August ’25 Links
What is the actual evidence regarding Joan of Arc? Also, “‘eh, just let a single random charismatic person command’ isn’t a great system; but it might be better than the French system of the time — ‘Let a bunch of squabbling nobles each take 10% of the troops and do what they want.'”
Nagasaki wasn’t the original target for the second atomic bomb, which was Kokura (a military factory city, and much larger) but there was cloud cover. Then the bomb missed Nagasaki proper and landed 3 miles off target, with hills shielding the city from the brunt of the blast. And it turns out there may not have been cloud cover. Did one man deliberately miss to reduce casualties? Was he under orders to do so?
A toy model of species intelligence that includes hard-steps and long time delays published at the Royal Society.
How to cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that re-arrange into a square.
The Malagasy terms for times of day: “What time is it? Frog-croaking o’clock” or “Sun-death.”
Cate Hall’s 50 Things She Knows. Some useful advice. Also by Cate (expanding on one of the points) — In praise of quitting. I lack tenacity (in some fields) but I do think my willingness to just walk away from a job (etc) has been a net positive in my life. (I am absolutely positive I was correct to quit grad school, and pretty positive about most of the jobs I’ve quit).
The new world record for holding your breath underwater is …. X minutes and 3 seconds. Care to guess what X is? Nope. It’s higher, Try again. Nope. Still too low. Maybe think a bit higher? Good, now double that. Nope. Still too low.
I feel that most ideas in education a) work very well when the implementor is passionate and brilliant (a person that hollywood makes a movie about) and b) does not scale to rank-and-file schools across a nation (although it might work with highly motivated students). (This is Arnold Kling’s Null Hypothesis in Education). So I doubt Alpha School scales; but I’d love to be wrong, because that would free the childhood of millions of kids. (See also Freddie de Boer’s Education Doesn’t Work).
How States and Cities Decimated Americans’ Low Cost Housing Option (from Pew). Matt Yglesias digs in and finds that the housing regulations were deliberately written to exclude the poor. Also — How Japan’s regulations allow for micro-stores and pubs.
I mentioned Finn Kolesnik a few months ago, now he’s the youngest American (and 2nd youngest ever) to win the Bermuda Bowl (Bridge World Championship).