I just got an international driver's license at a Japanese government office. Took 7 minutes total, and I did not have to wait. Super efficient, right? The funny part is why I had to do this in the first place.

My website has light/dark mode, and it's hard to find accent colors that work well in both modes in terms of contrast and visibility. Claude made this neat tool based on color theory. Easy! Sharing in case it's useful for others. claude.ai/public/arti...

If it can't sustain itself without ads, maybe it should not sustain itself.

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If it can't sustain itself without ads, maybe it should not sustain itself.

Last week I put out a new episode of Experience.Computer with @marco-giancotti.bsky.social. We explored aphantasia, SDAM, and spatial memory. We also wondered why looking at a picture of a sour fruit (Umeboshi) doesn’t make everyone’s mouth water. experience.computer/p/marco-gian...

"Before language men did not know that other men dreamt." Cormac McCarthy

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —Philip K. Dick Sounds airtight. But what happens when science itself keeps replacing its own version of what's real?

I was recently interviewed by Jay Springett on his podcast Experience.Computer, all about what it's like to imagine things when you have aphantasia. It was a lot of fun.

I was recently interviewed by @thejaymo.net on his podcast Experience.Computer, all about what it's like to imagine things when you have aphantasia. It was a lot of fun.

New Experience.computer is out! In this episode I lead thinking-tool artisan, writer, and engineer @marco-giancotti.bsky.social (Aether Mug) through a series of imaginative exercises. experience.computer/p/marco-gian...

Amazing footage of a living foraminiferan, a type of single-celled ocean plankton that extends long thin gelatinous tendrils of cytoplasm through its shell to forage. Like some cosmic dandelion, drifting through the ether, shimmering and electric

any metacognition people looking at the effect of LLM usage on metacognitive sensitivity? (in any context)

Nothing feels as hollow as an LLM saying "I deserve that. Sorry I deleted your data."

An LLM talks not as a sentient machine would, but as a human who was thoroughly gaslighted into thinking they're a machine would.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a whole page about holes. Should we consider a hole to "be a thing" in the same sense that street lamps and airliners are things?

The "publish or perish" culture must perish. Scientists need time to think. We just published our Slow Science Manifesto, where we argue that huge changes are needed in the way we fund, publish, and evaluate science. Read more and sign here: www.slow-science.com

To think better, you need to understand how thought works. But it's one thing to theorize about its building blocks, and another to see them in action, real-time.

Thinking is an action.

Happy 462nd Birthday to Galileo Galilei, born #OTD in 1564 -- a crucial figure in the early stages of what we now call the scientific revolution. Here are photos that I took in 2009 of his (rather humble) birthplace in Pisa, and his ornate tomb in Florence: #science #history #histsci

In Ikebukuro Station, Tokyo, commuters form double queues at each train door. One line boards the next train. The other waits for the train after that. No one directs them. There are no detailed instructions. People just seem to know.

On Darwin's birthday, the charming doodles his kids left all over his manuscript of "On the Origin of Species" www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/06/c...

Great apes may use playful teasing to learn about their social relationships. In a new paper, Erica Cartmill & I propose a bond-testing hypothesis for ape teasing. Out today in Phil Trans Biology: royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Out if context quotes

Last year a researcher asked if he could borrow my aphantasic brain for an experiment. That decision led to me spending 30+ hours deep inside an MRI, looking at pictures or trying (and failing) to imagine them.

Maybe nature has no joints. claude.ai/share/fb5af...

Indeed.

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese (Somehow, though, I can still read it) aethermug.com/posts/i-use...

A great book by Sean B Carroll on two of my intellectual heroes: Jacques Monod and Albert Camus. Two giants (and friends) who won the @nobelprize.bsky.social but also fought totalitarianism during the Nazi occupation (joining the Resistance) and afterwards. Two great inspirations for these days.

When the IT guy takes over my computer remotely

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

Clusters - an Asymmetrifcal Particle System with Emergent Patterns By Jeffrey Ventrella vimeo.com/1048238799

Determinate Self-Sabotage, or Obsessive Connoisseurship? aethermug.com/posts/self-...

Every year at the end of the semester, I ask the students in my Psych of Language class to create memes about what they've learned. They then vote for their favorites. Here's the winner about how the idea of a universal grammar is no longer as compelling as it once seemed. 1/5

This is a new image from #JWST. The bright points with spikes are stars in the Milky Way. Everything else is a galaxy. Everything. Else. Is. A. Galaxy.

In chaotic systems, the smallest fluctuations get amplified. As scientist Edward Lorenz put it in the 1960s and 70s, even a seagull flapping its wings might eventually make a big difference to the weather. Here's how scientists came to understand what chaos is, and how to wrangle it: 🧵

How can biological systems anticipate future events? In our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social, we show how a simple genetic circuit can predict future trends through a simple (and perhaps widespread) mechanism @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @koseskalab.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Bertrand Russell, writing on the other side of two world wars, on how to heal an ailing and divided world – it is not too late www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/13/e...

One thing is to say "thank you", another thing is to imply it even without saying it out loud. Which is not possible in most languages. What if Gratitude Was Built Into the Grammar? New post on Aether Mug: aethermug.com/posts/what-...

Researchers think a single strand of RNA could have done the work of a contemporary protein enzyme. It might even have been capable of replicating itself, helping to explain the origin of life. 🧪

Gorgeous vintage Japanese illustrations of animals and scientific phenomena www.themarginalian.org/2019/12/12/k...

Norbert Wieiner, who was a central figure within the field of cybernetics—a precursor to complexity science—is describing below the implications of the compression that automatization entails. Outsourcing a computation to a machine explicitly or implicitly involves the creation of and investment in—

Another day, another proof of the Riemann hypothesis in my inbox

The responsibility is reciprocal: I'm bad at socials and socials are bad at me.

1/🧵 The biggest parenting myth? That our behavior has ENORMOUS influence on our children. Almost every trait kids develop gets blamed on something parents did (usually mom...). This belief creates massive anxiety. But what does the SCIENCE actually say? #ParentingTips #MomTok

An Aphantasic's Observations on the Imagination of Shapes aethermug.com/posts/an-aph...

This will never stop blowing my mind.