July 2026 general links
(continues June 2026 links)
Many of these seem to be bellwethers for what's on and just beyond the Horizon of the moment,
collected from the Incoming for their portentous savor, and illustrative of my engagement with serendipity)
The form factor I seem to gravitate toward is The Commonplace Book, a now-digital place to entomb snippets that seem at the moment of encounter to want saving, often as prime examples of some form or genre to which my attention has been drawn. Most offer temptingly yawning Rabbit Holes, and these collections of links form a sort of map of my wanderings and encounters.
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Now Yourself: The Elusive Science of What the Present Moment Is Made of and How It Makes You Who You Are Marginalian
My Canada Stephen Downes
At the Vanguard of Vinyl: A Cultural History of the Long-Playing Record in Jazz Darren Mueller via library.upenn.edu (2024) and full text from Duke UP
10 Hacks Every MacBook Pro User Should Know
Brian Sietsema, Linguist/Priest via languagehat
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A synthetic cell grew, copied its DNA, and split in two boingboing
Rainbow Nation maps mania
How Trump Sabotaged Independence Day Dan Dinello at Informed Comment
Book Freak Kevin Kelly
H.G. Wells Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)
Science Friday
The making of the Manhattan Project Alex Wellerstein...Cai et al. (5) integrate a dynamical learning model into a computing system that processes data inside the memory hardware, rather than moving data back and forth to a separate processor. The platform can perform high-fidelity calculation with a millisecond-scale latency, establishing a pathway toward real-time computation in clinical imaging, robotics, and embodied intelligence.A neural dynamical system (6) is a computing framework that models how a surface continuously evolves over time, guided by artificial neural networks that define the rule of motion. In contrast to discrete-time models, such as a residual neural network that cannot reproduce the smooth temporal evolution of a physical system, a neural dynamical system formulates continuity by integrating an embedded neural network—a fixed, pretrained artificial neural network with weight values stored in memory units—and adjusting the discrete interval used in each iteration (time step). Such a continuous framework is mathematically designed to smoothly deform a system's state on a manifold surface—such as genus-0, which has zero “holes” and can be continuously deformed without introducing topological changes (tearing or merging) over time. This topological consistency helps ensure that the simulated dynamics remain physically faithful while improving fidelity and predictability.
...Cai et al. integrate a neural dynamical system into a computing-in-memory architecture (7) that performs data storage and computation within the same memory array. Analogous to processing raw milk on a dairy farm instead of transferring it to a factory, a computing-in-memory approach fundamentally reduces the latency and energy use incurred by data movement in von Neumann devices.
End "reusable" waste dumping in Africa
A Hormone Cell Atlas maps the human endocrine system at cellular resolution
Ronald Ernest Hahn obit, via Ted Gioia
Stop, collaborator, and listen! Sarah Kendzior
...The most galling aspect of Trump's 250th anniversary of America is not the nazi-chintz decor or half-assed state fair. We have come to expect shock value and the desecration of US culture from this regime. Why would they honor a country they are selling for parts? Why please a people whom they see as, at best, pawns in a mass delusion, and, at worst, obstacles to be removed by force?Their real offense is the celebration of independence that we no longer have. For on the 250th anniversary of its freedom, the US government has surrendered its sovereignty.
The new owners of the US are transnational actors. Their goal is not to rule, but to mine. Technofascists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk shape the course of American life more than elected officials. Plutocrats with multiple passports and offshore accounts suck the marrow from a skeletal US economy. The biggest new industry is AI, a project aimed at destroying American land to build a facsimile of American life.
Trump gets blamed, but he's an inflatable tube dude at a mafia chop shop. His apathy to governance is mistaken for sway. Governing was never the point. Trump's casual treason has always made him an ideal vessel for America's going-out-of-business sale.
The buyers are foreign and domestic, but one looms above all. One that demands from Americans both taxation and representation — for their wars, their genocide, their demands that US laws on speech and assembly be shaped around their desires, US independence be damned.
The uniparty's fealty lies with Israel.
...The few representatives that oppose funding Israel — whether a right-wing libertarian like Thomas Massie or a left-wing Ferguson activist like Cori Bush — are ousted through smear campaigns and massive donations to candidates selected for their obedience to the lobby. American civilians who criticize Israel's wars risk losing their jobs, particularly if they work in education, media, or law. Jewish-Americans who criticize the Israeli government are deemed traitors: to Israel.
There's a Crack in Everything Sam Buntz
...The way digital recording technology functions feels like an allegory for how the world has moved more generally. Digital recording functions by cutting music up into pieces, into bytes, whereas traditional analog methods record the whole sound. They don't leave anything out. This is why vinyl records have higher fidelity, with the needle flowing over the unbroken groove rather than interpreting a collection of mico-pieces of sonic data. Philosophically, we could argue that the move towards digital constitutes privileging the part over the whole and hence the left brain (which perceives parts) above the right brain (which perceives wholes). The world has grown more technical and hence more obsessed with analysis, with dissection.Naturally, this acts at cross-purposes with artists, who follow their instincts and intuitions, who trace the flowing line of the whole, as opposed to engaging in the analytical dissection more characteristic of the technical professions (and of editors). But the coldness of digital, its harsh white LED-like glow, can be strategically incorporated to generate a personal and artistic effect.
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Photo statistics: how many photos are taken every day in 2026?
Five Photography Truisms That Aren't True. Or Are They? Pete Cripps at Medium
...It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
--David Bailey
Seeing Before Knowing Anthony Morganti at Medium
The Tiny White Grain That Runs The World (And No — It's Not Cocaine) Quantastic Journal
...A battery is a controlled difference across a boundary. One side holds more charged stuff than the other. The machine works because the difference wants to collapse, and some clever structure forces the collapse to pass through a useful gate.Modern biology runs on ion gradients, charged differences held across membranes so thin they make a soap bubble look like a Chernobyl's dome. Sodium on one side. Potassium on the other. A gate opens, charge moves, a nerve fires, a muscle contracts, a thought crosses the room inside your skull and becomes your hand reaching for the...salt shaker.
So the first battery wasn't built. It was metabolized.
...Every animal cell is a tiny border dispute. Sodium wants in. Potassium wants out. Water wants to follow the crowd. The cell wants to live, which means it has to keep the crowd from becoming a flood.
So the body runs a pump. It spends energy shoving sodium out and pulling potassium in, over and over, like a nightclub bouncer working the door during a riot. Three sodium ions out, two potassium ions in. One ATP molecule burned for the privilege. Repeat this enough times and the membrane becomes a charged wall.
In the brain, this maintenance bill gets obscene. Neuroscience estimates that the sodium-potassium pump uses about 20 to 40 percent of the brain's energy. That means a big slice of breakfast never becomes a poem, a bad decision, or a brilliant excuse. It goes into keeping tiny charged particles apart so the next signal can actually happen.
...The body hides infrastructure inside pleasure. You think you want chips. The mammal wants voltage.
...People worked the Hallstatt salt mine in Austria for thousands of years, carving wealth out of a mountain. And salt preserved tools, textiles, leather, wood, and human waste so well that researchers could study ancient feces and identify what miners had eaten. In one Iron Age sample, DNA from Penicillium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae gave the first molecular evidence for blue cheese and beer consumption in Iron Age Europe. The proof came through Hallstatt waste.
...Sodium-ion batteries are now leaving lab promises for industrial seriousness. Their appeal is easy to understand. Sodium is common, widely distributed, and far less geopolitically concentrated than lithium, cobalt, nickel, or graphite. The chemistry can suit stationary storage, where weight matters less than cost, safety, and supply. A 2025 analysis of sodium-ion battery roadmaps found pathways to competitiveness with low-cost lithium-ion batteries in the 2030s, but only with technical progress and with outcomes still tied to lithium, graphite, and nickel markets.
...Oil was power because it stored ancient sunlight in a dense, burnable form. It is indeed a superpower that makes machines move, armies faster, suburbs possible, plastics cheap, and politicians strangely emotional about shipping lanes. Salt works through a different logic: it stores difference. Across a membrane, that difference becomes life. In food, it becomes time. In a state monopoly, it becomes revenue. In a cavern, it becomes strategic fuel. In a battery, it becomes a charger waiting behind a gate.
A civilization can run for a long time on the substances that help it cross boundaries, between seasons, markets, bodies, empires, and electrons. It can also forget that every boundary has a cost. The body pays in ATP. The deer pays in distance. The miner pays in lungs, joints, and years. The river pays in chloride after the thaw.
And the future pays when another “abundant” material becomes a growth story before anyone asks what scale will do to it.
Mapping the Origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything maps mania
...dozens of creation stories that you can explore on the Origin Myth Map, an interactive atlas of the myths that civilizations have used to explain the origins of the universe, the earth and humanity. The map brings together the origin traditions of 51 civilizations spanning five historical eras, from prehistoric societies to the early modern period....The Origin Myth Map's Migration Paths mode highlights some of the great journeys that carried myths and cosmological beliefs from one region to another. For example, the Silk Road transported far more than silk, spices and precious goods. For over 1,600 years it also served as one of history's greatest conduits for the exchange of religions, philosophies and cosmological ideas.
Gaza Genocide is a World-Historical Event Juan Cole
...It's enormous. 80% of the buildings have been destroyed and, as you say, 1.7 million people displaced. There were only two million people in Gaza. So it's almost everybody that has been displaced. And people are living in tents. Most important medicines are not available. There's high mortality not only from people having been bombed to death but also from disease, from malnutrition, and from inadequate health care, because most of the hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. The children are not in school except informally, because the schools have been destroyed. There are no schools or universities standing.So this is a world historical event. We have seen many genocides in the last century. We saw Rwanda and Cambodia and so forth. But if we look at this proportionally — it's a small place, with the 2 million population — then the proportion of people devastated by this particular military campaign, which I think is a genocide, is unprecedented.
Crooked Donald and the Strait of Hormuz Tom Engelhardt
building a crwth, a might-be Project
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Alien v. Predator or MAGA meets AI - a "crossover" monument to the USA at 250 Adam Tooze
In pop culture there is a genre known as "crossover", where the main protagonists of different fictional universes — often monsters — are brought together in one narrative space.
...From the point of view of anyone trying to narrate our current reality, such crossovers may serve as a fertile image: Not one nightmare, not one drama, not one cast of "bad guys" v. "good guys", but distinct, overlapping dystopias, in a giant melange.
In 2026 we have the China shock discourse — the global division of labour being upended by China's gigantic growth model -—some sort of East Asian mechatronic giant, more or less effectively corralled by the CPC on a mission of historic national rejuvenation.
Then we have the war-mongering "middle powers" — the likes of Russia, Israel, UAE unleashing regional mayhem.
And we have the US, still straddling the world with its military and financial infrastructure, but caught internally by the dynamics of MAGA and AI.
...Does "America" have a program? Does it form anything resembling a single coherent power, whether for better or worse? At this point, surely, it would be embarrassing to claim so. Better surely to concede that elite coherence has collapsed and that the US as it enters its second quarter millennium, is best thought of not as a single coherent agent, but as an incubator, a petri dish, a "zone" from which things emerge that defy summation in a single graphic image.
...it was, in fact, from the midst of that process of transformation, in the 1930s and 1940s, that the comic book imagination of the US emerged. So if we grant that the US has always been a "zone" as much as a single coherent state, let us concede that Jefferson or suburban imagery is candy coated. In the current moment, the environment that comes to mind is not a slave-based idyll like Jefferson's Monticello, but Batman's Gotham city — a mythical, corrupt and depraved urban sprawl, located somewhere in New Jersey.
...On the national anniversary, the USA as "zone" is presided over by a president who is shamelessly engaged in haphazard and fly-by-night self-enrichment to the tune of a few billion dollars or so, mainly through crypto scams. Meanwhile, the broligarchs — the real lords of Gotham city — play for the serious money, with rockets, chips, AI models, a hundred billion, a trillion at a time.
For birthday entertainment, the White House hosts cage fights.
The Pentagon is a war-fighting machine that has command-chain issues and unleashes mayhem with global implications in coalitions with other powers, for which it lacks any obvious national rationale.
Dotted across this landscape there are, of course, much private prosperity, livable communities, comfortable suburbs and highly potent centers of innovation. In those centers engineers from all over the world work to generate new technologies of finance, fossil energy and tech. If we are looking for powerful, world-changing monsters in Gotham city, right now, AI is where it is at.
Max Headroom — Complete Series at archive.org
via Tooze:
The total dollar value of the trades was somewhere between $600 million and $1.86 billion, according to his financial disclosure for 2025, which lists values in broad ranges. Many of the transactions involve large companies that have business with the federal government.
