Ruban

Jan & Feb '26

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.
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%.
Video: Into the abyss, Werner Herzog.

Herzog interviews a prison chaplain who accompanies condemned inmates to their executions in Texas.
Video: Terence Tao on the cosmic distance ladder.
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.
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.
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.
Lab leaks are extremely common, but usually benign.
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.
2025: the year in LLMs.
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.
Claude composer.
Story of a Chinese vibe coder.
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.
Chasing greatness.
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.
70% of Laos’s economy is cyberscams.
Integer programming easily encloses horse.
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.
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.

Nov & Dec '25

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

John von Neumann shot lightning from his arse, and rebuttal #1 and rebuttal #2.
Inside Cursor.

Pace and work ethic are among the most contagious norms (in both directions): If your colleagues move fast, you do. If your colleagues are responsive on Slack, you are. If your colleagues go home for dinner, you do. If your colleagues come into the office on Saturday, you do. The default setting at Cursor is fast. And most people are happily, not begrudgingly, excited to meet the demand.

Fuzz is my favorite Cursor ritual. When a big ship is imminent (think a new client release or website update), everyone gets in a room and tries to break it.
TPUv7: Google takes a swing at the king.

We assume that in the case where Google earns a margin on leasing TPU 7 to external customers that the TCO per hour can still be up to ~30% lower than the cost of the GB200 and ~41% lower than the cost of the GB300. This is what we believe is reflective of Anthropic’s pricing via GCP.
The political gap between AIs and citizens.

The leaderboard below ranks each AI model by how closely it predicted actual election results.
Confederate monuments and performative violence.

Study claims that Confederate monuments reduced racial violence by serving as a substitute for it; when there was a Confederate monument in town, Southerners felt less need to enforce white supremacy in other ways. Therefore, removing racist monuments increases anti-black hate crimes.
Gypsies and Jews.

The key detail here is that gypsies selectively desist in identifying as gypsies. Those who advance in the educational system are more likely to stop identifying as gypsies; those who move into higher-paying, more prestigious jobs are more likely to do the same. In fact, more than half of gypsies who become professionals change the way they identify themselves—they claim that they’re members of some other ethnic group.
A story of slavery in modern America.

One day during the war Lieutenant Tom came home and caught my mother in a lie—something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table.” Mom cowered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a quivering voice, she told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Lola looked at Mom pleadingly, then without a word walked to the dining table and held on to the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound.

My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I brought it up with Lola, she asked to hear Mom’s version. She listened intently, eyes lowered, and afterward she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”

Lola never got that allowance. She asked my parents about it in a roundabout way a couple of years into our life in America. Her mother had fallen ill (with what I would later learn was dysentery), and her family couldn’t afford the medicine she needed. “Pwede ba?” she said to my parents. Is it possible? Mom let out a sigh. “How could you even ask?,” Dad responded in Tagalog. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?”
China bows to de-industrialization.
Red Alert 2: Chrono Divide
Can you just do things? and do it anyway!.

The idea that intelligence is not what matters because intelligence is becoming cheap is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.
Watch men.

Only the French held out, hoping that Paris Mean Time would be the global standard for almost three decades after. They finally relented in 1911, but even then refused to acknowledge GMT, referring to it instead as Paris Mean Time and running the country nine minutes and 21 seconds ahead of Britain.
Why the West was downzoned.
Anduril: The amusement park for engineers and setbacks from drone crashes.

What made this work was our matrix organization. Instead of creating dedicated teams for each product, we built functional organizations (across electrical, mechanical, and embedded systems) with deep expertise that could surge resources toward critical projects when needed. When we began developing Roadrunner, we pulled engineers from electrical and mechanical pools for intensive development, then shifted them to other projects when those phases ended.
Africa needs to generate more electricity.
Concerns about the legitimacy of Nucleus Genomics.
European pension promises as % of GDP.
Norway’s wealth tax unchains a capital exodus.

The recent wealth tax increase in Norway was expected to bring in an additional $146M in yearly tax revenue. Instead, individuals worth $54B left the country, leading to a $594M loss in yearly wealth tax revenue—a net decrease of $448M+.
Governments spend far more on old people than children: Spain and Britain.
Joshua Kushner on navigating complex situations.

“My advice to you and your team is to just be yourselves,” Rubin explained. “Because if you do what you think the rest of the world wants, one of two things will happen. You might be right, but if you are, you won’t really know why; and if you’re wrong, you’ll be angry at yourself for deviating from what is true to your core. So just be yourself, and either you’ll be right, and it’ll feel really good; or you’ll be wrong. But at least you’ll still be yourself.”
The untold story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich.

While there, he spent more than $10,000 on jewelry and clothing for his latest girlfriend — and charged it to the firm. The accounting department noticed the payments and flagged them to the financial controller, who quickly concluded that the expenses were improper, according to a person with direct knowledge of what happened. The controller reported the matter to Greenberg, by then the chief executive. Once again, there were no consequences.

2025 Year's End

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Year-in-review essays permit a certain amount of navel-gazing, but 2025 resists the usual warm retrospection. I started the year at my grandmother’s funeral and ended it with a dislocated shoulder on the ski slopes of Chongli, China.

Travels

I spent close to 50 days on the road this year.

Cities	When
🇨🇭 Geneva	05 Apr
🇫🇷 Val Thorens	05 - 12 Apr
🇲🇾 Malacca	18 - 19 Apr
🇦🇺 Perth	27 May - 03 Jun
🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur	28 - 30 Jul
🇻🇳 Ho Chi Minh City	24 - 27 Aug
🇵🇹 Faro, Lisbon	24 - 26 Oct
🇪🇸 Bilbao, San Sebastián	26 - 30 Oct
🇬🇧 London, Bristol, Bath	30 Oct - 08 Nov
🇨🇳 Beijing, Chongli, Shanghai	10 - 25 Dec

I learnt to snowboard in Val Thorens in April. The spring slopes were icy and unforgiving, which made falling down repeatedly a miserable experience for my arse. It clicked on the final day, when we started racing each other and I stopped overthinking every turn. By the end, I was finishing blues and greens without trouble. One of my roommates fractured his arm that same afternoon. At least that’ll never happen to me, I thought.

Beijing, China · Fujifilm X100V

Eight months later, I dislocated my shoulder in Chongli, one run after finishing my first black, on a baby slope. The resort was genuinely excellent, better than the European ones I’ve been to, which made spending the rest of the trip in a sling all the more annoying.

China surprised me. Western media had primed me for some kind of panopticon, but I found something more mundane. Shanghai was lovely and the food a pleasant surprise. Turns out I prefer northern Chinese cuisine¹ to southern: it’s more lamb-heavy, unpretentious. Beijing was too cold, too grey, and had too little going on outside the tourist sites. Reminded me of Moscow.

San Sebastián, Spain · Fujifilm X100V

The standout was San Sebastián. I went solo and discovered the particular pleasure of wandering between pintxo bars with no plan. I loved the food², the views, and the people. Bilbao was forgettable. The Guggenheim in particular was a letdown as I’ve never enjoyed art that exists primarily to be explained.

From Spain I flew to the UK to see Anna, who’d left in September to do her master’s at King’s. We did London, Bristol and Bath. London has always felt like a second home. Londoners are inexplicably kind to me.

I started carrying a Fujifilm X100V on the Europe trip. I used to dismiss photography as a distraction from experience, but I was wrong. It forces you to actually look at the details you’d otherwise walk past. It’s also nice to have something to show people afterwards.

Honourable mentions:

Kuala Lumpur: The hojicha cheesecake from OGA Tea & Dining.
Malacca: Jonker street cafes and Atlantic Nonya HQ were good.
Faro: Only got three hours of my time, but the pierogis from My’oMeu were excellent.
Lisbon: Pastéis de Belém, of course.
Bristol: Nadu reminded me how good thosai can be. The ambience in the Cosy Club was goated.
Bath: The Scallop Shell had the best fish and chips Anna and I have ever had.

Health

Not in the best shape of my life, but certainly fitter³ than I was in 2024. I ran the 2XU half marathon and SC 10km, both with better times than the previous year. I still don’t enjoy running, if I’m honest. Halfway through each race I find myself thinking: “why the fuck am I doing this?” And yet, I’ll probably sign up for a few more runs in 2026. There’s something to doing hard things you don’t enjoy, though I’m not sure what exactly.

I didn’t climb a mountain this year, breaking a streak I’d kept since 2023. Had my eye on Mount Kinabalu (4,095m) but never made it happen. The shoulder willing, I’ll be back on the slopes by March, and I’m eyeing a marathon or Ironman 70.3 for later in the year.

Work & School

I graduated with a master’s in maths from NUS in July. A good GPA felt like a minor victory given my undergrad was in engineering. The ceremony itself didn’t move me much. The real winners were my parents, who missed my undergrad graduation to COVID and weren’t about to miss this one.

I interned as a quant at a bank for the first half of the year. My manager pushed hard for me to sign a full-time offer but I turned it down. Quant work is siloed in a way that doesn’t suit me: just coding and maths, minimal interaction with people, and everything you build is abstract. I couldn’t show anyone what I was working on. Interest rate models aren’t exactly tangible.

Meanwhile, applications elsewhere were rough. I had the lowest interview-to-application ratio I’ve had since undergrad. Twice I made it to final rounds at hedge funds⁴ and got nowhere. In retrospect, I’m glad it didn’t work out. There’s this Thiel line about his time at a law firm: from the outside, everybody wanted to get in; from the inside, everybody wanted to get out. Finance is the same. So much of your identity gets wrapped up in winning the competition to get there that it’s hard to ask whether you actually want to be there.

So what the fuck do I want? I want to build things I’m proud of and ship them to people who actually use them. Something I can point at and say: I made that. Work that’s messy and high-context and illegible to HR departments.

Side Projects

I rebuilt this website this year and I’m pretty proud of how it has turned out. Everyone should have one of these, if only to have a corner of the internet that’s actually yours. I’ve gotten some lovely comments from strangers since launching it, proof that putting things out there works, even when it feels self indulgent.

I moved from a shared rental in Tanjong Rhu to a two-bedroom unit in Punggol Coast, just me. It was a fresh apartment, so I had to handle the plumbing, drilling, retrofitting, etc. The place is incredible. I look out over the sea from my desk and it’s quiet for Singapore, except for the F-15s that serve as my morning alarm.

On the reading front, only two books! This has been my worst year since I started tracking on Goodreads in 2017. Sometime around 2024, reading started to feel like work—writing marginalia, forcing myself to review post-completion, etc. Maybe the fix here is to just read casually again, without trying to remember everything.

Other stuff:

Built KeepIt, an Apple Vision Pro goalkeeping game.
Got my drone pilot licence from CAAS.
Shipped Teletable to feature-complete.
Picked up functional programming and Haskell.
Got much better at Python (LeetCode monkey) and the command line.

Coda

I’m excited for 2026. I feel in my bones there’s good stuff ahead. No blackpilling, no dooming. We’re all gonna make it.

Thank you to my parents, who spoil me. To Anna, for sticking with me. To the people from Twitter who have been supportive despite never meeting me. To the folks at my workplace who taught me the ropes when I was lost. To new friends made on trips this year, and old ones who reconnected. And to you, for reading all this far.

Have a wonderful 2026 and see you on the other side.

Perth, Australia with Anna · iPhone 15 Pro Max

The squid skewers near Yuyuan Garden on Jiujiaochang Road were the best I’ve had. ↩
Highly recommend Antonio Taberna for the tortilla, La Cuchara de San Telmo for the suckling pig and La Viña for the cheesecakes. ↩
Strava and Hevy tell me I ran 400km, biked 200km and logged 93 gym sessions. ↩
One of them took seven rounds. Seven! ↩

Sep & Oct '25

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

How France achieved the world’s fastest nuclear buildout.
How China raced ahead of the US on nuclear power.
Book Review: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci.

At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want.” Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck.

Shah Jahan famously built the Taj Mahal in a romantic gesture to honor his dead wife, but what’s less well known is that he went on to have one heck of a rebound. As the Sultan of Hindustan and King of the Kings of India, he had a harem full of thousands of eager women, yet he gradually destroyed his kingdom by repeatedly seducing or raping the wives of his most faithful advisors. Even this was not enough to satisfy his libidinity, and he established an annual fair where, for eight consecutive days, all men besides the king were expelled from the palace and tens of thousands of women of all races and nationalities were locked inside, while he toured them with his female attendants like a vast meat market

[During the civil war between Dara and Aurangzeb]: As his odds grow longer, Dara turns to supernatural assistance and recruits holy men to petition Muhammed in paradise and request his intervention. The holy men go away and give it a try, then come back and dejectedly report that Muhammad is busy. Busy? Yes, busy, Aurangzeb is talking to him nonstop, and as a result their messages cannot get through.
Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War.

