Holiday Hiatus

Admin note: Posting will be light the rest of this week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday!

AI And Radiology Misconceptions

Dr. Ben White: "Hallucinating about AI"

McArdle On Education Decline

"The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore".  (If that link doesn't work, try this version.)

The results of this thinking can be seen in a recent report from the University of California at San Diego, which like the rest of the UC system stopped accepting standardized test scores in 2020. In 2024 the school had to redesign its remedial math program to create a class that focused entirely on remediating elementary school and middle school math. In 2025, more than 8 percent of entering students needed that class. These are college students who chose to enroll in a major with a math requirement yet struggle to round numbers to the nearest hundred, add or divide fractions, or work with negative numbers... 

That’s what happens when you silence the alarm instead of responding to it: The fire burns out of control. It should be a warning to the growing number of politicians who think they can fix other problems — like soaring rents or rising electricity costs — by simply freezing prices. The prices are telling us that there’s too little supply to meet demand, or that something (such as renewables mandates or too few natural gas pipelines) is driving up supply costs. Freezing prices doesn’t fix that any more than a courtesy A gives students what they actually need to succeed in college.

Inside The Wayback Machine

"Inside the old church where one trillion webpages are being saved"

Superman Comic Found

Kids clean out attic of their deceased mother's house and find a nearly-pristine copy of first "Superman" comic book from 1939. Sells for record $9 million at auction. 

For years, mom had mentioned once owning some "old comics", but everyone thought it was just a family legend. #GreatScott

More AI Math

"Google's Nano Banana Pro is by far the best image generation AI out there. I gave it a picture of a question and it solved it correctly in my actual handwriting. Students are going to love this. 😂"

Google’s Nano Banana Pro is by far the best image generation AI out there.

I gave it a picture of a question and it solved it correctly in my actual handwriting.

Students are going to love this. 😂 pic.twitter.com/GXd6PbZYxn

— sid (@immasiddx) November 21, 2025

Escher Online

"The Boston Public Library has made its digital archive of M.C. Escher's works available online."

Between Awake And Sleep

"At the Mysterious Boundary Between Waking Life and Sleep, What Happens in the Brain?"

Cowen Interviews Scholl

Video: Tyler Cowen interviews "Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure"

Brain Implant Update

"New therapeutic brain implants could defy the need for surgery"

Signal Post-Quantum Security

"Why Signal's post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement"

Teaching An Octopus To Play Piano

Video: "I taught an octopus piano (It took 6 months)"

Not A Bubble

"A simple reason why the market's biggest investors say they aren't worried about AI bubble". 

 (Note: This is not financial advice. Do your own research before investing money. Never invest funds you can't afford to lose.)

Legislators Vs. VPNs

"Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs -- And They Have No Idea What They're Doing"

Beautiful Science

"What Makes an Experiment Beautiful?"