AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “Human-like systematic generalization through a meta-learning neural network”, Lake & Baroni2023 (task/data diversity in continual learning)

• “TabLib: A Dataset Of 627 Million Tables With Context”, Eggert et al 2023

• the 1973 Lighthill Debate

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Xist ribonucleoproteins promote female sex-biased autoimmunity”, Dou et al 2024

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Crowd prediction systems: Markets, polls, and elite forecasters”, Atanasov et al 2024

• “Congestion on the information superhighway: Inefficiencies in economics working papers”, Lusher et al 2023 (how bad must it be in AI?)

• the Arago spot

Politics/Religion

• “A systematic review & meta-analysis of the relationship between economic inequality and prosocial behavior”, Yang & Konrath (an extremely small & inconsistent & unpredictable relationship—does this literature mean anything at all?)

• “Scale AI Quietly Scrapped Deal With Chinese-Owned TikTok Over Security Concerns: The deal was one of several challenges facing the federal business of the $7.3 billion AI startup, whose CEO Alexandr Wang has become an outspoken advocate of American national security amid the threat of China. One expert called the optics “horrible”” (Wang must not be that worried about Chinese AI after all…)

• “Reincarnation in Exile”: Tibetan Buddhism’s struggle to retain monks designated as reincarnations

• “Bitter Memories: The Fall of Saigon, April 1975”, Tom Glenn2015 (the NSA evacuation from Vietnam)

Psychology/Biology

• “Live, Attenuated, Tetravalent Butantan-Dengue Vaccine in Children and Adults”, Kallás et al 2024

• “The illusion of absence: how a common feature of magic shows can explain a class of road accidents”, Ekroll et al 2021 (‘amodal completion’ produces certainty that an ‘empty’ road is empty)

• Why can, or does, Brandon Sanderson write so much?

• the Strip search phone call scam (1994^–₁₀2004_20ya); “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam”, Charlotte Cowes; “How I got scammed” out of $8,000, Cory Doctorow2024

Technology

• “Could a Giant Parasol in Outer Space Help Solve the Climate Crisis?”; Calcium aerosols: “The how, for those sick and tired of litigating the why”

• Phonautograph

• “Bending Spacetime in the Basement”, John Walker 1997_27ya (demonstrating gravity with a home torsion bar)

Economics

• “Certificates and Computers: The Remaking of Wall Street, 1967^–₄1971_53ya”, Wells 2000_24ya (what does it take to increase productivity & computerize? time, suffering, & bankruptcy)

• “Footprint of publication selection bias on meta-analyses in medicine, environmental sciences, psychology, and economics”, Bartoš et al 2024

• How economist Piero Sraffa made his fortune by buying Imperial Japanese bonds in 1946

Philosophy

• “Guy Alexandre, Transplant Surgeon Who Redefined Death, Dies at 89”

Fiction

• “The Redaction Machine”, Ben Pace

Miscellaneous