Links
4 stars
I put 40 billion marbles in the Colosseum to find alien life | Epic Spaceman [YouTube]
36-minute video
Possibly the best Epic Spaceman yet. On habitable planets and moons, the prospects for alien life, and a bunch more.
3 stars
My Family and the Flood: A Firsthand Account | Texas Monthly
12-minute read
As we reassembled in the kitchen, the vinyl flooring under our feet started to bubble, and then water began to pool. My dad walked into his bedroom and saw the carpet floating off the floor. The river’s musty scent permeated the house, mixed with what smelled like freshly chopped wood. My sister sat Rosemary and Clay on the kitchen island countertop. We discussed whether we could get them higher, maybe even on top of the cabinets in the small space below the ceiling. Then the roof over the porch crashed down and we heard glass shatter in my father’s room, just off the kitchen.
[...]
Alissa managed to keep both kids on the countertop, one hand on each, still trying to reassure them. As the house came undone, she grabbed one in each arm. This is the part that will forever haunt me. If I or anyone else had been closer to them, we would have helped her. We would have grabbed one of the kids. But we didn’t know that we were about to be plunged into the water. We simply didn’t know.
Alissa remembers two things after she and her children hit the water. She heard Clay coughing. And she heard Rosemary saying “Mama.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Book Review: Arguments About Aborigines | Astral Codex Ten
18-minute read
A thought I had throughout reading L.R. Hiatt’s Arguments About Aborigines was: What are anthropologists even doing?
The book recounts two centuries’ worth of scholarly disputes over questions like whether aboriginal tribes had chiefs. But during those centuries, many Aborigines learned English, many Westerners learned Aboriginal languages, and representatives of each side often spent years embedded in one another’s culture. What stopped some Westerner from approaching an Aborigine, asking “So, do you have chiefs?” and resolving a hundred years of bitter academic debate?
Of course the answer must be something like “categories from different cultures don’t map neatly into another, and Aboriginal hierarchies have something that matches the Western idea of ‘chief’ in some sense but not in others”. And there are other complicating factors - maybe some Aboriginal tribes have chiefs and others don’t. Or maybe Aboriginal social organization changed after Western contact, and whatever chiefs they do or don’t have are a foreign imposition. Or maybe something about chiefs is taboo, and if you ask an Aborigine directly they’ll lie or dissemble or say something that’s obviously a euphemism to them but totally meaningless to you. All of these points are well taken. It still seems weird that the West could interact with an entire continent full of Aborigines for two hundred years and remain confused about basic facts of their social lives. You can repeat the usual platitudes about why anthropology is hard as many times as you want; it still doesn’t quite seem to sink in.
If you want to know the exact contours of two hundred years of scholarly debates around Aborigines, Arguments About Aborigines - which is shockingly well-written for an academic book - is the text for you. It also had some unexpected answers to the original question: what are anthropologists even doing.
My Best Friend’s Murder Was a Tabloid Circus. Now, I’m Looking for the Truth | Rolling Stone
14-minute read
In the summer of 2024, I began retracing our journey on a cross-country road trip, visiting people who could help me put the pieces together, trying to remember who Nicole was before everything went wrong, since a chance encounter with seven kids blew our lives apart, with a bullet ending one life and shattering countless others. Murder doesn’t only happen to the person who dies.
It’s been two decades since the media took an incredulous phrase that fell out of Nicole’s mouth — “What are you going to do, shoot us?” — and blamed her for her own death while capitalizing on it: The Village Voice called it “A Murder Made for the Front Page.” The New York Post covered the killer’s trial gavel to gavel, while glossy magazines wrote about how not to let this happen to you.
Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia | Astral Codex Ten
18-minute read
“The scientific paper is a ‘fraud’ that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”
This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.
[...]
And what are the consequences for scientific progress?
In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.
The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.
However, cracks are showing in this façade.
How to Save a Dog | New Yorker
10-minute read
In October, after more than five months of searching, Michelle forwarded a Scrim sighting a few blocks from my house, near a quiet brickyard that Tammy suspected of being his lair. Could I go check it out? I really couldn’t—I was on deadline—but, minutes later, I was there. I found him walking carelessly along the road, the raggedy king of Bienville Street. I followed at a distance as he entered the parking lot of a limousine company.
Scrim noticed me and trotted off, but he moved with familiarity. When Tammy and Michelle arrived, we walked along a fence that surrounded the lot; aside from a gap in the rear, which we could seal, there was no place for him to crawl under or leap over.
[...]
It was now Mardi Gras season, and Scrim was becoming a sort of patron saint for the city. Partygoers wandered the streets, drinks in hand, wearing Scrim costumes made from furry onesies. One float depicted him as an outlaw, riding a motorcycle through a window to freedom; another showed his big ears flapping triumphantly in the wind. People were spending time and money to honor a troublesome dog of no pedigree, and whatever he stood for: wildness, rebelliousness, a refusal to heel.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
Becoming Earth | Emergence Magazine
9-minute read
Through the misty woods a figure approaches, a slender, gray-haired man in khaki pants and work boots with many miles upon them and an auger in his hand. I’m not surprised at all. This is a man you’d meet in heaven.
The felicitously named Dr. Francis D. Hole was a soils professor at the University of Wisconsin. We were not allowed to use the word “dirt” in his class. Filth had nothing in common with soil so clean and nourishing you could eat it.
“Do you feel that?” he asked, bouncing a little on his toes. “That sponginess underfoot? The humus here is extraordinary—millennia of decay. Imagine the rain of organic matter; needles, spores, twigs, and bugs building the soil from the top down. Photosynthesis—now isn’t that a pure wonder, how light and air can end up as soil?” He liked to remind us that the genus Homo is derived from the Latin word for “humus” and for “humility.” He was a humble man, a man of the soil who signed his name not with PhD appended, but as Francis D. Hole, TNS. It always drew the question.
Does marriage have a future? | The New Atlantis
13-minute read
But ultimately, the underlying force that is rearranging the contours of marriage is technology. This is most obviously the case with Mr. Kondo and his digital bride, and with dating apps like Tinder and reproductive technologies like IVF. But it is in fact nothing new, or even recent. On the contrary, marriage has always evolved along with changes in the ways we make goods and services — changes in what Marx labeled the “means of production.” And it has always tracked and supported the broader changes that sweep across societies in the wake of technological change. As the costs and benefits of interpersonal relationships shift, the realms of marriage, family, and sex are slowly but inevitably transformed as well.
Checking In on AI and the Big Five | Stratechery
12-minute read
I thought it would be useful to revisit that 2023 analysis and re-evaluate the state of AI’s biggest players, primarily through the lens of the Big Five: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.
How Kyoto, Japan Became the World’s Loveliest Tourist-Trap | New York Magazine
16-minute read
“This is painful,” Maggie James told me as we took a stroll through Gion, the famous geisha district in Kyoto. It was a warm April night, and James, a high-end local fixer for jet-setters visiting the city, was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, which had become emblematic of the plague afflicting Kyoto and, increasingly, much of the world: too many tourists. Gion’s quiet streets lined with lanterns and low-slung wooden machiya townhouses were now filled with foreigners preening in polyester kimonos they had paid $20 to rent for the day. “None of them are Japanese,” James said, pointing to a group of men in elaborate getups. “These guys are wearing full-on shogun shit.” We walked past a spice shop that James and her friends used to frequent until the owners started selling “Samurai Spice” to foreigners.
As we turned onto Hanamikoji Street, Gion’s main drag, I let out an audible whoa at the heaving crowd — an overflowing river of people. “It’s such a beautiful street, but now it looks like Disneyland,” James said. I had been in Kyoto for only a few days, but I was surprised at how many of my fellow world travelers seemed to treat Kyoto like an amusement park. In Gion, tourists had developed a habit of opening the sliding doors into unmarked machiya on the presumption that anything inside was meant for their entertainment, only to end up walking into someone’s living room. “It’s on the news,” James said.
Original link | Archive.is link
I’ve Seen How the Neo-Nazi Movement Is Escalating. You Should Worry. | The Assembly NC
14-minute read
Then, just before 5 p.m., the cameras registered something. At first, it looked like shadows flitting behind the leaves of the large magnolia tree in our front yard. Then six human figures came into focus.
A minute later, the deer cam we’d fastened to a tree registered the five men standing shoulder to shoulder. I recognized the man in the middle: Sean Kauffmann, a notorious neo-Nazi leader from Tennessee.
Trump is enabling Chinese power | Noahpinion
8-minute read
In sum, the Trump administration and the MAGA movement simply seem incapable of prosecuting Cold War 2 in a coherent or effective manner. Trump himself is too irresolute, cowardly, and focused on personal enrichment. Too many of his subordinates harbor an isolationist view of geopolitics. The administration in general is too incompetent, too bereft of human capital, and far too focused on prosecuting domestic culture wars by burning down any institution they see as harboring wokeness.
This doesn’t mean that China is going to rule the world. Ruling the world is a very hard thing to do, and there are many obstacles other than American power — China’s own internal power struggles and the limitations of its authoritarian system, opposition from its neighbors, long-term economic and demographic challenges, and the personal flaws of Xi Jinping.
But with Trump making America more and more of a geopolitical nonentity, chaos agent, and wild card, the path to hegemony looks a lot smoother for China than it did nine months ago.
He Claims He’s the ‘Sports Betting King.’ What Are the Odds? | New York Times
12-minute read
But this was March Madness, when upsets happen all the time, and it would take only one to make Mazi $1.1 million poorer. He also stood to win just under $1.35 million, and Carolina had already done its job during a play-in game the night before.
