface of boulders that lie atop an extensive network of moraines (distinct ridges of unconsolidated debris) left behind when the glacier retreated. Nearly half of the obtained 10Be ages contained isotopes that were inherited from prior exposures to cosmic rays, which is a common complication in polar or high-latitude environments where the glaciers' base remains frozen to the bed and erodes very slowly (7). Young et al. used a second chronologic technique that measures radioactive carbon-14 (14C) isotopes from previously ice-entombed vegetation that have been preserved below the low-eroding ice. Dead vegetation covered by the glacier no longer takes up 14C, thus providing an exact time stamp of when the glacier advanced over the materials.
...During interglaciations, the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), which is the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, retreats to Arctic canada, where it achieves a minimum configuration. the reexpansion of the LIS following this minimum marks the start of the next glaciation. Here, we show that the last remaining remnant of the most recent LIS, barnes Ice cap (Baffin Island, Canada), achieved its minimum interglacial dimensions after ∼3.6 thousand years ago, before reexpanding ˜2000 years ago, marking the onset of the next glaciation. the new LIS reached maximum dimensions in ˜1960 ce, after which anthropogenic summer warming resulted in a negative mass balance, ice margin recession, and the termination of the next glaciation. the demise of the next glaciation, despite the ongoing decline in summer insolation, illustrates the influence of anomalous greenhouse gas forcing on climate.
Once regarded primarily as creatures of instinct and simple learning, birds are revealing cognitive abilities that rival and sometimes surpass those of primates. Even the pigeon, an animal not typically associated with high cognitive skills, can distinguish between images of cancerous and healthy cells, represent the concepts of same and different, perform numerical discriminations, and tell the difference between words and nonwords in ways that resemble aspects of human reading. Corvids (crows, ravens, scrub jays, and rooks) show even more impressive abilities, such as self-recognition, tool use, problem solving, episodic memory, theory of mind, and planning for future events, at levels that often exceed similar abilities in primates. On page 445 in this issue, Schmidbauer and Nieder (1) report that carrion crows can make ultrafast and accurate decisions. These findings add to the growing appreciation of the abilities of the avian mind
...AI agents are language models equipped with tools and databases that can autonomously perform multistep analyses. We introduce the Virtual Biotech, a multi-agent organization modeled on a drug-development company, with agentic divisions spanning target discovery, safety assessment, modality selection, and clinical development. A virtual chief scientific officer interprets scientific questions, delegates analyses to domain-specialized scientist agents, and synthesizes their findings. The system provides access to more than 100 specialized tools covering 78,726 targets and 39,530 diseases, enabling in-depth and nuanced primary data analysis. A scientific reviewer critiques analyses before evidence synthesis, and analysis artifacts are retained for transparency and reproducibility
...Monroe's Motivated Sequence, and here's how it goes:
Hook
Problem
Solution
Visualization
Call to Action
Monroe refers not to the former president but to Alan H. Monroe, a public speaking expert (read: professor of advertising) from Purdue University who developed this framework for persuasive communication in the 1930s. But if you think about it, it makes a tight cheat code to rhetoric from long before:
Hook: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
Problem: The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
Solution: Grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Visualization: I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Call to Action: You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
Or, if Shakespeare's not your flavor, how about Lincoln?
Hook: Four score and seven years ago...
Problem: Now we are engaged in a great civil war...
Solution: We have come to dedicate a portion of that field...
Visualization: We cannot hallow this ground...
Call to Action: ...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Notice how each part flows into the next. The solution answers the problem; the visualization turns the solution into an image: the thrice presented "kingly crown," the hallowed ground.
Once you know the beats, it's easy. Every issue can be boiled down to a set of five steps; every person can be convinced by this string of logic. When I was working on a draft it used to become a rhythmic chant in my mind, lyrics backed by the percussive sound of tapping keys: Hook, Problem, Solution, Visualization, Call to Action, VisualizationCalltoAction, HookProbSolVizCall, Call, Call. If I hit a wall while writing, experienced a research block, or worked with a principal who didn't know what they wanted to say, the answer was simple. This was the first—and almost always, the best—place to start.
The Web isn't dying, but it is being distanced from us. As a place to seek knowledge and connections, it is being replaced for many (including me) by AI chatbots that harvest findings from it, rewrite and summarize what they find, and—as gravy on that steak—point to sources it finds there.
To some degree, this disincentivizes publishing on the Web. Chatbots remove readers and viewers, discourage advertisers and subscriptions, and tell writers that the Web is less worth their effort than it was in the past.
Also, as the sum of information harvested to train and inform chatbots approaches a virtual Everything, it almost seems as though the collective provisioning of human knowledge is complete—or near enough.
Of course we'll continue to publish, because we are curious, thinky, and chatty animals. But the land rush that gave us forty zillion websites (seriously, about 210 million, according to Netcraft) actually ended around 2011 (Netcraft again), and has pretty much plateau'd since then
...We always mischaracterized the Web with mixed real estate and publishing metaphors: pages we'd author and post in sites we'd construct or build at locations on domains that we'd visit and browse, as if these were the solid and durable occupants of a world wide library.
But in fact the Web is a whiteboard. And it's much easier on the Web to erase stuff than to produce and keep stuff up.
While I love the Internet Archive and consider it the most saving grace ever invented, it's a cemetery with glass-top graves. What's there is done. It's of near-infinite value, but not new. And new is what keeps the Web alive.
Not in a "wow, meditation is so peaceful" kind of way. I could almost see myself from above. I could see myself sitting there, the people around me, the shrine, the room, it's like as if I had moved the camera up above my head.
