Category: Pointers
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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 finding holds up and how important it’d be. If it turns out to be true. My biggest criticism is that some of the findings aren’t…
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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 eminent scientists discussing their ideas. This 2012 interview in the Guardian captures the intent and spirit of the website well. No other part of the…
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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 values had become the province of artists and bohemians, people explicitly outside respectable society. The bourgeois rationalization of existence left no room for beauty as…
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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 PhD great-grandfather. He was prominent in my chosen field, old and wise. Scientists at English research labs like ours didn’t and still don’t make much…
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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 front of the star, dimming it slightly. Direct imaging has only become feasible recently. As Paul Gilster writes on Centauri Dreams, we now have an…
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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. In other words, tech scales. Could the massive success of GLP-1 drugs change this? Is the recent valuation of Eli Lilly at of $1 trillion…
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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 contact to the outside world for 40 years. Ishi was the last American native in California to make contact with the Western world in 1911.…
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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 less weird than they once were. It’s an observation that has been made by me and others, on this blog and in many other places,…
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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 Bay beyond mere preservation and would be public money well spent. It’d also be possible to find a private donor. Why not have a ranked…
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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 stylized or idealized. At least that’s what I used to think until I learned of the Fayum mummy portraits from Roman Egypt. They were created…
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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.
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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 the solution as I’m writing it down, and only later, after having thought about it for some time, do I understand it in some nebulous…
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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 existing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits as much energy as ~200,000 incandescent lightbulbs but after an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t…
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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 review of Egan’s novel Distress.
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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 seen from the outside many times. It has dawned on me recently that I may be bourgeois. I put Christmas lights on my roof. The…
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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. We have since sequenced the genomes of many other species. GOLD, the database that tracks this, reports 108,358 eukaryotic genomes. This number will keep going…
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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 reports on employees’ fit to the company’s “core culture” and “principles” to be written. A lot of the conventional corporate wisdom surrounding feedback is wrong.…
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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 in addition, causation does not imply variation. Just because something is causative doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. In my field of genetics, genome-wide association studies…
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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. Data stored on hard drives and flash memory like SD cards will degrade within a decade or two. Cloud storage like Google Drive requires the…
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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 subsequent batches of the substance to assume the same crystal structure. A tiny amount of the polymorph can be enough to cause all subsequent batches…
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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. He’s desperate. Whatever he describes, it’s terrible. Here he is about the impact of smartphones: We thought we were just having fun times with devices;…
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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, light. The elements are at our command in dials and switches. How ridiculous that must sound to most of history! How hard to believe. It…
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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 meat prices. Liv Boeree in Palladium magazine makes a convincing case that current law prioritizes low meat prices too much and animal welfare too little.…
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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 may be a marker of a general decline in cultural weirdness and innovation. Are we getting tamer and less interesting? As Mastroianni himself observes, not…
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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 great and enduring pleasure, but is it really a loss to society if people find their fun elsewhere? One can read for information, but –…
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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 I remembered it when I saw that it was available as an in-flight movie on a plane home from yet another conference last week. Jane…
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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 the more powerful AI features worthwhile.
