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3 stars
The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Exclusive Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined | WIRED
A year after OceanGate’s sub imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic.
Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? | Construction Physics
This is exceptionally good:
Because of its potential to provide effectively unlimited, clean energy, countries around the world have spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of fusion power. Designs for fusion reactors appeared as early as 1939, and were patented as early as 1946. The U.S. government began funding fusion power research in 1951, and has continued ever since.
But despite decades of research, fusion power today remains out of reach. In the 1970s, physicists began to describe fusion as “a very reliable science…a reactor was always just 20 years away.” While significant progress has been made — modern fusion reactors burn far hotter, for far longer, and produce much more power than early attempts — a net power producing reactor has still not been built, much less one that can produce power economically. Due to the difficulty of creating the extreme conditions fusion reactions require, and the need to simultaneously solve scientific and engineering problems, advances in fusion have been slow. Building a fusion reactor has been described as like the Apollo Program, if NASA needed to work out Newton’s laws of motion as it was building rockets.
But there’s a good chance a working fusion reactor is near. Dozens of private companies are using decades of government-funded fusion research in their attempts to build practical fusion reactors, and it's likely that at least one of them will be successful. If one is, the challenge for fusion will be whether it can compete on cost with other sources of low-carbon electricity.
‘I’m good, I promise’: the loneliness of the low-ranking tennis player | The Guardian
I was once Ireland’s No 1 player, and tried for years to climb the global ranks. But life at the bottom of the top can be brutal
The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet | New York Times
Scientists like Osburn have shown that, contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren. In fact, a majority of the planet’s microbes, perhaps more than 90 percent, may live deep underground. These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxygen. And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures. Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the groundwork for all other terrestrial life.
2 stars
I shrink 10x every 21s until I'm an atom - The Micro Universe | Epic Spaceman [YouTube]
Another Epic Spaceman video!
This is a journey into the microscopic world, we usually think about the Universe as planets, space and galaxies but so much of the scale of the Universe is in the world of the small. I've always wanted to understand it better, so I've spent the last few months trying to make this Micro Universe not just accessible but something that can be remembered.
Working title (insurance) | Bits about Money
Most people assume ownership is recorded in some sort of government database, in the same sense that your bank balance is recorded in some sort of bank database. If you assume this, you’re right… for many places in the world.
For example, if you wonder who owns a particular tiny sliver of Tokyo, you can hire a judicial scrivener to go ask the government, and in a fairly deterministic fashion they will bring you a piece of paper saying that the Legal Affairs Bureau’s records show one Patrick McKenzie as very definitely owning it. That piece of paper suffices as proof of title for almost all purposes in Japan. Courts, lenders, and the ward office will all treat it as one step below holy writ.
The United States, perhaps surprisingly, is not operationally capable of producing that piece of paper. There is no government body in the United States which will confidently say that, as of this instant, Patrick owns this property to the exclusion of all others. Serious professionals who work in or adjacent to the real estate industry understand this incapacity of the United States and organize their lives around it.
WWDC 2024: Apple Intelligence | Daring Fireball
Jon Gruber:
We had a lot of questions about Apple’s generative AI strategy heading into WWDC. Now that we have the answers, it all looks very obvious, and mostly straightforward. First, their models are almost entirely based on personal context, by way of an on-device semantic index. In broad strokes, this on-device semantic index can be thought of as a next-generation Spotlight. Apple is focusing on what it can do that no one else can on Apple devices, and not really even trying to compete against ChatGPT et al. for world-knowledge context. They’re focusing on unique differentiation, and eschewing commoditization.
The forgotten priest who predicted black holes – in 1783 | BBC Future
Almost 200 years before scientists accepted black holes exist, a British clergyman called John Michell published some surprisingly prescient ideas about these strange cosmic objects. Why isn't his work better known?