For a minute or two, I was just watching myself sitting there. And the even more 2X strangest part was that I knew I was imagining it.
I knew it was happening inside my head. Somewhere in the background, Morgan Freeman's voice was probably going, "Child, you crazy."
There was literally a voice in my head narrating the whole thing.
"Okay, so we're imagining ourselves floating now. Interesting. Is this meditation? Are we doing this right?" wait is that me sitting there, why do I look extra fat from this top angle ... so and so.
My brain had apparently decided to become its own podcast.
I got scared, panicked and opened my eyes.
Later, when I got home, I did what the internet has trained all of us to do.
I Googled it. Somewhere down the Reddit rabbit hole, I came across the idea of the
"Watcher Mind."
...There is an idea in psychology around the observing self — the part of our awareness that can step back and notice our thoughts, emotions, and sensations rather than completely getting lost in them. In Eastern philosophy, there is a somewhat similar idea called witness consciousness.
Basically, there is a difference between having a thought and noticing that you're having a thought.
...When you're sitting quietly with your eyes closed, you're removing a huge amount of the visual information your brain normally processes. Add repetitive chanting or mantra repetition to that, especially something as structured as counting towards 108, and your attention can become increasingly focused inward.
You're giving the mind something simple and repetitive to hold onto while everything else becomes quieter.
It's almost like reducing the number of tabs open in your brain.
But here's the fascinating part: you don't necessarily become unconscious. You can become deeply absorbed while still remaining aware.
And maybe that's what happened to me.
...What's more bizarre is I saw some ambient green faint lights floating around my eyes too, well later after a great fall into the Reddit spiral found that the strange lights and patterns we sometimes see with our eyes closed can be phosphenes — visual sensations that can occur because our visual system doesn't simply switch off when we close our eyes.
The floating sensation can also have neurological explanations. Our brain constantly combines information from vision, balance, touch, muscles, and joints to figure out where our body is in space. When we're completely still, deeply relaxed, and have our eyes closed, that information changes, and some people can experience sensations of floating, movement, or even feeling detached from their usual sense of physical location.
...I am not everything that happens inside my head. Sometimes, I'm also the one watching it happen.
...And now we're in another technology boom, this time driven by investment in AI. Many credible observers believe that this is another bubble: Impressive as the technology is, it's hard to see how the "hyperscalers" building data centers can earn enough profits to justify their huge spending. What will happen if and when this alleged bubble pops and the flood of investment dries up?
...According to current estimates, AI hyperscaler investment will be equivalent to somewhere between 2.4% to 3.2% every year for the next several years — a recurring amount of investment several times larger than the IT investment wave of the 1990s. So a bursting AI bubble would be a much bigger shock to the economy than the bursting IT bubble at the end of the 1990s that brought us to the edge of a liquidity trap. Yet the Fed has much less room to cut rates now than it did then: the current Fed funds rate is only 4 percent. So if huge AI spending is a bubble, and that bubble bursts, I can't see how the U.S. can avoid plunging into a liquidity trap — a situation in which the Fed simply lacks the tools to get us out of a slump. If this should happen, the economy is likely to remain depressed for years.
...my point is that a loss of confidence in nations' ability or willingness to honor their debts had severe consequences for output and employment. Panicked investors demand much higher interest rates to continue to finance a country's fiscal deficits, and governments trying to calm these investors make savage cuts in public spending. Both effects depress the country's economy
...Unlike France, the U.S. has relatively low taxes compared with other advanced nations, which means that there is ample room to reduce budget deficits by raising taxes — and supplying the IRS with sufficient resources to go after widespread tax evasion. But Republicans adamantly oppose tax increases and even enforcement of existing tax laws, and Democrats are reluctant to take on the burden of fiscal responsibility only to have their efforts squandered on more tax cuts for the rich by a future Republican president — which has happened repeatedly in the past.
...Recently a truly novel threat has emerged: the hack-apocalypse. AI's most dramatic impact so far has not been to raise workers' productivity. Instead, it has dramatically increased the ability of hackers to break into supposedly secure systems. Azeem Azhar has likened this to the emergence of Covid, calling this “The internet's Wuhan moment,” and argues that the open internet as we knew it will soon be gone. If he's right, there will be severe economic consequences
...just like no one knows when the current wars will get out of control and end up destroying the Gulf's oil facilities and Ukraine's critical infrastructure, no one knows how far Iran might go with Europe as well if the new round of strikes causes any serious harm to the regime.
...The regime knows very well that it can never defeat the US-Israeli pressure militarily. So, it has essentially devised its strategy to tackle the issue in an asymmetric way. Last year, I wrote a detailed article predicting that Iran would definitely attack the Gulf neighbors in case a war were imposed on it. And in 2026, it's happening.
Just think, for a moment, with the mindset of a military planner. What else can you expect, honestly, from an adversary that has much less to lose, has enough means, is willing to fight, and is cornered like never before?
...Germany's classified report Operationsplan Deutschland says that Russia is deliberately attacking Germany's key infrastructure as preparation for potential large-scale conflict. It further says Germany is a primary target for covert hybrid attacks on energy and defense infrastructure because it serves as NATO's main hub in Europe.
...All in all, the common man has unwillingly entered the era where anything is fair for enemies' militaries.
Ukraine and Russia think that each other's oil facilities are legitimate targets if it helps them win the war.
Saudi Arabia believes starving the already famine-infested entire Yemeni population by blockading it if it stops Iranian weapons from reaching the Houthis is okay, and Houthis think that if that's the case, it should also be fine to essentially blockade Saudi airports and jam its economy this way.
