Nehaveigur

  • Monarch Wings

  • More Fundamental Than Physics

    Physicists have a reasonable claim to their discipline being fundamental to all of science. After all, they deal with elementary particles and laws which make…

  • The Narrow Beam of Consciousness

    Why is the beam of our consciousness so narrow? We can only consciously perceive very little at any given time, even though our senses collect…

  • Anemone

    There are no better places than tide pools to find alien-like creatures. Sea anemones are predatory animals, but you wouldn’t know it looking at them.

  • My Maximum Likelihood Solution to the Fermi Paradox

    By far the most likely resolution to the Fermi Paradox is that there aren’t any aliens capable of interstellar travel or even interstellar communication (radio…

  • AI Against Slop

    Hamilton Mann worries that AI makes monetizing content creation on the internet more difficult and less lucrative. It’s a valid concern, but there’s a more…

  • Why Read?

    Is reading novels really a better use of time than watching clips on YouTube? I like to read, not because I think it makes me…

  • The Portability of Concepts

    Part of the fun of learning Go is like pretending that you’re speaking Japanese. There are these concepts like Sente or Gote or Seki or…

  • History and Function

    Why something exists, and what it’s good for, are two different things. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay Of Kiwi Eggs and the Liberty…

  • Even Chances

    This forecast on Metaculus gives a 49% chance that AI will result in broadly positive outcome (Futurama, Singularity) by 2050, a 42% chance that it…

  • Peripherical Drinking

    David Samuels, has published an article about America, inspired by a recent visit to American Samoa. There, at the country’s extreme periphery, he sits in…

  • Attention and Emotion

    Liel Leibovitz, in County Highway, draws a line between our decreasing attention spans and our lack of emotion: What we have here, then, is a…

  • Freezing Bubble

    Video of a freezing soap bubble

  • The Enemy is Numbness

    There is a pervasive feeling that modernity is bland: Buildings, clothes, cars and interior design are minimalist and identical everywhere. Emotional blandness or numbness gets…

  • Two Visions of the Future

    Scenario 1 We have extensively terraformed a planet circling a distant star. Its atmosphere is breathable and because of its low gravity, trees  grow a…

  • No Dangerous Knowledge

    If belief in evolutionary theory made us demonstrably behave worse, should we protect people from learning about it? If a factually incorrect religious belief made…

  • Elephant Seals

    This time of the year, elephant seals gather on California beaches, separated from humans by yellow plastic tape and stern warnings not to approach them.…

  • Tastefully Painted Statues

    This is a thorough debunking of the claim that the ancient Romans and Greeks painted their statues in garish colors. Also, do yourself a favor…

  • The EU-Mercosur Agreement

    This week, the European Union decided to go ahead with an agreement with Mercosur, the South American common market. It’s a victory for free trade.…

  • Plumbing, and Lack Thereof

    One of the final chapters of The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa is set during a grand ball attended by Palermo’s high society. Hundreds of…

  • Gateway

    Gateway by Frederik Pohl came out almost 50 years ago, in 1977. It won both the Nebula award and the Hugo, which, I believe, was…

  • Shingles Vaccine and Dementia

    Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a viral disease that causes a painful rash as well as pain and general malaise. There is a…

  • Ecojargon

    There’s something about the way ecologists talk that makes my eyes glaze over: Prairie plants sequester carbon, prevent erosion and provide key habitat for endangered…

  • Mathematica

    Mathematician David Bessis has written a book about what we do when we do mathematics. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently. One…

  • Another Utopia

    It’s easy to think of the ways in which things may go badly, but a less familiar exercise is to imagine ways in which they…

  • Feynman vs. The Abacus

    This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the…

  • LLMs Are Not High IQ

    Practicing for intelligence tests doesn’t improve performance much. IQ tests really seem to measure some innate ability that is relatively unresponsive to training. Processing speed…

  • Many and Few

    Leo Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Jim Harrison wrote that our wounds…

  • Spider Web

    Related: here‘s what happens when you give drugs to spiders.

