Elise Cutts

I guess the book jacket people did their job exactly right, because this American prefers the American version!

Looks amazing.

Thank you! The form to begin with is usually something way sharper — think of how a pencil starts out as basically a cone with a point tip when it is sharpened, then weathers down with use. Animal teeth and spines are the same way. They start sharp, then get blunt.

I decided to highlight this study for two reasons:

1) It is fun. There's an experiment involving "pencil gladiators." And spikes across scale. Need I say more.

2) It's a good reminder that not everything in biology exists to serve some evolutionary purpose. Biology is also physics.

To make a long story short: the universal stabby curve cometh from mechanical weathering.

It is not some evolved optimum solution for stabbing, it is just the shape you get if you expose a pointy thing to the elements for long enough.

Stingers and spikes across nature have the same shape. Here's why. Not everything in biology evolved for a purpose.

Spikes are a lie. They are not as spiky as they might appear.

Across nature, spikes end in a blunt, paraboloid curve — the universal curve of stabbiness.

And that's true at EVERY SCALE. From microscopic to narwhal.

Why? Whence cometh the universal stabby curve?

Science has your answers: 🧪

I realize this is obvious to everyone who isn't in a weird job where you work alone in a room at a laptop but you know, for my fellow laptop gremlins out there: find a mentor

It is so unbelievably helpful just to be able to talk to a person with more experience doing the thing you do

The big math changes to small math 🧪

Weird, I imagine they must charge an arm and a leg. I was able to get the economist via the Vienna library, but only through the PressReader app which is usable but really awkward.

Also the public library systems in the Boston metro are great and you should be able to access magazines for free through them, if I remember right.

If you get the MIT tech review for free while at MIT, I can recommend it!

Also I have to respect their commitment to a sassy, pun-heavy editorial voice. There aren't too many magazines I can recognize just by the tone of the article.

I've gone back and forth between having and not having an economist subscription so many times... it's pricey, but it is really kind of the best at what it does in a way that's hard to replace. Esp. how they get across why things happening halfway around the world matter everywhere.

What are your favorite media outlets to read right now?

Emails spawning more emails is so real

I do feel like I'm getting an uptick in spam emails that aren't the usual scams asking me to send money somewhere or buy something or click on a fishy link — just random shit like this. And I have to wonder why...

Screenshot of an email. Subject: TRADE - TRADE - TRADE From: HISTORIAN ECONOMIST (email address given), to: blanked out. Content: Economic

OpenClaw is that you?

I did that too, and I'm surprised how effective it was. Also set up a minimalist first page with just text links to the apps I actually want to use (notes, maps, whatsapp, etc.)

monkey brain likes colors I guess

The things I'm most conflicted about is whether to keep:

1) emails

and

2) a web browser

Both can come in really handy esp. when traveling. But I guess I could just delete the apps so if I really want them I have to consciously re-install?

Any tips for dumbing your iphone?

I know I can't amputate this thing entirely but I want it to stop distracting me and just be a tool.

I cannot wait to see that interview, they better not back out!

Also, office hours are the way you actually get to know professors and TAs. Those relationships are professional connections that lead to opportunities like internships and research projects!

So there are real reasons to go to office hours even if you could get a perfect answer from Claude.

We were able to mostly (not perfectly, ok, but perfection isn't a realistic goal) ban kids from drinking without selling all their biometric data to vampiric silicon valley weirdos and call me naive but I think we can do that for phones, too.

I sometimes wonder if it'd be better, if we decide we need to ban kids from the internet up to a certain age, to do this for hardware and not web access.

Like, what if we made it illegal to physically hand a kid an unlocked non-"kidproof" smartphone the same way it is to hand a kid a beer?

It's a tactic that works, unfortunately.

I had a conversation literally today at lunch about this very topic and until I mentioned the privacy thing and the fact that Big Tech actually *wants* age id laws etc. some people were all for it.

Also the germanosphere loves its homeopathy and alternative medicine and "wellness" like nothing else. There's a hike near my place that has signs marking the "positive energy points" along the route.

literally came here to say that Austria loves hating vaccines but you beat me to it

(This is not to discourage relevant tips about upcoming papers, love those)

Have any other journalists been getting more emails from scientists and PR folks with paper/press release pitches lately, or is it just me?

I'm wondering if this has to do with people letting AI agents loose on the internet, or if I am crossing some unseen career threshold into email hell

Translation: this is a post about adjacency matrices

Translation translation: this is a post about how networks are actually tables of numbers and why this is useful actually