Jul & Aug '25

You can now buy eggs from in-ovo sexed hens.

In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone, approximately 350 million male chicks are routinely culled each year.

1952 Texas gubernatorial election.

There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically).

Of plants native to the Canary Islands, wood independently evolved at least 38 times!

It’s possible that the last common ancestor between an apple and a peach was not even a tree.

Book Review: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr.

This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.

How does o3 guess latitude from photos?

Icepath: a Pokémon inspired 2D programming language.

##################################################
# @ > 9 1 + 1 0 |  |                           < #
#               >  > : ! ~ ; + R 1 - : 0 = R R ^ #
#                                        ±       #
##################################################
Last Op: LEFT
Stack: 5, 3, 5
Stdout: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3
Program: fibonacci.ice

The program above calculates the first 10 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. It uses two constructs which require logical opcodes. You may have noticed that by using direction pointers, we can direct the cursor to follow a circular pattern. A loop.

British institutional decay: Regime change by Dominic Cummings and how emigration ended the Empire.

And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

Life lessons from poker.

Sunk cost habits kill asymmetric bets. If you don’t learn to prune the losing bets quickly, every “small” risk you take hides a fat left tail that can siphon your time, resources, and emotions.

How Airbus took off.

The McDonnell Douglas acquisition is often marked as a turning point for Boeing. Despite being the acquiring firm, Boeing absorbed much of their target’s management philosophy. This disconnect was embodied in the company’s decision to move its headquarters from Seattle (where its main production facility was located) to Chicago, for the sake of just $63 million in tax credits.

Adults with Down syndrome tend to be resistant to most solid cancers.

Economic nihilism and the megaproject economy.

That developing and largely unindustrialized countries like India or Colombia are seeing rapidly falling birth rates is evidence that it is not industrial production which causes fertility collapse, but industrial consumption. They are getting the overflow of the industrialized world, which can produce more smartphones and televisions, more sweets and candies, more appealing online videos, more appliances and apparel, more power plants and electrical poles, than it knows what to do with.

Childhood leukemia: How a deadly cancer became treatable.

Chess grandmasters do not burn 6000 calories per day.

The outsize impact of AI logistics.

Nightmare frequency is a stronger predictor of premature death than smoking, obesity, poor diet or lack of physical activity.

Why we feel tired: It all comes down to mitochondria.

China’s provincial challenges: Fertility rates and debt repayments.

India and the invidious comparison with China.

According to the World Bank, India had an average adult literacy rate of just 77% in 2023–roughly China’s level in 1990. This average gap is aggravated by the scandalously low female literacy rate in India, just 70%.

The last survey data collected by the World Health Organization show that 36% of young children in India were stunted (far too short for their age) in 2020. That’s similar to the proportion in China in the mid-1980s; but China at the time had per-capita GDP of only a third of India’s today.

Detailed list of all 44 people in Meta’s superintelligence team.

40% from OpenAI, 20% DeepMind, 15% Scale

50% from China

75% 1st gen immigrants

So you think you can heritable?

What does it mean to be thirsty?

The blood-testing organs don’t measure water levels but rather the concentration of salt, whose healthy range lies at almost exactly the same concentration as that of the brackish intertidal water in which vertebrates first evolved (which is about one-third as salty as seawater).

Review: Dating men in the Bay Area.

Mouth taping.

Right now, our data shows that the average participant experiences a 2ms increase in HRV when taping.

What is a color space? and a perceptual color space in Minecraft (Oklab).

When will an open source AI win gold at the Math Olympiad?

July 2021: 2043 (22 years away)

July 2022: 2029 (7 years away)

July 2023: 2028 (5 years away)

July 2024: 2026 (2 years away)

Video: The AI that solved IMO geometry problems.