I think our modern culture has built a very strong taboo around certain parts of the human experience, and I understand there are valid reasons for that taboo, but I can’t help but roll my eyes a little bit at the idea that there is nothing cool or ennobling about war. Really, nothing? Have you ever felt the rush of seeing an enemy tank destroyed?

Before my experiences in Ukraine I used to desperately feel like I had to do something, without even necessarily knowing what it was. I think a lot of young men feel this way, and have felt this way since prehistory. For most of human history war has been a powerful answer to that longing. From ancient indo-european tradition we have the concept of the Koryos, a group of young unmarried men who would spend some time living outside of normal society, raiding rival tribes and living by violence. After this period, those who survived would return to their people and be fully integrated into society.
So you want to be a writer? - Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don’t do it.
A $19bn industry is about to pay its workforce for the first time.

In 43 of 50 states the highest-paid public employee is a university football or basketball coach. Texas A&M, the largest university in the country, is paying about $77m in severance over eight years to Jimbo Fisher, its former head coach, while handing his successor $7m a year. For comparison, the median manager in the English Premier League earns $6m a year.
Major religions in China.
The Fatima sun miracle.
The Islamic argument for competence.

In daily life in much of the third world, especially the Arab and South Asian world, there’s no such thing as a civil conversation done for objective, unemotional, detached purposes. Every single topic is interpreted as having some ulterior motive or signalling behind opening it up in conversation, and with it the assumption that you’re fully endorsing whatever ideas you’re bringing out in the open. You are always expected to perform an eastern “Song and Dance” to express yourself as a matter of decorum instead of just politely and directly saying how you feel.
How hawker signboards tell the story of Singapore.
When and where did blue eyes appear? And why?

An estrogenic effect is especially likely for red hair, which is the hair color that differs the most in prevalence between men and women. Female redheads do worse on average than other women in ten health categories and better in only three. They are especially prone to four types of cancer: colorectal, cervical, uterine, and ovarian — three of which are estrogen-dependent. A higher degree of fetal estrogenization may explain why several studies have found an association between blue eyes and certain feminine traits.
Age and cognitive ability.

The pattern that longitudinal studies show, namely, increase in both fluid and crystalized intelligence until age 50 or 60, and only start to very quickly decline after age 70.
How the boomers crippled France & it’s even more insane than you think.

A quarter of all public spending in France goes towards pensions, well above the EU average. Worse still, pension spending keeps rising. In 2024, France increased pension spending by another €14 billion in 2024, just to keep payouts in line with inflation, despite the government scrambling to find billions in cuts elsewhere. And this was far from a one-off occurrence: of the €1 trillion of additional debt taken on during the Macron presidency, half can be traced back to pension spending.
Thomas Peterffy: Market Maker.
The visions of Neil Mehta.

The process looks something like this: Greenoaks selects for people who believe that it’s really hard in the world of capitalism—which is filled with “me-too products swimming in a river of beta,” in Mehta’s phrase—to build something that delights human beings at a differential rate. The world therefore moves forward only through the products and companies built by generational founders who break tradeoffs and build competitive moats by creating a Jaw Dropping Customer Experience, which “usually starts with doing something perceived to be impossible, either technically or operationally, that gives competitors nightmares. Everything else is just a shell game,” Mehta believes.
How Rockefeller and his partners built Standard Oil.
Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince on the internet history and pay-per-crawl.
Video: Why complex exponents matter.
Tesla’s approach to autonomy.
Creation of Lambda notation.
The quantum mechanics of greenhouse gases.
Birds’ vocal warnings provide new insight into the origins of language.

The researchers wondered why birds from locations spanning Australia, China and Zambia all use the same call to identify their parasites, despite never coming into contact with each other.
Protein powders and shakes contain high levels of lead … or are they actually fine?.

Jul & Aug '25

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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.

FPL Optimisation with Julia & JuMP

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

After a decade of watching United stumble from one false dawn to the next, fantasy premier league (FPL) has become my sole source of joy in football. This is my seventh season playing, and in a game where 11.2 million managers compete, I have reached the top 100k¹ twice: 35,192nd in 2023/24 and 66,805th in 2020/21, good enough to justify the hours spent watching games over the weekend.

Strip away the football and you’re left with a constrained optimisation problem where you maximise points scored by players based on real-life performances (goals, assists, clean sheets, etc.). You get £100m to build a 15-player squad consisting of 2 goalkeepers, 5 defenders, 5 midfielders, and 3 forwards. Only 11 play each gameweek, following standard formation rules². Other constraints include a maximum of three players per club, and one free transfer per week, with additional transfers costing -4 points. You captain one player for double points.

The past six seasons, I picked teams like everyone else: browsing r/FantasyPL 10 minutes before the deadline, checking fixture difficulties, and convincing myself that Bruno will finally haul. But last year, while studying optimisation in uni, I realised I was manually attempting what a computer could solve in seconds.

I built four optimisers:

Single gameweek - pick the best team for one week
Multiple gameweek - plan ahead without transfers
Multiple gameweeks with transfers - plan ahead with squad changes
Current team - optimise from your existing squad

You can find them here as Pluto.jl notebooks.

Julia

I came across this blog post a few months ago about FPL optimisation in Julia and JuMP. The syntax looked clean and I wanted to try something that wasn’t Python for once.

I was worried about speed initially. Given the nonillion³ possible squads, I imagined the solver churning away for minutes to hours. Julia supposedly runs optimisations faster than Python, though I never benchmarked this myself. It turns out this doesn’t really matter as modern solvers crush this problem in seconds regardless of language. But by then I’d already written everything in Julia.

To run the optimisers:

cd /fpl/optimiser
julia --project=.  # After installing Julia and Pluto
using Pluto
Pluto.run()

The Data

I’m using Solio Analytics for the expected points projections. They offer free data for August and September, with predictions 12 gameweeks ahead. The CSV has player names, buy/sell values (different because FPL taxes you 50% on profits when selling), and expected points for each gameweek.

begin
	df = CSV.read("../data/gw$(START_GW)-projection.csv", DataFrame)
	sort!(df, "$(START_GW)_Pts", rev=true)
end

The expected points come from their model which factors in fixture difficulty, player form and historical data. Another alternative is FPL Review’s Massive Data Planner at around $6 SGD per month. I’ll probably build my own model at some point, but that’s another rabbit hole entirely.

Level 1: Single Gameweek

This is the simplest optimiser; we just want to pick the best possible team for one gameweek. No transfers or future planning to worry about here.

function optimise_single_gameweek(df)
    model = Model(HiGHS.Optimizer)
    n = nrow(df)

	@variable(model, squad[1:n], Bin)    # 15-player squad
	@variable(model, starter[1:n], Bin)  # 11 starters
	@variable(model, captain[1:n], Bin)  # 1 captain (2x points)

    @objective(model, Max, sum(df[i, "$(START_GW)_Pts"] *
        (starter[i] + captain[i] + BENCH_WEIGHT * (squad[i] - starter[i]))
        for i in 1:n))

The objective function has three parts: starters get full points, the captain gets double⁴, and bench players contribute via a token BENCH_WEIGHT⁵ because they might play if someone gets injured.

# Budget
@constraint(model, sum(df[i, "BV"] * squad[i] for i in 1:n) <= BUDGET)

# Squad composition
@constraint(model, sum(squad) == SQUAD_SIZE)
@constraint(model, sum(starter) == STARTING_XI)
@constraint(model, sum(captain) == 1)
@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "G") == GK_REQUIRED)
@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "D") == DEF_REQUIRED)
@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "M") == MID_REQUIRED)
@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "F") == FWD_REQUIRED)

# Max 3 players per club, plus my own constraint: max 2 defenders from same team
for team in unique(df.Team)
	@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Team"] == team) <= MAX_PLAYERS_PER_TEAM)
	@constraint(model, sum(squad[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Team"] == team && (df[i, "Pos"] == "G" || df[i, "Pos"] == "D")) <= MAX_DEFENDERS_SAME_TEAM)
end

The second constraint in the for loop is based on my experience. Having multiple defenders from the same team results in correlation risk, where one conceded goal wipes multiple clean sheets. Therefore, we limit to 2 defenders (including goalies) from a single club.

# Hierarchy: captain must be starter, starter must be in squad
for i in 1:n
	@constraint(model, starter[i] <= squad[i])
	@constraint(model, captain[i] <= starter[i])
end

# Formation constraints
@constraint(model, sum(starter[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "G") == 1)
@constraint(model, 3 <= sum(starter[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "D") <= 5)
@constraint(model, 2 <= sum(starter[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "M") <= 5)
@constraint(model, 1 <= sum(starter[i] for i in 1:n if df[i, "Pos"] == "F") <= 3)

Running the optimiser with just these basic constraints gives a team which passes the eye test. A Liverpool triple up with Salah as captain is what you’d expect from a soulless optimiser.

Level 2: Multiple Gameweeks

Unfortunately for us, FPL runs for 38 weeks. This version plans across multiple gameweeks without transfers, essentially picking a “set and forget” team.

The key addition is weighting future gameweeks.

const NUM_GAMEWEEKS = 5
const GAMEWEEK_WEIGHTS = [1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.7, 0.6]

These weights work like a discount factor in finance where future points are worth less because predictions decay over time. Players get injured, managers rotate squads and teams may over/underperform expectations. The predictions in the first gameweek are fairly reliable (weight = 1.0), but by gameweek 10, you’re not really sure if Haaland and Salah are still fit.

I’m using 5 gameweeks because that’s when I plan to wildcard. The transfer window closes a few weeks before that, giving me a chance to bring in new signings early. Plus, 5 gameweeks should give me enough data to see if the optimiser holds up or needs tweaking. Solio’s data covers 12 gameweeks if you want to experiment with longer horizons.

The objective function now sums across all gameweeks:

@objective(model, Max, sum(GAMEWEEK_WEIGHTS[gw - START_GW + 1] * df[i, "$(gw)_Pts"] * (starter[i] + captain[i] + BENCH_WEIGHT * (squad[i] - starter[i])) for i in 1:n, gw in START_GW:END_GW))

Running this gives a much more balanced squad that is predicted to perform across 5 gameweeks.

Level 3: Multiple Gameweeks with Transfers

Now we’re playing actual FPL. This optimiser can make transfers between gameweeks. I’ve kept transfers simple here: one per week with no -4 hits⁶ for additional transfers.

@variable(model, squad[1:n, START_GW:END_GW], Bin)
@variable(model, transfer_in[1:n, (START_GW + 1):END_GW], Bin)
@variable(model, transfer_out[1:n, (START_GW + 1):END_GW], Bin)

# Squad evolution
for gw in (START_GW + 1):END_GW, i in 1:n
	@constraint(model, squad[i, gw] == squad[i, gw-1] + transfer_in[i, gw] - transfer_out[i, gw])
end

# One free transfer per gameweek
for gw in (START_GW + 1):END_GW
	@constraint(model, sum(transfer_in[i, gw] for i in 1:n) <= 1)
	@constraint(model, sum(transfer_out[i, gw] for i in 1:n) <= 1)
end

Here, squad[i, gw] tracks whether player i is in your squad at gameweek gw. The evolution constraint ensures squad continuity: each week’s squad equals last week’s plus transfers in, minus transfers out.

The output now shows the squads for the next few gameweeks, with the necessary transfers.

Level 4: Optimising from Your Current Team

Mid-season optimisation is different. You’ve already got a squad, maybe some money in the bank, and you can’t just tear everything down without a wildcard. This optimiser starts from a given team and plans the transfers.

current_team = [
    "Sánchez",
    "Pedro Porro",
    "Romero",
    "Tarkowski",
    "Gabriel",
    "Wirtz",
    "B.Fernandes",
    "Palmer",
    "M.Salah",
    "Mateta",
    "Luís Hemir",
    "Dúbravka",
    ("Barnes", "F"), # Position check since there are multiple Barnes in the PL
    "Tielemans",
    "Estève"
]

function optimise_from_current_team(df, current_team, initial_bank=0.0)
    current_team_indices = Int[]
    current_team_sell_value = 0.0

    for name in current_team
        idx = findfirst(row -> row.Name == name, eachrow(df))
        if idx !== nothing
            push!(current_team_indices, idx)
            current_team_sell_value += df[idx, "SV"]
        else
            @warn "Player $name not found in data"
        end
    end

The tricky bit here is tracking your bank balance. As mentioned earlier, FPL taxes you 50% of profit when selling⁷. Fortunately, Solio’s data makes this easy to handle with separate buy (BV) and sell (SV) values, computed based on the team ID.

