Unfortunately not about Fremen but still great series. “The opposite of Fremenism is almost invariably termed ‘decadence.’ This is the reserve side of this reductive view of history: not only do hard conditions make for superior people, but that ‘soft’… Read More »Collections: The Fremen Mirage, Part I: War at the Dawn of Civilization
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
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
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
2 and 3 work great if you are wrong. “there are three ways to approach a problem: Move the world towards the desired state Change your perception of the current state Change your desired state” https://andreasfragner.com/writing/three-ways-to-solve-problems
Evolution, murder and rap.
One of the best TED talks still.
Measuring stuff is hard. “Microwave ovens run at roughly one horsepower. This sounds like nonsense unless you’re familiar with math, energy, work, dimensional analysis, electromagnetism, radiation, dielectric heating, magnetron design, and thermodynamics.Well, it sounds like nonsense until you microwave your… Read More »100,000,000 CROWPOWER and no horses on the moon