AI

• History of the Micromouse robotics competition (Micromouse maze-running wasn’t actually about naive algorithmic maze-solving, but end-to-end minimization of time—completely different! Also showcases evolutionary shifts in record-setters)

Matters Of Scale:

• “Cyc: Obituary for the greatest monument to logical AGI”, Yuxi Liu 2025

• “Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly”, Huang et al 2024

• “Interpreting Emergent Planning in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning”, Bush et al 2025 (model-free RL agents can learn to do model-based-RL-like planning)

• “The world’s first commercial automatic chicken sexing machine” (chick sexing falls to the machines)

• “NeuRaLaTeX: A machine learning library written in pure LaTeX”; ytmytm/llama2.c64: Inference Llama-2 on a C64 (runs TinyStories 0.2m-param LLM: “You will receive one output token every ~8 minutes. This is an estimation, the attention step depends on the number of tokens generated so far, so the process gets slower & slower.”)

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

• “Translation of a human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived ovarian support cell product to a Phase 3 enabling clinical grade product (Fertilo) for in vitro fertilization treatment”, Paulsen et al 2025

Statistics/Meta-Science

• “Flat origami is Turing Complete”, Hull & Zakharevich 2023

Politics/Religion

• White clothing in Korea

Psychology/Biology

• “Primates as prey: Ecological, morphological and behavioral relationships between primate species and their predators”, Hart 2000_26ya (our primate ancestors were hunted a lot, especially by cats)

• “Lilly’s oral GLP-1, orforglipron, demonstrated statistically-significant efficacy results and a safety profile consistent with injectable GLP-1 medicines in successful Phase 3 trial”

• “Dose-response relationship between evening exercise and sleep”, Leota et al 2025

• “How some tropical trees benefit from being struck by lightning: evidence for Dipteryx oleifera and other large-statured trees”, Gora et al 2025

• Sultan Khan; “Arithmetical Prodigies”, Scripture 1891

Technology

• “The Secret History of the War in Ukraine” (good, fast command & control, with fast OODA loops, are critical to making modern weapons extremely effective in war)

• The Eruption of Mount Edgecumbe

• Maxfield Parrish & Daybreak

Economics

• “The M6 forecasting competition: Bridging the gap between forecasting and investment decisions”, Makridakis et al 2024

• “The Effects of Medical Debt Relief: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments”, Kluender et al 2024

• “Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush: White snus pouches were designed to help Swedish women quit cigarettes. They’ve become a staple for American dudes” (where did all this Zyn suddenly come from nowhere out of? Sweden, turns out)

• “The Haves and the Have-Yachts: Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers” (Why super-yachts? Because they are still exclusive, and due to legal regulations, offer “a level of service you cannot really contemplate until you’ve been fortunate enough to experience it.”)

• “Who Reaps All the Superchats? A Large-Scale Analysis of Income Inequality in Virtual YouTuber Livestreaming”, Zhao et al 2025

Philosophy

Fiction

• “William Stanley, 6^th Earl of Derby” (real Shakespeareans know that the Earl of Oxford claim is nothing but a conspiracy theory meant to distract from the true earl who wrote the Bard’s plays)