And in South Asia, India believes stopping the rivers on which Pakistan's 90% socio-economic fabric depends is a just move, while Pakistan thinks that striking India's critical industries in case it's provoked ever again would be a great idea.
...Bottom line, I'm a "word guy." As a writer, my creative life is about playing with language, essentially herding and reconfiguring words, making them dance what I want them to dance
...What follows is a list of words and phrases that suddenly appeared in everyday jargon, all of which, at first, I had to guess the meaning of
1) Charcuterie board
2) Cosplay
Suddenly it seemed, outta bloomin' nowhere, this word seeped into discussion after discussion. And, I'm supposed to know what it means!
Apparently, "cosplay" was born in Japan sometime around 1984. The term originally pertained to people who attend science fiction conferences in costume, as their favorite fictional characters.
Since then, anyone who takes on another personality or role plays as someone or something other than their authentic self is participating in cosplay.
3) Aspirational
4)Anecdotal
Knowing that an anecdote is supposed to be at least partially based on a true happening, my assumption was that "anecdotal" meant that whatever followed was the acknowledged truth.
I held on to that assumption until I finally learned that "anecdotal" doesn't serve to verify the information to follow, but instead describes individuals' lived experience or memory of that experience, as it pertains to and/or supports the information.
5) Drop
...now, the word "drop" — hip-hop slang for the commercial release of new audio product — has been fully absorbed into the English language.
6) Gut (and 'gut health')
...The more contemporary version of "gut" hides away on the interior of a person's lower belly. It's the place where, thanks to billions of invisible bacteria, digestion takes place, where immunity from disease and overall well-being resides.
Gut health, we're now learning, is good health. And, listening to a plethora of commercials for probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes, fiber supplements, and hydration boosters, it seems like dumb luck that the human race has survived this long without being fully aware of the benefits of good gut health.
7) Atmospheric River
8)Hack
...Now, any tip aimed at making one's life, job, hobby, physical image, or family life easier or better is known as a "hack," shortened from "lifehack."
...Another type of humor carries the hoity-toity name "benign violation." This is when an ethical or social norm is violated, but no harm is done, and we laugh. It's why we'll often laugh at a joke that is in horrible taste, or about something tragic.
...When you're publishing cartoons that millions might see, you quickly learn that the same joke can either entertain or offend, depending on one's perspective. While almost anything will be considered funny by somebody, the one comedy rule that's worth understanding is the difference between "punching up" and "punching down." Making fun of people better off or more powerful than the average is “punching up.” (Politicians, wealthy celebs, etc.) Making fun of people with less power or in the minority is "punching down," and it's completely unacceptable to the majority of professional humorists.
...he wasn't just any idiot; he was to become the Buddha, and he did that by writing the very first listicle: The Four Noble Truths. (Not a bad band name.)
Shit happens. Get over it. (Life has always been a nonstop parade of absurdity performed by unwitting clowns like you and me, and our bitching won't stop that.)
Greed and hatred will poison you. (You're never going to have everything you want, so stop wanting and whining. Look what it's done to Elon Musk. And hatred is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. If that were effective, a certain crooked real estate developer would never have had the opportunity to spray-paint the Oval Office gold.)
Accept life as it is. (Expecting the world to match your preferences is a recipe for suffering, and it won't work.)
Don't be a jerk. (Being nice to people makes you happy. Being an asshole, even if you're "winning," will keep you up at all hours, shouting into the abyss on your social media accounts about how unfairly you've been treated by the fake media, and praying in vain that you won't be sent to jail as soon as you've been removed from office. [Hypothetically speaking])
...Admittedly, it is more difficult to laugh when the circus is as dark and grim as it is now, but that's when it is all the more important to do so. Nothing strips bullies of their power more effectively than when people begin to laugh at them.
I've come to think of this planet as a clown college for the soul, but unlike the Ringling Bros. version, it teaches us to abandon the costumes and pretenses and laugh at ourselves. I suspect it takes most of us many lifetimes to graduate.
...I'd been wondering whether consciousness might exist beyond the physical brain, with the brain acting more like a receiver than the source itself.
...Take consciousness itself. We know an extraordinary amount about the human brain compared with what we knew a century ago. We can observe neural activity, identify areas involved in memory and perception, and see how damage to particular regions affects a person's experience of the world. Yet we're still trying to understand why all that physical activity produces the subjective experience of being someone
...It's possible, I was thinking, that this playwright in his eighties is the most contemporary writer I know.
...It was my first and only escapade in theater, after which I realized that I disliked theater intensely, a dislike that was somehow linked to the basic essence of it, the psychopathic, relentless enforcement of an unconvincing illusion. But I never stopped loving Shawn's plays because they seemed to share and understand this hatred. The hatred was part of their allure. They were based on such an aesthetic of the explicit that the question of a play's reality was irrelevant.
...Shawn as an actor has developed a Hollywood shtick of shimmering ambivalence, with an expression of bemused wonder and a voice so unique that he is, as he has noted, "frequently summoned to provide a voice for talking animals of every kind in cartoons intended for five-year-old children"
...After early studies of taxidermy and local farming, he found his eye in the early 1980s with a series of images of mines and quarries, subjects he has returned to again and again. These are the negative spaces that supplied the material for the spectacular constructions of our modern world.
Some of his first successful images came from the Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vermont, at six hundred feet the world's largest deep-hole granite quarry:
I would find the right location and then light up a hash spliff just enough to shift my perception and dial down the noise in my head yet not altering enough that I would be unsafe standing on edges of the quarries on broken and unstable rocks.