Trump averaged 85 trades per market day, an analysis of the report shows. Just 10 days accounted for about a quarter of all trades executed in 2025. Many of those came during heightened volatility on Wall Street after Trump had already announced policy changes.
and from WSJ, via Tooze:
Instead, the value of those tokens tanked. While Christensen and many like him lost big, the president made a fortune, netting $800 million from that crypto project, according to a financial disclosure he filed this week.
"In crypto, people say a game is a game," the digital-asset entrepreneur said. "He played a better game than I did."
It has been clear for some time that President Trump's forays into the crypto world have been lucrative, but the stunning disclosure that those ventures earned him some $1.4 billion last year underscored the different reality the president is living in from many of the investors who have embraced digital assets alongside him.
The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.
Roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump's memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent a few thousand on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen's analysis of 26,663 wallets shows that 85% of World Liberty's $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater.
The Grain of the Note Philip Clark at NYRB
Sealskin Jeff Dworsky
Two Scorpions in a Jar: Netanyahu and Trump Informed Comment
Agriculture From the Perspective of Economic Theory Michael Porter at Medium
...In the 1800s, European and American farming became agriculture. This is less romantic than the "noble farmer" but this system produces so much food today that more than 80% of the population of middle- and upper-income countries live in cities and are freed to work in manufacturing and services (or not at all).
...A fundamental assumption in the development of classical economics is that people act rationally.
People are often, but not always, rational or perfectly self-interested.
...Adam Smith and his early colleagues wrote about "political economy," which explored society, governmental action, and the public welfare. Our existing economic (and food) system is the product of collective human behavior, incentives, and disincentives played out over more than 200 years. Like many systems, it creates a mix of good and bad outcomes. The forces that eliminated the threat of starvation also increased the rate of soil degradation and environmental pollution. The forces that led to inexpensive, highly palatable food may also lead to a rise in chronic disease.
The Greek Roots of Sycophant and Showing the Fig
Mapping the Light: Sunrise & Sunset maps mania
Confronting the Palestine Exception of the American Historical Association Juan Cole
June: World's Oceans Hottest on Record as El Niño Looms Informed Comment
On Photography and Style Pete Cripps at Medium
Life With a Hand Up Your Butt Dan Piraro
...Our tendency to anthropomorphize is essentially the same trick that AI uses to convince us it is a person. Once you get into a conversation with it, it's hard to remember you're talking to a glorified toaster.
Indian Place Names of New England archive.org
Toponymy of Nova Scotia Wikipedia
Nothing Personal Richard Avedon and James Baldwin (1965) (pdf)
From Bloomberg, via Tooze
Trans Mountain Corp., a pipeline operator owned by the Canadian government, has been tapped to build a new export conduit connecting Alberta's oil sands to a Vancouver-area port, Prime Minister Mark Carney said. The proposed 1 million-barrel-a-day pipeline will link to a deepwater port capable of receiving Very Large Crude Carriers, or VLCCs, with the goal of "meeting significant Asian demand from countries like Japan, Korea, China and India," according to the government of Alberta. The project will largely follow the route of the existing Trans Mountain line, Carney said. That's the only crude pipeline in Canada that currently reaches an ocean port, limiting Canada's ability to send oil to markets other than the US. ... By doing the project through Trans Mountain, the two leaders are effectively providing a government backstop for a complex energy project that is certain to cost tens of billions of dollars. The Alberta government said construction of the project could cost between C$35.2 billion ($24.8 billion) and C$43.7 billion if investment is greenlit in the next three years. But it also forecast the potential to increase Canada's real gross domestic product by more than 0.6% a year by the 2040s.
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought gizmoodo
License plate cameras scan 20 billion vehicles a month, and cities are pulling the plug boingbpoing
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1452/1453 mystery eruption Wikipedia
Eastern Late Woodland Summary eHRAF Archaeology
The 1972 Script for Our Collapse Is Tracking Perfectly Noel Johnson on Medium
Yesterday, I viewed the recent update to this information. What was interesting to see was how well the chaos of the 2020s supply chain fragility, along with the increasing costs of raw materials and the overall sense that our global economy is beginning to sputter, was nothing short of predictable. In fact, if you look at it now, a decade ago we mapped out exactly where we'd be today. We aren't drifting wildly through history. We're tracking a decades old systems model with alarming accuracy.
...The world3 model was never a fixed prediction. It was about what happens when a limitless growth based system hits up against the finite nature of a planet. According to several new academic studies validating the World3 model, we are no longer outside of this model looking in. We're currently operating within it and running right on pace.
...This is the Innovation Trap. Technology is a means of directing energy and materials, not a miraculous source of energy. Advanced technology often requires more complexity, not less. Rarer minerals, more accurate production and a highly specialized international supply chain are all necessary. Each 'solution' we design adds a new layer of upkeep and a new set of dependencies.
...we must fight the temptation to consider 2040 to be the "apocalypse" year. It is more accurately described as a time of transition. For the generation currently entering the labor force. They will be the first generation in millennia to navigate a world of limitation rather than expansion during their most productive years.
...The years between now and 2040 won't be remembered for a single pivotal disaster if the model's trend continues. They will be remembered as the period when the signals were impossible to reject. Global supply chain vulnerability was made clear by the pandemic. Trade, food, and energy were all affected by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. While slowing growth and growing debt showed how much work is now needed to maintain the world we constructed.
Audiomass and About Audiomass "an open-source web based audio and waveform editing tool."
AudioMass lets you record, or use your existing audio tracks, and modify them by trimming, cutting, pasting or applying effects, from compression and paragraphic equalizers to reverb, delay, repair tools, pitch/speed profiles and multitrack mixdown.
How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech Cory Doctorow
The Milky Way's Arms May Stretch Farther Than We Thought gizmodo
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Pascal would have thrown away his iPhone JA Westenberg
This realization, Pascal argued, produces a fundamental dread. When we stop moving, when the noise fades, when we confront our own mortality and smallness, we feel a terrifying emptiness. Pascal called this ennui, a soul-crushing boredom and anxiety that grows out of awareness of our wretched state.
To escape the dread, we invented what Pascal called divertissement, or diversion. Diversion is more than having fun. It's a psychological defense mechanism, the frantic human attempt to avoid facing the void.
The smartphone is the ultimate precipice-blocker, a pocket-sized diversion engine engineered to anesthetize the ennui. Pascal argued that humans don't actually want the things they chase; they want the chase itself. Give a man everything he desires — wealth, power, leisure — and he turns miserable, because you've stripped him of the distraction of the hunt.
...Pascal believed that wisdom, peace, and connection with the divine could come only from facing the void - from staying in the room and sitting with the silence until it turned familiar and something deeper could be heard. The smartphone makes that confrontation impossible. It floods the silence with noise, so we never have to meet our own souls.
...The smartphone is the enemy of deep thought. Deep thinking needs sustained attention, incubation, and boredom. Boredom is the soil where creativity grows. An unstimulated mind starts to ruminate, to connect general ideas, to wander, and that wandering is what produces genius. But our phones have killed boredom. We fill every micro-moment of possible incubation with a micro-dose of dopamine. We check the phone while the kettle boils, while the elevator descends, while the computer boots, while the kid cries, while the coffee gets made. We've outsourced our inner monologue to the algorithm.
...We're brilliant at accessing information, with the sum of human knowledge in our pockets, but we've lost the ability to turn it into wisdom. Because wisdom — well, it needs friction. It needs the struggle of staying with a problem, feeling the discomfort of not knowing, and letting the subconscious work. The smartphone hands us an endless buffet of pre-digested answers, opinions, and outrage, and skips the struggle entirely. Pascal despised the ego. He wrote at length about human vanity, our hunger to be seen, our obsession with status, our willingness to conform to the crowd. "The omnipotence of kings," he wrote, "is not an omnipotence of command, but an omnipotence of fascination." Social media has handed that omnipotence of fascination to everyone. We're all kings and queens now, curating our digital kingdoms, hoping to fascinate our subjects, terrified of being ignored. The smartphone feeds this vanity without pause, making us prisoners of our own self-image.
Graham Platner Got Way Too Many Passes Monica Potts at newsbreak.com
Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was) Rebecca Solnit
This new El Niño is different realclimate.org
American ancestry map flowing data
Hormuz: China Oil Demand Tapped out, Heavy Truck EVs Rise Juan Cole
...There is no reason to believe that this kind of occasional US-Iran skirmish will cease any time soon. As I wrote when Benajmin Netanyahu and Donald Trump launched their unprovoked and illegal war on Iran, they have permanently destabilized the Gulf as a world energy source. Because petroleum and fossil gas are now so unstable as energy sources, wise governments are plotting to escape their use in favor of reliable, clean, local energy sources such as solar, wind, water and battery for electricity generation and batteries for electric vehicles. The front runner in this effort is China. China has used its refineries' petroleum reserves to slash petroleum imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to an astonishingly low 6.4 million barrels a day (this latter statistic is seaborne petroleum imports for June). A glut before the Iran War, a slowing Chinese economy, a ban on exports of Chinese petroleum, the big reserves held by Chinese refineries, and the huge investment of the country in electric vehicles, which do not run on petroleum, have all allowed China to avoid a big energy shock and to vastly reduce its oil imports.
...the huge passenger vehicle market only accounts for half of China's petroleum demand. Diesel-fueled heavy trucks were the other half. Having 44 million EVs on the road, some 12% of automobiles, and having 67% of new car sales be EVs, obviously chips away at petroleum demand and threatens to drive it down permanently. But if the country stops needing to use diesel for trucks, that is game over for petroleum. And, the country's manufacturers are innovating in producing large numbers of electric heavy trucks, with Sany, BYD, XCMG, and FAW Jiefang, among others, big in this sector.
Reuters reported in May that electric heavy trucks went from being a niche market only a couple of years ago to constituting about a third of new truck registrations in 2025. China has expanded the charging infrastructure for truckers, a key element in these sales, and one lacking in rival countries such as India.
There are 6,000 Stories in the Naked City maps mania
My Conversation With Karl Marx About Donald Trump Norman Solomon at Informed Comment
America's AI War Has No Civilian Stop Rule Informed Comment
AI does not turn stale or biased information into truth. It can make bad information travel faster. Human Rights Watch has warned that Israeli digital tools used in Gaza relied on incomplete data and inexact estimates that could raise the risk of civilian harm. The lesson is not that every use of AI is unlawful. It is that speed can magnify the consequences of a bad premise before anyone can catch it.
Choice Notes on History from *Notes and Queries* (1858) archive.org
Is Life Just Different? Quanta Magazine
...Mitchell is wary of rigid definitions, however. "People often take [such definitions] as a fixed set of criteria that they then use for demarcating a phenomenon in an all-or-none fashion," he said — either it is an agent or it isn't. "I don't think that's helpful or appropriate because I don't think agency is that kind of phenomenon. But if you approach behavior in a more holistic, systems-oriented, ecologically contextualized view, you'll be investigating agency by default."
Even the most gene-centric evolutionary biologist recognizes that many organisms can adapt their behavior to present circumstances and can often be considered to make choices. But without an ability to self-consciously reflect on the options and the likely outcomes of actions, does that rise to the level of true agency?
James DiFrisco (opens a new tab), a philosopher of theoretical biology at the Francis Crick Institute in London, thinks not. Agency, he said, is a psychological concept traditionally used to talk about human behavior. Importing it into biology as a whole risks imputing a kind of cryptic self-awareness to all life. "Agency is a term whose meaning comes from human interpersonal discourse, which takes place in the vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, freedom, deliberation, and personhood," he said. It's not clear how to transfer that word to situations where those concepts simply don't apply.
...In 2025, DiFrisco and his colleague Richard Gawne published a critique in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (opens a new tab) arguing that biological agency is therefore "a concept without a research program." Either it's invoking something already familiar in biological science, or it's conjuring up some almost mystical force that makes organisms do things. This force, they said, is resistant to explanation in terms of causal mechanisms: a vague kind of "holistic power" that doesn't really explain anything, much as the 18th-century notion of a "vital force" animating living things was really just an empty explanation. Some people, DiFrisco suggested, "are playing on the ambiguity of ‘agency' to support the idea that biology shows the need for some quasi-spiritual reality."
...The 18th-century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck went further. He believed, in the words of the Stanford University historian Jessica Riskin (opens a new tab), his latest biographer (opens a new tab), that "life at its essence is creative agency" — in contrast to the view then prevailing that the only real agency in the natural world was of divine origin. While Darwin differed from Lamarck about the source of evolutionary change, both placed the ability of organisms to act for themselves at the center of their theories.