# Track bank balance across gameweeks
@variable(model, bank[START_GW:END_GW] >= 0)

# Initial bank = what you have + sales - purchases
@constraint(model, bank[START_GW] == initial_bank +
    sum(df[i, "SV"] * transfer_out[i, START_GW] for i in 1:n) -
    sum(df[i, "BV"] * transfer_in[i, START_GW] for i in 1:n))

# Bank balance carries forward each week
for gw in (START_GW+1):END_GW
	@constraint(model, bank[gw] == bank[gw-1] + sum(df[i, "SV"] * transfer_out[i, gw] for i in 1:n) - sum(df[i, "BV"] * transfer_in[i, gw] for i in 1:n))
end

# Initialise squad with your current team
for i in 1:n
	@constraint(model, squad[i, START_GW] == (i in current_team_indices ? 1 : 0) + transfer_in[i, START_GW] - transfer_out[i, START_GW])
end

Coda

The optimisers obviously miss some stuff. They don’t handle chip strategy⁸, don’t model -4 points hits properly and definitely cannot predict Pep’s tactical nous of benching your City midfielders right after you captain one of them.

FPL at the top level has become somewhat boring. The game has become an XPts spreadsheet simulator, where everyone converges on identical template teams based on the same underlying projections.

So why build another optimiser? Because I want to win my mini-leagues! If the meta is mathematical optimisation, you either join or accept mediocrity. Also, it’s fun to build. Getting all of FPL’s weird rules into proper constraint form and watching the solver churn through them in seconds feels satisfying.

It’s worth remembering this is fundamentally a game about guessing which footballers will perform well. I’ll be running two teams this season: one following the optimiser, and another where I make all the calls. Either the math works or I’ve built an elaborate way to finish exactly where gut instinct would have gotten me anyway.

The FPL community considers top 100k the benchmark for being good. Some say top 10k is where ‘good’ starts, but I’m not saying that because I haven’t reached it. ↩
Formation constraints: 1 goalkeeper, 3-5 defenders, 2-5 midfielders, and 1-3 forwards make up the first 11. ↩
Roughly 10^30 squads given 685C15. ↩
Hence adding captain[i] again. ↩
BENCH_WEIGHT = 0.1 was completely arbitrary. The optimal value probably depends on injury rates and your bench strategy: are you going for cheap enablers or rotating options? Worth investigating properly! ↩
Sometimes, taking -4 hits can be worth it: bringing in a player before a price rise, or getting a captain option for a great fixture. Adding that complexity here requires additional constraints that would make the code harder to follow. Consider it a future enhancement. ↩
Typical British behaviour. ↩
Triple captain, bench boost and free hits. ↩

May & Jun '25

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?

Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent disabilities. This ranks it among the deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, alongside better-known ailments such as typhus and cholera.

The average cost of antivenom alone in sub-Saharan Africa was $124 in 2010, a steep price to pay for the 40 percent of sub-Saharan Africans who live on less than $1.90 per day. And that doesn’t even include the cost of the care or facilities. A survey of 129 Bangladeshi snakebite victims found that over 40 percent had to take out loans to meet the costs.
Will Jesus Christ return in 2025?

Time value of money: The Yes people are betting that, later this year, their counterparties (the No betters) will want cash (to bet on other markets), and so will sell out of their No positions at a higher price.
[3blue1brown] Video: But what is quantum computing?

Follow up video: Where my explanation of Grover’s algorithm failed.
Book Review: The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz.

Okay, but now imagine that you live in a globe-spanning hyper-empire that has ushered in an era of incomparable peace and prosperity. Can you imagine somebody like Napoleon or Alexander or Genghis Khan joining the US Army today? Like, the army with all the powerpoint slides and DEI consultants? It’s inconceivable. Laughable, even… The answer is startups.
Eau de vagina & Eau de homme.

Participants stood 4.4 inches closer on average to the female experimenter if she had applied the vab (p=0.1041).

Heart rates increased 1.2 bpm after the 10-second hug in the control group, and increased 9.0 bpm in the vab group (p=0.0596).

Females stood about 4 inches closer to males who were wearing either ball sweat (p=0.0109) or semen (p=0.0682) compared to the control substance.
Math team and other horrible things you do to get into Stanford.

It’s terrible to contemplate, even now. Competitive math was just one piece of it. We started school at 8 and went until 4:30. Nights were for other worthless extracurriculars to pad out our applications. I did debate team and jazz piano, student journalism and improv, extra science and math classes on weekends. None of it meant anything. Each activity was like the last, one box ticked after the next, each school day starting when it was still dark out and only ending when it was dark again, every hour blended together into some kind of gray resume goo.

The worst part was knowing that it was all going to be extruded into a few lines in an application form, that a committee would review for about ninety seconds before moving onto the next perfectly interchangeable application from some other straight-A tryhard.
100 years to solve an integral.

The integral of sec(x) is well known to any beginners calculus student. Yet this integral was once a major outstanding maths problem. It was first introduced by Geradus Mercator who needed it to make his famous map in 1569. He couldn’t find it and used an approximation instead. The exact solution was found accidentally 86 years later without calculus in 1645.
Making American milk safe.

But even once it was established that milk could carry dangerous diseases, there was resistance to its widespread pasteurization. In the US, take-up faced strong medical opposition from doctors, particularly pediatricians, who argued that the heating process might be making milk less nutritious and that clean, raw milk was best for infants.

Straus’s great project was to familiarize Americans with pasteurized milk by making it widely available to them at loss-making prices, putting to bed fears that it was an inferior product through easy access and familiarity.
Testing AI’s GeoGuessr genius and highlights from the comments.

You can find the benchmarks for different LLMs here: GeoBench

o3 got it right: this is Tianducheng, China.
Alexander goes west (A Silly Counterfactual).

Alexander’s soldiers expect to be paid and they expect to be paid in silver coins. Alexander was already substantially in debt when he took the throne (Philip II’s conquest of Greece was expensive), so he needs conquest to pay and he needs it to pay in silver. And here he has a problem because in the 330s and 320s, the Romans barely use coinage at all, and what physical ‘money’ they have is mostly in bronze.
The rise & fall of Australian nationalism.
Apple turnover.

“Don’t try to make money. Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow. Folks in the C-suite will try to tell you that these two goals are perfectly aligned—that making great products is part of being a profitable company. But they mean it in the same way that Frosted Flakes is part of a complete breakfast.”

Apple, as embodied by its leadership’s decisions over the past decade or more, no longer seems primarily motivated by the creation of great products. Time and time again, its policies have made its products worse for customers in exchange for more power, control, and, yes, money for Apple.
Book Review: Cambridge Latin course unit 1.

Like Ridley Scott’s execrable Napoleon movie (or any number of novels I won’t name here), a good idea executed poorly is often worse than never doing it at all — because now no one else can do it.
Spanish neutrality during WW2.

Spain’s monthly fuel demand of fifty thousand tons could be supplied in just ten tanker ships. When two tankers bound for Santander and Bilbao were detained in the port of Houston, the effect on the Spanish fuel stock was immediate and substantial. The American “embargo” which was more a slowdown than a total blockade terrified Francoist officials. U.S. companies supplied Spain’s entire oil supply, and domestic stocks covered no more than one month, after which the transport system, the fishing fleet, and agricultural production would grind to a halt.
Brain freeze.

So I prepared a sample for an electron micrograph. What I saw devastated me. The brain was shredded. Not only were the synapses ruined, the entire structure was riddled with holes.
Ashkenazi Nazis & the founding of Israel.

Herzl was LARPing as a Prussian noble. He loved Wagner, duelling, and German culture. He feared that this vulgar “Yid” would make his assimilation into this culture impossible. No matter how un-Jewish or un-Yiddish he became, Germans would always associate him with Eastern Jews. The only way to remove the stigma of this association was to remove the Yid from Europe. A Jewish state would quarantine Eastern Jews from their Western brethren, and anti-semitism would disappear with the disappearance of that which provoked it (i.e., the Yid). In other words, Zionism would eliminate the last barrier to Jewish assimilation.
Britain arrests > 1000 people a month for online posting.

Mar & Apr '25

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Conquest of the Incas.

They stood around awkwardly a bit more, and then De Soto, the allegedly superior diplomat, noticed that Emperor Atahualpa seemed to be purposefully avoiding looking at their horses despite how mind-blowing they must have been. So De Soto decided to get his attention by making his horse rear back on its hind legs and stomp on the ground with a great snort. Amazingly, Atahualpa didn’t budge nor look at the horse, but a bunch of his royal bodyguards freaked out and ran away. Later that day, they would all be put to death by the Emperor for cowardice.
Middle-aged man trading cards go viral in rural Japan town.

“We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” […] “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”

Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
Fish switch frequencies to avoid signal jamming each other while navigating.
This Russian tech bro helped steal $93 Million and landed in US prison. Then Putin called.
Why America prefers a weak and peaceful Europe.

NATO has pushed member states (minus America) to specialize their militaries. The United Kingdom and France have even discussed sharing their aircraft carriers. The stated reasons, namely, budget constraints and “interoperability,” do not fully explain the need to specialize a military. Limited budgets only call for a country to specialize its military when the goal is to reduce capabilities that are duplicated between it and an ally. A specialized military is a force without all the features necessary for independent military action—or indeed military independence. The effect of NATO pushing its members to specialize is that they become more dependent not only on each other but also, ultimately, on the United States.
A walk down Victoria Street.
Cops in American cities make more than the CEOs of the biggest European companies.
Age of Invention: How coal really won.
Wang Yongli on U.S. dollar hegemony and digital RMB.

Although many still nostalgically call for the restoration of the Bretton Woods system or propose versions like Bretton Woods 2.0 or 3.0, the original system was essentially a partial revival of the gold standard. Given the limited supply of gold, it could never keep pace with the growing value of global tradable wealth, making its long-term sustainability impossible. The collapse of the Bretton Woods system was inevitable.

The Earth’s reserves of precious metals like gold and silver are limited. The amount that can be supplied as currency is even more restricted. However, in theory, the value of global tradable wealth is infinite: besides natural and physical goods, there are also many artworks and virtual assets like Bitcoin. If the currency supply cannot keep up, exchange and transactions will be severely restricted; the development of the economic society, especially globalisation, will stagnate; it will even exacerbate conflicts, causing greater shocks.
Manufacturing share vs GDP.
Why markets crash faster than they rise.
Youth and what happens when it’s gone.
Men watch women’s sports more than women do.
Electronic voting in Belgium.

In a 2003 Belgian election, the Communist candidate got 4096 extra votes; investigators suspect a cosmic ray flipped a bit in the voting machine.
The right amount of randomness.

The better you get in any one domain, the more you have implicit mental models that guide the way you think about it. Especially in fields that change fast, these mental models drift away from reality, and suddenly they end up being actively misleading—a great deal of money was made in software by realizing that software was a product, not an add-on, and then by realizing that it didn’t have to come in the form of a CD and could be accessed by a browser, and then from realizing that a server did not have to be a specific box in a closet but instead could be an abstraction, at least from the user’s perspective. These shifts are hard to spot when you’ve only been through one cycle, but if you don’t develop the ability to spot them, it’s hard to thrive through multiple cycles.
The colors of her coat.

Jan & Feb '25

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The case for colonialism.

“Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.” In Borneo, the Sultan of Brunei installed an English traveler James Brooke, as the rajah of his chaotic province of Sarawak in 1841. Order and prosperity expanded to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established in 1888, the Sultan preferred to leave it under Brooke family control until 1946.
Pregnancy length effects.

Every week of gestation was significantly associated with increased IQ, but the strongest association was observed in the very preterm range, before 32 weeks gestation.

At 37 weeks, 10.5% of babies later failed to meet a mathematics benchmark, versus 9.3% for week 38, 8.3% for week 39, 7.7% for week 40, and 7.6% or week 41.
How to stop worrying and love Lynn’s national IQ estimates.