...1. Frontier Models Back during the 2024 campaign I wrote about the 4.0 operating system upgrade that had been loaded onto the JD Vance platform. Vance 1.0 was a memoirist and Hillbilly whisperer. Vance 2.0 was a Never Trump pundit. Vance 3.0 was a MAGA edgelord. Vance 4.0 is something like a cross between 2010 Elizabeth Warren and 2016 Marco Rubio, with some light nativism sprinkled in. Vance 4.0 was the Windows ME of the Vance platform. After November 2024 a new update shipped—the 5.0 VP Edition. But it was just a rebadged 3.0. As vice president, JD ran around slandering Americans killed by his police state, but in January we got an important patch—JD 5.1. The key upgrade on 5.1 was a backchannel feature that allowed the vice president to leak to reporters about how vehemently he disagreed with Donald Trump while publicly defending his boss. On Saturday, Vance Tech marked the soft launch of its 2028 presidential campaign with the unveiling of JD 6.0 at an event hosted by Bari Weiss's CBS News. Let's examine the new New JD not through the lens of politics or morality, but as a product—with an eye toward the question: Will it work?
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Hungarian digression, brought on by thinking of Fiume
...The "push" was primarily caused by poverty and overpopulation in the countryside. Hungary's population was augmented by two million in the 1880s. This aggravated the situation of the agricultural laborers, to whom the increased numbers of workers meant lower wages and less work. Moreover, the problem of overpopulation exerted greater demands on the already limited amount of available farmland. A semi-feudal land ownership system determined that one-half of all arable land belonged to landowners with large estates (ranging from a few thousand acres to 50,000 and 150,000 acres) and medium-sized estates (from seventy to 700 acres).[2] The other half of the agricultural population consisted of small landholders, dwarf-landholding farmers and landless agricultural peasants. Small landholders owned from fifteen to seventy acres and were able to make a living from their own property. The dwarf-landholding farmers owned a house and maybe a few acres, but could barely subsist on their own land. This latter group, along with the landless agricultural workers were the ones who immigrated to America. Working and living conditions were inhuman. Landless agricultural workers worked from sunup until sundown for usually less than twenty-five cents a day. Industry was barely developed in Hungary, and the poverty-stricken peasant could not find work in a nearby city or town. The over-abundance of laborers often resulted in maltreatment and abuse from overseers and landlords. Many of the peasant laborers had their fill of the back-breaking work and starvation pay. They gambled everything on steerage to America because they had little to lose and everything to gain.
...At the height of immigration, Hungarians in America sent home as much as one hundred to two hundred million kronen annually. According to estimates, the highest annual remittance was 125 billion kronen or the equivalent of $50,000,000.[3] Families which received significant amounts of money from America built new homes, bought land and paid off mortgages. Such concrete testimony of success in America promoted immigration in the entire surrounding district.
...entire villages were depopulated. The Hungarian government realized only too late the implications of such a loss of manpower to the nation's economy. The majority of Hungarians who immigrated to America at this time came with the intention of returning to Hungary, hopefully with enough money to purchase land. Emigration began in the following counties of northern Hungary: Abaúj-Torna, Sáros, Szepes and Zemplén. Migration began in districts where harsh economic realities, caused by such factors as crop failure, unemployment and widespread hunger put a great strain on the population. Initially, single men and men who left their families behind constituted a large percentage, over seventy-three percent of this emigration. During the years preceding World War I, however, the number of women emigrating equalled that of men. Three-fourths of these Hungarians were between the age of twenty and forty-nine. And over eighty-nine percent were literate. In America, they stayed in the industrial northeast, where they found immediate openings as unskilled laborers in steel mills, foundries and coal mines. At that time, industry paid fifteen cents an hour. Unskilled laborers worked ten to twelve hours a day, usually earning between $8 and $12 a week. The occupational breakdown of the Hungarians who immigrated was: 77.5 percent-agricultural workers and unskilled workers of all kinds; 8.6 percent-skilled workers; and 13.5 percent-miscellaneous occupations.[5]
...States with particularly large concentrations of Hungarian immigrants were: New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois. Living in close proximity to fellow countrymen already in America was important. It provided the newcomer, thrust into a foreign environment, with a certain degree of security. Numerous examples attest to such "group migration." From one district in northern Hungary, Bodrogköz, more than 7,000 immigrants settled in the state of Ohio. The Hungarian community of Homestead, Pennsylvania, was composed largely of immigrants from the county of Ung.
...More than half of those who arrived prior to 1914 managed to return. World War I and its outcome dramatically altered the lives of thousands of Hungarians in America, many of whom were living as aliens in the United States. As such, they were unprotected from discrimination and other forms of injustice directed against them because their homeland was on the "other side" during the war. Many simply accepted this situation and returned to Europe. Others returned because they wanted to rejoin their families and help assure their safety. The treaty which followed the war, the Treaty of Trianon, partitioned several sizeable sections of Hungary. Thousands decided to return to their villages in the midst of such political and economic upheavals. Those who stayed realized that this decision was a permanent one. After 1920 increased numbers of Hungarians purchased homes and became citizens of the United States. Others abandoned the hope of returning after long years of working and saving, or simply adjusted to life in America and chose to stay. Still others never returned because they lost their lives in a coal mine cave-in or a steel mill explosion.
...Central and East European immigrants were frequently brought to the United States as strikebreakers. Large industrial firms, unwilling to cede to the strikers' demands of fewer hours, increased wages and/or safer working conditions, simply brought a shipload of immigrants from Europe to fill the striking workers' jobs. The agents recruiting such workers were usually instructed to choose immigrants of many different national origins, so that it would be difficult to organize the newcomers because of language barriers.