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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) is also the one that is most conductive to greatness. Not necessarily greatness of the nation, but of the individual and of business and other…
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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 seconds into the video, Buffett and his girlfriend pick up a couple of hitchhikers, and the guy looks too much like McGuane to be a…
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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. At least interesting. At least not boring. And that in itself says an awful lot … We have become a society of convenience above all…
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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. Either there’s no simple improvement that’s possible, or there are trade-offs that make such improvements a bad idea. It’s a long blog post but it’s…
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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 completed and reached orbit in 1988, nine years after the first Space Shuttle. Even though that initial test flight was a success, it never flew…
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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 for food and it’s true for literature. Richard Ford: If I can use whatever I make of myself to write something that will make a…
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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 means sacrificing those things, the fight becomes meaningless. It’s the same idea than not foregoing our freedoms while fighting to preserve them. Just as we…
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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 acquire memories of events that happened to the donor. I’m skeptical, but it’s interesting to think about ways in which this could happen if it…
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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 Canada, Greenland, Siberia, North Africa, Brazil, Australia and the Himalayas. The data is from 2020 and I wish the publisher, the Wildlife Conservation Society, updated…
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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 Foster Wallace talks about in Consider the Lobster. Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related…
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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 Time Mold, are shared by 6-10 college age people. Rent is paid for them and they receive a small stipend. They will have little institutional…
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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. These indicators were selected by our returning partners at Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan group of political scientists from Dartmouth and other leading institutions who…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their family any more. Yet a few hours before their death, they regain the ability to speak for a few hours and may even be able…
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The Jerk Funnel
James Steinberg has come up with an interesting concept: There are behaviors and processes that unintentionally result in being surrounded by assholes. Unfortunately, he has called this the Asshole filter, which is confusing as it implies that the behavior filters out assholes. What he actually means is that the behaviour…
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Effective Mess
Chaos always defeats order because it is better organized Terry Pratchett A few weeks ago, I shared a pointer to a podcast about the internal messiness of AIs. They don’t represent the world neatly, but in a way that has been described as Fractured Entanglement. Interestingly, organizations suffer from the…
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Personnel as Policy
Despite all the research done on management best practices, all the articles and reports and books that have been written, despite all the experience accumulated by consulting firms and other organizations, it’s not clear if the quality of corporate management is higher now than it was fifty years ago. For…
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More on Assembly Theory
I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes Jäger helpful. Recursivity makes the dynamics of the model historically contingent. In the end, the kinds of objects that you actually can assemble are not…
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Amber Inclusions
Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in 2025, is an interesting experience. Most fossils, somewhere between bone and rock, are too different from the original animal or the plant to fully engage…
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Assembly Theory
In April, Sara Imari Walker gave a talk (video, essay) at the Long Now Foundation. It was about Assembly theory, developed by chemist Lee Cronin and extended by Walker and others. I still struggle to decide if she and Cronin are on to something. A combination of causal depth (did…
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Outdoor Books
This is a good list of nature, travel and adventure books compiled by Ken Ilgunas. His personal preferences align more with my own than the supposedly more objective meta-list he compiled from comparable book lists. The top spots in that list are dominated by old travel books, most of them…
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We Are Meant To Be Many Things
Singular focus is not a human trait. It is a machine trait. Human life is fragmented on purpose. We are meant to be many things: friend, worker, parent, neighbor, mentor, pupil, citizen.Matt Duffy This is from a though-provoking blog post on virtue by Matt Duffy on Signal-Noise Ratio.
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Fractured Entanglement
The most interesting perspectives on AI can be encountered on the Jim Rutt Show, which I have previously referenced with regards to AI risk. In a more recent episode, Rutt interviews Ken Stanley about his Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis. A preprint describing this hypothesis is available here. Here is how…
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Building Communities
We’re far from having imagined all the different ways in which society may evolve. One recurring complaint about America is its atomization. Have we taken individualism too far? There seems to be a pervasive yearning for a return to stronger communities. Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten asks why so…
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Electric Network Frequency Analysis
Given an audio or video file, it’s possible to determine where and when it was recorded based on the electrical power grid’s hum in the background. Small fluctuations in the power supply to devices and appliances that are close enough during the recording, while not perceptible to our ears, can…
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Animal Trick
The animal trick by magician Seth Raphael is mind-blowing, and what’s more, you can try it yourself here. If you have 5 minutes, do yourself a favor and go there now.
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Not People
With ChatGPT-5 just having come out, Adam Mastroianni has posted a timely reminder on Experimental History: Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they…
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Scientists are Weird
Derek Lowe on his blog, In the Pipeline, on the scientific worldview: [It] is not a mindset that most people naturally find comfortable. Or comforting. You get used to it, you even learn to like it, but I think it’s important to never lose sight of its fundamental strangeness. We’re…
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The Million Yen Melon
A friend returning from a trip to Japan told me about his experience with the fruit equivalent of Wagyu beef: the Yubari melon, grown on Hokkaido Those cantaloupes are sold for close to $100 each, and their flavor, according to my friend, is “life-changing.” There are reports of some Yubari…
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Spinning Sun-Powered Space Catapult
For years now, I’ve been following what’s happening in the field of interstellar travel. Not closely, but close enough to know what kinds of technology are out there. Paul Gilster’s blog Centauri Dreams is a good resource. Because of the large distances involved, and because of the energy needed to…
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The Moon Landing as Signaling
Signaling, as in virtue signaling, has a bad reputation. This essay by Malmesbury on Telescopic Turnip makes the point that signaling can also involve great things, like the moon landing.