For example, people with Down’s Syndrome may have trouble speaking, or speak abnormally. But this is primarily because Down Syndrome affects hearing (through ear structure abnormalities) and speech production (through tongue/mouth/chest abnormalities). The cognitive issues are only responsible for a small part of the deficit.
Musings about the past/present/future of sarcopenia therapeutics.

Parahiba (2020): The initially significant effect size of testosterone treatment on handgrip strength (+1.58 kgf [0.17, 3.0]) dropped to a non-significant +0.43 kgf [-2.05, 2.90] after excluding low- to mid-quality studies.
Plastic List.

The results were striking – food that spent 45 minutes in the takeout containers showed 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals overall compared to the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant. The increase wasn’t uniform across all chemical types: phthalate substitutes showed the biggest jump at 40%, while phthalates increased by a more modest 15%.
What the ‘year of democracy’ taught us.
Building a calculator app from scratch.
Book Review: Imperial China.

Roughly half of the Khitan aristocracy, including the royal clan, immediately adopted Chinese customs, moved to the city, and began building a bureaucracy. The other half, including the clan that Khitan kings traditionally picked their wives from, stayed in the steppe and had nothing to do with any of this. They then established two governments, two sets of laws, two taxation regimes, two writing systems, two of everything. One was civilized, the other was barbarian.
Creating a highly-integrated open-source laptop from scratch.

Nov & Dec '24

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The most controversial Nobel prize in recent memory.

In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a powerful sense of external threat. Some fear invasion; others worry about being cut off from a vital economic input, such as energy, food, and investment capital. Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by China, as was Israel’s after the Arab states began to unite around it. These two countries needed to build high-tech defense industries at home and earn money to purchase advanced weapons systems produced abroad.

How did such a demonstrably incorrect thesis win the Nobel Prize? In part, I suspect, because it tells the story that many educated Westerners want to hear about democracy. We want to live in a world where democracy cures all. But if democratic nations overpromise what democracy can achieve, they risk delegitimizing it.
Notes on Trinidad and Tobago.
Concubines:The key to dynastic China’s success.

It’s not uncommon for friends to gift each other concubines when their bro is looking particularly down. If three noblemen tell you that they’ve had five, eleven, and nine concubines each respectively, that doesn’t mean there were actually 25 unique women involved.

Sep & Oct '24

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Political rational behind sibling marriage in ancient Egypt.

Royal princesses were off limits for elite Egyptians, and thus none of them had a special claim to the throne, superior to that of other members of the upper class, and even remotely comparable to that of the sons of the previous pharaoh. At the same time, the lack of royal dowries to be paid and the fact that fewer inheritances had to be divided meant the crown was always vastly wealthier than anybody else.
Reflections on Palantir
Nakamoto Satoshi = Central Intelligence?
Jensen’s Inequality as an intuition tool.
The myth that the fed sets rates.

The truth, though, is that the Fed sets only one interest rate, the Fed Funds rate, and that none of the rates that we face in our lives, either as consumers (on mortgages, credit cards or fixed deposits) or businesses (business loans and bonds), are set by or even indexed to the Fed Funds Rate.

In fact, in the quarters after the Fed Funds rate increases, US treasury rates (short and long term) are more likely to decrease than increase, and the median change in rates is negative. In contrast, in the periods after the Fed Fund decreases, treasury rates are more likely to increase than decrease, and post small median increases.
Why Britain has stagnated.

But the reforms of the late 1940s, largely under Clement Attlee’s governments, caused Britain to grow more slowly than any other major European country and the US until the mid-1980s. Britain was overtaken by Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Italy and Switzerland.

In 2005 Britain’s GDP per capita was just 2.8 percent behind Germany’s, in purchasing power parity terms, and fully 20 percent higher in US dollar terms, according to the World Bank. Penn World Tables, the other major source, have the UK overtaking Germany on GDP per capita in the mid-2000s.
This Russian family lived alone in the Siberian wilderness for 40 years, unaware of WWII or the Moon landing.
Weaponized mediocrity in western politicians.

They’re all focus-grouped to the gills. Everything they say is a tiresome rehearsal of things you’ve heard a million times before. From Angela Merkel to Tony Blair to Barack Obama, none of them ever come out with anything original. Occasionally, a new buzz phrase will enter the political lexicon and they’ll all start repeating it within days of each other, like a human botnet. They’re over-practised and deeply generic, like a bunch of D-list actors in a tiresome made-for-TV drama reading lines that somebody else wrote.

A major reason for the intense personal popularity that many populist, anti-establishment political figures enjoy – from Nigel Farage to Alice Weidel to Donald Trump – is simply their deviation from these grey and dystopian tendencies. They say new, original things and they seem to have real personalities. Even if you don’t like them, even if you’ll never vote for them, it’s such a relief to encounter any sentient being at all in this desert world.
On Armenia.
Highlights from the comments on Nietzsche.

Something that’s always puzzled me a bit is girl-power pop-feminism. They’ve internalized a lot of Randian/Nietzschean/master-morality ideas (be strong/powerful, don’t apologize for who you are, make time for yourself, don’t make yourself smaller to make other people feel better, etc.). And yet their ideal doesn’t look very much like Dagny Taggart. Instead of building rocket trains to Mars out of magic green metal that cures cancer or whatever, it seems like the idealized girl-boss is just leading a few Zoom meetings and then going home to do yoga and meditate on how liberated she is.
Spanish plan for the conquest of China.

Jul & Aug '24

Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

OpenAI expands lobbying team to influence regulation.
Ownership of the firms producing raw materials.

73% of all cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 69% of rare earth elements are mined in China, and half of the global nickel supply is mined in Indonesia.
A century ago, insurances didn’t cover earthquake damage.

98% of losses were attributed to fires rather than the earthquake, and many of those fires were set by building owners after the earthquake, because, like today, most insurance covered fire damage but not earthquake damage. Word spread throughout the city that fires were covered by insurance and people started burning down their properties. Fires raged on for 3 days.
Incentives for Olympic medalists by country.
The marshmallow test does not reliably predict adult functioning.
Matt Yglesias considered as the Nietzschean Superman.
Palmer Luckey, American Vulcan.
When the mismanagerial class destroys great companies.
Book Review: How the War Was Won.

The Allies won the war by using air power to destroy the German and Japanese capacity both to produce military equipment and to transport it to the battlefield.

The amount of concrete devoted just to protecting Hitler personally from air attack was almost a third of the entire total for fortifications on the Eastern Front.

The V-2 program cost the Germans proportionally as much as the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project. According to O’Brien, the design and construction of V-2 rockets cost as much as all German AFV construction between 1939 and 1945.

For example, one very successful initiative was the aerial mining of Japanese ports. The mining didn’t start until March 1945, but it still sank more tonnage than U.S. submarines did in the entire war.

Early in the war, aircraft were delivered to forward operating bases by aircraft carriers, limiting the ability of pilots to get lost. Once the American Navy had driven Japanese carriers from the scene, Japanese pilots had to make several over water hops to fly from the home islands to forward bases. Shocking numbers were lost along the way—up to 50%.

By 1945, the Japanese economy was so desperate for fuel that the government set up more than 34,000 small stills in the home islands to distill the oil from pine needles into aviation fuel.

May & Jun '24

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Fifty late bloomers.
Women outperform men in ultradistance swimming.
A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it?
How to build 300,000 Airplanes in five years.

Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 325,000 airplanes valued at roughly $46 billion ($800 billion in 2024 dollars). Not only is this more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during the war — it’s also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation.

As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into remote Pacific island airstrips, parked in a vacant clearing, and abandoned. Many such aircraft “boneyards” were later used for target practice by U.S. bombers on training missions. Scrapped airplanes were bulldozed into pits, and the wreckage compacted by running tanks over them. Marginally damaged carrier planes were pushed off the flight decks into the sea, and new replacement units flown in from escort carriers. This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all.
Can SO2 reverse global warming?

One balloon releasing SO2 in the stratosphere is the equivalent of 38,636 fully-grown trees that last for a year.
The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right.
Baby simulators increase teen pregnancy rates.
The plastic chemicals hiding in your food.
The outside is much more brighter than you think it is.
Taking Risk.
Why did supersonic airliners fail?
The evolutionary mystery of the German cockroach.
Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to incite fear of Chinese vaccines.
No evidence sperm counts are dropping.

Mar & Apr '24

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Exposure to poor people weakens support for redistribution among the rich.
Kolmogorov-Arnold networks.

While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes (“neurons”), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges (“weights”). KANs have no linear weights at all – every weight parameter is replaced by a univariate function parametrized as a spline. We show that this seemingly simple change makes KANs outperform MLPs in terms of accuracy and interpretability. For accuracy, much smaller KANs can achieve comparable or better accuracy than much larger MLPs in data fitting and PDE solving.
Do ten times as much.
Notes on El Salvador.
Notes on Azerbaijan.
A strong US dollar weighs on the world.

High Fed rates, a response to stubborn inflation, mean that American assets offer better returns than much of the world, and investors need dollars to buy them.
What if the Fed rate hikes are actually sparking US economic boom?

This is, the contrarians argue, because the jump in benchmark rates from 0% to over 5% is providing Americans with a significant stream of income from their bond investments and savings accounts for the first time in two decades. These people and companies are in turn spending a big enough chunk of that new-found cash, the theory goes, to drive up demand and goose growth.
Fertility roundup #3

Fertility rate drops from 2015-2023:
China: 1.75 -> 1.05
South Korea: 1.24 -> .73
Singapore airlines concorde.
Video: The scale of black holes.
Reddit IPO’s winners and losers.
The academic performance and mental wellbeing of World Cup babies.

South Korean students born approximately ten months after the World Cup tend to perform significantly worse in school. Moreover, our results uncover a hitherto overlooked aspect: the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.
Memories are made by breaking DNA and fixing it.
Rootclaim’s $100,000 COVID lab leak debate.

It’s hard to watch the videos and not come away impressed. Peter seems to have a photographic memory for every detail of every study he’s ever read. He has some kind of 3D model in his brain of Wuhan, the wet market, and how all of its ventilation ducts and drains interacted with each other. Whenever someone challenged one of his points, he had a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation already made up to address that particular challenge, and would go over it with complete fluency, like he was reciting a memorized speech.
Lavender: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
LMSYS chatbot arena leaderboard.
As caste vanishes only genes remain.

Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils.
How NPR lost America’s trust.
Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs.
Minicircle follistatin gene therapy: how legit is it?

An AAV gene therapy containing the follistatin 344 isotype injected into macaque monkeys resulted in durable increases in muscle size (25% increase in quadriceps diameter at 20 weeks) along with thicker muscle fibers and greater force generation. Over the next 15 months, the animals showed no abnormal blood work, tissue morphology, or changes in sperm quality or menstruation.
Value capture.
King Hochschild’s hoax.

Most memorably for readers, Hochschild reprints staged photographs taken by the English missionary Alice Seeley Harris and supplied to the anti-Léopold campaign through the English missionary John Weeks. The missionaries knew that showing these fake photos at “lantern shows” in community halls in Britain won more attention and donations than their detailed accounts of cannibalism and sleeping sickness ravaging their areas. Hochschild does not tell the reader that the photographs are staged, nor does he explain that the photographs of people with severed hands were victims of gangrene, tribal vendettas, or cannibalism having nothing to do with rubber.

Jan & Feb '24

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology.

It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception.
Surprising things I’ve learnt from @OurWorldInData.

Fertility rates in China and Taiwan have reduced at similar rates over the past 50 years, suggesting that China’s one-child policy didn’t have a significant effect on curbing its population growth.

Polio used to affect few people because bad hygiene caused babies to be already exposed to the virus when they could still benefit from their mother’s immunity. Thus, ironically, it was improved sanitation that caused polio to kill many people in the early 20th century!
A history of US Steel.

In the short term, taking risks is what kills institutions. In the long run, though, it’s avoiding them that’s the problem.
Science needs sovereigns.

In the aftermath of World War II, American officials in the State Department and the CIA wanted to undermine the dominance of pro-Soviet communists in the Western highbrow cultural scene. To do this, they planned to promote artists and intellectuals who were either anti-Soviet or at least not especially sympathetic to the Soviets. They considered abstract expressionist painting, which was then a new and obscure movement, a promising candidate.

In 1946, the State Department organized an international exhibition of abstract painting called “Advancing American Art.” It was so poorly received that the tour was canceled and the paintings were sold off for next to nothing. Undeterred, the CIA continued to arrange international exhibitions for abstract expressionists under a front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Eventually, the movement caught on.
What will be left of Gaza when the war ends?
Europe’s political stupor.