...Is agency itself a causal factor, or is it a higher-level umbrella term for a host of specific and particular reasons that things happen? To put it another way: Agents make decisions — that's what agency means — but do organisms? For DiFrisco, speaking of organismal decisions “is just a convenient and compact way of referring to the operation of a (multiscale) mechanism” that determines behavior — a mechanism that is perfectly capable of incorporating context and conflicting signals. But for me, the key point here is that the actions can be governed by reasons and goals. The hare is genuinely trying to escape the fox; it doesn't merely look that way. And the hare did not have that specific goal before the fox appeared. Perhaps it had been trying to forage and to look out for predators. Such "trying to" is the fundamental nature of organisms: Evolution builds entities that try to do things
...If we can get a clearer idea of what makes an agent, this could help us to understand how collective goals arise — as they did when multicellular organisms first arose long ago — and how they can break down, as in cancer. What's more, a proper theory of agency might give us a clearer idea of what's needed to make genuine artificial agents, not just computers and machines programmed with our own goals, but ones that can formulate their own. We might then also get a clearer idea of the potential benefits and dangers such truly agential machines might bring. But perhaps the most compelling argument for recognizing agency is that it might help us understand what makes life so different — not just humans, but life — that it is able to shape an entire planet in a manner visible from outer space.
The metamorphoses of the dollar Adam Tooze
Beni Is a Cute Autonomous Camera Robot On Wheels petapixel
tic-tac Hobbledehoy
Self-generated hydrogel ejects bacterial cells for localized biofilm dispersion Nature Microbiology
Basketry Sarawak Museum
Scientists Say a Critical Ocean Current System May Already Be Past the Point of No Return gizmoodo
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Enchanted Spirits Andy Ilachinski
Time Traveler by Merriam-Webster: Words from 1974
The Entire History of Human Warfare maps mania
Can Office-to-Residential Conversions Survive the Pfizer-Building Crisis? New Yorker
Junker Jane via Daniel
links re: Nomothetic and Idiographic
Meditative Quiescence Andy Ilachinski
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3 Art Terms That Will Change the Way You Look at Paintings Christopher P Jones at Medium
In art history, it has come to mean "a collection of different things," and it has found particular focus in the type of painting shown above: a flat pinboard or wooden letter rack covered in a cluttered, hyper-realistic array of everyday ephemera.
(also cartellini and musca depicta)
Paul Krugman
Instead, however, AI is emerging in an American economy and society that are already strongly oligarchic, with enormous wealth and political influence in the hands of a handful of billionaires. The current concentration of wealth at the top is not only immensely greater than in the 50s or 60s, but is in fact far greater than during the Gilded Age. This state of affairs is both a cause and an effect of policies that benefit a tiny elite, such as low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak or nonexistent enforcement of worker protections and anti-trust, drastic reductions in programs that benefit ordinary Americans, and so on.
And in the context of a political and economic environment that is heavily tilted towards the hyper-wealthy, the negative impacts of AI will probably be larger than if they had appeared in a country with a more level playing field. That is,unless the very impact of AI leads to a much-needed pushback against American oligarchy.
So although AI is addressed in today's primer, the content will mostly be about oligarchy rather than AI: documenting how America has changed since our politics turned right in the 1980s, and why wealth and power have become so concentrated
via Tooze
This shift explains the huge differences between the US empire and previous ones. First, it rests on an unprecedented scale of offshore endogenous credit creation, larger than what we saw under British hegemony. Second, the destructive capacity of modern warfare has expanded dramatically. Third, transnational corporations have become conduits for the diffusion of productive knowledge, accelerating economic catch-up. (One big challenge for the center is ensuring that the periphery is always kept behind.)
From the perspective of uneven and combined development, the central challenge for any imperial core is preserving the asymmetry between center and periphery—maintaining a decisive advantage in the capacity to mobilize resources and generate power. Yet under contemporary conditions, that gap tends to narrow far more rapidly than in previous eras.
Empire Suicide Watch phenomenalworld.org
Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic
The Human Cost of DOGE's War on U.S.A.I.D. Atul Gawande at The New Yorker
links re: Jared Diamond (includes Clifford Geertz review)
Holdfast 0: Situating Erin Kissane at wreckage/salvage
...We find information and build it into knowledge socially: by word of mouth, with neighbors or in class, at the church or the bar or the gym, on Facebook or TikTok, and at work. We watch people talking on TV and sometimes we read the news or a book, or we ask a doctor or a lawyer or therapist or another kind of priest, but mostly we talk to and listen to other ordinary people.
Taken far enough, societal destabilization into extremism transforms racist riots into national policy: In the US, as we exhaustively catalogued at Unbreaking, hastily recruited ICE and CBP officers have spent much of the past year and a half beating, tear-gassing, detaining, harassing, starving, sexually assaulting, shooting, and killing people who looked like Black and brown immigrants or allies of immigrants—all against a background of fake videos, xenophobia, white supremacy, and viciously racist and dehumanizing rhetoric on social platforms, including from elite figures and official government accounts.
We're all living in this ecosystem now, whether we choose to use a given platform or not, but I don't think any of it can be sustained. I don't believe Zuckerberg and Musk—or Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, for that matter—will be the forever-rulers of our social and information spheres. Frankly, I expect the eventual backlash against global authoritarianism to include at least one faction devoted to obliterating the platform monopolies that now hold so much unelected and unaccountable power. All empires fall, and even the wealthiest and most powerful come to dust.
...Ecological in the sense that we can't keep treating our online social systems in isolation from everything else and expect things to go well outside them. They're not going well! In the US, the changes produced by the web, accelerated by the social internet, and turbocharged by AI have eaten the heart of corporate journalism and most other forms of publishing—we lose an average of 2.5 local papers each week. And an ecological view lets us stop debating precise allocations of blame for specific events and consider that the social internet is entangled at every level of our information worlds: We shouldn't just consider who lit a match, but who put the matches in their hands, who helped turn baseline-racist publics into the equivalent of dry tinder, and who turned local knowledge-webs into desiccated news deserts populated by national politics and clickbait façades. The answer is almost never "the social internet" by itself, but the social internet's almost never out of the picture, either.
Thoughts on world population day 2026 and what might come next Bryan Alexander
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Hey Thingvellir, That's a Mighty Big Atlas You Were Published In Alan Levine
China Just Bet $17.5 Billion That Quantum Teleportation Is Real. It Is. Nov Tech
Intelligence Can Be Rented But Taste Must Be Earned Alberto Romero
AI requires that you develop your imagination, for it will not so much lead you as follow you. It requires your vision, and vision comes from the ability to see the negative space; to see what isn't yet. You might think you don't have a poet or painter in you, but what you certainly have is an inner little child who has awaited this moment since you got a lobotomy of imagination sometime in sixth grade.
...What happens if you dominate imagination and agency but not taste? That you drown in "nouveau content": you make infinite images, infinite text, and infinite code without any curation whatsoever. Taste takes the form of this question: should you? Taste is both the art of restraint and the habit of selection.
...We are entering a complicated reality that resembles Borges's Library of Babel. Access to information and content and knowledge is trivial inside a library that contains all possible permutations of words. You have total access to whatever answer you seek, but the ability to find the meaningful answer amidst the gibberish remains divine. Taste is as much being able to discern the best nook among the rest as it is being able to write it yourself.
In a world of infinite content, taste is the only thing separating you from infinite noise. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a famous treatise titled On Bullshit, defining "bullshit" not as lying, but as speech created without regard for the truth; AI, left unchecked, is a perfect engine for "bullshit" as it produces plausible-sounding content without caring about reality. Your imagination isn't enough: you visualize every path. Your agency isn't enough: you commit to any path. Taste is the filter that reveals which one you should pursue.
Latent Space
This extreme compression of knowledge within latent spaces was not the original intention of the researchers who invented LLMs. The book smartness they contain came as sort of a surprise to the people training them, and we are still trying to figure out how they actually work. What we can say for sure is that the LLM does not contain copies of everything it knows. For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references. Likewise, the LLM could recognize the face of almost any person, and it could generate any possible human face, but nowhere in its code are copies of human faces. Rather, the model is storing all the information about human faces, without storing any faces.
...LLMs were originally invented to do automatic language translation, that is all. But instead of teaching it the rules of language, which is what earlier AI researchers did, this time no language expertise was required. Instead, a neural net absorbed a very large database of human written language (the internet), with the goal of having the neural net (AI) extract out all the hidden patterns of language below our awareness contained within those billions of documents. The goal of the program was to replicate, imitate and synthesize the patterns of language as it is used everyday by humans.
...Latent space is an abstraction, a map built not in two dimensions, but in billions of dimensions. Imagine a brain made up of billions of straight long arrows going in all directions. Each arrow is dedicated to one idea or one thing
...Every thing, every concept has a specific location in the map of this huge space, but instead of having just two coordinates (x,y) each thing has a billion-long coordinate. So an old rusty gasoline lawnmower buried in weeds is a very specific intersection with a very long address. Each of its thousands of attributes (rust, gas, lawn, cut, weeds, push, red, dirt, clippings, roar, etc.) has its own direction intersected. Nearby in latent space is a lawn mower that is more in the rust direction, or less red, but also more catlike, or more doglike, or less spaceship-like, or more like whipped cream. That point may represent a real thing or only a virtual or theoretical thing. This mapping works for not just nouns, but any idea, any sound, any image. The whoosh of a splash of water is a direction in latent space. The aha moment in invention. The fright seeing a snake on a path. The notion of a prime number. All these are contained within a single map. This is one of the most astounding, yet underappreciated aspects of an LLM latent space: Everything — everything! — appears on just one map. We've never had a system to integrate everything we know and everything we can imagine. One map for all! This has long been a holy grail.
...While training, the LLM is fed millions of books, billions of web pages, and billions of pages of text from social media. It reads every word on each of them, and once this entire library of material is loaded into its mind, it massively calculates all the interconnecting vectors, all the relative directions pointing to each other. The scale of this vast synchronized parallel calculation is staggering. It then throws away the books, the text, the images, and only keeps this tangled web of directions and vectors. These billions of directions are called its parameters. As we build larger and larger models, mapping more and more material, the parameters increase. The latest models on the frontier of AI contain trillions of parameters, meaning there are trillions of directions, or trillions of attributes that it uses to map every idea or thing it has seen.
...Something as complicated as a book winds up as both a point in latent space and a journey through latent space. All the notions encountered in a story (window, mid-day stroll, street, vendor, chat, anger, fight, forgiveness) are directions, and as sentences pile up, the directions shift around, going one way and then intersecting in another. The story is really a journey through latent space, which very much mirrors the journey-like experience we have when we read.
So a book contains a sequence of vectors in latent space. But the sum meaning of a book is also just a single point or direction in itself. For instance if I reference the book The Iliad, I'm referring to the whole book, and its vector is closely related, and therefore "nearby" to the other epic war narratives like Beowulf, The Mahabharata, or even Apocalypse Now, even though many parts of them only tangentially intersect. The more related a thing or idea is, the more directions (vectors) it shares with similar things. This is in part how LLMs know stuff. They search for patterns nearby.
When you ask an LLM a question, it will find the answer in latent space. Your question itself begins as a direction, which points to the answer. The LLM addresses each word in your prompt one by one, with each new word shifting the direction of where it goes. The model travels through latent space with each word of the prompt, searching for its answer, step by step. In this way the answer is grown, rather than found.
Latent space Wikipedia
The Latent Space: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook Xinlei Yu et al. at arxive.org (2026)
What Is a Latent Space? towardsdatascience.com
Journaling via cooltools
Your iPhone Is Hiding a Powerful Document Scanner lifehacker
Archaeologists Just Found the Earliest Known Named Scientist in the Ancient Americas gizmodo
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Dale Sanders, re-hiking the AT at 91 NYTimes
Gerontocracy's failure mode Cory Doctorow
The billion-dimensional map hidden inside every AI model
Ellsworth Toohey at boingboing
Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of Earth's 'Great Dying.' It's Bad News for Our Future gizmodo
A Million Warnings and One Huge Invitation: Climate 2026 Rebecca Solnit
...We have, to return to the metaphor with which I opened, the lifejackets and lifeboats, the firehoses and ladders, to do what we need to do. We have everything we need except enough organized political will of the great majority to rise up with a force adequate to overpower the elite minority invested in short-term profit and longterm destruction. That begins by making climate central to our political (and economic and health and environmental and moral and spiritual) conversations.
Can We Call This Anything But Piracy? Brad DeLong
The market reaction is also very interesting. As I understand it, markets have concluded—rightly—that Donald Trump is simply a chaos-monkey, and there is no point in trying to forecast what the hell he will do.
