Nehaveigur

Category: Pointers

  • Being Yourself

    Almost everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird. If you’ve got even an ounce of strange inside you, at some point the right decision for you is not going to be the sensible one. You’re going to have to do something inadvisable, something…

  • 30 by 30

    In 2016, Edward O. Wilson proposed that half of Earth‘s surface should be protected similar to a national park. In 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order with the goal of protecting 30% of the state’s surface by 2030 (30 x 30). Given that we’re now halfway between…

  • Coalescence

    Coalescent theory is a population genetics approach to reconstructing the history of populations. This paper by Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin applies an advanced coalescent model to humans to infer our demographic history. We already knew that Neanderthals and non-African modern humans interbred 45,000 to 49,000 years ago,…

  • Terraforming

    Getting to Mars is hard and may take longer than we anticipate. Terraforming it in any meaningful way is going to be even harder and would take centuries. The challenges are outlined here. Proponents of terraforming often focus on changing a planet’s environment to make it friendlier to humans and…

  • Decimal Time

    For anyone like me who is familiar with both inches and centimeters, it’s obvious that the metric system is superior. I have done anything from large DIY projects and cooking using both systems. As a scientist, I also think about how to measure things a lot professionally. The metric system…

  • The Egely Wheel

    As a kid, I had a device that proved that I had the ability to move physical objects with my mind. It consisted of a plastic base that held a thin metal wheel balancing on a central hub. When I put my hands around it, taking care not to touch…

  • Why are More Neurons Better?

    This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the number of neurons and intelligence holds for biological brains and for AI, if we take the number of parameters to be equivalent to the number…

  • Audititis

    How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives Annie Dillard How much of our working lives do you spend doing the work that needs to be done and how much you we spend on justifying your work to your superiors, assuming that you’re unfortunate enough…

  • Placebo Controlled Self-Experimentation

    I have previously thought about how I’d do a placebo-controlled trial on myself. How could I create identical-looking pills – some with the substance I want to test and others as placebos – while still being able to identify them later when I analyze the results? Well, Dynomight actually did…

  • The Humanities are Avoiding AI

    Few people working in the humanities have extensively tested the latest large language models, and most people base their opinions on what they have heard or read others say about them. This is surprising, as those who write and read for a living are well positioned to judge an algorithm…

  • Neanderthal News

    Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:

  • Quikscript

    A constructed alphabet for English, if we ever have to start a new writing system from scratch. It looks pretty.

  • The Venus of Monruz

    This figurine looks like it was created in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s abstract and only hints at a human form. In fact, it was created 11,000 years ago.

  • Chauvet Virtual Tour

    The French National Museum of Archeology has a good virtual tour of the Chauvet cave here. They also have a good gallery of the cave’s art here. Don Hitchcock’s frequently updated website is another great starting point for exploring paleolithic art. Related posts:

  • Mars

    As I kid, I read The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. The book had come out a few years earlier, in 1996. I don’t remember the details, but the overall message has stayed with me: We could go to Mars with current technology and even settle it, if only…

  • Kevin Kelly’s Travel Tips

    Kevin Kelly’s travel tips are based on 50 years of experience. Below are my favorite ones; the common theme is that they make it easier to engage with the locals and go beyond typical tourist experiences. Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses,…

  • The Game of Life

    The board game Go is famous for having extremely simple rules yet having an almost unlimited number of ways to play it. The mathematician John Horton Conway was good at coming up with simple games that resemble Go in that they have simple rules and complex outcomes. This includes games…

  • AI Overreliance

    I use AI at work and for fun, but I’m worried what it may do to us individually and as a society if we’re not careful. Erik Hoel discusses one particular concern: We may become too reliant on AI doing our thinking for us. There isn’t convincing evidence either way…

  • Ghost Town Living

    Brent Underwood, together with investors, bought the ghost town of Cerro Gordo to the East of the Sierra Nevada mountains and for the last four years has been living there while renovating it. You can watch the videos he makes about this here.

  • Optical Illusions

    Akiyoshi Kitaoka‘s collection of optical Illusions. He’s added to the site since 2002, so there’s a lot.

