Essays, links, and thoughts from Ruban
How far back in time can you understand English ? The same passage written in 100 year intervals, here’s how English in the year 1000 reads: And þæt heo sægde wæs eall soþ. Ic ƿifode on hire, and heo ƿæs ful scyne ƿif, ƿis ond ƿærfæst. Ne gemette ic næfre ær sƿylce ƿifman. Heo ƿæs on gefeohte sƿa beald swa ænig mann, and þeah hƿæþere hire andƿlite wæs ƿynsum and fæger. Area of irrigated farmland…
Why is the sky blue ? It’s not as simple as Rayleigh scattering since Mars has a red daytime sky but blue sunsets, the inverse of Earth. Are two heads better than one? A neat probability puzzle: two friends each independently tell you the result of a coin flip, each lying 20% of the time. One friend gets you to 80% accuracy. How much does the second friend help? The answer is 0%. Video: Into the…
John von Neumann shot lightning from his arse, and rebuttal #1 and rebuttal #2 . Inside Cursor . Pace and work ethic are among the most contagious norms (in both directions): If your colleagues move fast, you do. If your colleagues are responsive on Slack, you are. If your colleagues go home for dinner, you do. If your colleagues come into the office on Saturday, you do. The default setting at…
Year-in-review essays permit a certain amount of navel-gazing, but 2025 resists the usual warm retrospection. I started the year at my grandmother’s funeral and ended it with a dislocated shoulder on the ski slopes of Chongli, China. Travels I spent close to 50 days on the road this year. Cities When 🇨🇭 Geneva 05 Apr 🇫🇷 Val Thorens 05 - 12 Apr 🇲🇾 Malacca 18 - 19 Apr 🇦🇺 Perth 27 May - 03…
How France achieved the world’s fastest nuclear buildout . How China raced ahead of the US on nuclear power. Book Review: Storia do Mogor , by Niccolao Manucci. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot…
You can now buy eggs from in-ovo sexed hens . In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A plurality mistakenly believe these chicks are raised for meat, and another 10% even think that male chickens can lay eggs. Most people are surprised, and often disturbed, to learn the truth: in the United States alone,…
After a decade of watching United stumble from one false dawn to the next, fantasy premier league (FPL) has become my sole source of joy in football. This is my seventh season playing, and in a game where 11.2 million managers compete, I have reached the top 100k 1 twice: 35,192nd in 2023/24 and 66,805th in 2020/21, good enough to justify the hours spent watching games over the weekend. Strip away…
Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage? Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent disabilities. This ranks it among the deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, alongside better-known ailments such as typhus and cholera. The average cost of antivenom alone in sub-Saharan Africa was $124 in 2010, a steep…
Conquest of the Incas . They stood around awkwardly a bit more, and then De Soto, the allegedly superior diplomat, noticed that Emperor Atahualpa seemed to be purposefully avoiding looking at their horses despite how mind-blowing they must have been. So De Soto decided to get his attention by making his horse rear back on its hind legs and stomp on the ground with a great snort. Amazingly,…
The case for colonialism . “Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.” In Borneo, the Sultan of Brunei installed an English traveler James Brooke, as the rajah of his chaotic province of Sarawak in 1841. Order and prosperity expanded to such an extent that even once a British protectorate was established in 1888, the Sultan preferred to…
The most controversial Nobel prize in recent memory. In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a powerful sense of external threat. Some fear invasion; others worry about being cut off from a vital economic input, such as energy, food, and investment capital. Taiwan’s very existence is threatened by China, as was…
Political rational behind sibling marriage in ancient Egypt. Royal princesses were off limits for elite Egyptians, and thus none of them had a special claim to the throne, superior to that of other members of the upper class, and even remotely comparable to that of the sons of the previous pharaoh. At the same time, the lack of royal dowries to be paid and the fact that fewer inheritances had to…
OpenAI expands lobbying team to influence regulation. Ownership of the firms producing raw materials . 73% of all cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 69% of rare earth elements are mined in China, and half of the global nickel supply is mined in Indonesia. A century ago, insurances didn’t cover earthquake damage. 98% of losses were attributed to fires rather than the…
Fifty late bloomers . Women outperform men in ultradistance swimming . A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies . Did she do it? How to build 300,000 Airplanes in five years. Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 325,000 airplanes valued at roughly $46 billion ($800 billion in 2024 dollars). Not only is this more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined…
Exposure to poor people weakens support for redistribution among the rich. Kolmogorov-Arnold networks . While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes (“neurons”), KANs have learnable activation functions on edges (“weights”). KANs have no linear weights at all – every weight parameter is replaced by a univariate function parametrized as a spline. We show that this seemingly simple change…
Most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology. It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception. Surprising things I’ve learnt from @OurWorldInData . Fertility rates in China and Taiwan have reduced at similar rates over the past 50 years, suggesting that China’s one-child policy didn’t have a significant effect on curbing its…
How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution. Huang was relentlessly bullied. “The way you described Chinese people back then was ‘Chinks’” Huang told me, with no apparent emotion. “We were called that every day.” To get to school, Huang had to cross a rickety pedestrian footbridge over a river. “These swinging bridges, they were very high,” Bays said. “It was old planks, and most of…
The Irish logarithm . Why the culture wins: an appreciation of Iain Banks. Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist has been taken over by the AIs, leaving for humanity nothing but the role of “sensualists without heart.” Thus the chief attraction of the Culture is the promise of…
Should you cut your loses early, and let your profits run ? Book review: The laws of trading . Bell Labs developed a syllabus of graduate-level courses and taught it to any interested employee. They didn’t outsource the curriculum or the teaching. If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. Economists use a gravity model to find ancient lost cities. Napoleon was the best general ever and…
Lessons from ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert Caro. If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the Senate, “Kennedy would finally say he was sorry they couldn’t agree, but he understood.” Lyndon Johnson, Jackson would say—and Jackson worked closely with Johnson as…
Bill Gates has perfected managerial philanthropy. From 2014 through 2019, the Gates Foundation earned around $28.5 billion in investment income while giving away $23.5 billion in grants over the same time span — a net profit. But Gates’s largest political donations do not go to candidates themselves; for example, the Gates Foundation donated $456 million dollars to Arabella Advisors, founded by…
Hayek and Schmitt on the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy . Vietnam’s red Napoleon . How do I draw a pair of buttocks ? Childhoods of exceptional people. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how…
Life of Qian Xuesen . Iranian man who didn’t wash for half a century dies at 94. But, local media say, Amou Haji finally succumbed to pressure and washed a few months ago… He became ill shortly afterwards and died on Sunday. How genes can leap from snakes to frogs in Madagascar. Why did Vikings appear out of nowhere? Researchers have suggested that Vikings may have originally started sailing and…
An introduction to current theories of consciousness . Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US . It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the world’s best. If Elizabeth II…
World’s oldest tree reveals the largest solar storm in history. Legalising recreational marijuana decreases a state’s birth rate by an average of 2.78%. He dropped out to become a poet. Now he’s won a Fields medal . In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do . Comparing the Webb Telescope to the Hubble. The perils of…