AI

Matters Of Scale:

• Google releases Gemini-2.5-pro: now the best free reasoning model (and best publicly-available model, period?)

• “Deep Learning is Not So Mysterious or Different”, Wilson2025

Genetics

Everything Is Heritable:

• “Socio-economic status is a social construct with heritable components and genetic consequences”, Abdellaoui et al 2025

Recent Evolution:

Engineering:

Statistics/Meta-Science

• Pfeilstorch (“birds migrate” is a good contender for one of the most startling “humanity discovered that when? and they thought what instead? And it took what to disprove it?” factoids)

Politics/Religion

• “Academic Receivership As Alien Rule”, Dubrow & Friedman2005 (what is ‘academic receivership’?)

Psychology/Biology

• “Oral Semaglutide and Cardiovascular Outcomes in High-Risk Type 2 Diabetes”, McGuire et al 2025

• “Buridan’s Principle”, Lamport1984/2012

• “Too Much of a Good Thing: What Mania Feels Like”, Liam Rosen2022

• “Topical Minoxidil Exposures and Toxicoses in Dogs and Cats: 211 Cases (2001^–₁₈2019)”, Tater et al 2021 (“Death occurred in 8⁄62 (12.9%) cats that developed clinical signs”)

• “The Dinner Party That Served Up 50,000-Year-Old Bison Stew: When life gives you frozen bison, make dinner” (Blue Babe: the oldest verified thing ever eaten?)

Technology

• “James Reason, Who Used Swiss Cheese to Explain Human Error, Dies at 86: Mistakes happen, he theorized, because multiple vulnerabilities in a system align—like the holes in cheese—to create a recipe for disaster”

• “The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952^–₁₅1967_58ya” (‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk’)

• “Flushed Away—The crappy lie Americans still believe about their toilets” (how ill-conceived low-flow toilet government mandates were, decades later, finally ameliorated by improved testing & carefully redesigned toilets)

• ‘Mountain climbing’ is surprisingly recent

• “Remaking of ‘The New York and Erie Railroad Organizational Diagram’”, Nicholas Rougeux2025

• “GBI (German Bold Italic)” (TTF)

Economics

• “Promoting to Opportunity: Evidence and Implications from the U.S. Submarine Service”, Suandi2021 (unusual natural experiments: dud torpedoes in WWII)

Philosophy

• “Learning in War-Time”, C. S. Lewis 1939

Fiction

• Walter Savage Landor