Links
4 stars
You Can Run: The Fugitive Childhood of a Cocaine Smuggler’s Daughters | Atavist
35-minute read
When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.
3 stars
Hard Rain: The battle over weather modification | Harper’s Magazine
22-minute read
Climate change is an enormous accomplishment. From an engineering perspective, the ability to coordinate activities to modify the average temperatures of an entire planet, change the pH of deep oceans, and cause vast shifts in the distribution of arable land across continents is a realization of powers as considerable as anything humanity has achieved before. It rewrites the core story of our origins, in which we are powerless before the forces that have made us. The fact that this discovery of our powers—that we can modify the weather on a planetary scale—was more or less accidental only puts it more firmly in the canon of scientific revelations. We are also, as with our other emergent powers, quite apparently terrible at it.
The innumerable crises prompted by our moment—the desertification of arable land, increasingly catastrophic storms, the deadly rise in temperatures in previously habitable regions—are nothing if not urgent incentives to grasp hold of what we have already done. After millennia of reaching up toward the sky, the levers just out of reach, the consensus on climate change indicates that we are, in fact, already manipulating the weather every day.
All of which suggests a new question: Are we ever going to get good at it?
Original link | Archive.is link
The Metaverse Fever Dream | Pixel Envy
17-minute read
Near the end of the Connect 2021 presentation, Nick Clegg, then Meta’s global affairs chief, said “the metaverse isn’t something we’re building, so much as it’s something we’re building for”. Olson, in his video, wryly notes that, in the eyes of its promoters, “the metaverse cannot fail; you can only fail to make the metaverse”. The metaverse is so inevitable that “you might even already be in it”, according to Barron’s. But the metaverse is not predestined; it never has been. It is a construction of tech companies that saw in the pandemic their future — not ours.
[...]
But a more cynical view is no less fair. With the pandemic undoubtably came a realization of how much money Facebook stood to make, if only it had a platform. In 2019, there were two publicly traded companies worth over a trillion U.S. dollars; by the end of 2021, there were five, with Apple and Microsoft now worth over two trillion dollars each. This pandemic was not going to last forever — but it did not need to. Our world was permanently changed, or so it would have seemed, and we would surely want to virtually attend concerts and buy PNG files of band t-shirts with real money. And these companies would take their cut.
Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning | Rolling Stone
13-minute read
It was supposed to be a sweet moment between a basketball star and her young fan. And it was, it absolutely was — that is, until certain men on the internet saw it, and ruined everything.
What happened next was a chain reaction: an internet cesspool of hateful comments, a Midwestern T-shirt store coming to the rescue, a $1,000 reward, a Boston-based reporter flying into town, a troll unmasked, and finally, a meeting between the little girl and her online bully.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
Your Book Review: The Epic Of Gilgamesh | Astral Codex Ten
30-minute read
Its longevity isn’t because it was made of durable rock, and it’s not because a stray copy happens to have been found in modernity. This piece of writing lasted because it was considered of such cultural importance, and copied and imitated so extensively, that we can’t help but find parts of it, wherever we find writing from this period. The Egyptians built the pyramids to last, and the Mesopotamians put the same care into immortalising this story. It’s their gift to us, crafted not from atoms, but from bits.
That’s what I am in awe of whenever I read this book: the age, the scale, the importance. Like a rock formation, it was here long before I was, and will be here long after I’m dead.
Looking Back at Lewis and Clark | New Yorker
12-minute read
In the national mythology, Lewis and Clark belong to the morning of the story—back when the waterfalls hadn’t been choked by dams and there were still bands of Native Americans in the Rockies who had never seen a white person. The tale is scenic. There are stirring ups and downs. But if the American idea—the experiment of letting people rule themselves, in the hope that they will grow into the necessary trust and wisdom—is now foundering, or better instantiated in other countries, what sets the expedition apart from any other long camping trip, full of rain, mosquitoes, and, intermittently, the sublime?