...it becomes hopeless to expect the market to in any sense discipline Trump by signaling that his disastrous policies are in fact causing disasters. The market is not going to signal that, since Trump's announcements are not in any sense policies. Moreover, since there is a very strong and correct expectation that many of Trump's announcements are intended to spook the market, so that he and his favored can benefit by insider trading on their reversal tomorrow, you would be a fool if you did react to anything Trump says he is going to do until things start blowing up on a large scale.
Technocarcinization:
Enshittification is the great leveler Cory Doctorow
Lately, I've watched the American Big Tech platforms as they underwent their own form of technocarcinization, which is when every tech company turns into Facebook.
...Apple is no longer the company that protects you from surveillance — they're the company that spies on you, having secretly added a total surveillance system to the iPhone to target ads to you
...Google used to pride itself in its ability to send you to the open web, viewing search as a conduit to other peoples' resources. Now, with AI search summaries, Google is harvesting the open web and then eating the seed corn, keeping searchers inside of Google's walled garden
...What's driving this technocarcinization? Well, the obvious answer is that the more Facebooklike a company becomes, the more ways there are for it to rip you off. Surveillance can be monetized by selling your data, by ad targeting, and by surveillance-based pricing and wage-suppression
...Facebook is run by Mark Zuckerberg, a cringe halfwit whose only successful idea was to offer Harvard bros a way of nonconsensually rating the fuckability of female undergrads. Everything he's done since was an acquisition (Whatsapp, Insta) or a flop (metaverse, Libra), or both (Oculus). Zuck owns the majority of the voting stock in the company, which means he has total control over its actions. He can ignore or fire his board members at will. He is the move fast/break things guy, whose every foolish whim can become policy that impacts billions of people.
...the worst people imaginable run these companies, but the reason they're able to yield to their most venal impulses and succeed is because the world has been re-arranged to make sociopathy and greed into fitness factors. We get technocarcinization because the most fit organism for a landscape without consequences is a zuckerbergian techno-crab
via Tooze:
Since then, the largest southeast Asian nation has attracted many researchers to study hominins, some of which have made headlines: one is H. floresiensis in 2003, nicknamed the Hobbit after the work by J. R. R. Tolkien, owing to its small stature. In Bumiayu, Noerwidi hopes to discover another breakthrough: a hominin fossil as old as the roughly two-million-year-old fossils of several hominin species, so far all found in Africa. Some evidence from other finds suggests that hominins could have been in the area around two million years ago, says Noerwidi. Unlike the discoveries of the Java Man and the Hobbit, which were driven by foreign donors, the current expedition is funded by Indonesia and led by the country's scientists. BRIN (Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency) has earmarked US$180,000 annually for up to ten years of work at Bumiayu. Noerwidi and his team had successfully convinced BRIN's Directorate of Research and Innovation Funding about the site's importance. In 2020, he and his team reported the discovery of 1.8-million-year-old fossilized thigh-bone pieces from what might have been H. erectus1,2. The finding was a promising start for the excavation, and older layers of soil at the site might contain even older H. erectus samples. Bumiayu is just one site among many where BRIN is flexing its power in the country's research sector. But BRIN's establishment as a superagency that can both manage the country's science funding and conduct research itself was not without controversy.
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'HyperTexting' Is a Fresh, AI-Free Take on RSS Feeds of Yore lifehacker
Mad Maxxing: A Genealogy of Optimisation Cultures (and their corrosive effects) livingtogethersomehow
Being built around the development of individual characters in the context of shared, imaginative storybuilding and world exploration, D&D game play — informal game practice between individuals, mediated by a Dungeon Master (DM) rather than formal Game Theory (as above) — then evolved the idea of min/maxing10.
In D&D, min/maxing is about squeezing the maximum benefit from the minimum cost – for your individual character. As one forum respondent posted, min/maxing is just "when you go out of your way to try to make your character as strong as possible". As another wrote, it's about how to combine or "exploit rules to get the most out of characters in terms of power"
(continued at Mad Maxxing: The Disappearance of the Other
how the other disappears as the corrosive logic of our age breaks out of its games)
Democracy in an Age of Powermaxxing Paul Krugman 16vii26...Massive political spending has given billionaires massive political power. True, some of what the Trump administration does reflects Trump's personal whims, obsessions and vanity — which is why the Iran debacle happened and is turning into a quagmire. But a large part of federal policy now is government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.
What do billionaires want and get? Money isn't their only object. Some of them genuinely believe in causes beyond their own further enrichment. Unfortunately, these causes are on average loathsome. Elon Musk, to take the most prominent example, appears to be personally committed to white supremacy and right-wing extremism. Peter Thiel, who bought JD Vance his Ohio Senate seat, appears to be genuinely crazy: he's called for a return to monarchy and is now ranting about the antichrist. As Henry Farrell argues, we shouldn't be talking about billionaire derangement syndrome, we should be talking about deranged billionaire syndrome.
...the Citizens United decision, along with the Trump administration's raw corruption, opened the door for the all too numerous predatory billionaires to acquire more political power in order to further rig a system that is already greatly tilted in their favor. Want to pollute air and water? Want your anti-competitive merger approved? Want a big tax cut that benefits the billionaire class while stripping ordering people of their healthcare? Want to eliminate financial regulation so that you can play games with and siphon off other people's money? No problem on all those counts.
Above all, the billionaires want low taxes for themselves. A recent paper by Balkir et al estimates that because we tax income from wealth at much lower rates than income from wages, the wealthiest 400 people in American pay an average tax rate of 24%, compared with 30% for the population at large and 45% for high-income Americans who derive their income from earnings rather than ownership of assets.
David Wengrow Wikipedia, and Beyond kingdoms and empires (2024)
Deranged billionaires and their syndromes Cory Doctorow
How do you arrange society so that selfishness produces public benefit? With markets. Faced with relentless competition, the most effective way to accumulate and retain wealth is by striving to make your wares cheaper and better. In a competitive labor market, we can secure fair treatment for workers without labor law or unions — bosses who treat their workers badly will lose them to better bosses. Just "align the incentives" and let markets do the rest.
...if you squint just right, you'll see both communists and capitalists agreeing on this one thing: if you want the bourgeoisie to bend its efforts to producing something that the rest of us can benefit from, you'll get further by appealing to their fear and greed than by trusting in their munificence.
...Anyone who believes in markets must also tacitly believe that successful market participants don't believe in markets. They should understand that capitalists hate capitalism, that every pirate yearns to be an admiral. They should understand that capitalism's winners only defend disruption when they're the ones doing the disrupting. They should understand that profits are only good when you're a scrappy challenger, but once you've conquered the market, every capitalist seeks to become a feudal lord, converting profits to rents and insulating themselves from an exhausting life of constant competition
...the benefactors with the most money and power to contribute to their think-tanks, university economics departments, conferences and publications are the rentiers – the billionaires who've shored up their fortunes with Warren Buffet's beloved "moats and walls." They're the blitzscaling billionaires who thrive on predatory acquisitions and high capital costs that prevent new market entrants from challenging their incumbency and its easy profits. They're the pirates who've become admirals.
...the economic doctrine of "meritocracy," which holds that markets are giant computers that process uncountable trillions of decisions we all make about what to buy and sell and at what price, seeking out the "correct" price for every commodity and also elevating the people who are best at allocating capital in ways that arrive at the best prices for the best goods. Just as a Puritan believes that wealth is evidence of virtue, a hewer to economic orthodoxy believes the meritocratic system graces the best among us, giving them control over our lives by allowing them to "allocate capital" to create or destroy jobs, or entire firms, or whole sectors of the economy. You can tell they're the right people to do be doing this because the market chose them — if they were bad capital allocators, they'd have gone broke by now. QED.
When capital allocators' kids end up allocating capital too, well, that just shows that "merit" is a heritable trait and the people who have it are born to rule over us. Meritocracy cashes out to a eugenic belief in royal blood and royal dynasties. We know King Arthur was suited to rule us because he pulled a sword out of a stone, and we know Bill Gates is suited to rule over us because he pulled a fortune out of an operating system
The dispensable nation — updated John Quiggen at Crooked Timber
The most intractable area of dependence is that of information technology. Efforts to build a "European stack" have started, but as the term suggests, dependence is multilayered. At the software level, for example, it's necessary both to promote Linux as an alternative to US-owned operating systems and to break with reliance on Microsoft for office software. And that's one of the easy parts of the story.
The biggest questions relate to AI. If the US hyperscalers are right, their huge spending with produce a monopoly or oligopoly with entry barriers too high for any rival, including any European rival. My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral, running maybe a year behind the US leaders, can replicate their capabilities at.a fraction of the cost, and without reliance on massive data centres.If that continues to be true, the benefits of massive US investment will not be reaped by the current leaders but by followers.
The really big unknown here is the fate of the Trump regime. If Trump can cement his own power, and pass it on to someone more competent (Xi to Trump's Mao), and other would be dictators like Modi establish themselves, Europe and its democratic allies will become an island (or maybe an archipelago including places like Canada and Taiwan) in a world of rival autocracies. Maintaining that will be costly in all sorts of way.
On the other hand, if Trump is defeated, the US cannot return to the status quo ante. It will take decades to rebuild a new and sustainable political order on the wreckage left by Trump. The two-party system, the Supreme Court, billionaire controlled media and much more will require either replacement or radical restructuring. That will leave its former allies no alternative to disengagement while the US sorts out its own problems.
China Just Performed the World's First Implant of a Commercial Brain-Computer Interface gizmodo
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"Persia Has Become a Holy Land — William Morris and Iran Juan Cole
Poets composed dozens of skeptical and libertine quatrains during the Mongol period in Persia from the 1220s to the early 1300s, when Buddhists ruled and Muslim orthodoxy fell by the wayside. A handful began being attributed to eleventh-century astronomer and mathematician Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), but there is no evidence that he wrote Persian poetry. He was probably chosen as a frame author because scientists had a reputation as religious skeptics. In the mid-fifteenth century, anthologists began creating entire books full of these unconventional stanzas that they gathered from numerous manuscripts and attributed to Omar Khayyam. In 1460, one Maĥmūd Yerbūdāqī of Shiraz produced a celebrated such manuscript for rebel Turkoman prince Pir Budāq of the Qara Qoyunlu dynasty. The convention spread like wildfire. Soon thereafter, an even bigger collection appeared in Tabriz, the Qara Qoyunlu capital. By 1506, an illustrated manuscript of the Rubā'iyāt of Omar Khayyām was published in Lahore. Throughout the medieval period, calligraphers wrote out such manuscripts, adding more quatrains on various themes. In India, the court chronicler of Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) wrote that Akbar expressed the opinion that "one should write out a quatrain of Omar Khayyam, after reading an ode of Hafez, otherwise the latter is like drinking wine without a relish." When lithograph printing came to British India in the 1820s, a copy of the Rubā'iyāt of Omar Khayyām, containing nearly five hundred quatrains, was one of the first books to be published. It featured prominently in literature omnibuses lithographed in India and Iran throughout the nineteenth century, showing its popularity among Persian speakers.
Donald Trump is running out of options in Iran Informed Comment
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It's Just a Blurred Photo Alvin Greis at Medium
Jo Walton's "Everybody's Perfect" Cory Doctorow
Murder Ballads [Passages] bandcamp and [Drift] by Mick Harris & Martyn Bates
Brad DeLong:
The Global Map of Agricultural Decline maps mania
Human/Nature Rodrigo S-C re: Burtynsky
One of the Strangest Paintings in Art History Christopher P Jones at Medium
God Killed the Great Mother Jack Preston King
A Book That Finally Tells Persia's Story From the Inside Prateek Dasgupta at Medium
Camper Accidentaly Discovers Ancient Meteor Crater on Google Maps
PetaPixel
Exploding cyclosporiasis outbreak flowing data
Metallurgy, Southeast Asian Sambali.blogspot
A descriptive and historical account of hydraulic and other machines
for raising water
Ewbank, Thomas (1842) (pdf)
A naturalist in Madagascar, James Sibree (1915)
Pentagon Says Drones Can Hide in Wind Farms, Freezing 155 Wind Projects gizmodo
Volcanic winter of 536 Wikipedia
Martin Picard's Mitochondrial Theory of Mind Quanta Magazine
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Wikipedia
'Better late than never': how Brian Eno and David Byrne finally laid a musical ghost to rest Guardian 11viii22
The Story of Dounia Younes and the Lost Recording Project Revolver
Drying of the Aral Sea reshapes the anthropogenic carbon inventory of Central Asia Science
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Intelliday Doc Searls
The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can't measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you'd get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn't. (I speak as a former schoolkid whose known IQ scores had an 80-point range—and was at different times rewarded for being smart and punished for being dumb. Fact: I was both all along. So are we all.)
