What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds beyond Ours—Stephen Wolfram Writings

We humans have perhaps 100 billion neurons in our brains. But what if we had many more? Or what if the AIs we built effectively had many more? What kinds of things might then become possible? At 100 billion neurons, we know, for example, that compositional language of the kind we humans use is possible. At the 100 million or so neurons of a cat, it doesn’t seem to be. But what would become possible with 100 trillion neurons? And is it even something we could imagine understanding?

iamgio/quarkdown

🪐 Markdown with superpowers — from ideas to presentations, articles and books.

The Visual World of ‘Samurai Jack’

“There are so many sitcoms, especially in animation, that we’ve almost forgotten what animation was about — movement and visuals,” he told the press after the show debuted. The Samurai Jack crew aimed to “tell the stories visually… tell a very simple story visually.”

Talking was kept to a minimum. Instead, Samurai Jack would need enough richness and variety in its look and movement (and its filmmaking) to keep people gripped without words.

The Small World of English: Building a 1.5M Word Semantic Network for Language Games

Building a word game forced us to solve a measurement problem: how do you rank 40+ ways to associate any given word down to exactly 17 playable choices? We discovered that combining human-curated thesauri, book cataloging systems, and carefully constrained LLM queries creates a navigable network where 76% of random word pairs connect in ≤7 hops—but only when you deprecate superconnectors and balance multiple ranking signals. The resulting network of 1.5 million English terms reveals that nearly any two common words connect in 6-7 hops through chains of meaningful associations. The mean path length of 6.43 hops held true across a million random word pairs—shorter than we’d guessed, and remarkably stable.

Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights | The New Yorker

The aviator’s publicity-mad husband, George Palmer Putnam, kept pushing her to risk her life for the sake of fame.

When Figma Starts Designing Us / Design Systems International

It may seem harmless at first to introduce a DOM-like layout mechanism in a design tool, and it certainly has advantages in mature design files where the structure rarely changes. But many design teams today use Auto Layout to create full page designs of their digital products from the get-go. In practice, this locks the design in place and severely limits the possible expressions. You can’t drag things around freely or try odd combinations of layouts. You can’t simply paste something into a frame without it snapping to the bottom of the stack. The result is that designers are nudged into thinking like engineers during the earliest stages of exploration just when they should be working messily, freely, and loosely. It might feel convenient at first, but it comes at a cost. Have you ever opened a Figma file and tried to make a small change, only to find yourself wrestling with the layout? I’ve encountered this more often than I’d like, and it seems to be increasing in frequency.

Author of William the Conqueror’s ‘Medieval Big Data’ project revealed | University of Oxford

A landmark study co-authored by Professor Stephen Baxter, Professor of Medieval History, Faculty of History, has shed new light on the Domesday survey of 1086 – one of the most famous records in English history – revealing it as an audacious and sophisticated operation of statecraft and data management.

Radiocarbon dating reveals Rapa Nui not as isolated as previously thought

Archaeologists have analyzed ritual spaces and monumental structures across Polynesia, questioning the idea that Rapa Nui (Easter Island) developed in isolation following its initial settlement.

The most otherworldly, mysterious forms of lightning on Earth | National Geographic

Scientists are working to understand the curious phenomena of red sprites, green ghosts and blue jets high above thunderstorms.

[2507.01826] Dynamical origin of Theia, the last giant impactor on Earth

Cosmochemical studies have proposed that Earth accreted roughly 5-10% of its mass from carbonaceous (CC) material, with a large fraction delivered late via its final impactor, Theia (the Moon-forming impactor). Here, we evaluate this idea using dynamical simulations of terrestrial planet formation, starting from a standard setup with a population of planetary embryos and planetesimals laid out in a ring centered between Venus and Earth’s orbits, and also including a population of CC planetesimals and planetary embryos scattered inward by Jupiter.

You’ll never guess the culprit in a global lead poisoning mystery : Goats and Soda : NPR

“It’s the crime of the century,” says Bruce Lanphear.

He’s not talking about a murder spree, a kidnapping or a bank heist.

Lanphear – an environmental epidemiologist at Simon Fraser University – is referring to the fact that an estimated 800 million children around the world are poisoned by lead – lead in their family’s pots and pan, lead in their food, lead in the air. That’s just about half of all children in low- and middle-income countries, according to UNICEF and the nonprofit Pure Earth.

no days off

A celebration of consistency, discipline, and the pursuit of movement — en een fantastische reeks visualisaties. Technisch beetje onhoudbaar om 10 jaar data in gegenereerde svg te willen renderen, maar toch. 🙂