Nehaveigur

  • 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…

  • Star Bowl Spinning Overhead

    Writing by starlight Can’t see the words Fill a page Nothing there Waterfall distant sound Tree against stars Milky Way Juniper Jupiter white rock Wind…

  • All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky

    Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone.…

  • Eating Sushi With a Fork

    Imagine being so narrow-minded that you would outright reject eating sushi with a fork instead of the customary chopsticks, without even having tried it. Because…

  • 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…

  • America!

    Chanting USA! USA! is warranted when it comes to air conditioning. Not saying it isn’t warranted for other things too, but AC is an obvious…

  • Open Day and Night

    O goddess-born of great Anchises’ line, The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to…

  • Trash Panda

    Someone took the term trash panda too literally when they designed this.

  • 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…

  • Knives: I have an irrational fondness of them

    Since I was a kid, I’ve liked knives. Maybe it’s some primordial instinct that attracts me to those simple tools. Some of the earliest known…

  • Napping Outside: One of the best ways to experience nature

    One of my favorite things when I’m out backpacking or canoeing is to take an afternoon nap under a tree somewhere. Karl Heinrich Waggerl wrote…

  • Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

    You have to give it the old communists: They knew how to create a good slogan. Some of them are still in use today, and…

  • Everybody Sees That I Am Old But You

    Seventeen years ago you said Something that sounded like Good-bye; And everybody thinks that you are dead, But I. So I, as I grow stiff…

  • CrossFit

    Many of us spend more time on exercise than on sex, yet there’s not a single movie about exercise. As a contrast, consider sports and…

  • Signs and Spirits

    I used to take a bus past a church sign on 19th avenue in San Francisco every day. The message changed every day. This was…

  • Provincial China

    This summer, I returned to a city in Heilongjiang province that I had already visited around ten years ago. It is full of crumbling heavy…

  • Rushed Endings

    At high school, we had to write at least one long essay every week. I remember one assignment in particular: Write a well-structured adventure story.…

  • Avoiding Organic

    What matters more, what you eat, or the quality of that food? What’s healthier, low-grade boiled GMO vegetables from Food ‘n’ Stuff or a bag…

  • Small Gifts for Small Kids

    Small kids travelling in Europe get gifts all the time. This started on Austrian Airlines, flying from California to Vienna. Our three daughters, aged 3,…

  • A Critique of Marginal Revolution: Interesting but not courageous

    Some of the most interesting people happen to be unpleasant. The economics blog Marginal Revolution is like that. I’ve been reading and benefitting from it…

  • Meadows

    This is a mountain meadow in Lower Austria. Comparable meadows in the Sierra Nevada have fewer wildflowers and fewer insects, both in terms of absolute…

  • The Decorated Buck

    My brother’s cabin is deep in a narrow, forested valley in Lower Austria, not far from where I was born. The gravel road leading up…

  • I Like the European Union

    There’s much I owe to the European Union. Without it, my life up to now would’ve been very different and I’d likely have less to…

  • Drafts

    According to a pervasive belief in the German-speaking world, it’s essential to avoid drafts. They cause all kinds of diseases, including muscle stiffness and colds.…

  • Mandated Style

    The city of Santa Fe mandates that downtown buildings adhere to a specific style, Pueblo Revival. I’m in favor of making it easier to build…

  • Austria 2000-2025

    This summer I spent the most time in Austria since I left more than two decades ago. I’ve written about my impressions before. In this…

  • 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.…

  • Visual Thinking

    This is one of the books that influenced me as a kid but that I had forgotten about since. I only re-discovered it because I…

  • Pictures of the Atelier

    During my current stay in Austria, I’m spending a few days in a vacation home in the South of the country. It’s the same house…

  • 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.

  • San Franciscos

    Past visions of San Francisco‘s future, collected by Arthur Chandler.

  • Gabonionta: Probably just pseudofossils

    The Natural History Museum in Vienna has an exhibit on the Gabonionta, also known as Francevillian biota. They were multicellular organisms that appeared 2.1 billion…

  • Revenge of the Tipping Point

    Malcom Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point is thought-provoking without being a great book. This isn’t easy to pull off, but Gladwell did it. I…

  • 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…

  • Walking Vienna

    Change is the only constant, but it can take a long time. This summer, I’m spending a month in Vienna. I went to high school…

  • Network Television

    [Larry] Gross and several of his colleagues once did a fascinating bit of research to demonstrate what television of that era was capable of. He…

  • 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…

  • A Bold Choice

    Pandemic 2020 is the name of a cafe I encountered recently while walking around Vienna. I wasn’t brave enough to enter, which I now regret,…

  • A Joke Explained

    If, in order to understand a piece of art, I first have to study the artist’s intention, it’s like a joke that has to be…

  • Colloquial States of America

    I like maps, but I like this one especially. Here is something else that’s similarly juvenile and great.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Star Axis

    Construction began almost 50 years ago and may finish before the end of this decade. Here is a video, here is the Wikipedia entry, here…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Showtunes

    Here are some showtunes I keep returning to with hardly any bad conscience:

  • Universe Rating: Demanded to talk with the manager but was ignored

    Cleanliness Ambience Family friendliness Ease of assembly Cruelty Customer service Binary stars Unfathomable intricacy

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Anton Hansch

    Context here.

  • Thomas Ender

    Context here.

  • Rudolf von Alt

    Context here.

  • Marie Enger

    Context here.

  • 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…

  • America, Dark and Bright: More upside and more downside than elsewhere

    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,…

  • 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…

  • Computational Irreducibility: An underappreciated concept to understand the universe

    Computational irreducibility is a profound concept about how the world works. In many complex systems, the only way to know what will happen is to…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Puddling

    Around a puddle no larger than my hand, I observed three different butterfly species, jostling with bees and other insects. Despite a large lake being…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Backpacking Resources

    When preparing for backcountry trips, it’s helpful to know what to expect.

  • 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:…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Undemocratic Sculpture: Most of us can’t relate to abstraction

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • Unparalleled Misalignments: Nonsense of the best kind

    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…

  • National Park Ideas

    Here are some interesting ideas for new national parks by Ken Ilgunas.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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?”…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • California Fires

    Much of California has burned at some point. This map keeps track of historical wildfires.

  • 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…

  • 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…