For the German voter has basically no say over his country’s fate. Sure, he may cast a vote in an election for parliament. But in the end, the same centrist parties seem to hold a majority in parliament, the same centrist parties form a coalition government, and the same party leaders remain in charge, making policy mostly through backroom deals rubber-stamped by the parliament. Besides relatively minor policy tweaks, the elections don’t seem to matter much.
Recognizing Somaliland.
Marshmellow tests and SF’s homelessness problem.

The ones who overachieve the most are those who devise the most effective ways to manipulate their own psychology into jumping through ever more inane hoops, no matter the test that’s put in front of them.
Autism diagnoses are rising.

it appears 26% of the increased rate in autism is due to reclassifying people previously diagnosed with “MR”, that is, mental retardation (very low intelligence), or “special education” (meaning about the same). No one wants to be told their child is retarded or needs to go to special education (loser/weirdo school).
Income inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media.

Women post sexier pictures of themselves on Instagram in areas of greater income inequality. This is because these areas have fewer high status men to date or marry, thus greater intrasexual competition. All else being equal, for every one standard deviation increase in income inequality in a city, the number of sexy selfies goes up by 31-34%.
300 years of French history in Rambouillet.
Book review: The education of Cyrus.

“He did not run from being defeated into the refuge of not doing that in which he had been defeated.” Cyrus learned to love the feeling of failure, because failure means you’re facing a worthy challenge, failure means you haven’t set your sights too low, failure means you’ve encountered a stone hard enough to sharpen your own edge. Yes, it’s the exact opposite of the curse of the child prodigy, and it’s the key to Cyrus’s success. He doesn’t flee failure, he seeks it out, hungers for it, rushes towards it again and again, becoming a little scarier every time. He’s found a cognitive meta-tool, one of those secrets of the universe which, if you can actually internalize them, make you better at everything. Failure feels good to him rather than bad, is it any surprise he goes on to conquer the world?

But in the real world, the most important skills are not solving a quadratic by completing the square or whatever, the most important skills are: recognizing whether it’s possible to solve a given problem, recognizing whether solving it is worthwhile, figuring out who can help you with the task, and figuring out which tools can be brought to bear on it. The all-important meta-skills are not only left undeveloped by textbook problems, they’re actively sabotaged and undermined. This is why so many people who got straight As in school never amount to anything.

Cyrus wants to know how to attract followers and keep their loyalty, and his father gives him a very good answer which is: just be great. Be the best at what you do. Be phenomenally effective at everything. People aren’t stupid, they want to follow a winner, so be the kind of guy who’s going to win over and over again, and if you aren’t that guy, then maybe choose a different career.
Joke from the chinese web.

Xi summons his cabinet and announces that it is time to strike america. he proposes they nuke san francisco.
One official raises his hand and protests “we can’t do that, my eldest son is a undergrad at berkeley.”
Xi sighs and then says they will instead hit new york. another official raises his hand to state that his sister in law lives there and that his wife would murder them all.
This goes on for a bit longer, before xi, exasperated, asks the room: “is there any city in the west where no relevant chinese people live?”
They all look at each other for a moment and decide to nuke guizhou province.
Vesuvius Challenge: How AI deciphered ancient Roman scrolls.
Poland and the demon in democracy.
Things unexpectedly named after people.

MySQL (My Widenius)
Main Street, San Francisco (Charles Main)
Gasoline (John Cassell)

Nov & Dec '23

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution.

Huang was relentlessly bullied. “The way you described Chinese people back then was ‘Chinks’” Huang told me, with no apparent emotion. “We were called that every day.” To get to school, Huang had to cross a rickety pedestrian footbridge over a river. “These swinging bridges, they were very high,” Bays said. “It was old planks, and most of them were missing.” Sometimes, when Huang was crossing the bridge, the local boys would grab the ropes and try to dislodge him. “Somehow it never seemed to affect him,” Bays said. “He just shook it off.” By the end of the school year, Bays told me, Huang was leading those same kids on adventures into the woods.

Malachowsky and Priem were looking to design a graphics chip, which they hoped would make competitors, in Priem’s words, “green with envy.” They called their company NVision, until they learned that the name was taken by a manufacturer of toilet paper. Huang suggested Nvidia, riffing on the Latin word invidia, meaning “envy.”
The curious case of Dmitry Balyasny.
Video: Jeff Bezos rowing boat.
The Knight Capital disaster.
The greenhouse gas footprint of LNG exported from the US.

NOTE: Not peer reviewed yet. Total greenhouse gas emissions from LNG are larger than those from domestically produced coal, ranging from 27% to 2‐fold greater for the average cruise distance of an LNG tanker.

Shale extraction produces methane, which has a vastly stronger greenhouse effect than CO2. Substantial methane leaks occur at every stage of LNG production, storage and transport, and while more modern ships can use the evaporating methane to power their engines during the voyage, it is not enough to outweigh the costs.
The Israeli bombs raining on Gaza.
Appreciation of the Yemeni Rial relative to the USD.

The rebel-controlled Yemeni rial is made up entirely of a fixed supply of notes printed prior to 2016. In the chart below you can see it appreciating in value (the blue line) against the dollar.
Video: How to speed up Pandas in Python by 150x.
Sniffing women’s tears reduces aggressive behavior in men.
A GM bacterium that outcompetes the bacteria that cause tooth decay.

Lantern Bioworks says they have a cure for tooth decay. Their product is a genetically modified bacterium which infects your mouth, outcompetes all the tooth-decay-causing bacteria, and doesn’t cause tooth decay itself. If it works, it could make cavities a thing of the past.
What’s the matter with Bridgewater?
What the Italians did for us.

Early Christian men were far more likely to be secondary converts, someone who joins a religion because a spouse had done so.
Ants recognise infected wounds and treat them.

For treatment, they then apply antimicrobial compounds and proteins to the infected wounds. They take these antibiotics from the metapleural gland, which is located on the side of their thorax. Its secretion contains 112 components, half of which have an antimicrobial or wound-healing effect. And the therapy is highly effective: the mortality rate of infected individuals is reduced by 90 per cent, as the research group discovered.

Sep & Oct '23

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The Irish logarithm.
Why the culture wins: an appreciation of Iain Banks.

Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist has been taken over by the AIs, leaving for humanity nothing but the role of “sensualists without heart.” Thus the chief attraction of the Culture is the promise of non-stop partying and unlimited sex and drugs.
Harriet Taylor is the reason liberalism exists.
Video: I made a 32-bit computer inside terraria.
Cost disease kills.
Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner?
Book review: Power Failure, or why GE failed.
Book review: Cities and the wealth of nations.
Book review: Elon Musk.

Some writers have made much of Elon’s father “owning an emerald mine”. But the mine only cost $50,000, never really produced many emeralds, and closed after a few years - it was a side investment unrelated to the family’s wealth. Rumors that it used “apartheid labor” or produced “blood emeralds” are false: the mine was in Zambia, which had no apartheid or bloody conflicts.

“I had friends who complained that their husbands came home at seven or eight,” [Elon’s first wife] said. “Elon would come home at eleven and work some more. People didn’t always get the sacrifice he made in order to be where he was.

What’s really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I’ve met a lot of super super smart people but they’re usually super super smart on one thing and he’s able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he’ll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he’ll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does.
Fewer losers or more winners?

Dave told me that, in his 14 years in the job, the fund’s equity return had never ranked above the 27th percentile of the pension fund universe or below the 47th percentile. And where did those solidly second-quartile annual returns place the fund for the 14 years overall? Fourth percentile!

The only thing that matters is whether you bought any of the ten that defaulted. In other words, bond investors improve their performance not through what they buy, but through what they exclude – not by finding winners, but by avoiding losers.
Fertility roundup #2.
How historians lie.
Investigating the nord stream attack.

But the perception among investigators is that the will to solve the case is not particularly pronounced in the capital. Politically, it is easier to live with what happened if it remains unclear who is behind the attacks. The process is not being hindered, but neither is there much support from the overarching government ministries. Meanwhile, it is clear to career-oriented ministry officials that there is no glory to be had with this case.

International investigators and agents also say that all the intelligence has been pointing in one direction: towards Kyiv. At least those who are familiar with the evidence and clues.
How fast China’s birth rate is falling!
15 ideas, frameworks, and lessons from 15 years.
Israel is no longer Britain’s war.

Palestine could just as easily be a Right-wing cause, a cautionary tale about the perils of mass immigration. The root of the Palestinian tragedy was, after all, the influx of Jewish migrants, many of them desperate refugees, which altered the country’s demographic balance irrevocably, and of which the establishment of the Jewish state was the natural historical result. Such a reading would easily lend itself to conservative fears over unchecked immigration, and as demographic anxieties become the central driver of European political discontent, younger rightists could well, like the Nouvelle Droite of the Seventies, find themselves making sympathetic analogies with the Palestinian predicament.
Is the Israel-Palestine conflict a case of “eye for an eye”?
On a lack of ambition.

Jul & Aug '23

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Should you cut your loses early, and let your profits run?
Book review: The laws of trading.

Bell Labs developed a syllabus of graduate-level courses and taught it to any interested employee. They didn’t outsource the curriculum or the teaching.

If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.
Economists use a gravity model to find ancient lost cities.
Napoleon was the best general ever and the math proves it.
Taped conversations among German nuclear physicists after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

HEISENBERG: I don’t believe a word of the whole thing. They must have spent the whole of their £500,000,000 in separating isotopes; and then it’s possible.

WEIZSÄCKER: If it’s easy and the Allies know it’s easy, then they know that we will soon find out how to do it if we go on working.

HAHN: I didn’t think it would be possible for another twenty years.

…

HEISENBERG: We wouldn’t have had the moral courage to recommend to the Government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up.

WEIZSÄCKER: I believe the reason we didn’t do it was because all the physicists didn’t want to do it, on principle. If we had all wanted Germany to win the war we would have succeeded.

HAHN: I don’t believe that but I am thankful we didn’t succeed.

…

WEIZSÄCKER: If we had started this business soon enough we could have got somewhere. If they were able to complete it in the summer of 1945, we might have had the luck to complete it in the winter 1944/45.

…

HEISENBERG: Yes. (Pause) About a year ago, I heard from SEGNER (?) from the Foreign Office that the Americans had threatened to drop a uranium bomb on Dresden if we didn’t surrender soon. At that time I was asked whether I thought it possible, and, with complete conviction, I replied: ‘No’.

WIRTZ: I think it characteristic that the Germans made the discovery and didn’t use it, whereas the Americans have used it. I must say I didn’t think the Americans would dare to use it.
Australia’s ‘worst female serial killer’ freed after her children’s deadly gene mutations come to light.
Moriori genocide.

Younger members argued that the Moriori could fight back as they outnumbered Māori two-to-one. Elders, however, argued Nunuku’s Law should not be broken. Despite knowing Māori were not pacifist, Moriori ultimately decided to stay pacifist against the invaders, describing Nunuku’s Law as “a moral imperative”… The invaders killed around 10% of the population in a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days… the Māori invaders forbade the speaking of the Moriori language. They forced Moriori to desecrate sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori or Māori or to have children.
Our explosive past.

One of the most shocking results of a 2008 paper that sequenced several men from South Africa, including the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is that any two San Bushmen had more differences across their three billion DNA bases than a European has from an Asian.
Explaining Y Combinator.

In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. Having to hit a growth number every week forces founders to act, and acting versus not acting is the high bit of succeeding. Nine times out of ten, sitting around strategizing is just a form of procrastination.
Skill vs luck in games.

We find that poker contains about as much skill as chess when 75% of the chess results are replaced by a coin flip. Furthermore, the amount of skill we find in poker is comparable to that of a deterministic game when 85% of the results are replaced by chance.
$125K/year starting pay for a car wash manager in the US.
Britain is a developing country.

Americans could stop working each year on September 22nd and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year.

If the UK continues with the same rate of growth it has enjoyed over the last decade, then Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time.
What happened when Oregon decriminalised hard drugs.

In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.

The state audit found that, during its first 15 months in operation, the treatment-referral hotline received just 119 calls, at a cost to the state of $7,000 per call.
Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall.

Crinkle crankle walls resist horizontal forces, like wind, more than straight wall would. So if the alternative to a crinkle crankle wall one-brick thick is a straight wall two or more bricks thick, the former saves material.
The Covid lab-leak deception.

On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions.
Dictator book club: Putin.

Mrs Putin recalls how she got proposed: “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says ’ Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.”

Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne know little more about him than you do. Berezovsky told me he never considered Putin a friend and never found him interesting as a person … but when he considered Putin as a successor to Yeltsin, he seemed to assume that the very qualities that had kept them at arm’s length would make Putin an ideal candidate. Putin, being apparently devoid of personality and personal interest, would be both malleable and disciplined.
David Garrow on Obama.
Ketamine: WD-40 for the brain?
Ancestral Europeans and their meaning.

In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had suggested that Europeans were dark until relatively recently, because pale skin would only have become advantageous when people adopted agriculture. Hunter-gatherers enjoyed a high protein diet, but after the switch to cereals rickets would have become a serious problem, and so mutations for fair skin – which absorbs Vitamin D from sunlight more efficiently – would have spread quickly.

Interestingly, they suggested that this would have happened far quicker than we have traditionally imagined, because the advantage was enormous. As they wrote, ‘If it is indeed that recent, it must have had a huge selective advantage, perhaps as high as 20 per cent. It would have spread so rapidly that, over a long lifetime, a farmer could have noticed the change in appearance in his village.’
Book review: The mind of a bee.

The waggle dance is a line dance performed by honey bees - an individual bee discovers a food source, and boy, is she excited (the vast majority of bees are female). She arrives back in the hive, and begins ferociously waggling while running in a line, then does a semicircular loop and starts the dance again. The angle that the bee runs in relation to the vertical is the angle that the food source is relative to the sun. If a bee runs straight upwards, the food source is in the direction of the sun. The distance the bee runs is proportional to the distance to the food source.

As you may have surmised at some point, the sun moves. The dancers factor this in, and as they spend longer performing the dance, they change the angle of their dance in order to factor in the movement of the sun. And if the sun is behind a cloud? Bees are sensitive to polarised light, and can infer the location of the sun from this light.
Chinese youth unemployment rate might be around 45%.
Dell’s capital expertise.
How Air Canada pilots glided their plane to safety after it was filled with insufficient fuel.

Pearson and Quintal had determined the fuel weight by multiplying the the number of dripsticked liters by 1.77, as indicated by the documentation. However, unbeknownst to the pilots and the fuel crew, this multiplier provided the weight in imperial pounds; the new, all-metric 767 was based on kilograms, and required a multiplier of 0.8. As a consequence of this documentation disconnect, Flight 143 had left Montreal with roughly half the necessary fuel.

May & Jun '23

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lessons from ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert Caro.

If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, “Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.” Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say—and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as Representative and Senator for twenty-five years—Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t understand, would refuse to understand. He would “charm you or knock your block off, or bribe you or threaten you, anything to get your vote,” Jackson would say. He would do anything he had to, to get that vote. “And he’d get it. That was the difference.
Herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases.
Education and intelligence.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.
IQs of Nazi leaders.

Among the 21 individuals tested, the average was 128 – just under 2 standard deviations above the mean. Interestingly, the highest score of 143 was attained by Hjalmar Schacht, an economist who helped spur Germany’s “economic miracle” but who resigned his post in 1939 and was later arrested by the Gestapo. Schacht was acquitted of all charges at Nuremberg.
Does therapy really work?

Pim Cuijpers, a professor of clinical psychology at Vrije University in Amsterdam, co-wrote a 2021 meta-analysis confirming that therapy was effective in treating depression compared with controls, but he also found that more than half of the patients receiving therapy had little or no benefit and that only a third entered “remission” (meaning their symptoms lessened enough that they no longer met the study’s criteria for depression).

A blunter assessment of short-term therapies appears in a 2022 paper published by Falk Leichsenring and Christiane Steinert, psychotherapists and researchers affiliated with universities in Germany, who surveyed studies comprising some 650,000 patients suffering from a broad range of mental illnesses. “After more than half a century of research” and “millions of invested funds,” they wrote, the impact that therapy (and medication, for that matter) had on patients’ symptoms was “limited.”
Turkey at the crossroads?
Britain is dead.
Sex differences in the developmental trajectories of impulse control and sensation-seeking.

A male does not acquire the impulse control level of a 10 year-old female until around the age of 25.
Origin of sex-biased mental disorders.
The US Air Force is moving fast on AI-piloted fighter jets.
On the reign of Cleopatra.
Notes on Nigeria.

Abacha’s “so dumb it might work” scheme was to send somebody to the office that held the official records of Babangida’s decrees and backdate his resignation by 24 hours, thus negating all of his other decrees, including his transfer of power to the new president.

Abacha sent the agent, changed the paperwork, and then went to a radio station to announce that Nigeria technically didn’t have a leader. After all, Babangida had resigned before transferring power. Check the paperwork if you don’t believe him. Since Nigeria can’t fall to anarchy, Abacha announced that he was taking control of the country. Indefinitely.

In the 1970s, as Nigeria began to rake in oil money, the government greatly expanded the military’s budget. Unsure exactly what to do with all this money, generals began making sizable cement orders. In one year, the Ministry of Defense officially needed 2.5 million tons of cement; individual generals cumulatively ordered over 16 million tons, with virtually all of the purchases containing huge kickbacks between the cement companies and the generals. By April 1975, there was a backup of 105 ships (mostly carrying cement) in the Lagos harbor. Two months later, there was a line of 455 ships covering 50 miles. Every single ship charged fees to the Nigerian government for making them wait. The “Cement Armada” had enough cement to rebuild Lagos three times.
Chernobyl revisited.

A similar study was conducted in the Iranian city of Ramsar, which has the highest measured background radiation levels in the world at up to 200 times higher than the global average. Researchers found that Ramsar residents actually had lower rates of cancer than the control groups.
Discussion on eugenics.

In 1975, India had a worse-than-usual economic crisis and declared martial law. They asked the World Bank for help. The World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, made support conditional on an increase in sterilizations. India complied.

Force was not only physical in form but also indirect. The government issued circulars stating that promotion and payments to employees were in abeyance until they were sterilized or completed their assigned quota of people they convinced to undergo sterilization. People had to produce a certificate of sterilization to get their salaries or even renew their driving/ rickshaw/scooter/sales tax license. Students whose parents had not undergone a sterilization were detained. Free medical treatment in hospitals was also suspended until a sterilization certificate was shown. Those who suffered the most were people associated with lower classes. These unfortunate people were picked up from railway stations or bus stops by policemen, regardless of their age or marital status. Poor, illiterate people, jail inmates, pavement dwellers, bachelors, young married men, and hospital patients were all victims.

In the end about eight million people were sterilized over the course of two years. No one will ever know how many were “voluntary” by standards that we would be comfortable with, but plausibly well below half.
What if they gave an industrial revolution and nobody came?

Early Newcomen engines consumed ~45 pounds of coal per horsepower-hour; the most efficient engines of the late 1800s used less than one pound
How America took out the Nord stream pipeline.

Back in Washington, planners knew they had to go to Norway. “They hated the Russians, and the Norwegian navy was full of superb sailors and divers who had generations of experience in highly profitable deep-sea oil and gas exploration,” the source said. They also could be trusted to keep the mission secret. (The Norwegians may have had other interests as well. The destruction of Nord Stream—if the Americans could pull it off—would allow Norway to sell vastly more of its own natural gas to Europe.)
Ministers had secret unit to curb lockdown dissent.
Using deep learning to predict ideology from facial photographs.

Women with attractive faces were more likely to be right-wing, while women whose faces showed contempt were more likely to be left-wing.
Understanding the NHS crisis.
Crocodile found to have made herself pregnant.

Dr Booth analysed the foetus and found that it was more than 99.9 % genetically identical to its mother - confirming that it had no father.
US trade with the Indo-Pacific accelerated after the US said no to TPP.

US imports have doubled in dollar terms since the end of 16.
On the Russian war.

Azar Gat is probably right to suggest that the long peace is itself a consequence of the changing incentives created by the industrial revolution and to an even greater extent, by nuclear weapons. Prior to the industrial revolution, war was the best way to get rich (if you won) because land and conquered subjects were so much more valuable than any kind of capital investment (infrastructure, manufacture, tools, etc.) that could have been developed with the same resources. The industrial revolution changes this, both by making war a lot more destructive (thus lowering returns to successful warfare)1 while at the same time massively raising returns to capital investment in things like infrastructure, factories and tractors. It suddenly made more sense, if you coveted your neighbors resources, to build more factories and buy those resources than to try to seize them by force. Nuclear weapons in turn took this same effect and ratcheted it up even further, by effectively making the co

Coup proofing’ of this sort follows a fairly consistent basic model (which I may elaborate on at a later date). First, command needs to be divided so that no one general or minister of defense can turn the whole defense apparatus against the leader. You can see this with how the Russian armed forces were fragmented, with Rosgvardiya and Wagner Group not reporting to the ministry of defense, but it also extends to the structure of the Russian Ministry of Defense, where the Army, the Navy and the Airborne forces (the VDV) all maintain infantry forces. Setting things up that way means that, in a pinch perhaps elite, well-paid and loyal VDV forces could be used to counter-balance grumbling disloyalty in, say, the army. Of course such fragmented command is really bad if you need to launch a conventional war, as, in the event, it was.
Shipping sulpur emissions and unintended consequences.

On January 1st 2020 new shipping regulation came into effect, decreasing the maximum amount of sulfur in shipping fuels from 3.5% to 0.5%. From 2020 we see a rapid increase in the amount of solar radiation that’s being absorbed by the region highlighted above.

Mar & Apr '23

Sun, 30 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Bill Gates has perfected managerial philanthropy.

From 2014 through 2019, the Gates Foundation earned around $28.5 billion in investment income while giving away $23.5 billion in grants over the same time span — a net profit.

But Gates’s largest political donations do not go to candidates themselves; for example, the Gates Foundation donated $456 million dollars to Arabella Advisors, founded by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton White House official. Arabella is a “dark money” group—it spends money to influence elections, but the source of its money is not disclosed to the public. The group raised $1.6 billion in 2021 and spends its money on groups aligned with Democratic Party leadership.
“Together, the Albanians and the Chinese are a quarter of the world’s population”.
The false promise of Chomskyism.
Structural analysis of the economic decline and collapse of the Soviet Union.
Does the entrepreneurial state crowd out entrepreneurship?

By serving as the entrepreneur, Singapore’s entrepreneurial state imposes its vision by assuming the core entrepreneurial values and traits of opportunity recognition, discovery, and action. The entrepreneurial state, at least in the case of Singapore, retards the transition to an entrepreneurial society, which, paradoxically, is the vision of Singapore’s entrepreneurial state.
Why the Afghan security forces collapsed.
How scandal and mistrust ended Credit Suisse’s 166 year run.

What started over a disparaging remark by Khan about Thiam’s garden evolved into a lurid corporate scandal, shattering the company’s reputation for discretion and exposing a culture in which personal vanities outweighed ethical and legal boundaries. A few weeks after the dinner party, Khan was passed over for promotion and then quit in July. When he later accepted a job at UBS, the move caused concern in Credit Suisse’s top ranks that he might poach key personnel. A private security firm was hired to monitor his activities, but was discovered by Khan in an incident that led to a physical altercation.
There are more hedge funds than Burger Kings.

In fact, there are more hedge funds than there are Burger King outlets (over 18,700), employees at the Pentagon (24,000) and words in Animal Farm (assuming no prologue); and nearly as many as there McDonald’s franchises (ca 35,000) and listed stocks globally (about 43,000).
What is the longhouse?

The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother. More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced “The End of Men.” Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: “The future is female.” She was correct.

Think of the litany of violations of our basic rights to personal freedom and choice over the last two years that were justified on the basis of harm reduction. The economy, our dying loved ones, our faith practices, our children’s education, all of it served up on the altar of Safetyism. Think of the Covid Karen: Triple-masked. Quad-boosted. Self-confined for months on end. Hyperventilating in panic as she ventures to the grocery store for the first time in a year. Then scolding the rest of us for wanting to send our kids back to school, and demanding instead that we all abide by her hypochondria, on pain of punishment by the bureaucratic state. This person—who is as often male as female—is the avatar of the Longhouse.

This is not a call to adopt pickup artist buffoonery or the shallow machismo of an Andrew Tate, or any of the myriad pretensions of masculinity that one sees on the right. Such pursuits, even when motivated by a rejection of Longhouse norms, are equally deluded, and diminish one’s higher nature.
The rise and fall of the good British.
The crisis at the heart of the Conservative party.