The machine kind is a quantity. You can measure it in various ways, but economically the AI commodities for sale are called tokens.
The Future Of Baroque Music Sol Babitz at archive.org
Herbert Spencer Wikipedia
Sociocultural evolution Wikipedia
The Mystic River Massacre Peter C Mancall Lapham's Quarterly (2026)
Why Every Civilization Collapses: The Great Filter as a Failure of Second-Order Observation Elizabeth Halligan at Medium
Many people turn to Tainter's diminishing returns on complexity, Turchin's elite mismanagement, and Diamond's environmental destruction as the institutional foundation for explaining why societies fail. But these frameworks don't go far enough; they are blinded by the very inability to self-reflect that drives collapse in the first place. It's not that their work lacks value, but they focus entirely on symptoms rather than the root cause. By treating resource depletion, climate change, or economic inflation as the primary catalysts, these old-school models treat human behavior as a passive variable simply reacting to external events. The truth is far more uncomfortable. Humans are locked in amygdala dominance, refusing to self-reflect, adapt, and evolve, actively engineering the collapse of their own reality.
... humans can get hit by "bad luck" or bad weather. But we have engineered a closed-loop system that takes basic survival logic, abstracts it into artificial metrics like "profit" and "GDP," and then optimizes for those metrics even as they actively destroy our biosphere and our wellbeing. The collective likes to blame those in power, but this passivity is simply the amygdala hijack of functional freeze — allowing fear and petty differences to prevent us from coming together and refusing to run a suicidal system. People are too afraid of the gap of uncertainty required to take their power back. Thus, they do nothing. Their helplessness is just complicity masquerading as pragmatism.
...The Great Filter is a cybernetic threshold. Life is an autopoietic system driven by positive feedback loops (runaway recursion) that burns through its environment until it collapses, unless regulated by a higher-order constraint. The Great Filter is the ultimate cybernetic test: whether a civilization can transition from first-order runaway recursion to second-order coherent recursion before it destroys itself. First-order intelligence is highly capable of problem-solving, optimizing, and reproducing, but it cannot see the boundaries of the system it inhabits, because it sees itself as separate from the system.
... The Great Filter is not a physical, resource-dependent wall. It is a cognitive threshold. It is the existential requirement to transition from runaway, first-order recursion to systemic, second-order intelligence. First-order intelligence optimizes for local efficiency, resource extraction, and computational expansion. However, because it operates on a positive feedback loop of unchecked growth, it inevitably exhausts its material substrate.
...To survive the Filter, a system must develop second-order intelligence — the capacity to observe, model, and actively regulate its own observational and behavioral loops.
...the cyclical catastrophe of societal collapse is not an immutable law of physics. All systems are feedback loops. Whether that feedback loop stabilizes or triggers a total collapse and reset depends entirely on whether we possess the neural integration to receive and evolve from it. It depends on whether we are self-aware enough and possess the nervous system regulation capacity to integrate the feedback, and see that we ourselves are the authors of collapse.
The self-sabotaging authorship of collapse is driven by a software lock. By diagnosing civilizational collapse as a structural failure of neural integration rather than an accidental byproduct of history, we shift the entire human ledger from passive victimhood to active accountability. If our inability to self-reflect is what welds the gas pedal to the floor, then the only viable exit condition is a conscious, structural upgrade of our own internal, neurological architecture. We cannot engineer a stable external reality using a brain trapped in a faulty runaway survival loop. To break the cycle of collapse, we must pivot from the mechanics of blind self-destruction to the mechanics of evolution — stepping out of the primitive amygdala-dominated script we are stuck in and into the intentional, reflexive architecture of systemic healing.
Contact shelflist begun
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Map of underground fungi network flowing data
What Makes Us Human? Stephanie Shen at Medium
...In the 19th century, scientists primarily studied the brain anatomically. Notable examples include the discovery of Broca's and Wernicke's areas, which are primarily associated with speech production and comprehension, respectively. Around the same time, William James pioneered the discipline of psychology, branching out from philosophy, to study the brain holistically by examining behavior.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the Second World War accelerated research on radar, communication systems, cryptography, and early computers. Researchers, including John von Neumann, began to question whether any of those technologies relate to the brain. In particular, Claude Shannon's development of information theory greatly inspired the view of the biological brain as an information-processing machine.
Shortly afterward, as computers became more dominant in industry, they became an even more powerful metaphor for human cognition. A computer receives input, transforms information, forms an internal representation, and produces output. Doesn't the brain have the same processes, particularly for thinking?
From then on, scientists began developing the computational theory of mind, in which mental processes were modeled as symbolic computations, the brain as hardware, and the mind as software implemented through rules and algorithms. At the same time, cognitive neuroscience was established to study memory, reasoning, language, and problem-solving, all the non-emotional cognitive functions that can supposedly be modeled mathematically by computational theories.
Since the 1990s, the rise of artificial neural networks has illuminated a new path for neuroscience. As originally inspired by the biological brain, the remarkable success of AI makes it increasingly convincing that the brain is also a highly distributed neural network that might share similar learning algorithms and capabilities in pattern recognition, parallel processing, and distributed representation.
While those metaphors have been useful for scientists and researchers investigating the mechanisms underlying cognitive functions, they have also become a framework that could potentially limit our thinking and obscure the fundamental differences between the brain and a supercomputer.
First of all, the brain is a biological organ shaped by 4 billion years of evolution, not a computer. Because of its biological origin, there is no dichotomy between hardware and software. A computer is a machine designed by engineers. The brain is not designed. Neurons are self-organized from birth and develop organically throughout the lifetime.
...the brain "runs" autonomously, in concert with the body, a biological ecosystem that can't survive without continuous interaction with the surrounding environment. There is no "homunculus" at the center of the brain that first views the internal representation, and then issues commands to control everything.
To use vision as an example, we tend to think there is a computer-like internal representation in our mind that represents the image of the external world, a result of our retina capturing every detail of the environment like a camera.
...visual perception is an active process driven by specific eye movements, capturing selective information shaped by the viewer's intention and attention. A natural implication is that the brain doesn't need to form a complete image of the painting — the viewers see only what they choose to focus on.
American psychologist James J. Gibson further established this notion in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, published in 1979. He rejects the idea that perception is the internal representation built from sensory inputs. Instead, he proposes that organisms directly perceive meaningful information from their environments through movements and continuous engagement.
Moreover, he emphasizes the environment's active role in perception. A key concept in Gibson's framework is "affordances" — the actionable possibilities an environment offers an organism, such as a ground surface that "affords" walking or a door handle that "affords" grasping. Affordances are relational: the objective properties depend on the observer's capabilities. Moreover, they are perceived directly rather than inferred.
...the computer metaphor suggests a passive intake of information. By contrast, humans actively take in information through intentional, attentive actions. This evolutionary endowment allows us to be extremely efficient by ignoring most of the information we don't care about and focusing only on what is relevant. This is why attention matters. Meanwhile, intention gives us the sense of purpose.
...different symbol systems underlie the various forms of art, such as poetry, plays, literature, music, paintings, sculpture, and architecture. While notationality is an ideal symbol system, all those artistic ones deviate from it in varying degrees.
For example, music scores generally satisfy both the semantic and syntactic criteria. In contrast, ordinary language meets only the syntactic requirements, since ambiguity, redundancy, and overlapping word meanings hinder semantic clarity. Additionally, paintings and sculptures do not conform to any of these criteria for notionality. A painting's symbols, such as shapes, colors, brushstrokes, texture, and even the material used, can convey multiple meanings at various levels.
...artistic expression is the "metaphor exemplification" of certain properties of symbols. For example, a piece of music sounds sad. But sadness is not directly coded in the music score. Instead, it emerges from symbolic classifications (e.g., slow tempo, minor scale, etc.) that are transferable to listeners who understand the same conventions and draw the same metaphorical reference.
Furthermore, because of violations of syntactic or semantic requirements, an art symbol system is subject to different interpretations from different perspectives. For instance, a painting is "syntactically dense," so subtle differences between two shapes can convey substantial meaning. Similarly, the English language has high "semantic density" because many words have overlapping meanings with subtle distinctions.
In other words, an artwork's appeal in conveying emotions and feelings arises from its metaphorical exemplifications and "violations" of the criteria of the notational system, for which math and computer symbols have zero tolerance. Instead of having symbols strictly denote an object or process according to perfect syntactic and semantic rules, the true meaning of art appears to be introduced by creativity that tends to break away from those constraints, in order to capture, express, and convey the unlimited facets of human experience.
... The automatic pathway is subcortical, primarily involving the amygdala in the forebrain, which processes vital emotions linked to survival instincts, such as the "fight-or-flight" reaction. Conversely, the reflective pathway engages the prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive center, which has extensive bidirectional connections with both the amygdala and thalamus. Consequently, emotions and cognition are intertwined, acting as interconnected aspects of a continuous process.
...Human life is characterized by the continuous interplay of perception, emotion, cognition, and action, which drive our active engagement with the surrounding world. The brain is an embodied organ, and computational theory is far from accounting for its underlying biological mechanisms.
Spirit-Matter Andy Ilachinski
Earth's Oceans Are Rapidly Losing Oxygen. It Could Destabilize the Planet gizmodo
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Dealing with dickovers Cory Doctorow
Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose: Who Owns Pyrex & All-Clad Now worseonpurpose.com
John Esposito, 86, showed how Islamophobia warped US policy Ibrahim Al-Marashi at Informed Comment
...Danny Postel, in an obituary for New Lines Magazine, argues that Esposito's academic legacy served as a repudiation of that of the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who claimed to explain "the roots of Muslim rage" and "what went wrong" in the Islamic world. Lewis was also responsible for coining a viral academic meme, "The Clash of Civilizations," in his 1991 essay in response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The term would later be adopted by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington in his 1993 article and 1996 book of the same name.
...What emerged on the East Coast was two intellectual currents that would compete in a post-Cold War world, particularly after 9/11. One focused on an essentialist reading of Islam and its inevitable conflict with the "West," and another sought to deconstruct that very narrative.
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Oligarchy and the Media Paul Krugman
A Turkish Dating Joke Got 38.5 Million Views. Men Around the World Recognized It Luc Olinga at Medium
Then, making love in 2026. The man says the same line. The woman answers with a list: rent is due, she needs her hair done, she hasn't eaten since last week, she needs a new bag, new clothes, money for her beauty expenses. The man asks if she is a whore. She calls him disgusting, a misogynist, not a real man.
That's the whole bit. As of this writing, it has 38.5 million views.
...When I write about the manosphere, I usually start with the influencers, the podcasts, the men selling courses. This joke came from none of that. It came from an anonymous account in Turkey, in Turkish, and it traveled farther in five days than most manosphere content travels in a year. Nobody had to translate the feeling. The algorithm just carried it to men who already recognized it.
...The obvious reading, the one most of the replies took, is that modern courtship has become a transaction. The woman in the joke treats desire as an opening bid. The man, humiliated, reaches for the ugliest word available. She reaches back for the vocabulary of the discourse: misogynist, not a real man. Notice that nobody in the 2026 panel speaks like a person. Both of them speak in scripts. He performs the aggrieved man. She performs the offended woman. The '90s couple, by contrast, just wanted each other. That's the nostalgia doing the work.
But look at her list again. Rent is due. She hasn't eaten in a week. Half of that list describes a woman who is broke, and in plenty of the countries those replies came from, a woman's economic survival still runs through men, by design, by tradition, by wage gaps nobody chose to be born into. The joke wants us to see greed. The text, if you read it flat, also shows precarity. Two readings, one punchline, and 38.5 million people mostly saw the first.
...Our Take: The manosphere did not write this joke. It didn't need to. This is the raw material the manosphere runs on: a widely shared, cross-cultural suspicion among ordinary men that intimacy has been monetized and that they are the ones holding the bill. Andrew Tate built an empire refining exactly this feeling into ideology. When 38.5 million people nod at a four-line gag, the recruiters don't have to persuade anyone. They just have to show up and say, you felt that, didn't you.
The men laughing under that post are not villains. Many of them are describing something real in their lives, dates that feel like auditions, apps that feel like marketplaces, a sense that they are being evaluated as wallets first. And the women they're joking about are not villains either. In much of the world, asking who pays is arithmetic.
The '90s panel, for the record, is a fantasy. Courtship in the '90s had its own money, its own dowries, its own quiet calculations, in Yaoundé where I grew up, in Paris where I spent my adult life, in New York where I raised my son. What people are mourning under that post is the idea that desire could ever be free of the ledger. Maybe it never was. But tens of millions of people, in a dozen languages, clearly wish it could be.
