Author: robert.adlington
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How Did Life Arise? Three Turning Points in Early Evolution – The New York Times
“That is the absolute wackiest interval of Earth history that anyone’s aware of,” said Nick Butterfield, a paleobiologist at Cambridge. “You go in the one end, and it’s this old, dreary, boring microbial world, and you come out the other end after these two massive glaciations, and all of a sudden, there’s animals on the…
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Computers Made of Human Brain Tissue Identify Braille Letters In Breakthrough
A team transmitted electrical signals corresponding to Braille letters to human brain organoids, which are living neural tissues derived from stem cells. The results revealed that a single organoid, consisting of about 10,000 neurons, could classify the letters with about 61 percent accuracy, while teams of three organoids reached 83 percent accuracy. — Read on…
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John Battelle’s Search Blog In Defense of Writing (and Reading, and Conversation)
Not often does a New York Times’ OpEd rouse me to respond – but this one certainly did: I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. The author, Joe Cruz, is the chair of the philosophy department and the program on cognitive science at Williams College. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy……
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The Book That Changed My Life review – these joyful tales of the power of reading are TV magic | Television & radio | The Guardian
tackling Wuthering Heights “one word, one word, one word” at a time until suddenly the chaos of her classroom fell away and “it’s snowing. I’m on a moor.” — Read on www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/oct/14/the-book-that-changed-my-life-review-bbc-two-iplayer
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David Squires on … the endless growth of football vodcasts and banal digital banter | Football | The Guardian
Our cartoonist looks at the battle for eyeball and earhole supremacy in the game’s rapidly changing media landscape — Read on www.theguardian.com/football/picture/2026/oct/13/david-squires-on-endless-growth-football-podcasts-vodcasts-banal-digital-banter
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DOC • Prompting as Self-Portrait
The chat window is the only place I can be completely uncertain and receive something completely confident back. Being vulnerable yet receiving certainty back are things we chase in our jobs, in our relationships, and in our lives. But living inside this distorted reality, we end up alienating ourselves from our world, from work, and…
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Any Human Ever: one life from over 100 billion
Draw one random life from the more than 100 billion humans who have ever lived. Every detail sourced. — Read on anyhumanever.com/
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“Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness.” – Marginal REVOLUTION
Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about. —…
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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible | ‘ERE I AM – JH!
There’s a further step – you don’t have to ask AI for posters as images that can’t be edited. Claude and Gemini can generate HTML, PNG, PDF, where the text is real text, layers are real layers, you can change fonts, move things around, edit the text – but that’s more than I want to…
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Things That Are Good to Do — Quarter Mile
Character compounds. Habits compound. Small choices matter. Protect your future self. Forgive your past self. Respect your present self. — Read on www.quarter–mile.com/Things-That-Are-Good-to-Do