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Anthroposophy
There are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide, and more than 2,000 Waldorf kindergartens. As a kid, I went to one of them and didn’t…
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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…
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An African Abroad
A recently published review of a travelogue first published in 1963 was intriguing enough for me to order and read it. An African Abroad was…
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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…
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Showtunes
Here are some showtunes I keep returning to with hardly any bad conscience:
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Universe Rating
Cleanliness Ambience Family friendliness Ease of assembly Cruelty Customer service Binary stars Unfathomable intricacy
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A Canny Eye
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is full of small facts and anecdotes that Dillard encountered in her extensive reading. Here is one that I enjoyed: This…
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Unfathomable Intricacy
Creation is so much more complex than it needs to be. The universe doesn’t just appear to be fine-tuned to support life but fine-tuned to…
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I have known about Annie Dillard for some time but I have never before read anything she has written. In retrospect, that was a mistake.…
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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…
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Rattlesnake Creeks
My neighbor told me about a swimming hole that nobody knows about. “It’s on Rattlesnake Creek,” he said. Armed with this information, I went to…
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Joseph Höger
I have inherited a number of 19th century paintings and watercolors from my father. I don’t think they’re worth much, but they’re pretty and they…
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America, Dark and Bright
Looking at the United States from the outside, it can seem that the country is all about its politics and its media. And it’s true,…
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Talking of Children and AI
We talk about our children and AI the same way. We say, “Did you notice what they can do now?” and “Can you believe that…
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Computational Irreducibility
Simple rules can lead to complex outcomes. If those outcomes aren’t predictable in any other way than executing the rules, this is called computational irreducibility.…
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Bigger Brains
To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have…
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Ineffective Alternatives
I don’t get anything out of cold medications. By the time my symptoms are severe enough that I take something, it’s already too late. The…
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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…
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Relax About Rain
Breathable rain jackets get damp on the inside after a few hours of rain. My solution is to not bring a rain jacket if I…
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Backpacking Resources
When preparing for backcountry trips, it’s helpful to know what to expect.
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Bees and Fish
Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses:…
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Life and Art
Life and Art, Richard Russo‘s newest book, is a collection of his essays. It came out only a few days ago, and since I like…
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Let Us Make You Fat
Being fat used to be something to aspire to. “It Is No Longer Necessary to Be Thin, Scrawny and Undeveloped.” Here are more ads from…
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Questions about Tourism
A recent work trip to Barcelona afforded me some time to explore the city. I grew up in Vienna, which, like Barcelona, is a major…
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The Sense for an Era
A few days after graduating from my Austrian high school, I took plane to England and stayed there for most of the next twelve years.…
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Speaking Extemporaneously
The conference ended on Friday afternoon and my flight didn’t leave until Saturday. I was free to spend Friday night exploring Barcelona on my own.…
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Flowers, Raindrops, Tracings
We’re all flowers for the void Gary Snyder We’re just raindrops on a window Jerry Seinfeld Our life is a faint tracing on the surface…
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When Adventure’s Lost its Meaning
In the quiet misty morning When the moon has gone to bed When the sparrows stop their singing And the sky is clear and red…
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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…
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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…
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Sea of Tranquility
Sometimes I read books that turn out to be boring, but rarely do I come across one I dislike. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St.…
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Live Demos
For some time I lived in a city in the North of England. It was full of terraced brick houses. When I wasn’t working, I…
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AI Rationalizations
AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it…
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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…
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Bad Advice to a Young Scientist
Freeman Dyson, in 2007: Sixty years ago, when I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology.…
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The Delivery Driver
As I was about to enter my house, a man stepped out of an old car parked on the other side of the street and…
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Propaganda Art
Inside the San Rafael post office there’s a mural that depicts a scene from 1851. There are Mexicans, dock workers, pioneers, Indians and a missionary.…
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Undemocratic Sculpture
There are those who report profound emotions when encountering abstract art, and I believe them, but I also believe that they’re in the minority. The…
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Using My Phone as a Microscope
My phone camera beats any magnifying glass. Here are photos of some bugs I encountered on a California beach today. They were 1-5 mm long…
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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.…
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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…
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National Park Ideas
Here are some interesting ideas for new national parks by Ken Ilgunas.
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Two-By-Two Matrices
Each of the fields I have worked in – computer science, genetics, management consulting, biotechnology – has its own 2×2 matrices. Computer science and medicine…
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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…
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Questions about Intelligence
Do we understand intelligence enough to formalize it in mathematical or computer science terms? We don’t, because otherwise there’d be no need for AI benchmarking.…
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Banning Advertising
Driving around San Francisco, the billboards by the highways advertise enterprise software solutions. In Los Angeles, it’s accident injury lawyers. In the Central Valley, cosmetic…
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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…
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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?”…
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Temptation
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do…
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o3 Can’t Stay Silent
I’ve recently speculated about how it may be possible to use AI to monitor the news and to alert me only when anything noteworthy happens.…
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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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My Reactionary Demands for Art
The artist is the creator of beautiful things Oscar Wilde In high school, I got into an argument with my art teacher. For a project…
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X and Y
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the X and Y chromosomes, named that way because those are the only letters that describe their shapes, sit together…
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The Atelier
My stepfather, a sensitive, alcoholic, intelligent, paranoid, articulate, chain-smoking, erudite and irresponsible artist, had an atelier on the ground floor of an old apartment building…
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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…
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Stainless Steel
The oldest piece of kitchenware I own is a stainless steel teapot. The previous occupants had left it behind in a flat in England I…
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Sister
One of my daughters, when she was around four years old and wanted to show off to strangers, liked to inform them, “I have a…
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When I Broke My Brother’s Nose
The moment my brother was old enough to travel, he flew to Thailand to study mixed martial arts. In the years leading up to this, he had…
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Managment Consulting
A consultant is a guy who borrows your watch and tells you what time it is Howard Gossage I used to work for a large,…
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Drinking With a Little Bird
This is a poem by Austrian actor Kurt Sowinetz. You can watch him recite it here but I as far as I know, it hasn’t…
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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…
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Revelation and Delusion
This is from Feet of Clay by Anthony Storr, as quoted in Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: Both revelation and delusion are…
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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…
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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…
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No More Holy Age Than Ours
There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has…
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Under the Banner of Heaven
In They Call me Trinity, a comedy western starring Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a group of Mormon pioneers is harassed by a languid, land-grabbing criminal…
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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…
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Questions about Appearance
Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be…
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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…
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Nuclear Nazis
In The Berlin Project, Gregory Benford, who is deservedly known for writing some of the best hard science fiction around, asks what would’ve happened if the…
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Intuition Pumps
Like all artisans, a blacksmith needs tools, but – according to an old (indeed almost extinct) observation – blacksmiths are unique in that they make…
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What Stirs the Life in You?
The Garden’s scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in. Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in…
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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…
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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…
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Why We Die
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The Generosity Scam
The four of us went out for lunch. Our company is located two blocks from the main street of a medium-sized California town, providing plenty…
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The Things We Worry About
I’ve always admired the ability to overcome one’s fears and to encounter danger not just calmly, but with levity. It took me years to realize…
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Los Angeles
The first conference I went to after the pandemic of 2020-2021 was in Los Angeles. It was my first visit to the city. I had…
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Getting Spoiled
The more money you spend of travel, the higher your expectations. The higher your expectations, the more likely they are to be disappointed. Luxury travel…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Miami Consul
To get my Austrian passport renewed, I needed to visit one of the consulates my native country maintains in America to hand over my documents.…
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