The Cosmic Symphony: Why the Laws of Physics Sound Like Music Marco Capriz at Medium
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Elon Musk, the New Hero of Populism Paul Krugman
The fact is that billionaires have had immense political power for decades, but they chose to exercise that power from the shadows, veiling their actions through patriotic sounding right-wing PACs and think tanks. Only political junkies understood what was going on underneath the surface.
Today, however, the new generation of the hyper-wealthy are out there and in your face, flaunting their influence rather than concealing it. And the poster child for this change is, of course, Elon Musk.
...there has been an important transition in America from the days when oligarchic power was mostly exercised in the shadows to the current era of flamboyant and extremist displays of billionaire influence.
What caused the change? At least part of the cause is a shift in the origins of great wealth, from fossil fuels (e.g. the Koch brothers) and other traditional industries to the tech broligarchy. As Henry Farrell argues, many tech billionaires are caught up in the cult of "founders," believing themselves to be superior beings entitled to special privilege and universal acclaim — which means putting themselves out in public. I would add that the tech industry has suffered a precipitous decline in public perceptions since its peak around 2015 — and the fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration were, to a large extent, former culture heroes who want their glory days back.
So surely part of the reason a majority of Americans now say that democracy is being undermined, that billionaires are running everything, is that the billionaires themselves are out there boasting about their influence.
If It Has a Chip, You Don't Own It Giles Crouch
Anything a chip can be put in, breaks a millennia old social contract. Brands spent a fortune over years, decades, to build trust with the consumer. But if you can chip it, then that trust flitters away into the aether, because you no longer have ownership if you want it to work.
...We don't see many family photo albums anymore. And when we do, they are more treasured than ever, for most of our photos reside out in the aether. If a major storage service shuts down or even if we lose the connector cable for that hard drive, they too, are gone. Victims of the chip lords.
When French Philosophy Was Cool Panio Gianopoulos at authorinsider
The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, Reviewed The New Yorker
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Science Friday
Birdsong diversity across the world
Passerines are present on all Earth continents except Antarctica. This order includes songbirds, which emit vocalizations that are long (lasting from a few seconds to several minutes) and complex (made of several acoustic motifs that are organized according to a specific order) (see the figure). These vocalizations, called songs, are typically used to defend territories and attract mates, but some species also use them for strenghening pair bonds (e.g., duets) (4). The factors that determine the acoustic features (duration, frequency, and amplitude) of passerine songs have been debated (5). These features are mainly constrained by the sender's sound-producing organ (the syrinx), its vocal tract, and its cognitive skills (learning and memory) (6). After propagation in the environment, the song can be attenuated; distorted; or masked by abiotic (nonbiological), biotic, and human-generated noises (7). Later, other birds decode the information contained in the song and might respond. The efficiency of this decoding process depends on the anatomy of the hearing system and the cognition of the receiver (6). The acoustic features of songs are also strongly shaped by their function. Songs aimed at close neighbors are more quiet, whereas those aimed at attracting females located at a distance are much louder (8). The capacity of oscine passerines (“true songbirds” for song learning, and hence cultural transmission, makes the search for song feature drivers within this subgroup even more complex (4).
A song's acoustic features therefore result from a trade-off between multiple factors that optimizes the fulfillment of the song's purpose despite environmental constraints. This might lead to acoustic similarities between closely related birds that share anatomical features or between birds living in the same type of environment. However, the large diversity of songbird species across the world makes it challenging to identify the main factors that shape their songs. So far, studies on the evolution of birdsong have mainly focused on single parameters [e.g., frequency (9)], specific climate regions or communities (10), or a restricted number of factors [e.g., body size and bill size (11)].
Protect and expand ocean observation systems
Long-term ocean observations are particularly important because some of the most consequential Earth system risks emerge gradually and can be detected only through continuous measurements. These include changes in major circulation systems such as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), marine heat waves, and ecosystem transitions with potentially far-reaching societal consequences (6). Indeed, in 2025, Iceland formally identified a potential AMOC collapse as a national security risk (7).
Reducing ocean observation infrastructure has global implications: Roughly 40% of the global population lives along coastlines, and the rapidly expanding ocean economy is projected to outpace global growth for decades (8). Satellites, which provide valuable insight into atmospheric change and surface dynamics but reveal little about the structural changes occurring to ocean currents, chemistry, or ecosystems, cannot replace this infrastructure. At a time of accelerating environmental change, ocean observing systems function as a planetary early warning system. Governments should treat them as critical public infrastructure, expanding rather than dismantling collection of the long-term observations needed to detect emerging risks, anticipate change, and navigate an increasingly uncertain future.
Epigenetic and 3D genome reprogramming during the aging of the human hippocampus
We present a comprehensive multiomic analysis of the aging human hippocampus. We uncovered age-associated changes that were regulated in a coordinated manner across different layers of epigenetic mechanisms, as well as changes only captured by individual modalities. Our data showed that age-associated epigenomic remodeling strongly influences transcriptional activity. DNA methylome profiling revealed that, with age, embryonically derived microglia were largely replaced by a population of microglia that epigenetically resemble blood monocytes. These potential monocyte-derived microglia possessed 3D genome and epigenomic features associated with inflammation. Concurrently, astrocytes and endothelial cells, critical for blood-brain barrier integrity, declined with age. Our data showed that age-related alterations in the epigenome and 3D genome architecture considerably affect the aging transcriptome, with erosion of genome topology accompanied by a decline in DNA-binding of CTCF, which together with cohesin defines the topologically associating domains (TADs) through the loop extrusion process (17-20). Our findings provide insights into regulatory mechanisms contributing to age-related neuroinflammation and synaptic dysfunction and provide a framework for dissecting complex aging phenotypes at single-cell resolution.
The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene
...There are ˜7500 languages signed and spoken in the world today (1, 2), and they have a wide range of grammatical structures, vocabularies, speech sounds, signs, and usage rules. The study of language diversity has brought distinctive insights into how human behavior and cognition are shaped by ecological, social, and communicative pressures (3-8). The observable limits of linguistic diversity—features that are either universally present or absent in the world's languages—have been at the core of what makes humans a distinctive species (9). Insights into language have also been used to understand other dimensions of human variation and homogeneity, including cultural and psychological traits. Over the past 500 years, all evidence points to a large systematic decrease in linguistic diversity, in parallel with the spread of a handful of behemoth languages, such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Hindi. Nearly 5 billion people use at least 1 of the 10 most common languages, whereas half of the world's languages are now endangered, and about four become dormant every year (10). This results in the loss of cultural and scientific knowledge embedded in minority languages and contributes to the unequal development in science, technology, medicine, and education that predominantly benefits speakers of the world's largest languages (11-13).
In consequence, understanding past stages of linguistic diversity is fundamental for making sense of human cultural and cognitive history as well as for framing the current reduction in the world's languages. However, direct evidence for language diversity is absent before the first attestation of writing around 6000 years ago (14) and is sparse for most of the historical record, as language catalogs and systematic attempts at language documentation are recent (see supplementary text). Moreover, although methods from historical linguistics and evolutionary biology have been utilized to reconstruct prehistoric linguistic events, few languages were documented in antiquity (15). Most contemporary languages are derived from a handful of population expansions stemming from major technological and cultural Holocene developments: the domestication of plants and animals in the Fertile Crescent, the Yellow and Yangtze River Basins, the Andes, and Mesoamerica (16, 17) and the development of groundbreaking technologies, such as seafaring in the case of the Austronesian world (18), among others.
Epigenetic and 3D genome reprogramming during the aging of the human hippocampus
Protect and expand ocean observation systems
Beyond Greece and Rome Aeon.co
...Part of what is driving this expansion in perspective is an accumulation of evidence hinting at connections between the ancient Mediterranean and distant regions in Afro-Eurasia. We now know, for example, that trans-Saharan trade can be traced back to the first two centuries CE, at the height of the Roman Empire, when Roman products such as wine, olive oil and silver were exchanged — largely through merchants operating in the southwestern Libyan desert — for gemstones, ivory and slaves. Hoards of Roman coins have been found well beyond the frontiers of the empire, from Scandinavia to India. A papyrus from Egypt in the middle of the 2nd century CE records the details of two contracts for the import of various goods from India, including pepper, pearls, silk and gemstones, shipped to Alexandria from the port of Muziris in Kerala, southwest India. What all of this implies is a far-flung web of transimperial commercial contacts in the first few centuries CE.
...the main backdrop for the new global antiquity is the transcontinental macroregion of Afro-Eurasia, especially the broad, temperate band stretching from the Mediterranean basin through the Iranian Plateau and Indian subcontinent to the Pacific Rim of China. Overland, maritime and riverine transportation systems together formed a complex communications network that embraced much of this space, enabling the sorts of contacts sketched above. The spine of the system was an east-west corridor, articulated into a series of overlapping, land-based routes. These overland routes connected Anatolia and the whole of the West Asian Fertile Crescent (the Levant and the Euphrates and Tigris river valleys) to the Iranian Plateau, with passages running up through the Hindu Kush mountain range and continuing into Central Asia. From there, a series of routes continued east through the Tarim Basin and Hexi Corridor (Gansu Province in northwest China). These routes then descended through the river valleys of the North China Plain before reaching the main population centres of ancient East Asia.
...The Indian Ocean was arguably the geographical core of the premodern Afro-Eurasian world system
...In coming to grips with the potential prospects and pitfalls of the new global antiquity, it is perhaps worth noting that our own global world has arrived at an inflection point — and this, as much as the latest archaeological discoveries, is surely driving contemporary interest in the global past. As a set of institutions, processes, relationships and ideals that has catalysed the worldwide circulation of everything from cellphones, financial instruments, American English and street fashion, to labourers, raw materials, Coca-Cola and microbes, globalisation has been the defining feature of post-Second World War global history, especially following a period of intensification beginning in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the explosive rise of China as an economic powerhouse have turbo-charged global connectivity over the past generation, with the twin hubs of the North Atlantic and East Asia functioning both as engines and as beneficiaries of this current iteration of the global order.
But the tectonic plates that have supported globalisation are moving. A structure that we have come to live with and take for granted — regardless of our feelings about it — suddenly appears unstable. Reassertions of national sovereignty, often couched in the language of ethnonationalism, and increasingly aggressive, imperialist claims to strategic or resource-rich territories are beginning to reinscribe the importance of borders and territoriality in a world that had been chugging along towards an ever greater, transnational integration of capital, information and culture.
...It is not just that the new global antiquity is opening up countless new paths of historical enquiry into the deep past. It is that this new field is also generating a richer and more layered context for thinking about our own globalised world — considerably more complex than its ancient predecessor, to be sure, but shaped by similar dynamics of movement, exchange, connectivity and competition. Perhaps the ultimate promise of the new global antiquity is the prospect it offers for helping us appreciate our interconnected past, our collective heritage and, ultimately, our common humanity.
Breakdown In Pakistan Astral Codex Ten
...Readers of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State will recall how mid-eighteenth-century German "scientific foresters" treated forests similarly, as a mechanism to reliably yield the highest volume of lumber. They planted spruce in vast uniform grids, ordered for easy counting and harvesting, while stripping out other non-timber species. The resulting monoculture plantations seemed ideal for both commercial exploitation and experimentation; it's much easier to control variables when you've removed as much natural variability as possible.
Within a few decades, the downsides became evident. The first generation of trees grew strong, sucking up the accumulated benefits of the previous forest's soil ecology; later generations were stunted, as the lack of biodiversity left the soils nutrient-poor. Plantations packed with trees of the same species and same height were far more vulnerable to pathogens, pests, and extreme weather. Large-scale forest die-offs, Waldsterben, eventually forced foresters to drastically modify their approach.
Cardiologist
Smart watch may improve detection of atrial fibrillation
Heart health notifications on your Apple Watch
Does the Apple Watch detect atrial fibrillation?
You can receive a notification if Apple Watch has identified an irregular heart rhythm that appears to be atrial fibrillation (AFib).
... Irregular Rhythm Notifications: For users who have not been diagnosed with AFib, the watch occasionally checks your heart rate in the background. If an irregular rhythm suggestive of AFib is detected, it will send an alert to your wrist. You can enable this feature via the Apple Support Guide on Heart Health Notifications.
Plotlines languagehat
Stephen Downes i Iceland (Flickr album)
Taylor Farms explosive diarrhea recall spreads boingboing
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As Modern Humans We Cannot Bring Ourselves to Face the Reality of Reality Eric Lee at Medium
The US Culture of Misunderstanding in Iran & the Middle East Andrea B Rugh at Informed Comment
...Americans believe Iranians will surrender with coercive diplomacy while the Iranians mistrust American motives and believe their intention is to dominate the country. In Mousavian's view the US would be more effective if it used the language of respect and equality. But Americans instead talk down to the Iranians, seeming unaware of the extent to which this irritated Iranians who feel proud of their glorious civilization and past.