  • NY, NY

    The first time I came to New York, I came for the New Year. My friend’s friend had gone back to Mexico for the holidays…

  • Aspirations for 2026

    I wish to you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where…

  • Driftwood

  • You Can’t Access Most Books

    150 millions books have been published, according to the estimate I asked ChatGPT for. Around 70 million have been digitized, but 70% of those are…

  • Aimless Reading

    Reading fiction is fun, but interpreting fiction isn’t. Neither am I convinced that trying to interpret novels or poems in a structured way is to…

  • Pastwatch

    At a house party this fall, I noticed a wall-to-wall bookshelf filled with science fiction paperbacks. I recognized some of the authors like Kim Stanley…

  • Doing it Yourself

    A few years back, before my wife and I had kids and when we still lived in a condo in San Francisco, we asked a…

  • Santa

    This time of the year makes me reflective and sentimental, so here’s my thought for today: My kids met Santa in front of the supermarket…

  • Bad Faith Communication

    Engaging in direct debate with those who communicate in bad faith is a waste of time and emotional energy. Similarly, following debates between bad faith…

  • The Higher Cause Delusion

    In the most recent episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks and Richard Dawkins talk about humorist P. G. Wodehouse. Towards the end, Brooks contrasts the…

  • Silent Night, Silently

    “Why would a chorus need a sign language interpreter?” I thought as the performance began. On the stage in front of me stood a hundred…

  • AI Jaggedness

    On One Weird Thing, Ethan Mollick argues that getting AI to be more powerful (both in the sense of more useful and more dangerous) is…

  • The Best Books I Read in 2025

    This year, I read 24 books. That averages two per month, which is a coincidence as I didn’t set myself a target. Most of them…

  • Big in 2025

    Here is a list of scientific and engineering news of 2025, ranked by potential impact. I like the idea of considering both the probability that a…

  • All’s Whale That Ends Whale

    The stuff guys will scrawl on the inside of bathroom stalls…

  • Edge.org

    For more than a decade, John Brockman’s Edge was one of my favorite websites. I’d visit every few days to check for new posts by…

  • Motivation

    It seems obvious that to build effective organizations, incentives have to be aligned with the desired outcomes. For example, we should give big bonuses to…

  • Pretty, Please

    The gay community has resisted cultural blandness more and better than any other. Ryan Khurana on Palladium: By the early 20th century, dedication to aesthetic…

  • The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research

    This article was recommended to me by the PhD advisor of my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor, or, as I like to think of him, my…

  • Aristocracy and Ability

    We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh. President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy I dislike of the concept…

  • Photo of an Exoplanet

    Initially, it was only possible to infer the presence from exoplanets indirectly from the way they made their star wobble, or when they transited in…

  • Can Pharma Scale?

    Pharma and tech are different industries. For example, tech benefits from network effects (if everyone uses LinkedIn it makes more sense to join), pharma doesn’t.…

  • Hermits

    Christopher Knight, called the North Pond Hermit, lived in the wilderness of Maine for 27 years. The Lykov family lived in Khakassia in Siberia without…

  • Overfitting Towards Blandness

    Our culture has become bland, as evidenced by fashion, building, cars, book covers, and household objects all looking the same. Even people seem to be…

  • Mexico

    I was the only recognizable tourist in the crowd, so of course the performer picked me. He was doing balloon animals. He asked me to…

  • Alcatraz

    Here is one idea for Alcatraz and here‘s another one. Here are some older designs for the island. Any of them would elevate San Francisco…

  • Lifelike Portraits from the Roman Empire

    We don’t have lifelike portraits of anyone until at least the Renaissance. Even the best sculptures and paintings from ancient Rome, Greece or China are…

  • Insider Attacks

    In Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes a massacre of French colonial soldiers in North Africa, carried out by a local chieftain by…

  • Wind, Sand and Stars

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a French pilot in the early years of aviation. He flew military and civilian aircraft in the 1920s and 1940s before…

  • Performative Xenophobia

    Denmark has more restrictive immigration policies than other Western countries. This is a good article without the hyperventilation that usually comes with the topic.