Meet the Smithsonian Bird Detectives Saving Lives | Washingtonian
When birds collide with airplanes, their remains are sent to a special lab in Washington, DC. There, an elite team of avian detectives works to identify the exact type of bird—the better to prevent future catastrophes.
The Augustinian Settlement | Goldwag’s Journal on Civilization
Octavian would return in triumph to Rome, and in 27 BCE, the Senate would bestow upon him the name “Augustus”, symbolizing his new unquestioned power over the State.
In history books, this year marks a firm transition–from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, with Augustus taking his place as the first Emperor of Rome. But Augustus’ reign is as notable for its continuity as it is in its reformation. The “Empire” as a distinct state was never established, and neither was an actual office of “Emperor”, and Roman writers continued to refer to the res publica for centuries. The mechanisms, traditions, and institutions of the Republican system were maintained wholesale, and the regime was defined by its adherence to tradition and stability, promising, if anything, a restoration of ancient virtue. This was, however, done in tandem with Augustus’ establishment of direct, personal rule of the state by himself, which his heirs would maintain for centuries.
I think it’s worth taking a close look at exactly how this was done, and how it may have been seen or convinced of by contemporaries. Historians have a tendency to look backwards with hindsight. We know that the Augustinian Settlement formed the basis of a hereditary monarchy that lasted for centuries, and so we see it primarily in that context. But is that too simplistic a view?
Gradually, then Suddenly: Upon the Threshold | One Useful Thing
We know AI is a general purpose technology - it will have wide-ranging effects across many industries and areas of our lives. But it is also flawed and prone to errors in some tasks, while being very good at others. Combine this jagged frontier of LLM abilities with their widespread utility and the concept of capability thresholds and you start to see the development of LLMs very differently. It isn’t a steady curve but a series of thresholds that, when crossed, suddenly and irrevocably change aspects of our lives.
#45. The Importance of Critical Analyses in Examining Social Science Evidence | Play Makes Us Human
I take no pleasure in this critique. I have tried to avoid it but no longer can. I know Jonathan Haidt and like him. We are among the cofounders of the nonprofit organization Let Grow. He and I agree that kids need much more opportunity for outdoor free play and adventure than our society presently allows and, through Let Grow, we have worked together toward that end. He and his researcher Zach Rausch even helped me get my Substack started. They are both kind and generous people. I have no question about Jon’s integrity. I am sure he believes the message he is presenting in this book and sees it as promoting valuable social reform. He really thinks that taking smartphones or at least social media away from kids will make them happier and decrease their rates of anxiety, depression and suicide, in part by providing them more time and motivation to get together and play in the physical world.
When I read, at Jon’s request, a pre-publication draft of the book, I told him I could not support it, and I explained why. I had at that time already looked quite broadly and deeply at the research pertaining to questions about effects of screens, Internet, smartphones, and social media on teens’ mental health and found that, despite countless studies designed to reveal such harmful effects, there was very little evidence for such effects.
Seeing Like A Network | Strange Loop Canon
The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times. An anti-panglossian sentiment.
Swallowing: I Was Mike Mew’s Patient | The Paris Review
A thing about growing up: you do not know what is strange until after. This was suburban England and the Holy Jemima’s hobby seemed about the same, to me, as my parents’ doctor friends’ African masks mounted on the walls above their CD towers of world music. Six streets down from them was Bellybutton Man, whose hobby was watching us leave school whilst silently smiling and lifting his blue T-shirt to finger his navel. And Bellybutton Man seemed about the same as Andy, eight minutes across town, who ran a pub and was a chess savant, who showed you newspapers and explained where the grandmasters were making mistakes. And Andy seemed about the same as Jake, whose hobby was that his parents let him drink as much Sunny Delight as he wanted. When you’re a kid it’s all just flora and fauna. You learn prejudices slow, like which plants are poison.
I met Dr. Mike Mew at the house next door to Jake’s. This house had been a house, but now it was a dentist. It was called the Smile Centre. Outside was a laminate board that said so, accompanied by a fading photo of a perfect and disembodied grin.
