Malmesbury

Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip Recommended soundtrack for this post As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin: Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these...

As we all know, any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Accordingly, whenever such artifact appears, a crowd of researchers soon gathers around it, hoping to translate the magic into human-understandable mechanisms, and perhaps gain a few magical powers in the process. Traditionally, our main supply of magical technology to...

Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip Disclaimer: This article is about living organisms, and how they are sculpted by evolution. Any use of mathematics is metaphorical, not literal – it's only there to give a sense of scale. Apologies to all the people who got correctly offended by my shamelessly hand-wavy references...

Cross-posted from Substack. I. And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge...

Crossposted from substack. As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the...

Cross-posted from substack. "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about clonal interference." – Oscar Wilde (kind of) As we all know, sexual reproduction is not about reproduction. Reproduction is easy. If your goal is to fill the world with copies of your genes, all you...

Cross-posted from my blog. As we all know, humans brains can be used to solve all kinds of problems, like classifying images, generating text or even taking important policy decisions. But these capabilities come with a downside – nobody really knows how they work. To this day human brains remain...