  • A Thin Film of Inertia

    The world is covered with a thin film of inertia. Maybe it is created by entropy, or human nature, or a magic yet-understood, or all three. Divine beings pierce it effortlessly, Let there be light is a powerful command. We can pierce this inertia too, with a little effort. In fact it…

  • Strong and Weak Link Problems

    I’ve been a collector and connoisseur of fine concepts for some time now and it doesn’t happen often that I come across one that is entirely new to me, but this happened yesterday. Adam Mastroianni on Experimental History writes about strong and weak link problems, and rather than try to…

  • Recurring Dreams

    Did you ever have this dream: You have to take an exam that you forgot to prepare for. How about this one: You’re late for a flight because you didn’t arrange transport to the airport. These fear-filled dreams are quite common, and on Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander offers a…

  • Implementing AI

    The genetics research team I manage has been experimenting with AI agents for a few months now. Within my biotech company, we’re well suited to drive the implementation of AI since we have both the ability and the motivation. We know how to code and we are good at dealing…

  • We Need Heroes

    Chris Arnade on his blog Walking The World writes something that seems very true to me and would explain a lot: This has been one of my pet theories that I’ve grown more and more confident of as I’ve walked the world, and read more, which is that cultures, like a…

  • The Cost of Transportation

    From Austin Vernon’s blog post on reducing human and freight transportation costs: It might be difficult to fathom that a mature sector like ground transportation could be 10x cheaper and have 10x greater throughput on existing right-of-way. But that is what the combination of electrification and driving automation software can…

  • Portrait of a Mammoth

  • The Definition of Coherence

    I have previously written about coherence without defining it. In a recent conversation between Jim Rutt and guest Kristian Rönn they talk about Rönn’s book The Darwinian Trap. A good definition of coherence may be any behavior that avoids Darwinian traps. This would make altruism, which can avoid game theoretic…

  • Moon Diagrams

    Bartosz Ciechanowski has created a wonderful page explaining a lot of what there is to know about the moon using animated diagrams. Also look at his past work, including on sound, watches, the internal combustion engine, curves and surfaces and the earth and sun system. Here‘s more on the Apollo…

  • Wikimedia Commons

    Wikimedia Commons is a great resource for finding photos and diagrams on any subset. The Picture of the Year winners highlight the quality of what’s available. The one below from 2016 is my favorite.

  • XKCD

    I’ve been following the web comic xkcd for almost two decades now. It’s usually good and sometimes brilliant. Here’s last Friday’s:

  • Niven’s Laws

    There are several laws, or maybe aphorisms, that science fiction writer Larry Niven has come up with. Wikipedia has a good list, and here are my favorites:

  • Resist Summary

    This is from Simon Sarris’ blog, The Map is Mostly Water: It is an interesting feature of stories and fiction that they resist summary. You cannot read a summary of Anna Karenina and somehow stockpile its pleasures and charms. Narrative resists compression. I think avoiding summary is even more important…

  • Life Without Stars

    In a recent blog post, Julian Gough argues not only that planets without stars (“Stanets”) may harbor life, but that most of the life in our universe exists without stars. Two recent observations make this plausible. The first is that many of the moons of the outer solar system have…

  • Thresholds

    From L. M. Sacasas’ blog, The Convivial Society, in which he asks if and when technology is beneficial to the individual. One way view this is through Ivan Illich’s concept of thresholds. Illich invited us to evaluate technologies and institutions by identifying relevant thresholds, which, when crossed, rendered the technology or…

  • Things to Argue About Over the Holidays

    Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics by Dynomight. Also see part II and part III.

  • Geocaching

    Geocaching isn’t as popular as it used to be. Google Trends shows that interest peaked in 2011 and has been at 25% of the peak since then, with a downward trend. Doesn’t matter, lots of things have had more adherents in the past but are still just as good. If…

  • The Art of Interesting

    As a guest on the Jim Rutt Show, philosopher Lorraine Besser recently talked about her book The Art of Interesting. One concept she mentioned has been going around in mind since. There are those that argue that a good life is a pleasurable life, or at least a life without…

  • Stigma

    Common sense dictates that there’s an optimum level of introspection, and it’s possible that many of us do too much soul-searching. A related idea is that increasing awareness of mental health struggles may be counterproductive. This hypothesis is further explored in this article: We propose that awareness efforts are leading…

  • Sprouts

    Sprouts is a two-player game that only requires pen and paper. A number of nodes (“Sprouts”), but at least two, are drawn. The players take turn to connect two nodes and drawing a new node somewhere along the new edge. Connecting a node to itself is okay. The last player…

  • Men Don’t Read

    “Women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales,” writes David Morris in the New York Times. Why is that? Most new books being written by women may have something to do with it but can’t completely explain it. After all, there are millions of books by male…

  • Why So Ugly?