Original link | Archive.is link
The Grate Cheese Robbery | Longreads
13-minute read
Cheese isn’t an easy product to shift. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s unwieldy. It’s smelly. It also needs to be held at very specific temperatures and humidity. It is its own microbiome: fat, enzymes, salt, bacteria, proteins, yeasts, molds. All of these—plus time—conspire to change the nature of the cheese. That’s why maturation is so important to the flavor and texture; it is an art form. Storing and transporting the cheese is technical and controlled. So if you’re suddenly going to find yourself in possession of tons of artisanal cheese, you’d better be prepared. Even a refrigerated van, or a temperature-controlled storage facility, is unlikely to cut it. Smash-and-grab, opportunistic cheese theft is a fool’s errand. The Neal’s Yard thieves—who, after all, specifically asked for Hafod Cheddar—knew what they were dealing with. They likely had a plan, and we can make some guesses as to where their cheese ended up.
The Rise and Rise of Balloon Racing’s First Family | Texas Monthly
16-minute read
Few balloonists in the world can maneuver their aircraft well enough to race in the World Hot Air Balloon Championship, held every other year in wide-open skies, where there are scant power lines that might ensnare these gossamer vehicles. About one hundred balloonists qualify. Only fifty or so—the best of the best—return frequently.
But even among that exclusive class, there are no competitors quite like the Heartsills. They are the first family of balloon racing—the Mannings of a sport with a tiny fraction of football’s fandom. Joe Heartsill, the clan’s 75-year-old patriarch, is built compact and lean, like a trail runner, with powder-white hair and tanned skin that betrays the years he spent working as a realtor beneath the West Texas sun. He tends to survey a room like an eagle at its perch, masking his killer instinct with a warm smile or an encouraging nod.
A recently inducted member of the U.S. Ballooning Hall of Fame, he has won five U.S. National Hot Air Balloon Championships, six Honda World Grand Prix races, and the 1995 World Hot Air Balloon Championship. His older son, Lucas, who is 48, was once named the national rookie of the year. His younger son, 41-year-old Rhett, was the 2016 world champion and is a four-time winner of the U.S. nationals.
Original link | Archive.is link
Inflammation Keeps Us Alive. It’s Also Making Us Sick. | New York Times
8-minute read
archive.is doesn’t render this article correctly, unfortunately...
Traditionally, we have sorted diseases into categories, separating contagious from noncontagious illnesses; acute events like strokes from chronic conditions like asthma; diseases of cell proliferation, like cancer, from diseases of cell death, like Alzheimer’s; and those that affect one organ or bodily system from those that impact another. Our medical disciplines reflect this logic, too. But we have lately realized how interconnected the body’s systems really are. More and more, researchers are starting to see things the way that Peter Libby, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a cardiologist at Mass General Brigham, put it to me: “We all study the same disease” — inflammation is involved with everything.
That new understanding has inspired countless researchers to look deeper for links between inflammation and the conditions they study. At the same time, the more connections they find, the more their advances fuel a booming wellness industry that profits by marketing anti-inflammatory products and advice.
Who is the Villain in Mars Sample Return? | Mars For The Rest of Us
8-minute read
Last month I wrote about the demise of Mars Sample Return, NASA’s most ambitious planetary science mission.
What fascinates me about sample return is that it’s a human mission in miniature. The goal is to land a large spacecraft on Mars and return its contents safely to Earth. The criterion for success is binary—either the sample gets back safely to Earth, or it doesn’t. The mission has a mix of American and European spacecraft launching over several synodic periods, interacting with equipment that has been pre-positioned on Mars years in advance. And the program as a whole consumes a substantial fraction of each agency’s exploration budget, spanning multiple election cycles.
This makes sample return a different animal from normal planetary science missions, which are set up so that there is a partial science return even if important components break, and whose costs tend to be front-loaded ahead of a single launch. For that reason, the demise of sample return may give us some clues about the political and organizational headwinds a human mission would face.
In my earlier post, I described the various moving parts of the Mars Sample Return mission that died in 2026. Today I want to try swinging around the finger of blame, to see who it points at most comfortably. The various suspects have been assembled here in the drawing room. Let’s meet them one by one.
Why Are Men So Bad at Making—and Keeping—Friends? | Derek Thompson
12-minute read
The face-to-face versus shoulder-to-shoulder distinction is really important. Todd Rogers, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, did a study where he went to the American Time Use Survey—which looks at how people spend their time, whether they’re eating, cooking, shopping, playing video games—and he asked men and women how likely they’d be to invite somebody to do each of those things. For women, it was most categories: “Yeah, I could invite somebody to go shopping, sit and have coffee, come over while I’m cooking.” For guys, it was basically watch sports or do sports. His idea is that it just doesn’t seem culturally acceptable for guys to invite other guys to do the things that time-use surveys show we actually spend most of our time doing. The categories that guys feel okay inviting other guys into are much smaller.
