Nehaveigur

  • 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…

  • The Rational Optimist

    Reading and thinking about Birds, Sex & Beauty by Matt Ridely reminded me of his other books I’ve read over the years. He’s a wonderful…

  • Life Without Clocks or Mirrors

    I’ve always been immoderatly clock-oriented. But that was part of what seemed wrong with my infrequent periods of actual labor: the deadly predictability of jobs…

  • Getting Started With AI

    If you haven’t yet used AI, or if you’re thinking about paying for a premium AI, this is a good guide. I find paying for…

  • Wood Swirl

    A piece of wood that reminded me of van Gogh’s Starry Night. Nature imitating art, once again.

  • 1933 and 2025

    To the degree it is possible for any one born in the 1980s, I have a sense for what occurred in Germany in the run-up…

  • Democracy, the Fortunate

    It’s fortunate that liberal democracy, the only acceptable sort of governance (because it’s the only one that respects the dignity and rights of the individual)…

  • Greatness Can’t Be Planned

    No plan survives first contact with the enemy Helmuth von Moltke The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything Dwight Eisenhower I haven’t seen…

  • Rome Was Different

    In SPQR, Mary Beard provides an overview of the history of ancient Rome from its founding to the first century AD. She knows her stuff and…

  • Things Don’t Happen For A Reason

    We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in,…

  • Playing With the Sun As With a Little Brook

    Girl lithe and tawny, the sun forms the fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweeds filled your body with joy, and your luminous eyes…

  • Shamanism

    There are those who travel spirit worlds. They may know that those worlds only exist in their minds, or they may believe that those worlds…

  • Tom McGuane’s Cameo

    Some trivia: I’m 80% sure that writer Thomas McGuane makes a cameo appearance in the music video for Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 song Come Monday. 70…

  • Ordinary Beauty

    You may not think [Victorian design] is beautiful, but I don’t think it was supposed to be beautiful. It was just supposed to be pretty.…

  • Birds, Sex & Beauty

    We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine…

  • Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry

    It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other…

  • The Algernon Argument

    If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument.…

  • In Patagonia

    Bruce Chatwin’s most well-known work is In Patagonia. It’s a mix of travel writing, history and a fiction. It was first published in 1977. Below…

  • The Territory is the Map

  • Great Argus

    Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem…

  • Selective Breeding for Longevity

    In his Science Fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. They arrived there…

  • Free Energy

    The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring…

  • The Soviet Space Shuttle

    The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was…

  • Rejecting Authenticity

    It doesn’t matter much if it’s authentic. What matters is if it’s good. Good and inauthentic is better than bad and authentic. This is true…

  • McDonald’s Innocence

    McDonald’s, according to journalist Chris Arnade, often is the only place for the very poor to meet and relax. It’s open to all in a…

  • Relax About the Population Collapse

    There’s widespread agreement that a declining population is equivalent to declining fortunes, be it for cities, for countries or for the whole world. That fertility…

  • The Things We Don’t Have to Do

    It’s the things we don’t have to do that make live worth living: Art, humor, play. Fleeting grace. Beauty. When that fight to save humanity…

  • Living

    Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing…

  • Helmets

    The idea behind the helmet law is to preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor it does not even try to stop the cracking…

  • Three Days by the Lake

    For three days, I went to a small lake in the Sierras. There was a dirt track that went in for 30 minutes. The lake…

  • Personality Transplants

    A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to…

  • Cruelty

    There’s some cruelty inherent in fishing and hunting. I’m not opposed to either and fish myself, but I think it’d be dishonest not acknowledge that…

  • Human Footprint

    Here is an interactive world map that quantifies the human footprint based on population density, infrastructure and other metrics. The truly wild places are in…

  • Consider the Fish

    Fishing is a bit cruel but also makes me feel closer to nature. Jon Ontario talks about this conundrum here. It’s the same tension David…

  • Preparation Charter Houses

    The two most interesting ideas on what could replace college I’ve come across are charter houses and The Preparation. Charter houses, proposed by Slime Mold…

  • Where the Mountains are Nameless

    There’s a land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And…

  • The US Democracy Threat Index

    Metaculus has introduced a US Democracy Threat Index. Here is their description: [It] combines 39 concrete forecast questions into a single metric tracking institutional resilience.…

  • Font Indifference

    What convinced some typesetters that it’s okay to add a paragraph on the font they chose for a book on the last page? Why not…

  • Marxism

    Radical: My reading of Marx. Reactionary: Your reading of Marx. Revisionist: Their reading of Marx. Realistic: None of us have actually ever read Marx Eric…

  • The Smile Brace

    One of my ancestors was a medical doctor who was responsible for accompanying the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his final resting place after…

  • Life on Mars

    In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained…

  • Shakespeare

    There are things we like the idea of, but if we’re honest, we don’t want to do them. Contributing to a tight-knit community, going to…