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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: AI represents accumulated intellect, not creative intelligence
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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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…
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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: Wrong but powerful beliefs
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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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…
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The Egely Wheel: It fooled me
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…
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Playing the Harmonica
A few years ago, I decided to learn how to play the harmonica. I started by watching a few YouTube videos, buying a $20 harp,…
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Hotel Room Monitors
Why don’t hotels provide workstations in their rooms? A good-sized monitor, a full keyboard and a mouse would suffice. If that doesn’t fit, have a…
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Political Fashions
Why are right wing parties doing well recently? Explanations that are limited to a single country (“It’s a backlash against Biden and Obama“) aren’t satisfying,…
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Unnecessary Backpacking Gear
There are lots of backpacking gear lists out there, and one day I may post mine. In the meantime, here is some backpacking gear I…
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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…
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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…
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Questions about Domestication
There are 3,900 species of mammals outside of rodents, yet we have only domesticated 15-20. Similarly, there are 12,000 species of grass, yet we have…
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Finite and Infinite Games
In this little book, James P. Carse argues that evil is the termination of possibilities, or as he calls it, of infinite play. Evil is…
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Collider Bias
This is also known as Berkson’s paradox. It arises when there is ascertainment bias in the study design. Here’s an example from Carl T. Bergstrom…
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Kids’ Birthdays
Some kids light up when their parent brings out the birthday cake with the candles and everyone sings “Happy Birthday,” enjoying being the center of…
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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…
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The Lion-man Toy
The Löwenmensch (German for lion-person) is a figurine of a man with a lion’s head, carved from a mammoth’s tusk at least 35,000 years ago.…
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Esperanto
Compared to the other languages I attempted to learn as a kid, Esperanto was easy. Already knowing German, English, Latin and some Russian meant that…
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Neanderthal News
Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:
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Quikscript
A constructed alphabet for English, if we ever have to start a new writing system from scratch. It looks pretty.
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After…
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The Venus of Monruz: Looks mid-century but is 11,000 years old
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…
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The Best of Billions
Why is paleolithic cave art so good? The artistic standard of the painting in Chauvet, created 35,000 years ago, is outstanding. My preferred explanation is…
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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…
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Avoiding the Paleolithic
Why are there no movies, TV series or even novels set in the paleolithic? After all, it’s the epoch that made us who we are,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Great Time to Be Large
I’d have loved to see Pleistocene megafauna like the mammoth with my own eyes, and maybe one day I will. In the meantime, I am…
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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…
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The Sorcerer II
Around the time I was doing my PhD, J. Craig Venter was one of the most talked about scientists on the planet. At some point,…
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Growing Up Without TV
I was driving my oldest kid back from kindergarten when she asked, “Papa, how come some houses don’t have a TV?” I realized that she…
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The Blue Boat
I recently came across the painting below. It beautifully captures what it’s like to paddle through a remote lake. A printout now hangs above my…
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Optical Illusions
Akiyoshi Kitaoka‘s collection of optical Illusions. He’s added to the site since 2002, so there’s a lot.
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Autogenic Training
Autogenic training is a relaxation technique similar to mindfulness meditation. I’ve tried both, and I prefer autogenic training. How does it work? You lie down…
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Do Composers Die Young? Maybe
When Mozart was my age, he was dead for five years already. He had gone from composing to decomposing. He wasn’t the only composer to…
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Medium-Message Discordance
There’s something about the medium and the message disagreeing that tickles me. Maybe one day I’ll make signs that say “Brotherhood” in pink, surrounded by…
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A Thin Film of Inertia: We can pierce it, with a little effort
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…
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Bumper Stickers I’ve Known and Liked
Americans don’t have opinions, they have bumper stickers Rich Hall Last summer, I finally found my favorite bumper sticker on an incredibly dilapidated truck I…
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What’s Enough?
How do you know what’s enough until you find out what’s too much? Tom McGuane in All That is Sacred
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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…
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Life Prefers Ice: Low temperatures are more compatible with order
Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire…
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Paperclip Apocalypse or Profit Apocalypse?
Let’s hope AI doesn’t turn the universe into paperclips and remains aligned with its masters. Even so, this could lead to suboptimal outcomes. Imagine AIs…
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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…
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Infinite in All Directions
The universe seems to be designed not just to allow live, but to favor interesting, diverse live, with plants and animals and minds and cultures.…
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Smooth Between Sea and Land
Here, on the level sand, Between the sea and land, What shall I build or write Against the fall of night? Tell me of runes…
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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…
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Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen
I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses…
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Shotgun Seminars
In Infinite in All Directions, Freeman Dyson describes a way to organize that I have not encountered before. It seems ideally suited to journal clubs…
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Go Ahead, Talk with Strangers
I don’t remember anyone ever telling me not to talk with strangers. As a result, I’ve never avoided it and it has been fine. In…
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Commander’s Intent
From Robert Coram’s biography of fighter pilot John Boyd: In a blitzkrieg situation, the commander is able to maintain a high operational tempo and rapidly…
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Less is More
I have previously written about how sometimes, knowing less can be an advantage. One example of this was that it’s easier to detect if someone…
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The Coffee Ban: How the king of Sweden cruelly forced prisoners to drink coffee
Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time…
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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…
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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…
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The Enemy is Blandness
Life, if you’re not careful, can be bland. Modern buildings, food, clothes, interior design, cars: They’re all very convenient, very safe and very bland. And…
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Kolkata
A few years ago, I took a short trip to Kolkata to go to a wedding. I didn’t take any photos, but the trip is…
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Moments of Grace
There are moments when I can feel grace. Driving home after a drink with colleagues or friends while the sun is setting. Everything is more…
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