Beyond Euclid #214

Hello from Beyond Euclid 214. This one starts with Pi Day and a pizza joke that’s actually a math proof, and ends with a smart glasses company quietly filming you in your bathroom. In between: Werner Herzog chasing ghost elephants through Angola, crows with better spatial memory than most people I know, a chair designed in 1927 that’s still in production, and the uncomfortable news that cleaning up air pollution is accidentally making climate change worse. There’s also an AI that outpaced a Fields Medal winner, and Americans being the only people on Earth who think their neighbors are morally bad. Make of that what you will. Let’s get into it.

Quick note before we do. Putting this together — finding the right stuff, cutting the noise, writing it up — takes a real chunk of time every week. If it’s worth something to you and you want to help keep it going, a paid subscription on Substack or a contribution on Patreon goes a long way. Forwarding it to someone who’d be into it works just as…