AI

Matters Of Scale:

• “DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning”, Guo et al 2025; “On DeepSeek and Export Controls”, Dario Amodei; METR: “the level of autonomous [coding] capabilities of mid-2025 DeepSeek models is similar to the level of capabilities of frontier models from late 2024.”; Epoch

• “20 Years of Bitext”, Peter Brown & Bob Mercer 2013_13ya (on early NMT, n-grams, finding & cleaning large linguistic corpora)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Heritable polygenic editing: the next frontier in genomic medicine?”, Visscher et al 2025

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “That Survivorship Bias Plane: The exact backstory to that picture of an airplane with red dots on top of it”, Yuxi Liu

Politics/Religion

• Review: Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders by Dennis C. Rasmussen

• “What science is like in North Korea: Isolated from the rest of the world, North Korean researchers struggle to balance rigorous scientific work with the demands of a dictator”

• “Trump Pardons Ross Ulbricht, Creator of Silk Road 1 Drug Marketplace”

Psychology/Biology

• “GLP-1 programs the neurovascular landscape”, Chen et al 2024

• 20% weight loss in preliminary ‘MariTide’ drug trial results

• “The Effects of Diagnosing a Young Adult with a Mental Illness: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Doctors”, Bos et al 2023

• “Agnosia, alexia and a remarkable form of amnesia in an adolescent boy”, Vargha-Khadem et al 1994_32ya (the boy who can’t remember his memories, but can write them down)

• “Seasonal Hair Growth in the Adult Domestic Cat (Felis catus)”, Hendriks et al 1997_29ya (a cat will shed its weight in fur every ~31 years)

• List of giant squid specimens and sightings

• “Hoover d—n! A brief look at sexual injury by vacuum cleaners”; “Hoovers and shakers: Another look at vacuum cleaner sex”

• Birds don’t breath like us

Technology

• “The Little Can That Could”, Daniel 1987_39ya (‘good design is invisible’: how American & British engineers reinvented the German jerrycan poorly because they didn’t understand its requirements nor solutions)

• “Unbundling Tools for Thought”, Borretti 2022; “Why Working on ‘Tools For Thought’ Fails: Lots of Working for the Tools, Not Much Thought”

• It is unknown whether Newtonian orbital mechanics is Turing-complete

• “Regex Chess: A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions”, Nicholas Carlini 2025 (writing & compiling to a VM for regexp-based loop-free programming)

• Writing in space; NASA’s 2009_17ya Mars Explorers Wanted posters

Economics

• “The Effect of Financial Resources on Fertility: Evidence from Administrative Data on Lottery Winners”, Tsai et al 2022 (fertility is not about wealth)

• “The Lifetime Costs of Bad Health”, De Nardi et al 2024

• “The Psychology Of Poverty: Where Do We Stand?”, Haushofer & Salicath 2024

• “Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-Ball Producers in Pakistan”, Atkin et al 2018 (challenges to efficiency improvements: insider sabotage)

• “Subjective Job Insecurity and the Rise of the Precariat: Evidence from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States”, Manning & Mazeine 2024 (precarity: neither objectively nor subjectively increasing?)

• The more useful “Cardinal-valued Secretary problem”: set the threshold after √n candidates, not n⧸e

Philosophy

• “Chimes at Midnight: It’s been an idea for over 3 decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?”, Nevala-Lee 2024

• “Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born”, Henrik Karlsson 2023 (how do you come up with good questions, not answers?)

Miscellaneous

• “The Color of Memory: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet”

Fiction

• Feast of Legends: Rise from the Deep Freeze, Wendy’s 2019