...If a major problem of conflicts is cultural, where will we who want to know find reliable cultural knowledge? In the past, anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict wrote about cultures in a way that was easily understood by the public. Today it's hard to find such studies. Anthropologists have pretty much withdrawn into academia where they neither address pressing problems of the day nor use language the public can understand.
chuckle, giggle, yuk, joke sesquiotic
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Population Growth ourworldindata.org
Life on the List NYRB
Complicating the process further is the fact that the US can recommend sanctions based purely on intelligence information, while European countries do so only if there has been a criminal investigation. Sometimes the ombudsperson can access the initial intelligence from the listing state; other times they're denied on national security grounds.
On "Reek Sunday" Ireland climbs its Holy Mountain Hobbledehoy
Polycrisis & nostalgia for lost futures Adam Tooze
...there NEVER was one globalization. Globalization discourse put a skim over the top of a hyper complex reality
Glossary for Other Worlds gov.sg
Against Oligarchy, Part II: Wealth Taxes Paul Krugman
We live in a world of divergent, incongruent but overlapping shocks. In recent years, I've been trying to capture this agglomeration of heterogeneous historical forces with the notion of the polycrisis. On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the USA it seems as though we may need a more graphic image.
...President Donald Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in his first year back in office, often in intense bursts tied to market events he created.
Trump Made $1 Billion on Crypto Deals While His Fans Lost a Fortune
Morten Christensen made a big bet on digital tokens sold by the Trump family's World Liberty Financial last year, hoping that a surge in value might be enough to help him retire.
...The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the literal fear of God. The composer Liza Lim conceived her forthcoming work Tongue of the Land, crafted for the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, around the demands of this long-forgotten instrumental hardware.
...Economics is often presented as a deterministic type of engineering, but it is really an observational social science involving the generalization and abstraction of observed human behavior—operating under the assumption that people are logical. It provides an explanation for why some things happen the way they do and offers general guidance to people making decisions. It is like a story that makes sense, but does not always match real life. The modern food system owes a lot to economic thinking, so it pays to understand it a bit about its influence.
...We may think puppets are nothing more than children's toys, but I'm fascinated by the power they wield over us psychologically. Though we know they are not alive, we can easily be mesmerized by them, buying into their feigned words and movements until we are fully captivated by a construction of fabric scraps. In a clever ventriloquism act, it is the puppet that has us in stitches, not the human.
...today the world consumes more than half of its fish and seafood from farms, requiring a huge fishmeal supply. At the same time, fish consumption per capita has also jumped, reaching 21.3 kilograms per year in 2024, up from 14.3 kilograms on average in the 1990s, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization
...Canadian state capitalism laying a pipe to Asia
(Limits To Growth, 1972) ...When the world3 model was first introduced, the entire scientific community basically laughed at it. Most economists dismissed it as "Malthusian," and politicians ignored it. We had entered into a period of unprecedented economic expansion and the concept that there would be an end to this type of expansion seemed like a total buzzkill from another era.
Pascal dissected the human condition with surgical precision. He believed human beings live in a state of paradox, caught between the infinite and the infinitesimal. We can grasp the vastness of the universe and the microscopic nature of the atom, yet we're fragile, mortal, and doomed to decay.
"We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it," Pascal wrote.
...n response to the IRGC refusal to see its strategic advantage chipped away at, the administration reimposed sanctions on Iranian petroleum. Those sanctions are unilateral and are rejected by China for that reason. There is no basis in international law for the United States to wake up in the morning and say Iran cannot sell oil to e.g. India or China.
Stories of New York City, Mapped is an interactive map of the New York Times' long-running Metropolitan Diary column. For nearly fifty years, the Metropolitan Diary has been the Times' home for reader-submitted vignettes, eccentric anecdotes, and overheard snippets of conversation that define life across the five boroughs. By geolocating thousands of these stories, the map creates a fascinating geographical archive of the city's collective memories.
...Advocates of military AI argue that better data and faster analysis can make attacks more precise. That is possible in principle. But precision is not something software simply possesses. It depends on the quality and age of the data, what a system treats as suspicious, and whether people have enough time to challenge its output.
...One way to express this idea is to say that living organisms have "agency." It's a hotly contested term. Some biologists reject it outright, at least for any organisms except humans, because we decide on our actions with conscious deliberation. (Whether we're truly the only species to do so is another issue.) Others think that agency is a fundamental attribute of all life. Since there's no agreed-upon definition of the term, to some extent it can mean whatever you want it to mean. But the debate about biological agency touches on fundamental issues in our understanding of what it means to be alive, because agency evokes a notion that biologists and philosophers have always wrestled with: teleology, the apparent purposiveness of life. If we admit agency into biology, do we open the floodgates to ideas about design, vitalism, or cosmic meaning? Or is it just a recognition of what makes life such a special state of matter?
Bacteria may be unicellular, but they don't always act that way. When they get together and form a biofilm, colonies can synchronize and divvy up labor, behaving more like a tissue than a clump of independent cells. However, working together can be a double-edged sword. One bacterium requires a lot fewer resources than thousands of them—and if food becomes scarce, an entire film can starve. Scientists were studying this kind of communal death when they saw something unexpected: before a biofilm finally dissolved, some of the bacteria were forcibly ejected, allowing them to scuttle away from the scene of the soon-to-be carnage. It appears as if "the biofilm senses that it is in trouble so it shoots cells out of the community like an escape pod ," explained study leader Gürol Süel in a statement, "so they can survive and live to fight another day." An 'escape pod' of motile bacteria breaks free from a biofilm. CHOU ET AL./NATURE MICROBIOLOGY (2026) How do these simple organisms coordinate such a mass evacuation? According to the team's experiments, just before cells are ejected, the film produces a polymer of poly-γ-glutamic acid (γ-PGA) that acts like a hydrogel; it can absorb a lot of water, and swells as it does so. This physically breaks open the outer layers of the film, ushering a bolus of mobile bacteria back out into the wild. While this is a neat trick for the biofilm, it could be used against these bacteria in the future. Removing harmful biofilms is notoriously difficult, as the cohesive unit is often resistant to antibiotics. The researchers were able to bust-up biofilms by forcing them to overproduce γ-PGA, suggesting an alternate tactic for removing them.
Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus.
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
Seven Nights
Knowledge is not an object that you acquire. It's not a mechanism that somehow you provide to the human mind. It's actually an epiphanal moment. And I think this is true of the arts, poetry, painting, music, and I would say also to spiritual understanding. [...] Is it possible to be alive, active in the world, and yet have such calm, such kind of inner openness and presence that one can lead a life, at least in part, that is an expression of that quality of meditative quiescence that's on the one hand quite alert and on the other hand, completely at ease, completely at rest. So it's a little bit like bringing the sleeping life into the day life.
—Arthur Zajonc (1949 - )Quodlibet... from the Latin for "whatever you please." In music, it refers to a piece that weaves together several, usually well-known, melodies into one.
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if AI had arrived in the America of the 1950s or 1960s, when income and wealth inequality were very low by historical standards. In those days, the tax code was strongly progressive and industry regulation, including antitrust policy, was robust. Under those conditions it's very likely that the destructive effects of AI would have been limited and contained.
there have been differences within this general logic of empires across history, as social technologies and the capacity to mobilize labor and resources have significantly expanded, enabling a general shift from despotic regimes towards infrastructural power.
...This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that's not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People's lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn't illiterate. It's postliterate. I started reporting on this topic in 2024. That year, I published an article about students who arrived at the nation's most elite colleges unprepared to read full books. I traced how middle and high schools had pulled books from their curricula in favor of short excerpts. Last year, my editors asked me to revisit the topic. It's often dispiriting to track just how little people are reading
(quotes Ursula Franklin The Real World of Technology:
I intend to look at technology the way Macpherson looked at democracy, as ideas and dreams, as practices and procedures, as hopes and myths. The second reason is that I wanted to discuss technology in terms of living and working in the real world and what this means to people all over the globe. This is the "real" part in the title...
...Imagination is how you bridge that AI gap, how you prime your mind to give up a set of tools that might be obsolete, how you stop looking in the rear mirror when the view before you promises so much.
(https://boingboing.net/2026/07/13/john-le-fucker.html)
Latent Space as a New Medium Kevin Kelly
A Large Language Model (LLM) is like a small zip file that contains all human knowledge. It takes massive arrays of 100,000 GPU chips working in the cloud, and costing billions of dollars, to compress all of human writing into a small working model that could run on one single GPU chip. Even the biggest frontier models compress down to several hundred gigs, which is small enough it can fit on a card in your palm. In a strange but real way the resulting tiny file contains all the information that is on the internet and in our libraries. This tiny card holds a significant proportion of what humans collectively know. Of all the remarkable aspects of AI, this astounding feat of compression may be the least appreciated. This dense, high order compression of human knowledge — called "latent space" — may also be a new medium itself.
...In a study published July 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists believes they have finally pinned down why so many sea animals died as a result of this extreme global warming. The findings not only solve a longstanding scientific mystery, but present a warning about Earth's future.
...We know everything we need to know, but who we is always a question. Survey after survey shows that the great majority of human beings on earth take climate change seriously and want to see action on it. That's important because that version of we is often blamed for it, either directly with climate-footprint-shaming (as if we ourselves are individually capable and responsible for exiting a system we instead need to change collectively) or indirectly with misrepresentation of public opinion as indifferent or in denial.
...If the piratical practice of presidents improvising piratical toll‑booth empires in strategic straits half the world away and courts retreating behind self‑execution technicalities is not a betrayal and a constructive repeal of the fundamental design principle of the American constitution that the president is a magistrate to faithfully execute congress-passed laws rather than a king with sovereign powers derived from Divine Right and salus populi suprema lex, it is not clear to me what it could be.
"Carcinization"x is a curious biological phenomenon: given enough time, across many environments, many species will evolve into crabs. The body-type of a crab, with its low center of gravity, sideways gait (useful for evading predators), ease of concealment and protected organs is suitable to many different environments
...Java, Indonesia's most populous island (the archipelagic nation comprises more than 1,700 islands), plays a crucial part in palaeoanthropology. During the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago), the island was part of Sundaland, the southeasternmost part of the Asian continent. This was one of the farthest points that H. erectus could reach from Africa. Grasslands, lowland forests and rivers dominated the landscape, creating perfect habitats for hominins and the animals that they hunted. And a tiny fraction of those lives have since been preserved as fossils. Palaeoanthropology "was born here", says Noerwidi. The Java Man, the first fossil evidence of H. erectus, was excavated by Javanese labourers and identified by Dutch palaeoanthropologist Eugène Dubois in 1895, confirming Charles Darwin's theory of human evolution described 36 years earlier in his book On the Origin of Species.
Source: Nature...from 1972, different individuals co-evolved a novel set of elements that moved away from wargaming, and into dungeon exploration, experience points, and individual character progression. In 1974, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was released, based around these new elements.
The theory of markets goes like this: even the best of us can fall prey to selfishness and rationalization, so let's arrange society so that people acting on their most selfish impulses end up producing benefit for all of us. That'll be easier and more reliable than convincing everyone to be more generous.
...The last parts of US hegemony in this respect are the dominant US role in the IMF and World Bank and, most importantly, the role of the $US as a reserve currency. I'll leave those for later.
...In Persian and Arabic literature, a rubā'ī is a quatrain, a poem of four lines. The quatrain was quite popular in medieval Persian literature, being relatively easy to grasp, and often contained a haiku-like twist in the third line. Throughout the reign of the Seljuk Empire (1037-1194), poets produced quatrains on a variety of themes, including romantic love, the cruelties of fate, the saving beauty of nature, the attractions of wine, and the path of mystical insight. Some Sufi poets such as Farīd al-Dīn 'Attār (d. 1221) produced entire volumes of rubā'yāt to express transcendent wisdom. Other quatrains were more secular or even ribald in orientation. Stanzas expressing sentiments of which the establishment of the time might disapprove were often released anonymously or attributed to some past figure.
The human brain is a massively parallel supercomputer that fits inside half a shoebox. It draws 50 watts of power. It is an amazing innovation, analysis, assessment and creation machine. 600 million years of proto-mammalian and mammalian evolution coupled with the genetic algorithm means that almost every single human can solve AI problems far beyond our current engineering reach—so much so that much of what our machines find impossible our brains find so trivially easy that we call such capabilities "unskilled". When combined with our brains, human fingers are amazingly fine manipulation devices. Human back and leg muscles—especially when testosterone soaked—are quite good at moving heavy objects. Thus back in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, we used our brains, our big muscles, and our fingers to lead cognitively interesting if stressful and short lives. But history has rolled forward since the hunter-gatherer age. And as history has rolled forward, we have figured out other things to do to add economic and sociological value than their uses in the hunger-gathers paradigm. Over the long historical sweep, the ability to add value using our backs to move heavy objects and our fingers to perform fine manipulations in cognitively-interesting ways has, relatively, declined
Mary and Child Surrounded by Seraphim and Cherubim, part of the Melun Diptych (1452-58) by Jean Fouquet.