  • From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe

    Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that…

  • Little Tigers

    “What you’re doing is as extravagant as keeping a pet tiger,” said my brother. “Having three kids is unheard of here.” My wife, our kids…

  • The Malleability of Intuition

    Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand…

  • Isotopes, Fast or Strong

    Dynomight has a list of things to be thankful for. My favorite: That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop…

  • Pyromaniac

    Trying to light a camp fire when it’s raining and everything is wet is a humbling experience, and not one that practicing in dry conditions…

  • Economic Policy Won’t Fix It

    How much of variance in economic performance is due to a country’s economic policy? This is an important question because our political discourse assumes that…

  • Unedited

    Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather…

  • The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

    Thinking about forecasting and AI, I sometimes remember this story by Greg Egan. It was published as part of his collection Axiomatic. Here is my…

  • Greece

    To get to my hotel in Athens, I had to pass through a crowd composed entirely of prostitutes trying to get my attention. Many of…

  • Arctic Facts

    Here are the facts I found surprising enough to highlight in my copy of Arctic Dreams: Most animals live lives in biological keeping with the…

  • Arctic Dreams

    Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez still shows the Soviet Union on its maps of the Arctic. There is no mention of global warming, unthinkable for…

  • Literary Voyeurism

    This essay by Scott McClanahan is a hole through which I can peek inside a world that is closed to me but that I have…

  • Genome Counter

    The Human Genome project took 13 years and cost $3 billion. It was completed in 2003, although some gaps took until 2022 to be filled.…

  • My Second Day At Work

    Like so many minds of my generation, best or otherwise, I came to California for work. The biotech company that hired me paid for my…

  • Facts About Americans

  • Dewdrops

    We’re just raindrops on a window. Jerry Seinfeld

  • Revenge

    The worst job I’ve ever had was also my first. This helped me later in life, with every job I’ve had since having been an…

  • Feedback

    This time of the year, managers are expected to provide feedback to their reports. There are forms to fill in, “coaching conversations” to schedule, and…

  • Causation Does Not Imply Variation

    As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that…

  • Data Archival

    You don’t have a lot of options if you want to preserve sure your data (your photos for example) for many years without any maintenance.…

  • Pharma Ads

    My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get…

  • Kári Stefánsson

    None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…

  • Wrangel Island Mammoths

    For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the…

  • Disappearing Polymorphs

    Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing…

  • New Mexico

    Santa Fe was less interesting than I had thought. The place has a lot of history but it doesn’t feel alive. Too many art galleries…

  • Politics Won’t Fix It

    For a long time now, Americans have felt that the country is moving in the wrong direction without anyone clearly articulating what the right direction…

  • Lack of Desperation

    I recently discovered Sam Kriss’ Substack, Numb at the Lodge. I wish I could write like that. At the same time, I don’t envy Kriss.…

  • Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity

    How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over.…

  • Corporate Email

    Here are two emails from my workplace, normally notable for its lack of quirkiness. Good morning Hope you are all well. Just in case you…

  • Viscerality

    First: The modern world is in fact very pleasant. We have a thousand labor-saving devices. We are thoroughly accustomed to instant heat, cold, transportation, water,…

  • One Argument is Better than Two

    People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and…

  • Ambivert

    I’ve never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp…

  • Wolf

    Wolf by Jim Harrison is a novel about being outdoors and about traveling. It’s Harrison’s first novel, published in 1971. There is a lot in…

  • Temptation Avoided, Character Unproven

    Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline Dwight Eisenhower Temptation is democratic, and it’s elitist. It’s democratic in that everyone experiences it: We…

  • A Tame Society

    Drinking, drugs, crime and cult membership are all down compared to a generation ago. Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History argues that this decline in deviance…

  • Modern Cave Art

    I’m wondering why we have stopped making cave art and I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. This is a painting by the…

  • No Book? Big Whoop

    Asterisk Magazine’s current issue is about books. Here’s what the magazine editors have to say about those fiber and ink bundles: Books are sources of…

  • Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

    I had seen posters advertising the movie Jane Austen Wrecked My Life earlier this year while traveling in Europe. The name was funny enough that…

  • The Evolution of Everything

    The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme…

  • Death by AI

    The most likely cause of death today is AI. It’s a reasonable statement. The most common cause of death right now is ischemic heart disease,…

  • The Funny Side of Cancer

    He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind…