How to earn a billion dollars. “Exponential growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible.” Paul Graham does the math on what it takes to go from a few million to a billion, and then explains why the […]
Midjourney Medical is building the future I want to live in. This is so cool. It reinforces so much of my optimism about the future for humanity. They call it “Ultrasonic CT” and say the scan takes as little as […]
Illinois wants more money and they’re coming for it. I shared a bit about this budget bill that passed the Illinois legislature. Well, it’s been signed into law. It includes several new taxes, including one on social media platforms. The […]
Who is C F Frost? It’s the name on all American Express cards in their ads. “Charles Frost–or Chuck, as we like to call him–is a real person.” American Express used his name on sample cards in the “Do you […]
An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Dry as a….? “You’ll notice that the top 3 bone, desert, and dust make up 43% of all usage, and there is a pretty quick drop-off after that with a long tail […]
Cucumbers used to be called “cowcumbers.” “By the end of the 18th century, ‘cowcumber’ had become a standard pronunciation, and even spread to the U.S.” It later became a class marker, and Dickens used it to signal lower class characters. […]
UFOs are the easy belief. “UFOs haven’t been disproven, whereas the blank slate has been disconfirmed nearly 3,000 times.” Jehan Azad argues that some respectable-sounding views (CICO denial, anti-building housing takes, tabula rasa) contradict entire fields more directly than aliens […]
China’s planting 100 billion trees and is 66% done. “Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees” to slow the expansion of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. The plan is to add 34 billion more over the next […]
How AI killed student writing (and revived it). From NYT: “High school and college teachers are watching students write, in the classroom, in order to protect against the incursion of artificial intelligence.” I, for one, am sad to have missed […]
Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. “WOW!! First time seeing @Dyson strawberries in the supermarket. Fully nerding out and losing my mind”. Fruit from your favorite vacuum maker! ~ learn more