Mike Mew is the head of the closest thing dentistry has to a cult. This was not true when I was nine but it is now. Mike and his father, John, believe that in humanity there is currently an epidemic of ugliness. They promise that you can build yourself a new and strong and masculine jawline, basically just by swallowing different. They call this mewing. His New York Times profile calls him a “celebrity to [the] incels,” but girls like him too. He has obtained adoration on both 4chan and TikTok. Mewing is a big thing, a real phenomenon.
Joe Biden should drop out | Silver Bulletin
Stating the obvious, I suppose, but still some good points:
I’m not really in a mood to critique Trump’s debate performance, which was stronger than I’d expected but also included lots of wild, rambling tangents that only seemed coherent in comparison to Biden. Trump never won a post-debate poll in any of his three debates against Hillary Clinton or his two against Biden in 2020. But he absolutely crushed Biden, 67-33, in CNN’s poll of debate-watchers. How bad do you have to screw up to lose a debate by 34 points to Donald Trump in a country as divided as this one? And yes, these polls historically do have some predictive power in anticipating movement in the horse race, especially with a result as lopsided as this one. […]
Instead, Biden has been graded on an incredibly generous curve, like after his substantively fine but poorly-delivered State of the Union address. And the White House has been playing hide-the-ball, from Biden’s declining to do a Super Bowl interview to reducing the number of debates from three to two to using executive privilege to block the release of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur — who concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and was pilloried for it, even though Hur had been appointed by the White House’s own Attorney General, resistance hero Merrick Garland.
@theramblingfool on X
I looked for someone justifying the presidential immunity SCOTUS opinion and found this:
For everything partisan-coded, 80% of people will lie through their teeth to serve their tribe's goals. So it'll be hard to find an impartial summary of today's presidential immunity SCOTUS opinion.
But I don't have a tribe. So here's my "just the facts" summary.
Are Men More Influential? | The Great Gender Divergence
Is the West still sexist? In employment, we can explore different dimensions of bias:
As job candidates, do women face discrimination? In socially valued domains, are they presumed to be less competent?
Within firms, are women less influential - either due to women being less confident, or less domineering, or because men are granted greater reverence?
Do male colleagues tend to support each other, in groups, building fraternal capital and mutual authority?
This analytical distinction is important, for the absence of (1) is often cited as evidence that patriarchy is over. Alas…
The age of SASEA | Noahpinion
Most talk about globalization these days is doom and gloom. It’s all U.S.-China decoupling, tariffs, export controls — the fragmentation of the world economy into competing geopolitical blocs. The assumption, whether stated or unstated, is that developing countries are going to suffer in this new fragmented world — shut out of developed markets by protectionism, and outcompeted by a flood of subsidized Chinese export goods. Some pundits talk glumly of countries being forced to rely on services instead of manufacturing development; even a few people who previously supported industrial policy have now fallen into the mental trap of thinking that China is the only country that will ever be able to make physical goods at scale. Others worry that slower global growth due to trade wars will negatively impact resource exporters in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
But as I’ve been arguing for a while now, there’s one region of the world that’s well-positioned to grow and industrialize in the new era of geopolitical fragmentation. This is the region I call SASEA — an acronym for South Asia and Southeast Asia. South Asia includes India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and some smaller countries nearby. Southeast Asia includes the big island countries of Indonesia and the Philippines, the medium-sized mainland countries of Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar, the small rich countries of Singapore and Malaysia, and a few others.
Is Bronny James underrated? Inside the phenomenon of the NBA bloodline | Yahoo! Sports
Tom Haberstroh:
It’s a market inefficiency that NBA GMs would be wise to correct. After studying the results of over 2,000 draft selections since 1989, new research suggests that second-generation athletes are vastly underrated compared to their pedigree-free peers. Many of the nepo-ballers slid on draft night. Some of them — Seth Curry, Gary Payton II and Wes Matthews Jr. — weren’t drafted at all. An Eastern Conference GM reasoned, “You don't want to rank him high just because of his father, so maybe you underrank.”
