Why Are These Sea Urchins Sporting Cowboy and Viking Hats?
Sea urchins like wearing hats! And for the same reason humans do!
Fun and Thought-Provoking
How Mark Rober hides "science vegetables" in viral videos (Transcript)
Mark puts out the most engaging, curiosity-muscle-building content there is. This is a great conversation about his motivations, his success, parenting, and critical thinking.
What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images | Quanta Magazine
Turns out most people actually see pictures in their mind when they imagine something! Not me -- I have no "mind's eye." But language is so full of visual metaphors that I never knew phrases like 'mind's eye' or 'picture this' were literal.
The Deep Research problem — Benedict Evans
Part 2 of the previous article.
we don’t know if the error rate will go away, and so we don’t know whether we should be building products that presume the model will sometimes be wrong or whether in a year or two we will be building products that presume we can rely on the model by itself. That’s quite different to the limitations of other important technologies, from PCs to the web to smartphones, where we knew in principle what could change and what couldn’t.
Are better models better? — Benedict Evans
The AI boom has raised deep questions left and right, but my favorite is "what are LLMs for?" I see a surprising number of people using them for tasks that require a right answer, but LLMs don't do "right." What applications will we find for magic that might be wrong?
What if absolutely everything is conscious?
"So many little buddies everywhere!" This article may have changed my mind about panpsychism. It sounds crazy at first, but the idea that there's a tiny component of consciousness in all matter might make more sense than alternative theories about what consciousness is made of.
What's expected of us - Nature
Love that Nature published a Ted Chiang micro-story, and the way it plays with the format
Harvard Researchers on Speaking to Whales | Harvard Magazine
My old lab is attached to much cooler projects now -- robots to tag whales with whale-speech decoders!
How do we gently say ‘Hello,’” he wonders, “in whale-ish?”
Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??
Car paint has started looking funny -- and it reveals something about our brains in our environment.
What’s Ahead in 2024? The Cookie Cutters Tell All.
How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?
Aphantasia -- "image-free thinking." Do you think in images? Do you have an inner monologue? What do we mean by those terms? I don't think I do.
The Exponential Age Will Transform Economics Forever
It's weird that exponential growth is society's plan. We should be talking about this more.
Why books donʼt work | Andy Matuschak
Let's face it: nonfiction books are not how we learn.
When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide
Serious stuff.
Comet Encke - Wikipedia
A crazy - but fun - theory that a spinning comet created a spiral in the sky, leading to the independent emphasis on spirals at certain points across human history.
Disposable America
A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw
Why everything might have taken so long
My favorite example is that we had the tech for the bicycle in ancient Rome, but didn't think of it until the late 1800s. Why?
Carboniferous
Did you know that America's big coal deposits exist because it took 60 million years after trees evolved bark for fungi and bacteria to evolve to decompose it, so wood just got buried for 60 million years, forming coal at a faster rate than now?
Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons
Watch a Gorgeous Journey Straight Through Pieces of Hardwood
Hypnotizing
Say These 9 Words, and We’ll Tell You Where You Grew Up
Pittsburgh is near the border of almost all of these - no wonder it's such an odd region
Welcome to the Future Range of the Woolly Mammoth
Bringing back the mammoths to fight climate change
Considerations On Cost Disease
"I don’t know why more people don’t just come out and say “LOOK, REALLY OUR MAIN PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS COST TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO FOR NO REASON, PLUS THEY SEEM TO BE GOING DOWN IN QUALITY, AND NOBODY KNOWS WHY, AND WE’RE MOSTLY JUST DESPERATELY FLAILING AROUND LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS HERE.” State that clearly, and a lot of political debates take on a different light."
Dropbox: the first dead decacorn
"When billion dollar tech companies die, it usually isn’t at the hands of their direct competitors. It’s simply because they go from one day being the best at what they do, to the next day being still the best at what they do except it doesn’t matter."
Finding the Way Back
It looks like the research bears out my suspicion that relying GPS every time you drive is bad for your brain. And there's something that just feels calming about knowing your position relative to the earth, the sun and the stars - it lets you zoom out a bit from our everyday human-focused trivialities.
Making the Grade: Why the Cheapest Maple Syrup Tastes Best
"After the Revolution, Americans looked at the maple tree in a new light. To the eminent Philadelphia patriot and physician Benjamin Rush, maple sugar seemed perfectly tailored to the new republic. Here was a commodity that could compete in a global market, bolstering the independence of yeoman farmers, and demonstrating the superiority of free labor. It tapped an abundant resource, required only a small amount of labor, and used supplies most farmers already owned. Best of all, it would destroy the market for Caribbean sugar cane, produced by slaves laboring in horrifying conditions. Rush set down his reflections in the form of a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson..."
Aptronym
So fun - An aptronym, aptonym, or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner. See also the 'nominative determinism' subreddit
Orion Magazine - State of the Species
"Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that’s like asking healthy, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills.
Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth."
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ... (Published 2014)
Currently this stuff -- no big deal, just humanity's actual best answers to "where are we, how did we get here, where did the world come from, where are we all going" -- isn't taught all together. What a tragic missed opportunity!
First taste of chocolate in Ivory Coast | VPRO Metropolis
Cacao farmers tasting chocolate for the first time