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Why is the sky blue?
It’s not as simple as Rayleigh scattering since Mars has a red daytime sky but blue sunsets, the inverse of Earth.
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Are two heads better than one?
A neat probability puzzle: two friends each independently tell you the result of a coin flip, each lying 20% of the time. One friend gets you to 80% accuracy. How much does the second friend help? The answer is 0%.
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Video: Into the abyss, Werner Herzog.
Herzog interviews a prison chaplain who accompanies condemned inmates to their executions in Texas.
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Video: Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder.
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More cows, more wives.
The Dogon of Mali, for example, have menstrual huts where women must seclude themselves during their menses. This advertisement of her cycle helps men to protect themselves from being cuckolded. He, along with the rest of the community, will know when she is fertile and so if she falls pregnant without him visiting her he knows the baby isn’t his. This system appears to work.
Individuals from ethnic groups where inheritance is shared between all children have lower fertility rates than those from ethnic groups where a single heir is chosen.
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Memecoin venture capital.
Relevant: Some crypto bros tokenized a hackathon project of mine without asking, and spent weeks pestering me on X to collect $1k USD in fees.
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On political power.
There’s an element of hacker mindset in interacting with the world this way. Both Johnson and Moses took seemingly irrelevant details of reality and leveraged them to get results that seem unbelievable (and/or appalling) to others. It is like when people do speed runs of video games: it feels like they are playing a completely different game. Speedrunners don’t think of the games the way normal players do—they don’t think in terms of “walls” and “doors” and “levels” and “weapons” and so on; they think in terms of the structure of the underlying software that is generating this, and the hardware that the code is running on.
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Lab leaks are extremely common, but usually benign.
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Poor oral health and reinjuries in male elite soccer players.
After full adjustment for age, player position and psychosocial problems, poor oral health was positively associated with all kind of reinjuries whether analyzed as a continuous variable or as a categorical variable.
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2025: the year in LLMs.
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Next-token predictor is an AI’s job, not its species.
When a monk decides to swear an oath of celibacy and never reproduce, he does so using a brain that was optimized to promote reproduction - just using it very far out of distribution, in an area where it no longer functions as intended.
In the same way, even though an AI was shaped by next-token prediction, the inside of its thoughts doesn’t look like next-token prediction. In the abstract, it probably looks like a world-model, the same as yours.
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Story of a Chinese vibe coder.
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The century of the maxxer.
Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed.
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Chasing greatness.
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Why Europe doesn’t have a Tesla.
Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans in any given year.
In 2024, Volkswagen’s works council blocked the company’s plan to cut costs by closing three factories in Germany. After the company union organized ‘warning strikes’, Volkswagen agreed to keep its factories open and halt compulsory redundancies until 2030.
A corporate restructuring in Germany and France costs companies the equivalent of 31 and 38 months of salary per employee laid off, putting all of the above costs together. In Italy, this is 52 months. In Spain, it is 62 months. In the United States, the cost per employee is just 7 months.
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70% of Laos’s economy is cyberscams.
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Integer programming easily encloses horse.
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Computing pi by flipping a coin.
Toss a coin until the first time the observed proportion of heads exceeds 1/2 (that is, until the cumulative number of heads exceeds the cumulative number of tails) and record that fraction; for instance, if the tosses proceeded as T, H, T, H, H you would record the fraction 3/5. Now start afresh, again recording a fraction that exceeds 1/2. Repeat. As you perform more and more such trials, the average of the fractions will approach π/4.
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The man who stole infinity.
There was also a note Dedekind seemed to have written to himself after he saw Cantor’s 1874 publication in Crelle. In it, he recounted how he’d sent Cantor the first proof in the paper and the revised version of the second — only to see them both appear “almost word for word” in print just a few months later under Cantor’s name alone.