    Given that we’re wealthier and technologically more capable than we were 100 years ago, why is our architecture not only the same everywhere but also much uglier? Tom Wolfe tried to answer this in From Bauhaus To Our House. I didn’t know about the book and I’m grateful to Scott…

  • Boring News

    I like my news like I like my visits to the doctor: Unemotional and infrequent. I’ve recently written about one way to achieve this. Packy McCormick introduces another way on Not Boring: News stories inspired by a prediction market and selected by an AI, which he thinks will reduce bias…

  • Metaculus

    Metaculus aggregates forecasts on a large number of questions. Because participants don’t make any money for making accurate predictions and instead only gain in reputations, it’s different from prediction markets. Metaculus aggregates forecasts as probability densities, which is the correct way. Here are some of the many interesting probability densities:…

  • We’re Not Free

    While we’re theoretically free, there is some empirical evidence that we’re not in practice. I don’t know if the optimistic or the pessimistic view of our ability to determine our future will win in the end.

  • We’re Free

    Consider the category of spandrel. A spandrel is something that results from the process of evolution, but itself carries no evolutionary benefit, and may even carry a detriment. Nipples are sometimes an adaptation (when present in women) but sometimes a spandrel (when present in men). Similarly, morality is sometimes adaptive…

  • Lottery Instead of Elections

    Sortition, which also goes by Demarchy, is a system of governance in which leaders are chosen by lottery instead of elections. Here are some pointers on the topic:

  • The Eight Mountains

    What was my father longing for? He, who never managed to stop working. He barely made it to the mountains for a few weeks in summer This is from the movie The Eight Mountains (trailer here), which is based on a novel by Paolo Cognetti. I’ve been wondering about the…

  • Headless Mike

    Chicken who keep running around after their heads have been cut off are a common story told by people who have grown up on farms, including my mom. I always assumed that this headless-but-alive state lasts a few seconds at best, but in the 1940s a chicken called Mike stayed…

  • On Not Going Home

    This essay by James Wood expresses something that I’ve been feeling myself for some time now. I left Austria when I was 18, and I’ve lived in England, Sweden, Germany and California since. I can go back to Austria at any time, but I can’t go home any longer. The…

  • Shel Silverstein

    Writing for both young kids and for Playboy, Shel Silverstein has one of the most interesting biographies I’ve come across. He also wrote the Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay, and had sex with “hundreds, perhaps thousands of women”. Here he’s…

  • Phantom Time and World Ice

    Of the many, many conspiracy theories out there, here are two less known ones that I quite enjoy for their entertainment value: In 1991, Heribert Illig proposed that the years 614-911 AD didn’t happen. They are fake, made up. Charlemagne never existed, and all historical documents from those years are…

  • Vengeance and Vindication

    Here’s a good paragraph by Philosopher Bear: People imagine that they want vengeance, when really what they want is vindication. In many cases, I think, the reason victims want a long sentence (when they do want a long sentence- it is a mistake to think they always do) is because…

  • Shallow Mysteries

    Books like Gödel, Escher, Bach give you goosebumps because they hint at something grand, but they can also be frustrating. This review articulates this more coherently.

  • Ice Cream for Lunch

    In the 1999 movie Ghost Dog, there’s a scene where an ice cream vendor hears that ice cream isn’t all that bad after all and can’t wait to pass the news on to his customers. “They say ice cream is really good for your health. Rich in calcium!”, he announces…

  • Free Trade

    Those who proclaim that Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong can safely be ignored. They’re not motivated by a dispassionate longing for truth but by blind faith or vague gut feeling. But how about economists who proclaim that free trade isn’t beneficial? In this essay, Paul Krugman argues that they’re not…

  • Wanted: Time

    So much universe, and so little time Terry Pratchett Here are three observations that’d I’d love to spend a few weeks to investigate further, spending a few weeks on each, but can’t because I have a family and a job:

  • California Anthem

    I’ve lived in the state for 10 years and only recently learned that California has an anthem. I’ve never heard it performed anywhere, for any occasion. It’s so obscure that I couldn’t even find any spoofs, hard as that may be to believe. The reason for its lack of prominence…

  • Needle Ice

    This is needle ice, which I observed growing out of the ground the morning of September 12th next to a backcountry lake in Yosemite National Park at 9,370 feet. More on the phenomenon here.