The newcomers were bewildered by the situation, and could not understand the reason for the hatred and violence directed against them by the strikers. For many Hungarians coming to the United States in the early 1900s, this was their first encounter with organized labor.
..."man is a man even if he is Hungarian" -unidentified journalist.[13] Resentment and discrimination were experienced by each new wave of immigrants and Hungarians proved to be no exception. Hungarian immigrants were handicapped from the start-they spoke a strange language and even if they learned English, the easily detectable accent was obvious. They were resented because they took the lowest paying jobs and lived on next to nothing, saving everything to return to their native land.
The phenomenal influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe triggered widespread fear and hatred of foreigners. The immigrants suffered grave injustices-in cases of civil disturbances, local police, judges and authorities: "…generally levied stiffer sentences against aliens than Americans, while newcomers victimized by native criminals often watched helplessly as their antagonist was let off with a mild reprimand."[14] This was true especially in the hinterland or backwoods regions of the United States. In one incident which took place in the town of Jasonville, Indiana in 1909, anti-immigrant sentiments heightened to such an extent that the "native" residents took up arms and forced the Hungarian immigrant community to evacuate Jasonville, leaving most of their valuables, homes and properties behind.[15]
Individual examples of injustice were widespread. Peonage is defined as the practice of holding a person in partial slavery to work off a debt. Though illegal in the United States, peonage was widely practised. A Hungarian who tried to escape from a Georgian lumber camp was horsewhipped and tied to a buggy on the way back to the camp. Later when charges were brought against the owners of this particular camp, the Hungarian immigrant observed the "peculiar kind of justice enacted": ...nothing was too strange as to find that the bosses who were indicted for holding us in peonage could go free on bail, while we, the laborers, who had been flogged and beaten and robbed, should be kept in jail because we had neither money nor friends.[16]
Aside from its pervasiveness across social media, the slang form of "maximizing" was also given Dictionary.com's top spot this year because of its broader social connotations. It's "the linguistic manifestation of a culture increasingly preoccupied with getting the most out of everything," Steve Johnson, director of lexicography at IXL Learning, Dictionary.com's parent company. "Whatever we're doing, we want to push it further." The same can apparently be said for the use of "maxxing," which appeared in digital media almost 19 times more often in August of this year than the monthly average for all of 2025, the company said.
The ascent of "maxxing" in pop culture has also gotten a big boost from the AI sector. For much of the past year, businesses across the United States had been "token-maxxing"—encouraging employees to use AI tools as much as possible, theoretically "future-proofing" the business as a whole. But like the hangover after a bender, many of those same companies ended up realizing that token-maxxing came with a steep bill, and have since switched up their strategy to what might be described as token-frugality.
Every society that has achieved economic complexity has done so with money at its core (Goetzmann (2016)). Money is, arguably, one of the most consequential social institutions humanity has built: it coordinates activity at scale, enables the division of labour and supports the web of commitments through which agents bind themselves to one another across time and space.
The word "social" deserves emphasis. Money is a social institution sustained by a shared expectation: that money accepted in the settlement of obligations today will also be accepted in the settlement of obligations tomorrow. This expectation is based on trust — in the stability of money and promises to pay built around it, in the system's capacity to scale with economic activity (ie its elasticity) and in the institutional arrangements that underpin it.2 Two kinds of trust are at stake. One is trust in particular promises: whether this bank or that issuer will deliver what it has promised when settlement falls due. The other is trust in the monetary system as such: whether there will be an acceptable means of settlement at all, and whether it will hold its value. The first is tested continually and is routinely broken, since individual issuers fail without the system failing. The second is tested rarely, and its failure is an event of a different order (eg hyperinflation, monetary collapse).3 Crucially, trust must operate at scale: across millions of agents, most of whom will never interact directly with one another. Achieving trust at scale is what distinguishes a functioning monetary system from a network of bilateral credit relationships. It is also what the architecture described in this paper is meant to deliver. When that trust holds, money recedes into the background and economic life proceeds smoothly. When it fails, the very foundations of the social order can be called into question.
Two claims follow from this perspective, which this paper develops at length.
The first is the centrality of money. The notion that money is a veil that masks an underlying real world of commodity production and that exchange is ubiquitous and deep-rooted.4 But money is not a veil. It is the essential substance of a world of interlocking promises to pay. The economy as we actually observe it, in cash flows, money prices and balance sheets, is a monetary economy, and the "real" categories of standard theory are derived from monetary magnitudes, not the other way round. Tokenisation is much discussed at present (BIS (2023; 2025; 2026)), and in a sense one could think about money as the original tokenisation: the representation in transferable form of the credit and debt relationships that bind economic agents together through the financial commitments they make to one another.
The second is the emphasis on payment and settlement. Money is first and foremost a means of settlement. It is what one delivers in order to extinguish an obligation, to discharge a debt. This is not the same as saying money is a medium of exchange, and the distinction matters more than it might first appear. Exchange is one context in which settlement occurs, but settlement is the deeper concept.5
Focusing on settlement rather than exchange opens the door to a richer understanding of what money is and how monetary systems actually work. It reveals that money and credit are qualitatively different things (money settles, credit promises) and that this distinction gives rise to an inherent hierarchy, in which what counts as money and what counts as credit depends on where they sit in that hierarchy. It reveals that the critical price in the system is not the price level (ie the price of goods in terms of money) but par — the price at which a bank deposit converts into cash or central bank reserves. Most of us never think about par, which is the point: It is unity and it must stay like that for the system to work. It is the price whose constancy allows all the others to be discussed at all. Finally, focusing on settlement reveals that the system's capacity to expand and contract as well as the backstops that prevent contraction from becoming catastrophic are not incidental features but the necessary architecture of trust at scale.
