Author: Jason

“[The Italian physicist Alessandro] Volta first speculated that it was lightning causing these [will-o’-the-wisps], and in some sense he was right, but not for the reasons he thought,” Zare tells Alex Wilkins at New Scientist. “It’s not lightning in the air coming from the sky; it’s really from the droplets.”

— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-actually-sparks-will-o-the-wisps-a-new-study-traces-the-science-behind-the-mysterious-wandering-lights-180987421/

These were our movies. Not galaxies far away, not fairy tales. Parking lots, parade floats, dead ends, second chances. We were always almost—almost boomers, almost millennials, almost grown up before the world caught fire. The reel runs out, and all that’s left is the ache of time passing, and the hope somebody was watching with us.

— Read on markmcinerney.substack.com/p/the-movies-that-defined-gen-x

AI cannot mishear. And mishearing is often how we learn.

Once, a student wrote a sentence so strange I wrote “What do you mean?” in the margin. The next week, she came to office hours. She told me the sentence wasn’t wrong—it was something her grandmother used to say. She translated it back into English the way she thought it should sound. It made perfect sense once she explained. But only after she explained.

– Read on therumpus.net/2025/10/02/human-error-is-the-point-on-teaching-college-during-the-rise-of-ai/

MAYER: When you see the quality of your search results go down, it’s natural to blame Google and be like, “Why are they worse?” To me, the more interesting and sophisticated thought is if you say, “Wait, but Google’s just a window onto the web. The real question is, why is the web getting worse?”

DUBNER: Okay, Marissa. “So Google’s just a window onto the web. Why is the web getting worse?” 

MAYER: I think because there’s a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases. There’s a lot more fraud on the web today than there was 20 years ago. And I think that the web has been able to grow and develop as quickly as it has because of less regulation and because it’s so international. But we also have to take the flipside of that. In a relatively unregulated space, there’s going to be economic misincentives that can sometimes degrade quality. And that does put a lot of onus on the brokers who are searching that information to try and overcome that. And it’s difficult. It kind of has to be more, in my view, of an ecosystem-style reaction, rather than just a simple correction from one actor. 

Is Google Getting Worse? – Freakonomics

If as few doses of Tylenol were consumed each year as Ivermectin, there would be one Acetaminophen death every 72 years.2

And, if as many doses of Ivermectin as Tylenol were consumed each year, the body count in the U.S. for the antiparasitic drug would be over 850,000 deaths annually. That would be like losing the entire population of a city like Indianapolis or San Francisco – every year.

— Read on ritholtz.com/2025/09/denominator-blindness-tylenol-edition/

It turns out the secret of human civilization was not any particular cognitive creation but our unending flexibility. To hit a wall and build a ladder to climb it, to design cars instead of faster horses, to come up with new levels of Maslow’s hierarchy to summit once we’ve satisfied the first.
— Read on jasmi.news/p/dictionary

But as impressive as this archive is, it is the byproduct of something that today looks almost equally remarkable: strangers on the internet disagreeing on matters of existential gravity and breathtaking pettiness and, through deliberation and debate, building a common ground of consensus reality.
— Read on www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales

Whenever I find myself snagged on a suggested edit, the first thing I ask myself is: Does this even need to be here?

I find the easiest thing to do with something that isn’t working in a piece of writing is to just cut it out completely.

— Read on austinkleon.substack.com/p/just-cut-stuff

My argument is entirely secular and philosophical. The basic line of thought is something like this. The universe has an infinite future. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. This includes the qualitative states that in fact brought about your current life. A sufficiently precise repetition of the right conditions will qualify as literally creating another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply that, given an infinite past, your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons. Given an infinite past, it is conclusive evidence.

philpapers.org/archive/HUEEIE-2

Apple never would have existed without Woz, and Woz personified “insanely great” engineering. He never contributed anything technical to Apple after the Apple II in the early 1980s, but, man, so much of his spirit and personality is infused in Apple’s DNA. He’s a hero to so many people who went on to work at Apple, and to so many of us on the outside too. The two Steves were so very different in so many ways, yet at heart, both exemplified that intersection between technology and the liberal arts.
— Read on daringfireball.net/linked/2025/08/15/woz-on-slashdot