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. Surprising things I’ve learnt from @OurWorldInData. Fertility rates...

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia is powering the AI revolution. Huang was relentlessly bullied. “The way you described Chinese people back then was ‘Chinks’” Huang told me, with no apparent emotion. “We were called that every day.” To get to...

The Irish logarithm. Why the culture wins: an appreciation of Iain Banks. Consider Weber’s famous diagnosis of modernity, as producing “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” In the Culture, the role of the specialist...

Should you cut your loses early, and let your profits run? Book review: The laws of trading. Bell Labs developed a syllabus of graduate-level courses and taught it to any interested employee. They didn’t outsource the curriculum or the...

Lessons from ‘The Years of Lyndon Johnson’ by Robert Caro. If, however, the senator said his constituency would not permit him to give that support, that if he gave Kennedy the vote he needed, the vote might cost him his seat in the...

Bill Gates has perfected managerial philanthropy. From 2014 through 2019, the Gates Foundation earned around $28.5 billion in investment income while giving away $23.5 billion in grants over the same time span — a net profit. But Gates’s...

Hayek and Schmitt on the ‘depoliticization’ of the economy. Vietnam’s red Napoleon. How do I draw a pair of buttocks? Childhoods of exceptional people. Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals required a...

Life of Qian Xuesen. Iranian man who didn’t wash for half a century dies at 94. But, local media say, Amou Haji finally succumbed to pressure and washed a few months ago… He became ill shortly afterwards and died on Sunday. How genes can...

An introduction to current theories of consciousness. Britain is in trouble because its elite is so engrossed with the US. It is the culmination of decades of (unreciprocated) US focus in a Robert Caro-hooked Westminster. You would think...

World’s oldest tree reveals the largest solar storm in history. Legalising recreational marijuana decreases a state’s birth rate by an average of 2.78%. He dropped out to become a poet. Now he’s won a Fields medal. In 1970, just 1 in 5...