  • Bionumbers

    I’m a geneticist by profession, but too often, I realize that I don’t know some of the basic facts. How many RNA molecules are there in a typical mammalian cell? I don’t even know the order of magnitude. The Bionumbers database is great for looking up this sort of thing.…

  • Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken MacLeod

    Kim Stanley Robinson and Ken McLeod are two of the most interesting contemporary science fiction writers. Robinson’s Mars Trilogy and MacLeod’s Intrusion are among my favorite novels. Here the two of them talk about global warming and space travel. One notable quote by Robinson on private space travel: An individual…

  • Long Trails

    The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. I was curious if someone has made a list of long-distance hiking trails, and of course the answer is yes. Worldwide, there are 46 trails longer than 1,000 kilometers that are passing through mostly wild areas with…

  • I Put my Toaster in the Dishwasher

    A 2012 blog post recently dug out by Slime Mold Time Mold points out that It is very difficult to discern the difference between Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Ignorance. For example, it may be fine to put a toaster in a dishwasher, despite everyone with a shred of common sense…

  • Where are the Aliens?

    Jim Rutt discusses the Fermi Paradox with writer and physicist Stephen Webb (podcast). Webb proposes 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox. You can read my take on one of them here.

  • Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life

    Out of Kevin Kelly’s twelve assumptions for extraterrestrial life, I agree with the first nine. However, he gets his tenth, and most important, assumption wrong: 10) The only reason for an advanced civilization to visit another planet is to see if there is another civilization which has invented things it…

  • Voyager’s Golden Record

    Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the human-made object most distant from Earth. It carries the Golden Record, a selection of sounds and images representing humanity. Its full contents are archived here. The Golden Record may survive for five billion years, which means it may be there after Earth and…

  • Klaus Dierks

    While doing some searches on Namibia for a previous post, I came across the website of Klaus Dierks, a civil engineer and politician during the first years of Namibia’s independence. His life appears to have been adventurous in the best possible sense. He was born in Nazi Germany, grew up…

  • Bulwer-Lytton 2024

    The 2024 winners for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written, have been announced. Here are my favorites: His burnt flesh sizzling like a burger on the grill, blood pouring from his wounds like an overshaken cola, and…

  • One Utopia

    Ken Ilgunas’ utopia for North America: A stable population of 100 million humans (a mostly arbitrary number), mostly clustered in metropolitan areas, eating the best, juiciest lab-grown sirloins, enjoying lives of meaning and leisure, with lots of solar panels and pagan orgies. Now that the land is free of domesticated…

  • Time Use

    How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Annie Dillard The equivalent of more than 20 million people’s lives are wasted watching Netflix. We spend two hours per day watching TV according to a recently updated time use survey. This hides a lot of person-to-person…

  • The Earth Used to be God’s Body

    One of the scenes in All That is Sacred, a short film about the artists and writers who got their start in 1970s Key West, shows the last words Jim Harrison wrote as he died. I wasn’t able to decipher the poem but found a transcription here. In unease the…

  • Tim’s Vermeer

    This is how I want to spend my retirement: Work on projects of my choosing, without having to consider financial constraints or whether others approve. Tim Jenison has the same attitude in the 2013 documentary Tim’s Vermeer. In this case, the project is the reproduction of a 17th century painting…

  • The Fire That Never Goes Out

    An essay by Richard Fisher on the Zoroastrian flame that has been kept alive for more than 1,500 years. More on the Long Now foundation here.