A government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. A government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. A government that complains about ‘woke-culture’ has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

The Tory party is not driven by some grand policy agenda, but simply grasping at shiny objects. It passes repetitive, unnecessary and ultimately inoffensive laws that criminalise things that are already illegal – like dog theft or assaults on emergency workers. Or else spends its time complaining that the world, the civil service and the blob is against it. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose, now it campaigns and governs in tweets.
How the biggest fraud in German history unravelled.
Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior.

To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent’s experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior.

We demonstrate that, with generative agents, it is sufficient to simply tell one agent that she wants to throw a party. Despite many potential points of failure—the party planner must remember to tell other agents about the party, attendees must remember the invitation, those who remember must decide to actually show up, and other possible points of failure—agents in our environment succeed. They spread the word about the party and then show up, with one agent even asking another agent on a date to the party, all from this single user-generated seed suggestion.
Singapore asks banks to keep quiet on wealth inflows during China boom.

This banker summarised the MAS’s message as being that private banks should “just quietly do your job” because “you don’t want to antagonise”.
How does electricity find the “path of least resistance”?
Who agrees with Hitler?
Fertility and mimetic desire.

There is a town in western Japan named Nagi that’s famous for making babies. Its fertility rate in 2021 was 2.68 lifetime births per woman, compared with 1.3 for Japan as a whole, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal that my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose recently cited. Delegations from elsewhere in Japan and abroad have come to Nagi to learn its secret formula. Is it the free medical care for all children? The affordable child care? The cash gifts to new mothers? I’ve been considering another theory. Maybe people in Nagi are having babies because other people in Nagi are having babies.

Jan & Feb '23

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Hayek and Schmitt on the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy.
Vietnam’s red Napoleon.
How do I draw a pair of buttocks?
Childhoods of exceptional people.

Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.

In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditation on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are never mentioned to adults. I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.
The debt ceiling is scarier this time.

Just how costly [technical default] can be is evident in a 1979 episode when Treasury inadvertently missed payments on Treasury bills maturing that spring. The mishap was caused in part by fallout from a delay in raising the debt limit, but also by problems with word processing equipment the Treasury used at the time to pay investors. Even though investors received their payments with only a small delay, T-bill yields initially jumped by 60 basis points and remained elevated for several months thereafter. The cost to taxpayers was ultimately in the tens of billions of dollars.
Why was Roman concrete so durable?
The censor who ended the Soviet Union.

One day, a year after the war was over, he heard that a train car of returning soldiers was passing through. He limped over to the train station to see if he could greet them. But when the train finally came to the station, it did not stop. As he soon learned, this is because these soldiers were not actually on their way home. Instead, the train contained a few of the nearly two million returning Soviet prisoners of war on their way to Siberian filtration camps—surrender had become a criminal offense during the desperate days of 1941 under Red Army Order 270. Prisoners liberated by the Western Allies were investigated for espionage. From there, many would be deported to the Far East, where they were to toil in the platinum mines of Magadan.

The Secret Speech sparked a crisis of faith among many of the younger cadres, including Yakovlev, and initiated a broader, gradual decay in party discipline that would continue for 40 years. Compared to its mass mobilization during the Stalin era, the party’s ability to embark on great projects and reforms would begin to slowly wither away. In the mind of every would-be hardliner, the question lingered: if even the Central Committee wasn’t safe, then what could happen to me?

In one meeting of the Politburo in 1988, Yakovlev noted that less than 15 percent of the population generally approved of economic and political reforms—half the support of 1986.

Perestroika from the very beginning…was an attempt to execute all the reforms from above, and it was done in the hopes that people would follow the enlightened rulers. All the attempts at reform in Russian history were of similar nature, and probably this is why all of them have resulted in no absolute success.

But common sense is not a useful or visionary tool for reshaping reality—oftentimes, the only lasting solutions to hard problems of social organization are unintuitive, and they might even involve irrational belief in the sovereign, the state, or the divine.
Building a virtual machine inside ChatGPT.
Why didn’t we get the four hour workday?
Politics is not downstream from culture.
How a woman whose muscles disappeared discovered she shared a disease with a muscle-bound Olympic medalist.
Castes and evolutionary stasis.

Most Japanese clam up in horror when the topic is broached, and so most young Japanese know far more about discrimination against blacks in America than about discrimination against burakumin in Japan. Some junior high school students in the town of Omiya, where there are many buraku, looked puzzled when the topic of burakumin came up. “Who are they?” a teen-age girl asked. “I’ve never heard of them.”
Energetic aliens.
Can a human eye see a single photon?

The researchers found that about 90 photons had to enter the eye for a 60% success rate in responding. Since only about 10% of photons arriving at the eye actually reach the retina, this means that about 9 photons were actually required at the receptors. Since the photons would have been spread over about 350 rods, the experimenters were able to conclude statistically that the rods must be responding to single photons, even if the subjects were not able to see such photons when they arrived too infrequently.
How researchers flashed lights at people to improve learning.
Why pessimism sounds smart.
Dealers & Gamblers.
Homo erectus made their ‘last stand’ 100,000 years ago on an Indonesian island.
France’s baby bust.

In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French.

So, the demographic transition took place exceptionally early in France, but why? In my research, I argue that the diminished sway of the Catholic Church, nearly 30 years before the French Revolution, was the key driver of the fertility decline. Since at least Tocqueville, and more recently Emmanuel Todd, we know that a sustained loosening of traditional religious moral constraints took place in the mid-eighteenth century, at a scale and extent that no other country has achieved.
Fertility rate roundup #1.

Economists suggest Korea needs to do more to improve gender equality so that women feel less worried about losing their jobs by having children. High education and housing costs are among other factors putting pressure on fertility, data show.

Wait, what? The solution to raising fertility is to promote gender equality so that women can worry less about losing their jobs? This is obvious nonsense. It does not make sense. Gender equality is a good thing for many reasons. Raising the fertility rate is not one of them. Not all good things go together. Finding out how to get them all at the same time is the problem one must solve, the solution isn’t to pretend they cause each other. Nor is gender equality helpful in making women worry less about losing their jobs.

Nov & Dec '22

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Life of Qian Xuesen.
Iranian man who didn’t wash for half a century dies at 94.

But, local media say, Amou Haji finally succumbed to pressure and washed a few months ago… He became ill shortly afterwards and died on Sunday.
How genes can leap from snakes to frogs in Madagascar.
Why did Vikings appear out of nowhere?

Researchers have suggested that Vikings may have originally started sailing and raiding due to a need to seek out women from foreign lands. Rich and powerful Viking men tended to have many wives and concubines; these polygynous relationships may have led to a shortage of eligible women for the average Viking male. Due to this, the average Viking man could have been forced to perform riskier actions to gain wealth and power to be able to find suitable women. Viking men would often buy or capture women and make them into their wives or concubines.
The mirage of European sovereignty.
What moneyball-for-everything has done to American culture.
The gut microbiome helps social skills develop in the brain.
The leveraged portfolio that has done best since 1871 has a β of 2.28.
China’s last eunuch spills sex secrets.

Sun’s impoverished family set him on this painful, risky path in hopes that he might one day be able to crush a bullying village landlord who stole their fields and burned their house.

His desperate father performed the castration on the bed of their mud-walled home, with no anesthetic and only oil-soaked paper as a bandage. A goose quill was inserted in Sun’s urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed.

He was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months. When he finally rose from his bed, history played the first of a series of cruel tricks on him - he discovered the emperor he hoped to serve had abdicated several weeks earlier.
How coastal west Africa will shape the coming century.
Strong evidence for assortive mating based on blood type.
Are farm antibiotics destroying our health?

Bacteria that we once vilified for their associations with disease, like the gut-dweller Helicobacter pylori—“the only good Helicobacter pylori is a dead Helicobacter pylori,” one scientist wrote in The Lancet in 1997—have been discovered as important in their own right: H. pylori is beneficial for preventing reflux and esophageal cancers.

But it was too late. As Blaser would write in a 1999 dirge for the bacterium, this discovery was made only after H. pylori had virtually disappeared from the microbiomes of children in the developed West. And because these microbiota are passed from generation to generation, whether through birth or breast milk, they are likely to become rarer with time.

By 2017, American cattle producers used about 171 milligrams of antibiotic per kilogram of livestock—four times as much as in France, and six times as much as in the United Kingdom.

It is not surprising that the introduction of antibiotics into an aquatic environment leads to reduced fertility and increased mortality. Lewis believes that antibiotics are responsible for the insect die-offs seen in industrialized countries: the antibiotic rifampin resulted in “prolonged reductions in longevity and fecundity” among two termite species, with similar effects shown with bumblebees’ exposure to antibiotics.
Was the $100Bn Time Warner merger deal the worst ever?
Wolves infected with Toxoplasma gondii were 46 times more likely to become pack leaders.
Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals.
Notes on Saudi Arabia.
Male athletes do cry more (when they win) in countries with larger female labor force participation rates.
Economics research is mostly untrustworthy because economists cheat so much with the statistics.
Fortuna favoured Boris Johnson until she changed her mind.

But for Machiavelli, the successful politician took Fortuna’s fickleness as an invitation to be bold. ‘It is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman,’ he wrote in a now-jarring passage, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly.’

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Johnson’s political career, and the turn of events ensuring he won’t be remembered except as a comedy turn, is that he survived. Had the prime minister died of Covid in April 2020, he would almost certainly be remembered as one of the greats, a man who might have reached Churchillian levels but fell steering the democracy through its greatest emergency since the war.

Of course, Johnson hadn’t wished for that, any more than any of us would; because what is historical greatness when you can enjoy the moment here on earth, and avoid dying a horrible death? What does it all matter, really, history? Deep down, I wonder if all Johnson’s classicism, the obsession with history and Fortuna and fate, was all just a LARP.
India’s 3000 year caste strait-jacket.

South Asians have about 3-5% more genetic variants per genome than Han Chinese, while Africans have some 20% more variants per genome than either group.

Despite being in the same state and speaking the same language, and believing in the same Hindu religion, the genetic difference between Dalits and upper castes in Uttar Pradesh is like that between nationalities within Europe or Chinese from the far north vs. far south. In contrast, the distance between Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh and Brahmins in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India, is 0.0002. In other words, Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh are more than 10x genetically closer to Brahmins in a state more than 1,300 miles away than they are to Chamars also right there in Uttar Pradesh.
Bacteria from an Olympic weightlifter’s poop improves muscle mass and physical function (in mice).
The yard-sale model and how taxation redistributes wealth.
Attractiveness relative to leg-torso ratio.
Martin Shkreli’s advice to SBF on prison culture.
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill.
Book review: Wang Fanxi’s Mao Zedong Thought.

In fact, Mao knew little about Marxism beyond its rudimentary principles at that point in his life. It was only in the late 1930s that he began to study Marxist literature properly. This was in the context of his rivalry with Stalin’s puppet Wang Ming, who used the authority of Moscow and Marxist terminology to attack Mao. According to Wang Fanxi, it was Confucian teachings and classical Chinese literature rather than Marxism that inspired Mao throughout his life. s As Chen Yuan, former chairman of the China Development Bank, once remarked: “We are the Communist Party and we will decide what communism means.”
Grade inflation in Harvard.

In 1950, when Harvey Mansfield was but a freshman at Harvard, the average GPA was estimated at 2.55. Now, it’s much closer to 3.80.
IQ scores can be increased by education but IQ increases do not represent an intelligence increase.

Sep & Oct '22

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

An introduction to current theories of consciousness.
Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US.

It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who can’t name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November.
80% of the French earn less than €3k a month.
Lost prison interview with Hermann Goering.

I believe Hitler was convinced that as a result of the Japanese attack, the main brunt of the United States force would be brought to bear on the Far East and would not constitute such a danger for Germany. Although he never expressed it in words, it was perhaps inexpressibly bitter to him that the main force of the United States was in fact turned against Europe.

Lack of shipping had prevented us from invading England, but, before the difficulties with Russia, we could have carried out the Gibraltar Plan, with 20 divisions in West Africa, 10 in North Africa and 20 against the Suez Canal, still leaving 100 divisions in France. The entire Italian army, which was unfit for a major war, could have been used for occupation forces. The loss of Gibraltar might have induced England to sue for peace. Failure to carry out the plan was one of the major mistakes of the war.
Why is China so obsessed with food security?
The grandchildren of China’s pre-revolutionary elite are unusually rich.
Born without a left temporal lobe.
Why was the second atomic bomb (on Nagasaki) dropped so soon after the first?
A method to soothe and promote sleep in crying infants.
English’s formal version of ‘you’ was actually ‘you’ and its informal - ‘thou’.
How mathematics changed me.
The despotism of Isaias Afewerki.
How modernity swallowed Islamism.