“I got three teams that should be blowouts,” he said. “So we lookin’ good.”
Mazi has 2.5 million followers on Instagram, his social media platform of choice, and a key ingredient in his mystique is that he is always somehow looking good, despite operating in a cutthroat, quasi-legal industry in which fates inevitably turn very bad. All the other suckers out there lose on a regular basis, but not Mazi, and he seems to have the betting slips — and the Lambos, the Maybachs, the private jets to Miami, the limited-edition Chrome Hearts jeans that can go for north of $10,000 and the $180,000 diamond chain by the jeweler to the stars Eliantte — that say so. Mazi has taken to calling himself the “Sports Betting King,” or “S.B.K.,” initials that are inked on his left hand. In a 2024 podcast, he claimed to have won $25 million the previous year alone.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Menagerie Lurking in Rural America | Slate
11-minute read
Every year, millions of exotic animals are bred, raised, and sold in the United States. Their number include not just llamas but kangaroos, ostriches, emus, lions, tigers, reptiles, bobcats, monkeys, porcupines, bears, hyenas, camels, and zebras. The exotic animal industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, one that spans multiple continents and boasts vast, clandestine trade networks and smuggling systems. But most of these animals don’t come straight from the plains of Africa, the Arabian deserts, or South American jungles. Instead, they are bred here and traded at auctions in rural America—from places like Nebraska.
Dark Ride to the Source | VQR
20-minute read
Over the course of thirty-six hours, my daughter and I rode with Mr. Toad into the depths of hell, squinted at a bonfire of sewing spindles, choked on hairspray, broke the fourth wall at least fifteen times, smiled at a thousand strangers, fell asleep with grease-glistening fingers, and learned to navigate the Lightning Lane as if it were a second language. We sang each other the Small World song and begged each other to stop singing the Small World song. We braved the dynamite and shadows of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, where my first boyfriend once sank into the glittering depths of a doom-skewed mushroom trip; and in the darkness of Space Mountain, we felt as close as we’d felt since the womb. Or at least, I did. The gap between I and we grew and shrank like the bathroom lines: nonexistent, then massive. I lost and regained faith in myself as a good mother many times, often over the course of a single hour. I felt a kinship with other parents whose children sported impossibly large frozen lemonades, or light-up wands—my kindred capitulators, my kind—and I spent massive amounts of money, and hated capitalism, and googled Disneyland Annual Pass and hated myself.
Why English doesn’t use accents | Dead Language Society
7-minute read
It was but a temporary replacement: English eventually re-established itself in the halls of power, thanks to the gradual loss of English territory in France and the birth of a new English identity during the Renaissance. But the period of French dominance left its mark on all aspects of the language, from vocabulary to pronunciation. And, as Godwin found to his chagrin, it had a revolutionary impact on English spelling.
In fact, this early French influence over English, which arose from the Norman Conquest, is the beginning of the reason why English is written without accent marks (é, à, ç, etc.), or, as linguists call them, diacritics, today.
How Smell Guides Our Inner World | Quanta
9-minute read
Smell is deeply tied with the emotion and memory centers of our brain. Lavender perfume might evoke memories of a close friend. A waft of cheap vodka, a relic of college days, might make you grimace. The smell of a certain laundry detergent, the same one your grandparents used, might bring tears to your eyes.
[...]
Several new databases, including one recently published in the journal Scientific Data, are attempting to establish a shared scientific language for the perception of molecular scents — what individual molecules “smell like” to us. And on the other end of the pathway, researchers recently published a study in Nature describing how those scent molecules are translated into a neural language that triggers emotions and memories.
Fusion energy start-up claims to have cracked alchemy | Financial Times
3-minute read
San Francisco start-up says modified fusion process could be used to produce gold from mercury
Original link | Archive.is link
Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity | Stratechery
10-minute read
It’s that last point that is fairly unique in tech history. While great programmers have always been in high demand, and there have been periods of intense competition in specific product spaces, over the past few decades tech companies have been franchises, wherein their market niches have been fairly differentiated: Google and search, Amazon and e-commerce, Meta and social media, Microsoft and business applications, Apple and devices, etc. This reality meant that the company mattered more than any one person, putting a cap on individual contributor salaries.
AI, at least to this point, is different: in the long run it seems likely that there will be dominant product companies in various niches, but as long as the game is foundational models, then everyone is in fact playing the same game, which elevates the bargaining power of the best players. It follows, then, that the team they play for is the team that pays the most, through some combination of money and mission; by extension, the teams that are destined to lose are the ones who can’t or won’t offer enough of either.