The longtime exec dubbed it, “The Seth Curry Phenomenon.”
The question is, if we know second-generation NBA players have genetics and other built-in advantages on their side, like growing up around the game, why do teams keep passing them up? […]
The legacy draftees, based on where they were drafted, were on average expected to generate 1.65 annual win shares in their NBA careers, the equivalent caliber of the 16th pick. Instead, they yielded 2.15, a 30% bump, which was more indicative of a No. 10 pick. Said another way, players with NBA bloodlines have performed six slots better than their actual draft spot.
1 star
Astronomers think they’ve figured out how and when Jupiter’s Red Spot formed | Ars Technica
Astronomers concluded it is not the same and that Cassini's spot disappeared in 1708.
Should we be eating three meals a day? | BBC Future
The idea that we should eat three meals a day is surprisingly modern. How many meals a day is best for our health?
Tim Doucette is legally blind. But he can see stars better than you do | CBC
Quinan Nova Scotia's Tim Doucette is an amateur astronomer. He's also legally blind.
Doucette has had impaired vision ever since he was born. A childhood diagnosis of congenital cataracts forced doctors to remove his lenses and widen his pupils.
Though he didn't know it for decades, that operation also made him a perfect candidate for stargazing because, even with 10 per cent of his eyesight, Tim sees better in the dark than most. In fact, an operation he had in his teens actually left him with super night vision.
Cosmic Research Hints at Mysterious Ancient Computer’s Purpose | New York Times
Scientists used techniques from the field of gravitational wave astronomy to argue that the Antikythera mechanism contained a lunar calendar.
The brain makes a lot of waste. Now scientists think they know where it goes | NPR
Now, two teams of scientists have published three papers that offer a detailed description of the brain's waste-removal system. Their insights could help researchers better understand, treat and perhaps prevent a broad range of brain disorders.
The papers, all published in the journal Nature, suggest that during sleep, slow electrical waves push the fluid around cells from deep in the brain to its surface. There, a sophisticated interface allows the waste products in that fluid to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which takes them to the liver and kidneys to be removed from the body.
“Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel | Shtetl-Optimized
Scott Aaronson on his recent trip to Israel:
Anyway, in two meeting-packed weeks, mostly in Tel Aviv but also in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, I saw stuff that could support any of those narratives. A lot was as I’d expected, but not everything. In the rest of this post, I’ll share eleven observations:
[…]
(4) But nu, what did our Israeli friends say about the war? Of course it’s a biased sample, because our friends are mostly left-wing academics and tech workers. But, at risk of overgeneralizing: they’re unhappy. Very, very unhappy. As for Bibi and his far-right yes-men? Our friends’ rage at them was truly a sight to behold. American progressives are, like, mildly irked by Trump in comparison. Yes, our friends blame Bibi for the massive security and intelligence failures that allowed October 7 to happen. They blame him for dragging out the war to stave off elections. They blame him for empowering the contemptible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. They blame him for his failure to bring back the remaining hostages. Most of all, they blame him for refusing even to meet with the hostage families, and more broadly, for evading responsibility for all that he did wrong, while arrogating credit for any victories (like the rescue of Noa Argamani).
(5) One Israeli friend offered to take me along to the giant anti-Bibi rally that now happens every Saturday night in Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. (She added that, if I left before 9pm, it would reduce the chances of the police arresting me.) As the intrepid blogger-investigator I am, of course I agreed.
When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents? | Mental Floss
As for the “why,” though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don’t pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, English people, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don’t know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of Appalachia, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region, and Smith and Tangier islands in the Chesapeake Bay sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists.
Canadian pet chicken identifies letters, numbers to break world record | UPI
One of the chickens, Lacy, emerged as the clear winner of the flock, correctly identifying 6 letters, numbers and colors in one minute.