...For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism's bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that "there is no alternative."
If The Market won't deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there's a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over the ICE), that's not the tech company's fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that's just How It Is. It's not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei's fault: there is no alternative.
...depending on our own partisan proclivities, we blame the party that we don't associate with as all the problems that our party is the good one. These are the classic narratives. But when I was living and breathing and working with the civil servants, what I found is that both parties have been problematic in different ways. And all of these efforts to constantly micromanage and change things related to the census have been consequential. So I was trying to find a way to describe what has been happening. And if you think about the wooden tower of Jenga and the game you play, what happens is that both players or multiple players take out pieces from the wooden tower and they add pressure to the top and each player goes back and forth.
But the problem with this game is that one person is declared the loser, the person who finally made the whole tower fall, but everybody actually loses. The whole tower fell. And so what I kept thinking about is that we've been living with Jenga politics for decades now where the administrative state has been experiencing pillars taken out from it, pressure put on top, often in well-meaning legislation, but sometimes other egregious things, different kinds of winds blowing and whatnot. And the civil servants are running around being like, "Can I keep the tower intact? Can I keep the tower intact? How do I keep the tower intact?" And maybe they've got duct tape, maybe they're figuring out ways of putting things back, but they're really struggling with a very wobbly tower. And my point in making that metaphor is to say we've all been responsible in different ways, whether we know it or not, and we need to recognize that.
And we need to recognize that the answer to addressing the very wobbly tower is to not add more pressure to the top, but to find ways to really strengthen it at its core. And that's a lot of what I want people to be looking for is how do you not just think about the new micromanaging law, but really thinking about the foundations? And part of it is that the census is also the foundation for our democracy. It's the foundation for our ways of knowing certain kinds of things. And so I want us to take those infrastructures seriously and trying to provide a metaphor that people can actually see infrastructure because people don't like infrastructure. It's boring and uninteresting until it breaks. And I'd like this not to break. I think it's better off if we can actually repair things before they break
Introducing the lumina project: large-volume radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of the epochs of hydrogen and helium reionization | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/552/4/stag1469/8971942
Observations from space telescopes including the James Webb and the newly launched Nancy Grace Roman are one way that astronomers piece together the earliest days of the universe. Simulations are another—and astronomers have published possibly the most detailed one yet, called Lumina.
Details about our universe's origins are some of the most difficult to grasp. So, researchers narrowed in on the first 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Using 15,000 graphics processing units running on a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, they modeled how the building blocks of the universe, including gas, dark matter, and radiation interacted to form early stars, galaxies, and black holes. Lumina comprises around 500 billion cells covering a cube of space about 1.5 billion light-years long on each side—similar to what powerful telescopes such as Webb and Roman can capture and more than 100 times the volume of previous simulations.
Astronomers are especially excited about how Lumina captures the periods when excess energy ripped apart hydrogen and helium, which had been covering the universe in an opaque fog. After these important "reionizations,”"mulations seem to show that the energy to break apart hydrogen came from early galaxies and stars, while the energy to break apart helium came from accreting supermassive black holes. No model has ever captured both processes.
...The resulting Epoch of Reionization (EoR) was highly inhomogeneous: ionized regions formed around biased sources, expanded into the cosmic web, and eventually merged (M. Neyer et al. 2024; N. Jamieson et al. 2025). Consequently, reionization is best described as an extended, patchy process rather than a sudden global ‘phase transition' (P. R. Shapiro & M. L. Giroux 1987; F. Haardt & P. Madau 1996; N. Y. Gnedin & J. P. Ostriker 1997; P. Madau, F. Haardt & M. J. Rees 1999; N. Y. Gnedin 2000).
...Instead, reionization is commonly attributed to hard ultraviolet emission from accreting supermassive black holes (quasars), whose abundance peaks at later times. In addition to changing the ionization balance, helium reionization injects substantial heat into the low-density IGM (L. Hui & N. Y. Gnedin 1997; J. Schaye et al. 2000; M. McQuinn et al. 2009; A. Garzilli et al. 2012) and leaves observable imprints on the IGM temperature–density relation and on the small-scale structure of the hydrogen Lyman- forest
...Over the past decade, our empirical view of galaxies in the EoR has advanced rapidly. Even the deepest Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging could identify only galaxy candidates at –8, and only a handful at higher redshift, with limited spectroscopic confirmation (e.g. R. J. Bouwens et al. 2015; R. C. Livermore, S. L. Finkelstein & J. M. Lotz 2017; H. Atek et al. 2018; P. A. Oesch et al. 2018). The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has dramatically expanded this landscape, yielding large samples of high-redshift galaxy candidates. Early observations reported a surprisingly high abundance of UV-bright galaxies at (e.g. M. Castellano et al. 2022; S. L. Finkelstein et al. 2022; R. P. Naidu et al. 2022; N. J. Adams et al. 2023; H. Atek et al. 2023; R. J. Bouwens et al. 2023b; C. T. Donnan et al. 2023; Y. Harikane et al. 2023; B. E. Robertson et al. 2023; H. Yan et al. 2023; K. N. Hainline et al. 2024), subsequently supported by spectroscopic confirmations extending to (e.g. E. Curtis-Lake et al. 2023; S. Carniani et al. 2024; G. Roberts-Borsani et al. 2024; Y. Harikane et al. 2024, 2025).