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The Penguin Lessons
There’s a brand of British comedy that consists of a character humiliating themselves in amusing ways over and over. The original British version of Ricky Gervais’ The Office is an example. Steve Coogan’s character Alan Partridge, an inept television personality an DJ, is another one. I’ve never enjoyed Alan Partridge…
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A Critique of Marginal Revolution
I’ve been reading and benefitting from the blog Marginal Revolution for more than a decade. It continues to be one of the most interesting aggregator blogs. I am so intimately acquainted with its two authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, that I know which of them wrote the post after…
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Dairy Products
Milk products are a constant source of confusion when traveling. Too many times have I been asked what Quark is without having an adequate answer. This graph from Wikipedia is the solution.
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It’s Priced In
Someone recently pointed me to this old rant on Reddit. I don’t think it’s accurate, but it sure is entertaining.
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San Franciscos
Past visions of San Francisco‘s future, collected by Arthur Chandler.
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Musical Innuendo
I like old showtunes because they’re joyful and uncomplicated. At least on the surface. After listening to them a few times, I pick up on the double entendre – yet another reason I like them. The 1940s and 1950s were a supposedly innocent time, but judging by theirs songs, that’s…
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Doubting Twin Studies
As a statistical geneticist, I used to think that the heritability estimates from twin studies are broadly correct. They suggest that variance in traits like height and intelligence is mostly due to genetic variation between individuals. The limitations of twin studies have been studied extensively for decades, and no flaws…
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Unpacking
When considering whether to attempt something new, should you contemplate the ways in which it may go wrong or be unpleasant? Yes, says Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History. Imagine what it’d actually be like to open a quaint little bookshop, including all the mundane things you’d need to do every…
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The 1,000 Year House
There is a series of blog posts by Brian Potter on how one would build a house that would last for one thousand years. It’s a fun question to think about, not only for houses but also for other buildings we may want to last a long time, like Star…
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People Don’t Read
Women read more than men, but that’s an incomplete observation, Oy argues here. Nobody reads contemporary literary fiction any more. People still read plenty of literary fiction, what they don’t read is contemporary literary fiction. They argue that it’s at least partly a quality problem: For the last twenty years American literary…
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Showtunes
Here are some showtunes I keep returning to with hardly any bad conscience:
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Ted Muller
Personal websites, updated and added to over many years, tend to be more interesting than social media profiles. Klaus Dierks’ website is an example, and Nick Bostrom’s is another. I recently came across Ted Muller’s homepage while searching for information on trails in the Sierra Nevada. The trail reports on…
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Tree Climbing
As a kid, I liked to climb a tall fir that stood beside our house. Its branches were spread close and evenly, which made it easy. Because I was climbing close to the trunk, the needles on the outside hid me from my parents’ eyes. One of my favorite parts…
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Backpacking Resources
When preparing for backcountry trips, it’s helpful to know what to expect.
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Optimum Bureaucracy
It’s reasonable to propose making statins available over-the-counter (OTC), which is exactly what Alex Kesin recently did. However, this shouldn’t happen with the stroke of a government official’s pen. Instead, it should happen by applying the existing regulatory framework. If current regulations are overly convoluted or slow, they should be…
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Information Content of the Genome
On Asimov Press, Dynomight asks how information there is in DNA. How should we define the “information content” of DNA? I propose a definition I call the “phenotypic Kolmogorov complexity”. Roughly speaking, this is how short you could make DNA and still get a “human” […] So what would this number be? My guess is that you…
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Plain Language
I participated in a corporate meeting this week. The aim was to come up with a mission statement for one of our departments. One of the resulting drafts contained this sentence: Our aim is to quantify the growth potential for the space including how our expertise may expand the market…
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The Hero-Jackass Continuum
The thing with self-experimentation is that, depending on the observer’s vantage point, your daredevilry makes you look either like a hero or like a jackass. Here are some men who fall on that continuum: As always, Wikipedia has a more complete list.
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Unparalleled Misalignments
I’m delighted by the list of Unparalleled Misalignments maintained by Ricki Heicklen. Unparalleled Misalignments are word-by-word synonym swaps that result in new meanings. Example: Operating system // Surgical procedure. I was going to list my favorites but then realized there were too many, so you’ll have to have a look…
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National Park Ideas
Here are some interesting ideas for new national parks by Ken Ilgunas.