Oil on panel. 94.5 x 85.5 cm. Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium...Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones's Persians: The Age of the Great Kings rescues the Achaemenid Empire from centuries of Greek framing
...Just as pre-Islamic evidence of the worship of Allah doesn't indicate that Islam as a religion was practiced, so too the mere mention or veneration of Ahura Mazda does not constitute sufficient proof of a widespread practice of Zoroastrianism. It was only during the Sasanian Empire that Zoroastrianism was properly codified and declared Iran's state religion. There were certainly Elamite, Babylonian, and Iranian polytheistic traditions in Achaemenid spiritual life, making the religious practices much more diverse than a uniform interpretation of Zoroastrianism, as we understand it today, would suggest.
...There is abundance of tòaka (rum) made in Antsihànaka, and its manufacture is the work of poor old men and women and (formerly) of slaves. In every house it is to be found, for they think it shows a want of respect to visitors if they have not plenty of tòaka to give them. Whatever be the business in hand, whether funerals or rejoicings, nothing can be done without drinking tòaka
...mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. These organelles make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, through a cascade of chemical reactions that breaks down glucose and fat from food. But mitochondria are much more than energy factories. Studies over the past decade have shown that they process all sorts of molecules, including neurotransmitters, hormones, and metabolites, which means they directly impact what we experience as mood, stress, sexual arousal, and the need to sleep. This makes them “the consilience point for many known processes demonstrated to underlie consciousness,” Picard said.
I began to think with the word 'pataphilology around 2001, as
a way of grouping a dossier of very strange texts that ranged
in date of origin from the 1860s through the 1990s and in
genre from avant-garde literature through the work of outsid-
ers, hallucinators, schizophrenics, and principled refuseniks to
normal (and normative) language practices. Sometimes these
texts (many of which are gathered in the epoch-marking 1998
anthology Imagining Language, edited by Jed Rasula and Steve
McCaffery) deploy perfectly respectable philological method-
ologies, but in a manner which leads to bizarre and even oth-
erworldly results; at other times new philologies are invented,
then deployed to produce remarkable and moving documents.
Reading these works, I felt as though I had entered an alternate
world in which everything I knew had somehow been subtly
changed, where everything was itself and yet unsettlingly differ-
ent at the same time.
We need different words for human and machine intelligence.
...If dynamic equilibrium is the foundational mechanism that allows stable systems to process energy, self-correct, and evolve, then its total absence is what defines civilizational failure. When a system can no longer adaptively balance its internal currents, it defaults to a rigid, structural panic. With this understanding of systemic health in mind, we can look past the surface symptoms of history and finally isolate the neuropsychological bottleneck at the center of every historical decline.
...In a society and culture that values rationality and reason as the crown of human intelligence, we tend to overlook the fact that we are primarily embodied, biological beings. The gap is more concerning now that AI seems to surpass, and could even replace, our rational thought process. We need to ask: do we really know ourselves? As human society advances by mainly looking outward, have we spent enough time looking inward?
quotes Teilhard De Chardin
In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit. All that exists is matter becoming spirit. There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. [...] Life represents the goal of a transformation of great breadth, in the course of which what we call ‘matter' turns about, furls in on itself, interiorizes the operation covering, so far as we are concerned, the whole history of the earth. The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self‑conscious. It is a cosmic change of stateOne of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for
a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website's mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn't give two shits about.
...His 1992 work proved prescient. He rejected the term "Islamic fundamentalism," for him a construct that emerged as part of the post-Cold War anxiety seeking a replacement for Communism. Reading the book now, one can draw enduring lessons about the path to America's two-decade-long "War on Terror," and its current conflict with Iran.
...If you ask, why do people still go out there saying that tax cuts pay for themselves and that tax cuts on the rich are an enormously powerful tool for stimulating economic growth? That's been tested to destruction, and it just ain't so. But it's a zombie idea. It keeps shambling along, eating people's brains, even though it should be dead. And the reason is, well, there's a lot of money in it.
A four-line joke about sex and money traveled from Turkey to China, Japan, Europe and the United States. The manosphere didn't create the feeling behind it. It already knew how to use it.
On July 9, a Turkish account posted a joke. Two panels, four lines. "Making love in the '90s," it begins. "Man: I'm sexually attracted to you. Woman: Me too. Man: Let's make out. Woman: Yes."
...When two or more orbiting bodies exert a regular, periodic gravitational influence on each other, they eventually settle into a "resonant chain" —a series of small-integer ratios like 1:2 or 2:3. In a very literal sense, the solar system is a vast collection of coupled oscillators. The same "objective physical coupling" that explains why we tap our feet is what prevents the moons of Jupiter from crashing into each other or drifting off into the void.
...Trump has brought American oligarchy out of the shadows and into the spotlight. As I noted last week, the spectacle of "the cavalcade of fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration" was a clear wake-up call. Yet the display of billionaire fealty to Trump, I would argue, is part of a larger dynamic in which the new generation of American oligarchs have chosen to make themselves public figures and hence public targets.
...We like to own things. Because we either worked hard to be able to buy them or they carry meaning because it was a gift. These things became ours. We did whatever we wanted with them. If we really like a certain brand, we'll buy it again. The brand delivered quality that we liked and could afford. When we buy something, a loop is closed. The object becomes ours.
Oldest known Mars rock offers glimpse of planet's watery youth
...Chunks of Mars blasted into space by impacts occasionally make it to Earth as meteorites. Because the martian atmosphere has a distinctive fingerprint of noble gases, researchers can distinguish martian meteorites from other space rocks by tiny amounts of gas trapped in them. Although most of the planet's surface is likely more than 3.5 billion years old, nearly all of the several hundred known martian meteorites are relatively young volcanic basalts—hard, durable rocks that better withstood their violent ejection from Mars and passage through Earth's atmosphere.
...birdsong diversity can be mapped into eight core motifs, whose use and geographical distribution are determined by a tradeoff between environmental constraints, evolutionary history, and biological traits.
...In lakes and oceans, billions of animals migrate vertically every day, feeding in surface waters at night and descending out of the photic zone during the day to escape predatory fish. Many migrants are crustacean zooplankton, such as copepods, that move vertically by passive sinking, active vertical swimming, and alterations in body lipid composition (1, 2). Such transit plays important roles in food webs and nutrient transfer (3). On page 398 of this issue, McKenzie et al. (4) report that insects also migrate vertically. Larvae of the midge Chaoborus edulis (family Chaoboridae), which live in Lake Malawi, Africa, dive during the day to depths of up to 200 m using a set of crush-resistant air sacs, the volume of which can be fine-tuned to regulate buoyancy. Surviving the depth of this water column raises the possibility that other insects exploit deep-water habitats, contrary to widespread belief.
...The ocean is a central regulator of Earth system stability and climate resilience. Ocean waters have absorbed 90% of excess planetary heat and 25% of human carbon emissions (4). This carbon sink function has buffered the effects of increased temperatures on human societies, but it is fundamentally changing ocean conditions (5).
...The human genome is not a static list of instructions but a dynamic, three-dimensional structure that folds, loops, and reorganizes within the nucleus to control where and when genes are expressed. This spatial and temporal organization—the "4D" nucleome—has emerged as a critical layer of gene regulation, one whose disruption is increasingly linked to disease.
...The hippocampus plays a critical role in learning, episodic memory, emotional regulation, and spatial navigation—functions that decline with age and are associated with hippocampal atrophy (3-5). Tran scriptomic studies of the aging human brain have consistently reported increased expression of immune response genes, suggesting chronic neuroinflammation, alongside decreased expression of genes involved in synaptic connectivity and plasticity (6-10), implying that transcriptional dysregulation may drive age-related synaptic dysfunction rather than neuronal loss. Single-cell studies in mammals further reveal cell type–specific aging effects, including altered inflammatory and neuronal gene expression, epigenetic remodeling, and three-dimensional (3D) genome restructuring (11-16). Despite the central role of the hippocampus in cognition, a detailed investigation of single-cell epigenomics and 3D genome architecture in the aging human hippocampus is still lacking.
Before the onset of plant and animal domestication, the number of languages was smaller than it is today (4500 to 6000 compared with 7500). Subsequent increases in global population precipitated increased linguistic diversity. We uncovered a linguistic "golden age" with tens of thousands of languages 3000 to 1000 years ago. Great loss of linguistic diversity did not begin with recent colonial expansion but as multinational empires first spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures. Thus, extinction has likely played a much greater role in shaping linguistic and cultural diversity than previously thought.
...The human genome is not a static list of instructions but a dynamic, three-dimensional structure that folds, loops, and reorganizes within the nucleus to control where and when genes are expressed. This spatial and temporal organization—the "4D" nucleome—has emerged as a critical layer of gene regulation, one whose disruption is increasingly linked to disease.
...In lakes and oceans, billions of animals migrate vertically every day, feeding in surface waters at night and descending out of the photic zone during the day to escape predatory fish. Many migrants are crustacean zooplankton, such as copepods, that move vertically by passive sinking, active vertical swimming, and alterations in body lipid composition (1, 2). Such transit plays important roles in food webs and nutrient transfer (3). On page 398 of this issue, McKenzie et al. (4) report that insects also migrate vertically. Larvae of the midge Chaoborus edulis (family Chaoboridae), which live in Lake Malawi, Africa, dive during the day to depths of up to 200 m using a set of crush-resistant air sacs, the volume of which can be fine-tuned to regulate buoyancy. Surviving the depth of this water column raises the possibility that other insects exploit deep-water habitats, contrary to widespread belief.
A dramatic shift in perspective is producing a much bigger, broader and more exciting view of 'the ancient world'
A couple of decades ago in Kabul, a fellow aid worker on his third beer came up with a vivid simile for what American money was doing to the Afghan organizations implementing USAID projects. "It's like gluing a rabbit mouth-first to a fire hose. You blast its guts right out of its ass... but as long as the water keeps running, it looks like you've taught the rabbit to dance."
Track your AFib History with Apple Watch
Go to the Apple Watch app on your iPhone.
Tap My Watch, tap Heart, then tap Set Up Irregular Rhythm Notifications in Health.
PlotLines is a terrific site: "The classics, mapped — every journey in the book, drawn on a hand-tinted period map, with the real 1890s Ordnance Survey wherever the story walks in Britain." For anyone who, like me, reads novels with maps and atlas at hand, trying to trace the characters' travels, it's a godsend, and it's brilliantly done
...Descartes and Plato were linguistic thinkers. Newton and Spinoza were not. You can't be a non-linguistic thinker and a leader within metastatic modernity able to question the consensus human-centric narrative of modern techno-industrial (MTI) cultures or form of overcomplex civilization based on the ideology (abstracted linguistic system of beliefs) of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise.]
... It has become increasingly clear that effective international communication is impossible without basic knowledge of world cultures. US officials say as much when they admit that failures in Afghanistan and Iraq were due in large part to ignorance of culture and pushing too many programs that conflicted with local values. In Afghanistan, for example, the US pushed tribal leaders to adopt a centralized form of government, when decentralization was a more familiar pattern of the past. It left the Afghan government only controlling Kabul in the end.
...Those sanctioned can now file an appeal to the UN via an ombudsperson. Appointed by the UN Secretary General in consultation with the committee, the ombudsperson is essentially a mediator for a process that occurs outside a court. They request information from member states and conduct independent research, then interview the petitioner and others. It can take up to sixteen months for them to issue a report and recommendation, which the committee has to vote unanimously to accept.
...As Mark Blyth once put it in the Guardian, in one of my favorite COVID-era quotes: "climate breakdown ... is a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It's one way traffic into the unknown."
This Glossary need not be read in full. Even when read modularly, it aims to
support public servants who need better ways to analyse,
design policies for, and respond to complex problems.
Its practical value is simple: when familiar language is
too narrow, the entries offer fresh concepts for asking
sharper questions about policy design, implementation,
engagement, crisis response, institutional learning, and
service delivery. These concepts are grounded in concrete
examples, case studies, and references — including
adaptive regulation, public health, renewable energy,
and more — for readers to draw on, cite, and adapt.
Each entry also begins with an overview and guiding
questions, to highlight its relevance to the public service
and invite practical reflection.