The HALO Effect | kwokchain
9-minute read
Over the last year, a new breed of deal structure has emerged in AI: an alternative to acquisitions and hiring that shares traits of both yet isn’t quite either. Companies like Inflection, Character AI, Adept, Covariant and most recently Windsurf have used this new structure in a common pattern.
A core team from the startup–usually including the founders and research team–are hired by a company in tandem with a non-exclusive license to the startup’s IP being inked. In return, the startup receives substantial licensing fees that are distributed as dividends out to their investors and employees. And in the part that most baffles outside observers, the startup continues operating now under new leadership.
These aren’t acquihires. The buyers don’t acquire the company, they hire the people and license the startup’s IP.
Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet) | Noema
9-minute read
This kind of “bottom-up” scientific approach has contributed to modern science’s success, and it is also why physicalism has become so compelling for most scientists and philosophers. This approach, however, has not worked for consciousness. Trying to account for how our lived experience emerges from matter has proven so difficult that philosopher David Chalmers famously referred to it as “the hard problem of consciousness.”
Free-market economics is working surprisingly well | Noahpinion
7-minute read
The boring truth is that the ideal economy is a mixed one; it’s built on the foundation of markets, but also contains a significant amount of redistribution, public goods provision, and industrial policy. The exact optimal balance depends on the country, and on the times; even if you happen to get it exactly right for a while, the optimal mix will change over time as countries develop, as technology changes, as trading patterns shift, and so on. Someday, if Argentina over-indexes on Milei’s early successes, they might very well become too laissez-faire.
27 Notes On Growing Old(er) | The Ruffian
7-minute read
Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.
Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.
Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity - while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.
Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity | Second Thoughts
10-minute read
METR performed a rigorous study (blog post, full paper) to measure the productivity gain provided by AI tools for experienced developers working on mature projects. The results are surprising everyone: a 19 percent decrease in productivity. Even the study participants themselves were surprised: they estimated that AI had increased their productivity by 20 percent. If you take away just one thing from this study, it should probably be this: when people report that AI has accelerated their work, they might be wrong!
1 star
Flounder Mode | Colossus
10-minute read
Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work
[…]
I asked him the difference between “following your interests” and being scatterbrained or having shiny object syndrome, like I sometimes worry I do. “The people who become legendary in their interests never feel they have arrived,” he said. When he talked about the power of passion and obsession in that process, I asked him if passion is enough. “Enough for what?” he asked, somewhat rhetorically. He had an impression of what I meant. “I think one of the least interesting reasons to be interested in something is money,” he said, and cited Walt Disney. “We don’t make movies to make money. We make money to make more movies.”
Practically-A-Book Review: Byrnes on Trance | Astral Codex Ten
9-minute read
We don’t directly perceive the external world. Every philosopher has their own way of saying exactly what it is we do perceive, but the predictive processing interpretation is that we perceive our models of the world. To be very naive and hand-wavey, lower-level brain centers get sense-data, make a guess about what produced that sense data, then “show” “us” that guess. If the guess is wrong, too bad - we see the incorrect guess, not the reality.
Should the Federal Government Sell Land? | Construction Physics
7-minute read
While almost half the land in western states is federally owned, the vast majority of this land is impractical for development purposes.
Goodbye plastic? Scientists create new supermaterial that outperforms metals and glass | ScienceDaily
2-minute read
“Our approach involved developing a rotational bioreactor that directs the movement of cellulose-producing bacteria, aligning their motion during growth,” said M.A.S.R. Saadi, the study's first author and a doctoral student in material science and nanoengineering at Rice. “This alignment significantly enhances the mechanical properties of microbial cellulose, creating a material as strong as some metals and glasses yet flexible, foldable, transparent and environment friendly.”
Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot | Ars Technica
1-minute read
Now, John Hopkins University researchers put a ChatGPT-like AI in charge of a DaVinci robot and taught it to perform a gallbladder-removal surgery.
Tiny fossil suggests spiders and their relatives originated in the sea | University of Arizona News
3-minute read
But the decisive feature demonstrating arachnid identity is the unique organization of the mollisoniid brain, which is the reverse of the front-to-back arrangement found in present-day crustaceans, insects and centipedes, and even horseshoe crabs, such as the genus Limulus.
"It's as if the Limulus-type brain seen in Cambrian fossils, or the brains of ancestral and present days crustaceans and insects, have been flipped backwards, which is what we see in modern spiders," he said.
Partisan Bias in Professional Macroeconomic Forecasts | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Republican-affiliated forecasters project 0.3-0.4 percentage points higher growth when Republicans hold the presidency, relative to Democratic-affiliated forecasters. Forecast accuracy shows a similar partisan pattern: Republican-affiliated forecasters are less accurate under Republican presidents, indicating that partisan optimism impairs predictive performance. This bias appears uniquely in GDP forecasts and does not extend to inflation, unemployment, or interest rates.