Category: Blog

The rocks left behind by these ancient lava flows are known as the Siberian Traps. Today, the Traps produce spectacular river gorges and plateaux of black rock in the middle of Russia’s boreal nowhere. The eruptions that produced them, and that once covered Siberia in 2m square miles of steaming basalt, are in a rare…

You’ve probably seen hospital documentaries that have featured an “awake craniotomy”, the macabre procedure that keeps a patient with a sawn-open skull conscious, so the effect of the scalpel’s cuts can be monitored in real time. Marsh, along with his longterm colleague, anaesthetist Judith Dinsmore, pioneered that. He performed numerous other exceptionally advanced operations with…

Another rule: look for formulations like “it’s not just X, but also Y” or “rather than A, we should focus on B.” This structure is a form of computational hedging. Because an LLM only knows the relationships between words, not between words and the world, it wants to avoid falsifiable claims. (I’m saying want here…

And yes, I know it’s simple, but it makes me think that we have consider our “theory of mind” of all of our devices. And also a kind of proxemics… like, a cursor that comes right up close will appear to be way more certain than one that dances away. All the new devices will…

This kind of hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online. Their minds normalize prank-as-expression. In this context, throwing a dildo on to the court during a WNBA game isn’t just an act of crude rebellion. It sadly mirrors the Skibidi Toilet ethos: low-effort disruption cloaked in irony,…

These standardized scripts, and departures from them, influence how and how well we remember specific instances of these event types, his lab has found. And recently, in a paper published in Current Biology in fall 2024, they showed that individuals can select a dominant script (opens a new tab) for a complex, real-world event —…

If an intracellular mechanism for memory exists in brainless, unicellular organisms, then it’s possible we inherited some form of it, given the advantages it presents. All eukaryotic cells, including our own, trace their evolutionary origins to a free-living ancestor. That legacy echoes in our every cell, yoking our fates to the vast unicellular realm, where…

SVGs are one of the most remarkable technologies we have access to on the web. They’re first-class citizens, fully addressable with CSS and JavaScript. In this tutorial, I’ll cover all of the most important fundamentals, and show you some of the ridiculously-cool things we can do with this massively underrated tool. ✨ — Read on…

History has had a number of these explosive profusions of interconnectedness, driven by a radical innovation in communication technology. But not many. The writer Naomi Alderman calls them “information crises”, and argues that the present one is only the third. The printing press was the second. The invention of writing some time around the fourth…

Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a…