4 stars
The Alchemists | Bicycling
The day before the Taliban trammeled her freedom, a young woman went for a bike ride.
She wore pants and a long-sleeved shirt under a sky-blue cycling jersey. Her ponytail flew behind her like a flag, free of the hijab she usually wore tucked into her helmet. Her smile was shy but also bold, with a pop of red lipstick.
Reihana Mohammadi was 18 years old, a new member of the Afghan National Cycling Team. She lived and trained in Bamyan, a small and peaceful city in the rugged heart of Afghanistan. On this 20-mile ride she was thinking about her next big race, three weeks away in Pakistan. She hoped to raise her country’s flag in her first international victory. […]
Pedaling out of the city, Reihana felt a mounting gravity. The air was still and heavy with dust. Such weather made the old women whisper: Something bad is going to happen! Locals were gathering in the streets, shoving parcels into trucks.
As Reihana rode past, some glanced up and noticed: A young woman pedaling a bicycle through the desert.
“You are crazy!” they cried in Dari, the native tongue. “The Taliban are very close!”
It was August 14, 2021. On TV screens across the world, maps of Afghanistan showed districts falling to the Taliban as the U.S. withdrew troops that had occupied the country since 2001. The center of the country was a bull’s-eye of freedom, and in that oasis was Bamyan. An island of peace in a sea of war, shrinking in the rising tide.
3 stars
A Trail Gone Cold | Damn Interesting
Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent of Iceland’s 390,000 residents can trace their ancestry back to the earliest permanent inhabitants, a Nordic-Celtic mix. The tradition of the Norse sagas lives on in the form of careful record-keeping about ancestry—and a national passion for genealogy. In other words, it is not the place to stumble upon old family mysteries.
But growing up in the capital city of Reykjavík in the 1950s, neurologist Dr. Kári Stefánsson heard stories that left him curious. Stefánsson’s father had come from Djúpivogur, an eastern coastal town where everyone still spoke of a Black man who had moved there early in the 19th century. “Hans Jónatan”, they called him—a well-liked shopkeeper who had arrived on a ship, married a spirited woman from a local farm, and became a revered member of the community.
The local census did record a man by the name of Hans Jónatan, born in the Caribbean, who was working at the general store in Djúpivogur in the 19th century—but that was all. No images of the man had survived, and his time in Iceland was well before any other humans with African ancestry are known to have visited the island. If tiny, remote Djúpivogur did have a Black man arrive in the 19th century, the circumstances must have been unusual indeed.
From Caveman to Chinaman | Cremieux Recueil
How man went from bumbling around in savannahs to building the Great Wall, and why China fell behind Europe […]
But is there evidence that seasonality actually led to storage behaviors prior to the advent of agriculture? The answer is yes! […]
Man started farming because the motions of Jupiter pulled the Earth into a stellar situation that made proto-farming desirable and, from there, it was a hop and a skip to real farming. Farmers established states to make life possible when nature threatened their ability to farm. After the Chinese state unified, it tended to stay unified because of the constant threat of steppe nomads invasions. Finally, the unity of China was its downfall because premodern state capacity was limited in ways that disposed its dynasties to massive population shocks that critically impaired the process of knowledge accumulation.
Historical contingency set China on a path for failure, and that is why the West won.
2 stars
Machines of Loving Grace | Dario Amodei
This piece (by the CEO of Anthropic) got a ton of positive coverage — and perhaps because my expectations were raised, I thought it was solid but unspectacular:
I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don’t think that at all. In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future. I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.
In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.
How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S. | Construction Physics
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th century, and (to a lesser extent) China today. I’ve been struck by how many parallels there are between modern China (roughly the period from the late 1970s till today) and the Gilded Age/Progressive era U.S. (roughly the period from the late 1860s to the 1920s).
What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon | New York
As we all approached the line, with runners beginning to hop up and down with nervous anticipation, I removed my sweatshirt and tossed it in the box. I then took out my phone, loaded up my Spotify, and realized … I’d just thrown out my headphones with the hoodie. The perfect playlist was all for naught, and I was about to embark on the most difficult physical test of my life in total silence — a man alone with his thoughts, hearing only the steps of his own feet and the ever-increasing gasps and heaves of his own breath.
And it turned out to be the best part of the whole experience. The New York City Marathon is not something to be filtered through one’s apps and siloed into algorithmic personalizations. It is best experienced with open ears, open eyes, and, yeah, I’ll say it: an open heart. To be among the people of New York for four hours is to be carried by them, and I’d have missed so much of it if I’d been enveloped by indie rock and death metal the whole time. To run the marathon is to be transformed, to learn things about yourself and the world around you that you couldn’t know beforehand. And to do it on the eve of an election that we’ve all, justifiably, spent weeks, months, years gnawing down our fingernails awaiting was therapeutic in all the right ways (and some of the wrong ones).
It’s like nothing I’ve experienced before or anticipate experiencing again. Here, the things you learn about yourself, and the world, running the NYC Marathon.