The Dirt That Refused To Die | Quanta
5-minute read
For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.
They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.
Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil.
AI is Rewriting Mathematics | Nofil’s Substack
4-minute read
At what point are people going to accept that AI is changing absolutely everything. Some people still call LLMs stochastic parrots and what not. This is total nonsense.
AI is rewriting mathematics. Just look at this timeline for the last 2 weeks.
[...]
OpenAI announces their next major model, Astra, solved 10 major open problems in mathematics, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science. The cost of generating proofs for all 10 of these combined was less than $2,000 at Sol API prices.
To give you an idea of just how absurd this is, every single one of these is a decades-old open problem, with some being considered as flagship problems of the entire field.
This isn’t AI assisting or solving one problem. This is a system conducting original research across entire fields and rewriting our understanding of them. If a single person produced all 10 of these proofs, it would be unprecedented; it would be like an entire generations worth of research across several fields being compressed into a single person’s output. Such a person would almost certainly be considered for a Fields medal. They would be heralded as a genius.
Life with locked-in syndrome: ‘Despite everything, you are alive’ | The Sunday Times
12-minute read
It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television “just like anyone else”. That sense of normality is fleeting, though. It can vanish with a pop-up. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming service, asks its viewers “Are you still watching?” If you don’t respond by pressing a button on the remote, it assumes you’ve nodded off and pauses the stream. Dawn can’t press buttons. She can’t move her fingers or toes or her arms or legs. She can’t swallow. She can’t speak. She hasn’t been able to do any of those things since Tony Blair was prime minister. After losing the sight in her right eye because a nurse forgot about her lubricating eye drops one weekend, Dawn’s only means of communication with the rest of the world is by blinking her left eye.
Original link | Archive.is link
Samurai City | Works in Progress
6-minute read
The city of Edo played a crucial role in this system. The daimyo were required to maintain mansions in Edo, in which their families were obliged to live permanently. Any act of disloyalty by a daimyo would thus place his family in the gravest peril. Most women of the daimyo class passed their lives as effective hostages of the state, never visiting the domains that their husbands, fathers, and sons governed. The daimyo themselves were also required to spend alternate years or half-years in Edo, bringing with them great crowds of samurai retainers. Edo thus had a dual nature: on the one hand, it was the apex of Japanese society, in which the country’s agricultural surplus was consumed; on the other, it was a kind of prison, in which Japan’s potentially dangerous elites were contained and monitored.
Highlights From The Discourse On The Hugging Face Incident | Astral Codex Ten
14-minute read
But I side more with Roon in his skepticism of a unilateral slowdown. I think removing any given company from the picture would slow things down less than 10%. Even that number would require an implausible scenario where the lab managed to lock down its compute and talent despite committing not to use them. More likely, the talent would migrate somewhere else, the compute money would dry up and the cloud providers would switch to other customers, and things would actually speed up because the leading project would have more total talent/compute. Meanwhile, the most safety-conscious lab would be out of the race, they’d lose their ability to lobby for more practical solutions, and as their market cap went to zero they’d turn into a terrible warning about the danger of ever listening to doomers.
What can individual labs do?
Darde Ghorbat | Off Assignment
6-minute read
Farsi is a language of tenderness. It is an infusion of poetry and humor, the intersection of everything human. “Jigareto Bokhoram”—which translates to “let me eat your liver”—is an expression of endearment. A person who is “bi Namak” is “without salt”: dull, the antithesis of charming. You could say “I love you,” or you could say, “I am willing to sacrifice myself for you” (“fadat besham”). There is an inherent desperation in how we express our love and utter our devotion. I think about what it means to live in the currents of this language. To speak with such longing, reaching. It is a reverence that feels impossible to touch.
“Darde ghorbat”—the sorrow of exile, of being in a foreign land—is the phrase that stings the most. Like most of the Farsi that has been fed to me, “darde ghorbat” is a phrase I learned from my parents. My dad is a stoic man, but when he’s talking about Iran, I can see the most wounded parts of him.
