I cannot begin to say how many goosebumps this photo gives me. There are more than a million wild alligators in Louisiana. You couldn't pay me to set foot in a plant-covered marsh in that state without a cash offer well into eight digits.

Let's be honest: Automotive safety has come a long way since some of us were being toted around in the rear-facing seats of Oldsmobile station wagons. The Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser: Where Your Kids' Legs Are the Crumple Zone!™

Shared with endorsement. Likewise, I find it baffling how hard Facebook, for example, tries to dehumanize its own platform by pushing endlessly for features like user avatars that look hopelessly unreal. Who wants to see an unrecognizable cartoon copy of themselves "living" in Zuck's fantasy world?

After a video from @spectrum.ieee.org showed up in my Facebook feed this morning, featuring some lines from @emilymbender.bsky.social that made me stand and applaud, I went in search of her verified socials so I could give her a follow. Then I read this, which deserves a prize in its own right:

On John Stuart Mill, aurora photos on social media, and why human thinking will always be a little different than what we can program computers to do: issues.eveningpostandmail.com/p/lights-in-...

Technically, this is an aurora over Aurora.

The human capacity for wonder and awe should be treated as the precious gift it is.

He's a Catholic from Chicago. I feel like "Blues Brothers" is on his shadow list.

Software "engineering" isn't really engineering if it doesn't thoroughly and relentlessly account for the possibility of failure.

As goes Ukraine, so goes the future. The more conclusively it can defend itself (with support from friends and allies), the greater the deterrence to future malevolent actors in the future who would try to invade their neighbors.

Shared with endorsement. "One of these days, I really want to use my seat cushion as a floatation device", said no one, ever.

Not sure which was the bigger historical snafu: Breaking up the Tribune/WGN empire or turning over Hong Kong.

Or the satisfaction of watching a good defragmentation.

Stand by for the unanticipated consequences. Chaos theory remains undefeated.

Toyota's plan to hybridize basically everything in its fleet took a lot of criticism earlier, but I think it's looking pretty smart now. www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/f...

This never would have happened if their password had been "m0mA!". www.pcworld.com/article/2961...

My intuition is that adding a Category 6 to the hurricane scale would represent a counterproductive form of mission creep. It's a somewhat subjective scale as it is, and we now have very good tools for measuring other values with precision, like wind speed, barometric pressure drop, and storm surge.

A hundred thousand color commentators and nobody available to do play-by-play.

Ten times better than scripted drama. A tied Game 7 in the bottom of the ninth with bases loaded. Cannot beat this. It's epic poetry on the diamond.

Baseball is the only sport that demands its fans love math and suspense.

As a Cubs fan, I think I have to go for the team with the longest drought. Ergo, go Jays.

Everyone - protect Kevin Bacon!

This is 100% correct.

It's exactly the same with private equity firms. I get calls and emails every week, asking about whether I'd sell my business. My response every single time is "Send me a starting price or a valuation method and I'll believe you're serious." If there's no number, the "buyer" is unserious*.

While I'm tempted to chalk up some of these choices to the classic problem of "STEM majors need to study the humanities, too!", it's looking more like a problem of "Computer engineers need to study the rest of engineering, too!".

This is really first-class information visualization.

There's a sociological pipeline from (a) excessive emphasis on youth sports to (b) breaking useful ties to institutions like clubs and churches because nobody has time to (c) the overreach of sports gambling to (d) masses of people with no hobbies and no community but a lot of screen addiction.

Truly historic (in all the worst ways). That pressure drop really is extraordinary. www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh...

Broadcasting can't be far behind in these awful rankings. It may not be a literal decimation, but it's close.

May I just say how impressed I am with the quality of the @wttw.bsky.social account here? A very good resource for tracking news and events from Chicago.

What a day to not have sold a contingency spot plan.

Normally, at sea level, there's enough atmosphere above you that if you had a tube containing a vacuum (i.e., no air), the weight of the atmosphere would push water 34 feet high into the tube. So much atmosphere is "missing" from the eye of Melissa that it could only press that column up 30¼ feet.

"A few hours ago, data from an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft showed that the central pressure in Melissa had fallen to near 906 mb." As someone who works with atmospheric pressure on a daily basis, this number is just crazy to me. www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh...

On infrastructure spending, low-growth GDP, and the challenge of promoting the general welfare through government (320 words) ⤵️ issues.eveningpostandmail.com/p/a-40-disas...

Not sure there are any bigger heroes tonight than the Hurricane Hunters who just took off to fly a plane (presumably) right through Hurricane Melissa. www.flightradar24.com/TEAL75/3cd78...

On "Three's Company", the Mandela effect, and the two very different paths that we could take towards digitally preserving and accessing the essence of a person after they die (410 words) ⤵️ issues.eveningpostandmail.com/p/digital-ou...

I think a strong case can be made that there's a huge difference between a program trained on an individual's written and recorded output that can be queried (I call this a "personality engine") and a program that attempts to replicate the "look and feel" (for lack of a better term) of a person.

On decision-making, Bugs Bunny, and what to do when more than just right and wrong apply (320 words) ⤵️ issues.eveningpostandmail.com/p/angel-devi...

On college applications, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the skill set we need to sharpen amid a whole lot of institutional decline (360 words) ⤵️ issues.eveningpostandmail.com/p/orchestrat...

I like this framing of "malnourishment" -- something that fills but doesn't really satisfy.

What's broken about this whole field is that we're mobilizing computer programs to give off the illusion of intelligence and the illusion of sentience, without even trying to give them the illusion of having a conscience. You can't reprimand an LLM and have it stick. There's no sense of guilt.

"Every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it does." - attributed to W. Edwards Deming It would be entirely rational to ask what kind of system produces a person like this.

"Education is meant to make us change for the better, to make us more thoughtful, to make us so broad that we will not seek to help one man because he belongs to this race or that race of people, and seek to hinder another man because he does not belong to this race or that race of people." ¹

The correct number of Princes, worldwide, is 1.

If there's one characteristic an economist really ought to be able to win every time, it's "rational".

Normal person: I asked AI and it told me-- Every AI researcher:

The world would be a much better place if the cable news channels just showed an animated "loading" icon whenever they didn't have *actual* news to report.

"It does not pay an individual to do anything except what his conscience will approve of every day, and every hour and minute in the day." - Booker T. Washington, "Character Building" (1902)

Stuff you should know: www.trade.gov/leading-econ...