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Intelligence and Race
It’s hard to have a good faith discussion about human intelligence with anyone, especially about the genetics of intelligence. This 2019 blog post by Ewan Birney and others is the best I’ve come across on the subject so far. For most traits, including IQ, it is not only unclear that…
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Primitive Technology
Primitive Technology is a popular YouTube channel about making things from scratch without any modern tools or materials. It’s not just what it’s about that I like, but, to quote Roger Ebert, how it’s about what it’s about. There is no talking. Context is provided in terse subtitles that remind…
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Meaning and Miracles
Mid-way through reading this I paused and thought, “This is better than anything that I’ve read in a long time. I wonder who it’s by?” An expletive may have preceded that. I scrolled back up to the top of the page, and it turns out it’s by Richard Russo. More…
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California Fires
Much of California has burned at some point. This map keeps track of historical wildfires.
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Of p Values and Effect Sizes
Scientists are obsessed with p values, and since I work in a particularly quantitative field, I’m more obsessed than most. When you run a statistical analysis on noisy data, there are several ways to get a statistically significant p value. You could increase your sample size to improve the statistical…
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Biosignature
Paul Gister on Centauri Dreams and Eric Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective have good posts about the new data strengthening the case for a biosignature on K2-18b. As Hoel writes, Alien life is no longer about waiting for evidence, but debating the surprisingly not-crazy evidence we do have.
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LMMs as Information Retrieval
Are we close to developing large language models (LMMs) that have artificial general intelligence (AGI) soon? Some think we’re already there, but according to this paper, assuming that LMMs are on the cusp of AGI is based on a misunderstanding. Cosma Shalizi, one of the co-authors, has more on his…
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YouTube Stats
Random sampling of YouTube suggests that by 2024, YouTube hosted 14.8 billion videos. There are 2.5 billion monthly YouTube users and a back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests that humanity collectively wastes 100 million lives watching YouTube content day and night. That’s a lot more time than is wasted on Netflix (21 million…
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Friedrich Schiller
Friedrich Schiller was the Jack Kerouac of Germany. Both were rebellious, youthful writers that didn’t only inspire a generation, but represented some feeling that still defines their entire nation. As a result, both of them may perhaps be more admired than actually read. Here is an essay on Schiller by…
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Tariffs
Scott Sumner has a good post on tariffs. Fringe views, like tariffs being beneficial, sometimes turn out to be correct, but most of the time they’re wrong. I’d extend this view to the Trump presidency as a whole: there’s a chance that he’ll do something positive, but it’s unlikely and…
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Miracles
When I say that I have experienced miracles, I mean that I witnessed things that are unlikely to have happened by chance. My “miracles” are interesting coincidences, nothing more. I assumed that it was obvious that I didn’t mean the word literally. I don’t believe that those events had supernatural…
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We Invented Ourselves
We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of humankind. Our greatest invention is our humanity. And we are not done inventing ourselves yet. This is Kevin Kelly, writing on the blog of the…
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Surely
This is Daniel Dennett in Intuition Pumps on the use of “surely”: When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document,…
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AI Benchmarking
A month ago, I observed that out of three big magazines dedicated to literature, none had a recent discussion of AI and what it means for writers. Since then, Paul Taylor has published a piece on DeepSeek in the London Review of Books. He mentions how the performance of AIs…
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Commodification
A friend sends me Christmas cards every year that feature cartoon versions of him and his wive. They hire an artist to create the images from photos that they have taken during the year. Now that it has become easy to generate such drawings using AI, I wonder if he…
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Genetic Drift on Generation Ships
On Centauri Dreams, Alex Tolley writes about the challenges a generation ship would face. He mentions one potential problem that I find particularly interesting, even though I’m not convinced of its seriousness: Genetic drift. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s…
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Edward Abbey
Edward Abbey held views that don’t align with our current political dimensions. He was an environmentalist, he was against immigration, he wanted people to have fewer children, he was pro-gun and as against economic growth. He also is one of my favorite writers, and one of the few miracles I’ve…
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God On Their Side
Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well…
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When Being Smart is Not Enough
What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve most problems in philosophy and maths, only improve on forecasting a little, and not solve physics or cure cancer. This is in line with my…
Nehaveigur 