‘Christofascism’ is here: inside the slow demolition of US public health | The Guardian
8-minute read
Driving these cuts is a neoliberal-theological fusion: the belief that dismantling public institutions is not just fiscally sound but morally ordained to combat demonic evils the likes of which, to most non-Pentecostal ears, sound a lot more exotic than a leather-wearing public health official.
The Center for Renewing America, an ultraconservative thinktank founded by Vought, puts that fusion in writing. In a healthcare blueprint published earlier this year, it described the Affordable Care Act, which extended coverage to tens of millions of Americans, as “cancerous”, and Medicaid, associated with lower all-cause mortality and access to care, as a “weaponized monstrosity destroying the lives of children”.
An entirely new kind of drug will help us treat the untreatable | New Scientist
4-minute read
I think we will look back at 2026 as a landmark in medicine, the year in which the first protac drug was approved. What’s special about protacs? Well, while most drugs simply block their targets, protacs utterly demolish them. Per molecule, protacs are far more potent, and they can also do things other drugs just can’t.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
The Exclusive Retreat Where Wealthy Kids Learn How Not to Blow an Inheritance | Wall Street Journal
6-minute read
Inside a three-day gathering where a group of heirs collectively worth $7 billion learn the secrets to staying rich.
Original link | Archive.is link
What happened to Borat’s village? | Dispatch
2-minute read
Neamu, 51, wants money for the interview. We eventually agree to return the following day with sunflower oil and polenta and sweets for the children. It’s not something I’d usually do but this is Glod and the villagers have been burned before, 20 years ago, by a mysterious man named Borat.
Why did South Korean stocks just crash? | Noahpinion
6-minute read
So although South Korea’s epic stock crash was probably related to Korea-specific financial factors, it could also herald the return of the “AI bubble” story. AI is far and away the most important thing going on in the American economy right now, so any hint of a bubble is worrying.
Find a way | Useful Fictions
4-minute read
When you’re approaching these make-or-break moments, it’s really important to make sure Melvin isn’t showing up.
Who’s Melvin? It’s a part of the human personality that exists in all of us, the part that’s good at avoiding blame or embarrassment by “acting normal.” Melvin is always taking the reasonable approach: Faced with a dilemma at work, rather than striving to really tackle it, Melvin executes a normal-shaped, solution-type action-thing.
You know the old saying, “nobody gets fired for buying IBM?” Melvin is the part of us that, faced with a big, chewy problem, tries to buy IBM — to do something that might not be maximally effective, but that won’t get you criticized. And then, if that doesn’t work, Melvin assumes the problem is unsolvable, and stops.
A moment that changed me: A telegram arrived – and I had to choose between my head and my heart | The Guardian
3-minute read
The next day, a letter arrived. My father, thrifty but not trusting the post and aware of the urgency, had hired at what must have been considerable expense a motorcycle messenger to bring a letter from his home in Kent to me at my mother’s house in Hampshire.
The letter consisted of two typewritten sheets marked A and B. Sheet A was headed “Why I should go to work in a discotheque in Tehran” and itemised the virtues and advantages of this option: a wonderfully rich culture to explore, financial rewards, lovely music, romance. There were not many points, but they were certainly plausible pluses.
Sheet B was headed “Why I should be the first woman in our family go to university” and argued the case with such fluency, persuasion and irresistible seduction that the decision was suddenly a no-brainer.
If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel | How Things Work
4-minute read
There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.
Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.
The most likely reason, though—one that often overshadows the other ones—is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.
Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact | Ars Technica
1-minute read
According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.
The Abilene Paradox: Why Groups End Up Doing Things Nobody Wants to Do | The Art of Manliness
4-minute read
Yet, though every person in the family thought the trip was a bad idea, they all went along with it because each assumed he or she was the only one who felt that way.
Thanks to their collective unwillingness to speak up, they took a dumb trip.
This is the Abilene paradox: a group collectively decides on a course of action that goes against the true preferences of each individual member.
Data on Chinese innovation | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Several surprising patterns emerge from the data: Chinese patenting is strongly associated with other measures of innovative progress; patents are not concentrated in corporate giants such as Huawei; universities have played a key role in innovation, much greater than state-owned enterprises or government-owned facilities; and fewer than one in ten Chinese critical technology patents involves an inventor with U.S. experience or training.