If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow | New York Times
The brainy birds carry big chips on their shoulders, scientists say. And some people who become subjects of their ire may be victims of mistaken identity.
How It Went | Daring Fireball
A well-told story by John Gruber:
My mom died at the end of June this year.
I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. […]
So, when my dad called me Tuesday morning, I thought it would be the election on his mind. It was all that was on my mind, that’s for sure. He had, in fact, just come back from voting, but it was something else. His voice was chipper, upbeat, but I could tell it wasn’t a good story. I know him too well.
Turns out, he had gone out to eat, by himself, Monday evening. In fact, at the very same restaurant where he and my mom ate their last meal together. He ate, drove home, and once home went to wash his hands before going to bed. That’s when he noticed his wedding band was missing from his finger.
Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? | Behavioral Scientist
Rory Sutherland:
Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn them into optimization problems with a single right answer. Because the second you acknowledge ambiguity, you now have to exercise choice. If you can pretend there’s no ambiguity, then you haven’t made a decision, you can’t be blamed, you can’t be held responsible. And what’s the first thing you remove if you want to remove ambiguity from a model? You remove human psychology, because human psychology, particularly around time, is massively ambiguous.
The secret life of Jimmy Zhong, who stole – and lost – more than $3 billion | CNBC
In 2012, someone stole 50,000 bitcoin from the Silk Road, an illegal dark web marketplace. Over time, the value of the stolen bitcoin skyrocketed to more than $3 billion dollars and for years it remained one of the biggest mysteries in the world of cryptocurrency.
On immigration, what Americans want is democratic control | Noahpinion
My point, instead, is that most Americans are not in those places. Most of them are in my situation. The border crisis and the asylum flood are something that’s happening to someone else’s community. It’s a distant thing they form opinions about after reading the news, like the Ukraine War or the federal deficit.
I think about this a lot when I’m trying to make sense of public opinion on immigration in America today. Majorities of both parties say they favor admitting more high-skilled immigrants and more immigrants who can fill labor shortages. 49% of Trump supporters and 85% of Harris supporters want more refugees. A majority favors allowing illegal-immigrant spouses of Americans to stay in the country. And yet a majority also favors mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
Elon Musk Goes Full Conspiracist | Persuasion
But why?
Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? | Construction Physics
Here’s an idea you see spreading across the internet every so often: that all semiconductor and solar PV manufacturing depends on extremely pure quartz from the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina. This quartz is used to make the crucibles which hold the molten silicon as it gets turned into silicon ingots, which are then cut into wafers and made into chips. The quartz needs to be very pure to prevent impurities from seeping into the silicon, and Spruce Pine is where this very pure quartz comes from.
Lost Maya City, Including Pyramids, Discovered in Mexico’s Jungle | Gizmodo
Archaeologists using an old map of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula have uncovered a lost Maya city, hidden until now, with thousands of buildings densely packed into a small area.
1 star
Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War? | 38 North
From the Stimson Center:
The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.
Who’s this Medieval Dead Guy at the Bottom of a Castle Well? | 404
Sverris Saga, an Old Norse epic, is packed with tales of heroic feats, marriage alliances, dynastic feuds, and bloody battles during the life of Sverre Sigurdsson, who reigned as King of Norway from 1177 to 1202. In one passage, the King’s enemies successfully infiltrate Sverresborg Castle, his fortress in Trondheim, setting it ablaze and tossing a corpse into the drinking well and covering it with boulders.
In 1938, workers excavating the ruins of Sverresborg Castle found human remains under boulders at the base of its well, raising the eerie question of whether this was the same corpse mentioned in Sverris Saga. Now, more than 800 years after the violent conquest of the fortress, scientists have conducted radiocarbon-dating and DNA-sequencing on the remains to find out.
In a new study this week, the team confirmed that the “Well-man” is very likely to be the person from the Middle Ages text, marking the first time that real corporeal bones have been linked to a character in these epics (even if it’s just a dead one).
Why Butterfingers Break | Tedium
I’ve always been deeply curious about the brittle nature of Butterfinger candy bars—so with that in mind, I thought way too hard about it in this piece.
What It’s Like Being a Billionaire’s Personal Assistant | New York
Everyone loves to judge what rich people do with their money, and no one has a better front-row seat than those they keep closest: their personal assistants. For decades, Brian Daniel worked as a PA for ultrawealthy clients; now, he helps recruit and train other high-level PAs for some of the world’s richest families and top-earning CEOs and has built a deep network of people in the private-service industry along the way. Here, he talks about what a typical day of work might entail, how he snags a table at the most in-demand restaurant at the last minute, and what it’s like when your boss has never heard the word “no.”
A New Visualization of the Atomic Nucleus | Kottke
A pair of physicists from MIT and Jefferson Lab and an animator have created a new visualization of the atomic nucleus.
For the first time, the sizes, shapes and structures of nuclei in the quantum realm are visualized using animations and explained in the video.
Household Surrealism: Clothesline Animals | Kottke
Multidisciplinary artist Helga Stentzel cleverly hangs laundry items on clotheslines to make abstract animal shapes.
