Emvolon, a new company founded by two MIT grads, says their technology can affordably convert methane from dispersed sources such as dumps, farms, and sewage treatment plants into methanol for industrial use. (Company web site, Engine Ventures, news story)
AI can predict human brain 5 states seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.
Mass sacrifice of animals within the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
The amazing enameled chest of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri (ca. 1160-1227).
A report that Vietnam is pursuing radical reforms aimed at greatly shrinking the government.
Suicide note of AI leader Felix Hill, who took Ketamine to deal with minor mental health issues, went psychotic, had to be hospitalized, and emerged with a horrible depression he was unable to shake. "Ketamine, and the consequent psychosis, converted me from someone who has learned to live with depression on-the-whole pretty successfully to someone who is dead." Summary from Scott Siskind in his monthly links post. One of the weaknesses of the Rationalist movement is that their emphasis on thinking for themselves leaves these guys feeling qualified to prescribe drugs based on their own research. Like Felix Hill. In the same post, Siskind wonders if Elon Musk's personality change has to do with his own Ketamine use, or else steroids.
Tyler Cowen takes an economic approach to The Odyssey.
A tour of Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London, constructed in 1739.
From the geography blog at the Library of Congress, maps and other documents from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
As they marched from Boston to Yorktown, the cartographers of Rochambeau's French legion made a map of every camp, including the ones at Philadelphia and Baltimore, giving us a set of 46 wonderful maps of America in 1781. Description here.
The fastest-growing major metropolitian area in the Americas is Toronto.
Alex Tabarrok attacks Curtis Yarvin's authoritarianism from a different angle than I did, emphasizing that capitalism works because of the market, not because individual firms have strong leaders. And it only works because we let firms fail, which is not how we usually treat nations.
The DOGE account on Twitter/X complains about the cost of pennies. If Musk can abolish the penny, that would be an achievement worth celebrating.
Richard Hanania reviews Trump's Day 1 Executive Orders. I may write something soon on Trump's ambition to end NEPA review of energy projects, a topic I know something about. I agree that NEPA is now being implemented in ways the people who voted for the law did not imagine, and I would like to see it cut back. Also, I think it is crazy that solar energy projects are regularly delayed so their environmental impact can be assessed; if climate change is a real concern, as everyone I know involved in the NEPA process agrees, then the environmental benefit of solar projects is always going to be positive and requiring them to go through NEPA is stupid.
The current vogue for online influencers reading classic novels. Via Marginal Revolution. As I said a while back, I think in some ways we have reached peak internet and we are going to see a lot more of people turning away from the social media whirl, at least in small doses.
Biologists think they know why mantas and other rays have such long tails: they are sensory organs. (NY Times, phys.org, original paper)
Noah Smith on the Trump and Melania memecoins.
At the Millersville Normal School, the (female) students who broke the rules had to produce hand-written notes to the administrators explaining their sins. JSTOR Daily has a collection.
Classical scrap yard full of statue fragments excavated in Turkey.
How one German intellectual thought about the Little Ice Age, a mixture of Christian apolalypticism and hermetic philosophy.
2 comments:
AI can predict human brain 5 states seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.
Ugh. That's one of the most depressing things I've read in a long, long time, not the part about AI and an ultimate, complex, molecular-level determinism, but the simple, bland "almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable"--which makes it sound like "almost everyone"--not me, at any rate--agrees that human behavior is not only predictable, but simple and indeed simplistic, and predictable along familiar lines such as those used by classical economics. I hope we've at least moved beyond rational self-interest, simple materialism, economic structure determinism, and game theory, as well as the half-baked, historically ignorant just-so-storyism of someone like Sapolsky or the intellectual crudity of IR-style "realism." Note that I do NOT say all of this because I'm holding out for human freedom and/or heroic character and/or inherent moral nobility, only what I see as a tremendous complexity, fine-grained variation, ambivalence, impulsivity followed by chagrin and back-tracking, etc., etc., etc.--all the psychological mishegas I've talked about before.
"which is not how we usually treat nations"
I think Yarvin and much of the coalition he serves would like to treat nations like companies, and foreign policy as a sort of competitive market in force, with liberal countries paying the price for being too nice, protection of small nations at thing of the past, etc., etc. The strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.
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