Links 4 July 2025

The good news about America.

500-year-old compass found buried near Copernicus' tomb, might have belonged to him.

The top television network inthe US last week was YouTube, which captured 12.5% of all watchers.

Strange long-term correlation between oxygen and the strength of earth's magnetic field.

On Twitter/X, Tanner Greer ponders the status and possible future of "classics" as an academic discipline. And here is a critical review of the same book Greer was responding to, which argues for the replacement of classics by global ancient history.

Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post, a fascinating little discourse on whether Australian aborigines really did not know that sex leads to conception, and the century-long debate over the question among anthropologists.

Michael Sugrue takes on twentieth-century philosophy, finds it a self-serving dead-end. (45-minute video)

"Reason's Overreach." Robin Hanson says that while technical changes based on reason have generally been successful over the past few centuries, social changes based on reason have often been disastrous. After exploring the great complexity of societies and our difficulty with understanding them, he writes: "All of which should make us quite hesitant to change key features of those macro cultures on the basis of reason. Yet we have not been remotely as hesitant as the considerations above recommend."

Guedelon, the French project to build a new castle from scratch using medieval methods, is largely complete. 4-minute video, 3-hour video, Guedelon web site.

You may have made mistakes at work, but did your new corporate strategy ever cause a 97% fall in sales? 

In India, the massive fall in fertility happened during a period when there was no increase in female labor force participation. (Twitter/X) The main reason fertility has fallen is that people want fewer children.

Primer on the interesting politics of Uruguay.

Using Claude to generate ideas for research (Twitter/X)

Malcolm Gladwell says driverless cars won't work in cities because kids will just play soccer in the street, knowing that the driverless cars won't ever hit them or even honk at them. (Twitter/X)

The president of the University of Virginia resigns rather than risk having his university defunded by the Trump administration if he stayed; they consider him too enmeshed with DEI efforts. (NY Times, CBS News)

Reason: "Americans celebrate Independence Day Less Proud of their Country than Ever."

Tyler Cowen has some thoughts on how to measure AI progress.

The 1974 Asilomar Conference and the regulation of gene splicing technology.

Great collection of vintage photos of London's East End, from Wonderful London magazine.

Remarkable 1915 recording of Taylor Holmes reading Kipling's poem "Boots."

Chinese acupuncture needles 2,000 years old.

The Webb telescope discovers an exoplanet by photographing it.

New thinking about the Permian mass extinction says the collapse of tropical forests was a main reason the crisis lasted so long. (PhysOrg, CNN, original paper)

Amusing rant about the contemporary writing scene.

The US tested the Massive Ordnance Penetrator on some of our own old underground nuclear testing sites. (Twitter/X)

Lousy month for the Russian air force: