Ruban
Ruban
Ruban
Essays and curated links on science, technology, finance, and whatever else catches my interest.
Latest Posts
Why is the sky blue? It’s not as simple as Rayleigh scattering since Mars has a red daytime sky but blue sunsets, the inverse of Earth. Are two heads better than one? A neat...
John von Neumann shot lightning from his arse, and rebuttal #1 and rebuttal #2. Inside Cursor. Pace and work ethic are among the most contagious norms (in both directions): If...
Year-in-review essays permit a certain amount of navel-gazing, but 2025 resists the usual warm retrospection. I started the year at my grandmother’s funeral and ended it with a...
How France achieved the world’s fastest nuclear buildout. How China raced ahead of the US on nuclear power. Book Review: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci. At some point, in...
You can now buy eggs from in-ovo sexed hens. In polling, only 10% of Americans correctly identify that male chicks in the egg industry are killed shortly after hatching. A...
FPL Optimisation with Julia & JuMP
After a decade of watching United stumble from one false dawn to the next, fantasy premier league (FPL) has become my sole source of joy in football. This is my seventh season...
Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage? Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent...
Conquest of the Incas. They stood around awkwardly a bit more, and then De Soto, the allegedly superior diplomat, noticed that Emperor Atahualpa seemed to be purposefully...
The case for colonialism. “Imperial expansion was frequently the result not just of European push but also of indigenous pull.” In Borneo, the Sultan of Brunei installed an...
The most controversial Nobel prize in recent memory. In my own research, I have found that countries with technology-driven, high-growth economies share one thing in common: a...
Political rational behind sibling marriage in ancient Egypt. Royal princesses were off limits for elite Egyptians, and thus none of them had a special claim to the throne,...
OpenAI expands lobbying team to influence regulation. Ownership of the firms producing raw materials. 73% of all cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC),...
Fifty late bloomers. Women outperform men in ultradistance swimming. A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it? How to build 300,000 Airplanes in...
Exposure to poor people weakens support for redistribution among the rich. Kolmogorov-Arnold networks. While MLPs have fixed activation functions on nodes (“neurons”), KANs have...
Most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology. It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception....