I’ve been confused about what’s going on with terminals for a long time. But this past week I was using xterm.js to display an interactive terminal in a browser and I finally thought to ask a pretty basic question: when … Read more
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2022, the level in Lake Mead, the largest water reservoir in the United States formed by the Hoover Dam, reached yet another all-time low of … Read more
My dog Leo clearly knows the difference between my voice and the barks of the beagle next door. When I speak, he looks at me with love; when our canine neighbor makes his mind known, Leo barks back with disdain. … Read more
In an important new paper, Rafael Ahlskog and Sven Oskarsson show that half of the effect size in observational studies, even in conservative estimates, is composed of confounding. In laypeople’s terms, this means that many academic studies considerably overestimate the … Read more
Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild fame once said that “careers are an invention of the 20th century”, and indeed it’s sometimes difficult to imagine a working life that doesn’t tend towards a linear, upwards progression. For example, people often … Read more
A change in the brain’s chemical balance is almost certainly behind the symptoms reported in humans who remove or reduce dietary sugar. As well as being involved in reward, dopamine also regulates hormonal control, nausea and vomiting, and anxiety. As sugar is removed … Read more
What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic, but it happens to shed light on our intuitions about radiation, the vulnerability of the human body, … Read more
What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic, but it happens to shed light on our intuitions about radiation, the vulnerability of the human body, … Read more
8,300+ curious folks read the fortnightly newsletter we send. Join them by signing up for free Hi, Vivek here. Hope you are staying indoors. Covid is not over yet. Few points before we jump into the piece. This is a … Read more
To veterans of financial bubbles, there is plenty familiar about the present. Stock valuations are their richest since the dot-com bubble in 2000. Home prices are back to their pre-financial crisis peak. Risky companies can borrow at the lowest rates … Read more