I'm cautiously pessimistic about The Life of a Showgirl. All tracks are produced by Martin and Shellback, so I'm expecting to like a couple of super-catchy pop songs and find the album overall a little bland.

Strange Google Trends bug: searches for 'ipad' didn't get categorised as being in the 'iPad' topic during an almost three-year period. trends.google.com/trends/explo...

Slow-running edit war on the Wikimedia page for the world map in Vat. Urb. gr. 82: commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pt...

Odd: When I heard the original, unsuccessful version of The Sounds of Silence (plural!), I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until the very last note. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0q7... But then when I played the famous version (singular Sound) afterwards, the difference was very obvious.

New office.

59 on Puzzle Storm, huge new best!

Apollo and Daphne, artist unknown, 1630-60

I'm pretty most of my Substack subscribers were trying to subscribe to Dave Barry the American humour columnist, so I'm surprised I don't get more of these "Email disabled" notifications after posting something.

Partial retraction of 'Misinformation on Marginal Revolution': pappubahry.substack.com/p/partial-re... Tyler Cowen did in fact have a good (uncited) source for the claim about Berthold Lasker and shuffle chess -- much better than ChatGPT -- so I no longer consider his post misinformation.

Work hosted a webinar by "MrExcel" last night (very strongly recommended if you get a similar opportunity). Apparently in the early days of the World Excel Championship, it was all raw Excel skill, but these days the top players bring dozens of custom LAMBDA functions with them on their computers.

Surprising photo to open today's Slow Boring.

'Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel... is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.'

Knight looking at the camera.

Getting annoyed at Tyler Cowen posting a ChatGPT hallucination as fact: pappubahry.substack.com/p/misinforma...

New best Puzzle Storm!

I've drafted almost all of my next blog post; I just need to check one reference, a hardcopy book waiting for me at the Post Office when it opens tomorrow. It will be bewildering and a little embarrassing if it contradicts what I've written.

A Dutch newspaper article from 1936 about Bill Ferguson, cricket scorer: www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/v... (De Telegraaf, 15 September 1936, morning edition, page 5 or 9 depending on how you count)

Films that aren't Star Wars 13: pappubahry.substack.com/p/films-that... Warfare: 9 The Correspondent: 7.5 Small Things Like These: 8 The Blues Brothers: 9 Psycho: 9.5 Sinners: 7.5 The Phoenician Scheme: 6 F1: The Movie: 8.5 The Naked Gun: 9 Ran: 5 The Naked Gun 2½: 7.5 The Naked Gun : 6.5

"Here, as is typical of fully macaronic verse of the period, English vocabulary has mostly been subjected to Latin morphology — that is, English words are combined with Latin endings (‘fart-era’ (2), ‘bump-i’ (7), ‘Red-nos-ans’ (8), etc) to create novel forms." vamoul.substack.com/p/on-chouque...

Jaws is good.

Magnificent transition from "entertaining because it's fun" to "entertaining because it's way too technical for me" at 2:03 in this video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=elkD...

Emily Dickinson's dashes were shorter than I had expected based on modern typesetting. www.edickinson.org/editions/1/i...

Interesting LLM translation failure (or success?) mode: Grok auto-translates a rot13 cipher that was being used to hide spoilers

I don't think I've ever felt so vain as after posting a McWhirtle in reply to a post in one of work's Teams channels. Four people in Australia reacted or replied quite quickly. I deserved many more notifications as people in different time zones arrived at the office, but got zero; unjust.

The Roman Road runs straight and bare As the pale parting-line in hair Across the heath. And thoughtful men Contrast its days of Now and Then, And delve--- Haha, ChatGPT. vamoul.substack.com/p/the-fields...

Productivity gains from AI are at least partly offset by the human feeling stupid and useless for a while after its silly mistakes are isolated and fixed.

Really cool article!

First impressions of GPT-5: I want more choices of model.

Wet and windy.

Minor update to the Senate preference explorer; fixed a bug where a custom query with a tally of zero votes in a division would be displayed as 1 vote in the divisions table and map. pappubahry.com/pseph/senate...

Usually I feel that people aren't sufficiently blown away by LLM chess skill. Today for the first time, I've seen someone (Yascha Mounk) overstating the case enormously: yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-peculi...

Tyler Cowen often posts links to o3 output. My suspicion is that the one in this post about Berthold Lasker proposing Chess960 in the 19th century is hallucinated: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo... I left a comment complaining about the sourcing but it was quite late.

For the 6022 Tasmanian below-the-line voters who numbered all the squares and put Eric Abetz last, the percentage of the n-th preferences going to a candidate from each party. (Sorted and shaded in Excel.)

Senate preference explorer 🥳🥳🥳 version 2!!!! 🥳🥳🥳 This introduces a custom query language to allow many more ways to filter and slice the data. Downloads: pappubahry.com/pseph/senate... Video tutorial: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOfO... Conversational documentation: pappubahry.com/pseph/senate...

Spammers had been following (many per day) and occasionally subscribing (1-2 per day, sometimes more) to my Substack for quite a while during my dormancy there. Yesterday I posted a comment, and they've stopped.

Never Tear Us Apart sounded vaguely familiar, but not to the point that I knew where the song was going; I probably heard it on the radio occasionally, but nothing more.

Giri doing a Chessable course on the Benko for Black: I feel targeted; nothing will want to make me give money to Chessable than learning what he has against White's king-walk 12.a4 line.

"Lions edge ahead 27-12" Not sure about this headline.

Amusing muscle-memory typo: I wanted to declare a variable that would say if the current node was descended from an ANY or ALL node, and had intended to type in_any_all. But instead my fingers went in_any_case; a lot more wrong letters than usual.

"Kevin Hassett in the running for Fed chair?" This could be a golden era of creative curve fitting.

Just figured out what was causing a crash by pasting my code into ChatGPT and describing what the output was. I didn't even have to press enter! The textbox just played the role of the rubber duck. What a wonderful piece of technology.

My ongoing senate preference explorer work is the first time I've used git for version control in a hobby project, rather than my usual practice of repeatedly making copies of files and then sorting by date modified.

"The 1910 midterm elections aren’t widely discussed nowadays"

Always disappointing, and a little surprising, when my question to ChatGPT is unintentionally ambiguous and it doesn't assume my intended meaning.

I'm somehow amused at the aesthetics of a Matlab-style mesh plot of the sort I did at uni between 2004 and 2008 (it took me a lot of Googling and back and forth with o4-mini-high to get Matplotlib to do this) using the Viridis colour scale, firmly of a more modern era.

Saw a reference to U3O8 that I thought was a molecular mass with an O typed instead of a zero until I checked the uranium Wikipedia article.

Fog!!!!

Facebook really pushing their AI (third in the list is someone I went to high school with):

I ask o4-mini-high a question, it replies in a minute or two, and I spend an hour thinking through its answer. I'm really feeling that I'll be left behind by the people who don't think through the answers, maybe not yet but one day soon.