I re-read it this morning. It’s excellent. Notes after the jump.

“That’s the connective tissue in practice — not one system, but the compounding between systems that weren’t designed to work together.”

“The loss of individuals, even weakly connected nodes, can disrupt social networks (11, 46)” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

what an introductory paragraph!!

Yay! Comms back! Alright. Hooray. Great job! Congrats Artemis, whole team, all of you, congrats!

6 minute comms blackout

Watching NASA’s coverage with 660,000 of y’all. Hello! To their credit, they are openly talking about the heat shield. Good stuff. Me, here, hoping that it goes well is inneffective. No impact on the outcome. I just hope that it’s all good.

I get this beautiful view of Earth rn. Live. Gorgeous. Mildly concerned about the heat shield. He-Man was once interrupted because of an event. In university, Miles interrupted a morning of essay research, live. That’s just how I experienced it. www.cbc.ca/news/science...

It's happening—we're about 2 hours away from the Artemis II mission splashdown! Here's a timeline of what to expect. Watch and follow @sciam.bsky.social for live updates (and s/o to @unamandita.bsky.social for the graphic!): tinyurl.com/443kra4s

We’re hallucinating certificates tonight at Trajectory Labs.

Hormuz was a big part of growing up in Calgary. Even a little rattle would send prices and bonuses up. Then I learned Moneterism, both in the adorable Chicago school form, and the policy learning variant. The connection was evident. And I was just some fucking guy in the hinterland.

Some runway. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

My priors remained immune to the superabundance material. (And I’ve read!) Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic futurescape. It’s all very 1835 New York. I get why some people believe. Sexy. Why the skepticism? Arrow, Condorcet, and Gödel. Unfortunately, as you may be aware: people.

Babylon5 is on Prime (Canada)

1. I love that Chickens goes without translation. 2. I love that outo flair. As a Canadian, you wanna know you got an O in your mouth when you say it. Bravo!

Waist deep in this muck. Creative talent is power law distributed and the ecosystem (Adner, 2023 def) has players with extreme info asymmetries; it’s intermediary loaded. Most creatives are focused on the medium side of the tech…odd duck emNLP approaches c. 2020-2022 haven’t diffused. Laaaaag.

That’s us! www.nasa.gov/gallery/luna...

A country that talked itself into existence will talk itself into continuing to agree to continuous dialogues to explore the definition of existence. I’m just glad we talk. Thankful, even. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I’ve assumed that the training tokens represented the median of an anglospheric version of humanity; an admission of incertitude about what got in. Median wisdom yields median wisdom. WIWO. The optimistic take on GIGO. It’s still made from our judgement. And then that may change.

Depends on the timeframe. Short run, no doubt there will be a lot of disruption to supply chains and plenty of demand destruction. In the long run we’re all dead.

Two Weeks

Curious. Study shows surge in wildfires *lags* ocean anoxia in the Late Devonian extinction, so wildfires can't be the cause of the anoxia (via denuding landscape resulting in erosion and nutrient surge to oceans) ⚒️🧵

Focused strategy. Discipline. Setting expectations and meeting them. Who knew.

Whatever dumb historic belief you can think of, some people still hold it, it will always be a war of margins.

Tonight I watched Earth disappear behind the moon. And I watched Earth disappear behind the flames.

Say Cheeeeeeeese!

How many Iranian refugees can Pakistan take before collapse? 5 million? 7 million? 10 million? How much load can that column bear?

Loss of Signal, for 40 minutes, is wild. We’ll end up with a few relay satellites on the other at some point. Happy for them rn.

“The groups that emerge differ not only in their willingness to cooperate, but also in their expressed beliefs about cooperation and in their preferences for conformity and coherence of their behaviors and expressed beliefs.” Reinforces the Graeber explanation.

mock all you like but a silicon sample is the only way to study the silicon population

Meanwhile in Haiti. Grim. www.ohchr.org/sites/defaul...

The countries hardest hit by the energy crisis are low in income and high in import dependency for fossil fuels, for example Morocco and the Philippines. They have nothing to do with this illegal war, yet their economies and livelihoods are being destroyed.

🚨 Christina Koch has officially become the farthest any woman has ever traveled from Earth

The Royal Canadian Mint launches new collector coin to celebrate first Canadian to fly around the moon in Artemis II #Canada #ArtemisII #MoonMission #JeremyHansen /1 thread www.ctvnews.ca/canada/artic...

🚨 Just shipped a major update to GERDA, the German Election Database. - State elections update: new years + mail-in - 3 new election types: Mayoral, County, European - Municipal elections: 1984-2025 - Meinungsbild public opinion - New website & features german-elections.com

We got a good thing going in Canada: you have the liberty to put on a show. The show doesn’t interfere with anybody else’s liberty. It doesn’t create an externality. Don’t like it? Don’t go. Threats of violence are bullshit and interfere with our enjoyment. www.cp24.com/local/toront...

I’ve been measuring synthetic opinion as I would organic. Took awhile to get the tech right. It opened up ways to explore game theory at scale. (LLM’s are not people) And it has affected me in ways. I wonder how it’s going to affect others.

Complex biogeochemical consequences of rapid global warming 56 million years ago. cp.copernicus.org/articles/22/...

It’s been such a long time that I felt a reward for consuming information-byproduct / “”news””. But Artemis? Artemis is the good stuff. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Artemis II Orion is good to go to the MOON! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rwf...

Understated title. I’m at a loss for a good solution. arxiv.org/abs/2601.135...

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

“What they’re observing is that the global population of Neanderthals was small—maybe a couple of thousand breeding individuals—and on top of that, spread out over a large geographic range.” www.science.org/content/arti...

“AI can successfully mediate difficult chat conversations, and train mediators. Recently, my team showed that LLM-based social media algorithms can reduced polarization in a 10,000 person field test.”

Thrilled they made it up. Time to go oot and aboot. www.cbc.ca/news/science...

Good luck Jeremy! www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

An interesting failure mode of LLMs in finance I’ve started encountering is that they will relay things like sell side estimates as truth because they appear very high quality and are associated with prestigious institutions. It probably cribbed from IDEF marketing docs! bsky.app/profile/olej...

President’s Choice Memories of Martin Luther (TM) “So indulgent!”

“The price increases we estimate likely arise in part from spillovers to the full-service sector, as well as changes in the production functions and product quality choices of limited service restaurants.”

This happened to me yesterday when this company secretly recorded a scholarly seminar I hosted on Zoom and posted it. I was able to get it removed, but WTF.