Automation cannot solve all science questions. “Yet as neuroscientist Anil Seth keenly observed, AlphaFold relies on the same underlying Transformer architecture as LLMs, and no one confuses AlphaFold with being a mind. Are we supposed to interpret that such an… Read More »The Death Of The Scientist
Games and movies use bad formations. “It is thus worth noting even here – we’ll see it even more clearly in a moment – that the most dense formation was not, in actual battle conditions, generally the best, because soldiers… Read More »Collections: Shield Walls and Spacing: Hollywood Mobs and Ancient Tactics – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Why is this hidden? “Samsung’s hidden Connectivity labs unlock powerful Wi-Fi tools.” https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-samsung-connectivty-labs-secret-wifi-menu
Logistics is fun. “So this army is stopped in what looks to be more or less the middle of the day. From a logistics perspective, this is a disaster. As I tell my students, pre-modern armies are like sharks, they… Read More »Collections: The Preposterous Logistics of the Loot Train Battle (Game of Thrones, S7E4)
Knowing a lot of frameworks helps you also outside of history. “Historians learn a lot of different frameworks because each one exposes the gaps in the others: there is no perfect framework (and no way to proceed without a framework… Read More »Collections: What Do Historians Do? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Nice explainer on how (historical) science works. “Consequently it is important for us to remain ‘up to date’ with everyone else’s research, which is why we spend so much time and effort (seriously, writing is hard) packaging our research so… Read More »Collections: How Your History Gets Made
I did not like humanities, but I have changed my mind a long time ago. “History is a humanities discipline through and through, whereas political science attempts to hybridize humanities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approaches; that’s not… Read More »Collections: The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities
Turning manufacturing model upside down. “Specifically, they have lost their lead to one remarkable Taiwanese company: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. TSMC are essentially the world’s greatest machinists. Other companies design the chips, and other companies create the (incredibly advanced) machine… Read More »FDI is the Missing Piece of Japan’s Puzzle
Japan lost decade came later than you think. “Why did Japan stagnate starting in 2008? It’s not clear. Potential culprits include the global financial crisis, the big earthquake and nuclear accident of 2011, the subsequent shutdown of nuclear power, rapid… Read More »I want the Japanese future back!
The boring documents are often the most important. “it is difficult to overstate the value of the papyri we do recover from Egypt. Documents containing census and tax information can give us important clues about the structure of ancient households… Read More »Collections: Why Roman Egypt Was Such a Strange Province