  • The First Motorized Transport Casualty

    William Huskisson has earned his place in history by being the first to be killed by a motor vehicle. In 1830, he was crushed by Robert Stephenson’s locomotive Rocket during the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester railway. He couldn’t get out of the way of locomotive running at 30 mph in…

  • All That Is Sacred

    We go through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms. F. Scott Fitzgerald This quote must’ve been popular in 1970s Key West. Thomas McGuane uses it in an interview about the period and Jim Harrison discusses it in a movie about fly fishing in the Florida Keys. Circa 1973, Key…

  • Sini

    Years ago, I went to the British Museum and looked at their collection of calligraphy. I still remember a handful of inscriptions and scrolls combining the Arabic and Chinese calligraphic traditions, which sounds like it wouldn’t work but actually is elegant and subtle. This style is known a Sini and…

  • The Long Now

    Before I traveled from Cambridge to San Francisco for the first time to do research on mutant yeast, a friend said: “While you’re there, you should check out the Long Now Foundation”. This was in 2008. Once I had settled into my lab at the brand new UCSF Mission Bay…

  • Early Sounds

    The earliest record of a human voice dates from 1860. Recordings of Bismarck and others from around 1890 are here. The first composition that includes musical notation dates from approximately 150 BC.

  • AI Tutoring

    I’m increasingly encountering the belief that capable leaders have become rarer or have even disappeared. While most often observed in the political realm, some argue that there are also fewer scientific leaders. Erik Hoel makes the point that today there are fewer geniuses of any description. I don’t think it’s…

  • Pale Blue Dot: A Restless Few

    For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has…

  • Hypocrisy

    Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue François de La Rochefoucauld David Mitchell makes the point that we cannot reasonably expect politicians to have absolute integrity. Very few people reach such a standard, and those that do make poor politicians. To win votes, they sometimes have to say things…

  • Forecasting

    Yesterday, the S&P 500 closed at 5,469 points. Do you think it’s going to be higher or lower by the end of the year? You have an opinion, but really, you don’t know. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’re a hundred percent certain you know which way the stock market…

  • Into Alaska

    It’s easy to be cynical about YouTube and those who create videos for the platform to make money. Chasing clicks and making videos that make you feel good after having watched them seems to be incompatible. However, there are some channels that redeem the platform. The self-videoing adventurers I admire…

  • The Paleobiology Database

    In every way (except responsiveness) superior to the map of California fossil sites I’ve previously made: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/

  • Things That Don’t Work

    A list by Dyonmite. Some obvious ones like acupuncture or communism, some less obvious ones too, including tree-based knowledge organization and jokes.

  • Two Very Good Movies

    A Man Called Otto: This is an example of a genre I enjoy. The genre is Grumpy old man with new neighbors. Other examples of GOMWNN are St Vincent (starring Bill Murray as GOM) and Gran Torino (GOM: Clint Eastwood). The story is that a grumpy man has lost his…

  • Of Ants and Men

    The 2015 documentary Of Ants and Men (PBS) on Edward O. Wilson is beautiful. He was a biologist connected to nature not only intellectually but also, as the documentary reveals, on a deeper, emotional level. One of the biggest scientific controversies of Wilson’s life was due to his advocacy of…

  • Alice Munro Has Died

    Alice Munro is dead. There are fragments from her short stories that I sometimes remember without any trigger I’m aware of, like the deception in Corrie. Since March, Paul Auster, Daniel Dennett and Vernor Vinge have died too. It’s enough now.

  • Paul Auster Has Died

    Paul Auster is dead. I keep returning to two of his novels, Mr. Vertigo and Moon Palace. Their protagonists, even though they are fictional, are more alive than many of us. Their lives aren’t anything to envy but they hint at what it means to live life to its fullest.

  • Democracy

    The beauty of democracy is that it’s the only acceptable form of governance if you agree that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and that they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. While…

  • Ash Jogalekar’s 100 Desert Island Books

    This is a good list. Plenty of inspiration. I’ll have to make a list like this eventually. Stay tuned.

  • Map of California Fossil Sites

    I made an interactive map of California fossil sites based on data by Don Kenney.

  • Ken Ilgunas’ Podcast Journey

    Ken Ilgunas’ experience of how podcasts have influenced him is similar to my own but he’s more articulate in describing it. He has also recently appeared on one of my favorite podcasts.

  • Spiders on Drugs

    Effect of different drugs on cobwebs

  • Podcasts

    The Google Podcasts app is going away on April 2nd, which suits me fine as I’ve been trying to escape to Google ecosystem of apps and devices. I’ll use Pocket Casts instead, which is free and has no ads. Here are the podcasts I’ll migrate:

  • Can AI Solve Science?

    To this ultimate question we’re going to see that the answer is inevitably and firmly no (Stephen Wolfram).

  • Vernor Vinge Has Died

    This week, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge died. Rainbows End (2006) is one of the best science fiction novels of all time.