In this respect, Islamist parties, despite their “moderation” or perhaps because of it, fell into the old populist trap of defining themselves in opposition to something real but failing to articulate a distinctive vision of what the state could be. The rest of us, as observers, may judge that this was for the best: If they didn’t know what they wanted, they would not succeed in altering the state and its foundations. For Islamists, however, this lack of vision would prove to be their Achilles heel. They would be feared and disliked for who they were, regardless of what—or how little—they did. It was the worst of both worlds. They were different enough to be hated by their opponents, but not different enough to follow through on their promise, however inchoate, of providing a genuine alternative to liberalism and the world liberalism built.
Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations.

In 2020, officers at Facebook and Twitter contacted the Pentagon to raise concerns about the phony accounts they were having to remove, suspicious they were associated with the military. That summer, David Agranovich, Facebook’s director for global threat disruption, spoke to Christopher C. Miller, then assistant director for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, which oversees influence operations policy, warning him that if Facebook could sniff them out, so could U.S. adversaries, several people familiar with the conversation said.

“His point‚” one person said, “was ‘Guys, you got caught. That’s a problem.’ ”
How do fireflies flash in sync?
The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth.

We conservatively estimate 20 × 10¹⁵ (20 quadrillion) ants on Earth, with a total biomass of 12 megatons of dry carbon.
Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching.

When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. This finding holds both for males and females. When instruction moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, the grades of attractive female students deteriorated in non-quantitative subjects. However, the beauty premium persisted for males, suggesting that discrimination is a salient factor in explaining the grade beauty premium for females only.
Sex differences on the progressive matrices.

There is no difference among children aged 6–14 years, but that males obtain higher means from the age of 15 through to old age. Among adults, the male advantage is 0.33d equivalent to 5 IQ points. These results disconfirm the frequent assertion than there are no sex differences on the progressive matrices and support a developmental theory that a male advantage appears from the age of 15 years.
Britain ‘secretly backed’ Mussolini’s march on Rome.
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case.

Parag: You are free to tweet “is Twitter dying?” or anything else about Twitter - but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I’d like to you provide you perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how it hurting our ability to do work. I hope the AMA will help people get to know you, to understand why you believe in Twitter, and to trust you -and I’d like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don’t get distracted, but we aren’t there right now.

Elon: What did you get done this week?

Elon: I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time.

Elon: Will make an offer to take Twitter private.

Parag: Can we talk?
Things that increase female reproductive lifespan.
Universal daycare in Quebec led to much greater aggression and antisocial behavior in boys.
How Brian Eno created “Ambient 1: Music For Airports”.
90% certain that honey works against coughing.
Someone improved my code by 40,832,277,770%.
Mosquito attraction to humans is associated with skin-derived carboxylic acid levels.
Why boys fall behind.

The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. (In fact, American boys do just as well as Finnish boys do on the Pisa reading test.)

The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. The correct answer to the question so many teenage boys hear, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ is something like, ‘Because, Mum, there are sexually dimorphic trajectories for cortical and subcortical gray matter!’.

Jul & Aug '22

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

World’s oldest tree reveals the largest solar storm in history.
Legalising recreational marijuana decreases a state’s birth rate by an average of 2.78%.
He dropped out to become a poet. Now he’s won a Fields medal.
In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do.
Comparing the Webb Telescope to the Hubble.
The perils of audience capture.
How Shinzo Abe reshaped Japan.
How the ‘diamond of the plant world’ helped land plants evolve.

A 2016 paper found that because of the robustness of sporopollenin, spores maintained their stability in diamond anvils at pressures of 10 gigapascals, or 725 tons per square inch.
Drone airspace: A new global asset class.

In 1980, McKinsey & Co. advised AT&T, their client, that US mobile phone subscriptions in 2000 would top out at less than 1 million. Two years later, in 1982, with company breakup imminent, AT&T executives volunteered to federal antitrust officials to forfeit their minuscule, money-losing mobile phone business. Unfortunately for AT&T shareholders, McKinsey analysts were off by two orders of magnitude – there were more than 100 million mobile phone subscribers in 2000.
Book Review: McNamara’s folly.

What McNamara failed to see was that many Project 100,000 were incurably limited. They were indeed “brain-poor” for life, with no hope of making huge mental improvements. No amount of McNamara’s audiovisual gadgetry could transform them from slow learners into bright, or even average, citizens. But wait a minute: hadn’t psychologists discovered that even people with serious mental limitations were capable of absorbing much more training than society had previously thought possible? Yes, and it was a valuable insight: mentally limited persons were not hopeless—they were capable of growth and maturity. But here was the problem: they might be able to learn how to make change, but that didn’t mean that they could someday create a spreadsheet. They might be able to learn how to put together parts in a factory assembly line, but that didn’t mean they could someday operate a 105mm howitzer in battle. There was no hope of dramatically lifting the IQ of Project 100,000 men who missed a test question like this: “If a farmer had a bucket of 24 eggs and he stumbled and broke half of them, how many eggs would he have left?”

The men who missed such questions were slow learners who were able to live happy, productive lives if they had a protective environment—a cozy haven with loving parents, helpful friends, and sympathetic bosses. Such was not the case for many Project 100,000 men.
Built to last: Continuity in Japanese genetics.
Lenin & the Russian spark.
Is the United States exceptional?

If one, for instance, compares the EU (far closer to the United States collectively in land area and population) rather than its exceptional smaller components the difference becomes obvious: the EU average GDP per capita – despite being a union made up almost entirely of developed countries – is still 30% lower than the United States.

Russian logistics was unable to cover the trip to Kyiv (about 450 miles); the United States, by contrast, has conducted major military operations in Kuwait (1991, 6,500 miles from Washington, D.C.), Iraq (2003-2017, roughly the same distance) and Afghanistan (2001-2021, c. 6,900 miles). No other country today is capable of global power projection on remotely the same scale, at least for now.

The World Bank is headquartered in Washington D.C. and the United States has the largest voting share in its governance (followed closely by US allies Japan, Germany, France and the UK); the IMF is likewise headquartered in D.C. and every single one of its first deputy managing directors has been an American, without exception (but Stanley Fischer had dual citizenship), while the managing directorship rotates.
Classifying abortion access across the rich world.

Andorra considered legalizing abortion in 2018, which led to a strange situation: For that to happen, it would have to be approved by the co-prince of Andorra who also happens to be a Catholic bishop. But Pope Francis threatened that if the bishop approved it, he would immediately be expelled from the church, which would lead to his abdication as co-prince, putting Andorra in a governance crisis and endangering its independence from France and Spain. They did not legalize abortion.
Book review: The man from the future.

Manhattan Project physicist Stanislaw Ulam contracted a case of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. His doctors told him that he should “rest his brain”, ie avoid thinking too hard. A desperate Ulam tried to distract himself by playing solitaire, but couldn’t help wondering about the probabilities of winning. Failing to solve the problem with any statistical trick then known, he was unable to prevent himself from developing what is now called the Monte Carlo method, which proved instrumental in the development of the hydrogen bomb and much of modern statistics.
Wittgenstein at war.
Heat & the great balls decline.

Decrease in spermatogenesis even 3 months after sauna sessions.
Couples who cohabited (prior to marriage) were 15% more likely to get divorced than those who did not.

A Stanford study cited other research finding that the link between cohabitation and divorce was especially strong for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband.

Given that most young adults today who cohabit do so with someone besides their future spouse, “they always see leaving as an option,” she says. And once they marry, that “mindset doesn’t really leave — they always can see that there’s a door to leave … they can leave at any time. Whereas since we didn’t (have previous cohabiting relationships), that’s just not an option we would think of.”
Why China’s aerospace experts have become Xi Jinping’s new political elite.
Dark matter doesn’t exist.

But a simple test suggests that dark matter does not in fact exist. If it did, we would expect lighter galaxies orbiting heavier ones to be slowed down by dark matter particles, but we detect no such slow-down.
Quality of RNG significantly affects results of Monte Carlo simulations.
Understanding Jane Street.
Taleb’s essay on Christianity.

Consider that in Semitic languages, din means law, which in Arabic translates into religion: the older and youngest Abrahamic religions were just law (one, local; the other, universal). But in Christian Aramaic, it is the word nomous from the Greek nomos that refers to law, separate from religion. For Jesus separated both domains with the “render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar”; some additional work came later by Augustine to formalize how one deals with the temporal, the other with the spiritual, the afterlife, etc. This brought a natural boundary between State and Church.

Ironically, modernists fall for what I have called the opiate of the middle classes, that is social science and stock market speculation. They refuse religion on rational grounds, then fall for economic forecasters, stock market analysts, and psychologists. We know that economic forecasts work no better than astrology; stock market analysts are more pompous but much less elegant than the bishop, and psychology papers do not replicate meaning their results do not hold.
Rapamycin is used for immunosuppression in organ transplant patients and trials are underway to test its efficacy in treating ALS, Crohn’s disease, and metastatic and advanced cancers.

Cells need nutrients to stay alive. This is where the protein mTOR springs into action, like a traffic policeman coordinating the metabolic decisions in a cell. When it receives messages from other proteins about there being enough nutrients — sugars, fatty acids, amino acids, for instance in the cell, it gives the cell the green signal to divide and proliferate. When nutrients are lacking, it flashes the red light, ordering the cell to stop making merry.

This process is great for healthy cells but can have a disastrous effect on cancer cells that grow rapidly. Here is where rapamycin comes to the rescue. It latches on to mTOR and tricks the cell into believing that there aren’t enough nutrients to grow.
Notes on the Balkans.

[On Macedonia] According to multiple Bulgarians I talked to, Serbia has been running a long-standing propaganda campaign in Macedonia to convince the Macedonians that they are, in fact, Macedonians, with some sort of vague nonsensical connection to Alexander the Great. In reality, Macedonians are just Bulgarians with a slightly different accent, but they’ve been brainwashed by textbooks and school curricula and tv shows, or something.

[On Ceaușescu] In 1981, he announced that Romania would pay off its entire national debt. It did so in 1989, becoming literally the only modern state to ever do so … Ceaușescu accomplished this by dramatically curbing consumption throughout the entire socialist economy, pulling Romania into a dramatic sustained economic crisis complete with the worst basic good shortages seen outside war-time behind the Iron Curtain.
HS2 costs £100Bn.
On how housing shortages affect everything.
The mineral conflict is here.

An analysis by the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that if EVs accounted for two-thirds of new car purchases by 2030, it would require dozens of new mines that are the size of the world’s largest in each key category. These mines are not currently being planned. And per the IEA, it takes an average of 16 years from initial discovery to open a mine.
Toxoplasma-infected subjects are more attractive than non-infected ones.

We found that infected men had lower facial fluctuating asymmetry whereas infected women had lower body mass, lower body mass index, a tendency for lower facial fluctuating asymmetry, higher self-perceived attractiveness, and a higher number of sexual partners than non-infected ones. Then, we found that infected men and women were rated as more attractive and healthier than non-infected ones.
Course sea spray can reduce lightning by up to 90%.
Skin exposure to UVB light induces skin-brain-gonad axis & sexual behavior.

UVB triggers a skin-brain-gonadal axis through skin p53 activation. In humans, solar exposure enhances romantic passion in both genders and aggressiveness in men, as seen in analysis of individual questionaries, and positively correlates with testosterone level.
Under-policing in America.
Epigentic ‘clocks’ predict animals’ true biological age.

But telomeres did not pan out as an aging clock. The correlation of telomere length with age and mortality is weak in humans and nonexistent in some other species. “Telomere [length] does not actually track age. It just tracks cell proliferation,” said Ken Raj, a principal investigator at Altos Labs.
Everyone is moving to the metropole.

The U.S. of 2050 will have a median age of 41. It will be decisively younger than China and other East Asian states and will edge out Iran, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, and even Brazil. The so-called BRICS countries built a coalition on marketing themselves as part of a young, rising world. In the battle of youth, the U.S. will beat all except South Africa. Even more importantly, the U.S. will have large and growing numbers of young workers, many more than other states of roughly similar median age.
Yao Yang’s “rebuilding China’s political philosophy”.
There are 12 notes in-order to accomodate the fourths & fifths between 2 octaves.
Why was there no Roman industrial revolution?

Ruban

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