...In this paper we introduce LUMINA, a simulation that extends fully coupled radiation hydrodynamics into a new regime of volume and resolution, and that enables a unified treatment of galaxies, quasars, and the IGM from cosmic dawn to the end of reionization. LUMINA evolves resolution elements in a box of side length down to , providing (i) the dynamic range required to model the galaxy population that dominates hydrogen reionization and (ii) the cosmological volume needed to sample the rare, bright quasars that drive reionization and produce very large ionized regions. The volume also captures the long-wavelength modes that can bias large-scale 21 cm statistics in smaller boxes (H. D. Kaur et al. 2020). We additionally include coherent baryon–CDM streaming velocities in the initial conditions, enabling a self-consistent assessment of their impact on early star formation and on the ionizing emissivity, which we will present in a future paper together with complementary smaller-volume, higher-resolution simulations. This combination allows LUMINA to connect reionization topology, the IGM thermal history, and source demographics within a single framework, and to forward-model observables spanning the EoR and the post-reionization Universe
...LUMINA is run with the massively parallel AREPO code (V. Springel 2010; R. Pakmor et al. 2016; R. Weinberger et al. 2020), which solves the Euler equations on an unstructured, moving Voronoi mesh with a finite-volume Godunov scheme, coupled to an efficient adaptive gravity solver
...AREPO solves the Euler equations with a second-order, finite-volume Godunov scheme (S. K. Godunov & I. Bohachevsky 1959) on a moving, unstructured Voronoi mesh. The mesh is defined by a set of mesh-generating points that move approximately with the local fluid velocity (M. Vogelsberger et al. 2012). This yields quasi-Lagrangian behaviour, reduces advection errors relative to static grids, and preserves Galilean invariance—a key advantage for problems with large bulk flows. To maintain an approximately constant gas-mass resolution, cells are adaptively refined or derefined: cells more massive than the target mass are split, whereas cells below the target mass are merged. In our setup, the quasi-Lagrangian character is primarily provided by mesh motion, while refinement and derefinement serve to keep cell masses within the adopted range around . The spatial resolution is therefore a direct function of the local gas density and varies by several orders of magnitude between cosmic voids and dense, star-forming gas (see Section 6). For efficiency, cells are integrated with a second-order accurate Runge–Kutta scheme using local time-steps organized in a power-of-two hierarchy (R. Pakmor et al. 2016). Gradients required for linear interpolation are calculated using local least-squares fits (R. Pakmor et al. 2016).
...My contact asked me not to take her silence as rudeness. I haven't. I take it as a measure of how fast a door can close when three governments lean on it at once, each alleging it is punishing someone else
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Impedence
I missed all of this in MY education. David was 16 years older, grown and gone (and breeding) so I didn't GET this from him by osmosis. Michael, Eric, and Ben DID osmose, variously, the essentials. Nick didn't (and osmosed differently). Daniel somehow did, but I know nothing of his ...circuitry.
...The first citation is from the New York Times of July 1, 1948 ("A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday") and the etymology is as follows:
Either (i) a blend of transfer v. and resistor n., with reference to the device transferring electrical signals across a resistor,
or (ii) < trans- (in transconductance n.) + ‑istor comb. form (compare earlier varistor n.).
Which seems oddly tentative for a word so recently invented, and you will note there is no named creator
...A form is anything with limits, boundaries, borders; all forms are Something and Not-something-else. But—and here's the essence of triadicity, what distinguishes it from other theories of meaning, being, and signification—forms are always forming. Triadic pedagogy accounts for, centers, and capitalizes upon this mutability.
In a sense, of course, we are forms, delimited physically and immaterially, by skin, physiology, ideas, thoughts, feelings, memories. We are meaning-full beings, with agency—the ability to engage our imaginations to generate choices, and to choose.
...Terence Tao, perhaps the greatest living mathematician, has been framing out a Math 2.0 that imagines where intellectual effort in mathematics should go post-AI. Tao explains that math has gone from a state of "proof scarcity," where many problems were still unsolved by humans, to one of "proof abundance," where the solutions to many problems can be quickly obtained with access to enough computing power. That leaves the role of humans in interpreting and understanding AI-produced proofs rather than in developing them. And for the moment, that is sorely needed. So far, the chatbots appear to be lousy at explaining why their proofs work. As mathematician Emily Riehl wrote in Science, "Once a door is opened, someone must enter the room and turn on a light, figuring out what the solution actually teaches us."
...Workers drew 75,000 liters of polluted water out of the pit and extracted its PFAS as a filthy foam. They pumped this concentrate into Eleanor, which squeezed the liquid to more than 200 atmospheres, heated it to roughly the melting point of lead, and mixed it with a caustic chemical. The punishing conditions ripped apart more than 99.9% of the PFAS molecules. "We find our sweet spot with really nasty, high-concentration liquids," says Brian Pinkard, chief technology officer at Aquagga, a Washington state–based company that developed the technology. "It's a very complete destruction process."
Deployed more widely, Eleanor and similar devices could help companies and governments deal with one of the toughest contamination problems around. PFAS were once prized precisely because they resist destruction. The molecules bristle with strong carbon-fluorine bonds that make them heat resistant, waterproof, and stable in living bodies—properties that made them valuable in products such as firefighting foams, nonstick Teflon coatings, and drugs such as Prozac.
Definitions vary, but according to one widely used measure, there are roughly 24 million distinct PFAS structures in the scientific literature, with thousands produced commercially. From 1950 to 2020, roughly 20,000 to 150,000 tons of nearly 2 dozen widely used PFAS entered the environment through air and water, according to a study published in August.
Once out in the wild, the same chemistry that makes PFAS so hardy also makes them extraordinarily persistent. The chemicals are now found in drinking water, food, soil, oceans, air, and the blood of virtually everyone tested for them. Some PFAS may interfere with lipid metabolism and immune signaling, and good evidence links a handful of legacy compounds—notably perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS)—to increased cholesterol, reduced vaccine effectiveness, and heightened cancer risks. Manufacturers have largely phased those two out, replacing them with shorter chain PFAS that appear less likely to build up in the body. But the health effects of most PFAS are poorly understood, says Luigi Margiotta-Casaluci, a toxicologist at King's College London. "For the vast majority, we simply don't know what they do biologically."
...The human cerebellum is an especially revealing location in the brain to assess development and function. It contains roughly four of every five neurons in the adult human brain and, beyond its widely recognized role in coordinating movement, contributes to processes ranging from language to attention. It is also a late bloomer. The cerebellum grows faster than any other brain region during the third trimester, increasing several-fold in volume and in layering complexity (2, 3). Most of that growth reflects the expansion of granule cells, tiny neurons that multiply in a temporary layer on the cerebellar surface before migrating inward. They then connect with Purkinje cells, large neurons whose fan-shaped dendrites carry the output of the cerebellar cortex. For an infant born at 25 weeks, nearly all this construction happens in an intensive care unit.
...This is not an argument for burdening popular history with intrusive academic apparatus. William Dalrymple's bestseller The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World demonstrates that ambitious history can combine narrative verve with extensive notes, bibliography, and glossary. Niall Ferguson's large-scale histories likewise expose their evidence to scrutiny. One need not agree with either historian to appreciate an essential principle: Documentation makes historical interpretation contestable.
This matters in the classroom. The Cauldron could stimulate lively discussion, but the absence of source notes limits its usefulness for teaching students how historical knowledge is constructed.
The problem extends beyond universities. Historical claims now circulate online rapidly, frequently detached from provenance and repeated until assertion acquires the appearance of fact. The modern Middle East is particularly susceptible to competing narratives mobilized in support of contemporary political positions. Historians writing for large audiences therefore carry an unusual responsibility to make the foundations of their narratives visible.
...People often picture the brain as hardware, a computer full of wired neurons exchanging electrical signals. Yet it is soft like butter, perhaps unsurprisingly, as more than half of it—as measured by dry weight—is made of the same class of molecules: lipids (1). But what are lipids? The term refers to a range of hydrophobic compounds encompassing several chemical species, for example, thousands of sphingolipids that differ in their backbones, head groups, and the length and saturation of their fatty chains. These molecules play several important roles in a cell: They form the membrane of every neuron and the myelin that sheathes their axons. Neuroscientists have long known lipids are important to the brain, but the assumption was that they only matter in the way an apartment's concrete walls do—structurally essential, yet blank, repetitive, and, in a sense, boring. The characterful “furniture” that makes each room different was assumed to be RNA and proteins, not lipids.
But what we know is shaped by what our tools let us see. Only recently could we read a cell's full lipid composition—its lipidome—and how this varies between cells with a technique called imaging mass spectrometry. This technique can identify and quantify lipid species in tissue at micrometer scale
...We discovered that lipids divide the brain into 539 distinct territories, which we named "lipizones," each with its own specific lipid signature, to define a hierarchical map of lipid diversity. Many lipizones correspond to known anatomy; some are finely localized as unique cell types, while others reveal boundaries that genes and stained sections miss. For example, white matter splits into a mosaic of compartments, which is unexpected given that oligodendrocyte transcriptional heterogeneity is comparatively modest; moreover, the ventricular walls and choroid plexus display their own biochemical gradients.
A map this complete lets us ask questions that had been impossible before. If lipids were merely a downstream shadow of genes, the enzymes that synthesize a given lipid should predict where that lipid appears. We were surprised to find they do not. Across the brain, the average correlation between an enzyme's expression and its lipid product is close to zero. We then asked how much of the explainable lipid pattern the entire transcriptome could account for. The answer was only about half (9). The lipid map is largely irreducible to gene expression. It represents a layer of brain organization in its own right. Notably, lipizones extend beyond cell bodies to track the distal axon terminals to which those cells project. Regions wired together by long-range connections share a lipid identity much more often than expected.
A map is not just a catalog, it is an instrument. With it, we could ask how the brain and its metabolism were remodeled by physiological adaptation
...Charles Darwin was captivated by the insect brain, describing it as "one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of man" (1), because of what it can do with so little. What it does is control a biological agent in a harsh world. A robot's controller is designed explicitly, but an animal's is implemented in tissue by evolution and development. The insect's core neurocontrol architecture is so successful that ∼10 quintillion insects exist in our world at any one time.
Connectomics, the science of extracting and interpreting wiring diagrams, is now beginning to reveal the logic of this architecture, just as semiconductor engineers take apart a competitor's hardware, image it at high resolution, and trace circuits to understand how it works
The October 27 election in Israel was a referendum on democracy, as are the US midterms. The results of those polls are inconclusive thus far, because of the Byzantine nature of Israeli party politics and the challenge of creating a majority coalition of 61 seats, which inevitably involves making alliances with some unsavory bedfellows. Israeli President Isaac Herzog has the unenviable task of consulting with the largest coalitions to determine who gets the first shot at forming a government.
This is the most consequential task the Israeli president performs, and a huge responsibility: His first pick has 28 days to form a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension. If that fails, Herzog can appoint the other party leader with the same 28-day timeline. Failure to form a government doesn't automatically trigger a new election, but that might well be the outcome of a deadlock
"Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness."
