Winter Solstice 2025 links
the best of the internet over the last season
- A Colossus profile on Thomas Peterffy
- Why a reachable position can have at most 218 playable moves (chess)
- TIL about the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a twenty five year long drilling project that was eventually abandoned.
- I’d always believed that the existence of the Mohorovičić discontinuity was a fact established by actual observation of the discontinuity. But nope, the Moho discontinuity is defined by the change in velocity of seismic waves as they pass through rocks with different densities.
- All attempts to reach this discontinuity have failed.
- “Even more surprisingly, this deep rock was found to be saturated in water which filled the cracks. Because free water should not be found at those depths, scientists theorize that the water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen atoms which were squeezed out of the surrounding rocks due to the incredible pressure. The water was then prevented from rising to the surface because of the layer of impermeable rocks above it.”
- “At that level of heat and pressure, the rocks began to act more like a plastic than a solid, and the hole had a tendency to flow closed whenever the drill bit was pulled out for replacement.”
- TIL that there is no major flood myth in Japan. Which is crazy because it is a tsunami and earthquake prone island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- Messenger
- A simple HTTP PUT request hack to access FIA driver licenses by Ian Carroll
- How Bangalore uses the Metro
- Some 2004 internet humour: E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone
- One of the best posts I’ve read on debugging PyTorch
- Neurotechnology numbers worth knowing
- This study made my day. Can astrologers truly gain insights about people from entire astrological charts?
- “While astrologers largely believed that they were able to do this task at an accuracy far above chance, as a group their performance was indistinguishable from guessing completely at random.”
- “Additionally, not a single astrologer got more than 5 out of the 12 questions correct, despite more than half of astrologers reporting (right after finishing the tasks) that they believed they had gotten more than 5 right.”
- “More experienced astrologers did no better than less experienced ones.”
- “Finally, astrologers had little agreement with each other about what the correct chart was for each question.”
- And related to the above link: The Astrotest
- “If astrology really works, it should be possible to design a test that satisfies both scientists and astrologers. Unfortunately, astrologers never specify what kind of test would be acceptable to them. They argue that astrological research is very difficult because scientific methods are too crude, intrusive or mechanical. Apparently, the alleged astrological effects are so subtle and hard to detect that we may wonder how astrologers had ever been able to identify them.”
- “The most “progressive” astrologers regard astrology as a counselling skill. To them the horoscope is only a therapeutic tool and not a source of reliable information.”
- Seeing Theory. I don’t know if all these visualization tricks—à la 3Blue1Brown—actually help while learning mathematics, but the effort to make them and the imagination to dream them, is super commendable.
- Read Something Wonderful: many good longform reads in here, albeit with a smattering of broken links
- The Life and Death of Hollywood
- Cognitive load is what matters
- The Lost Generation by Jacob Savage
- Structure of Jupiter’s High-Latitude Storms: this paper has some beautiful shots of turbulence in Jupiter’s atmosphere, from the Juno mission
- Breaking free from Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems
- The Making of Community Notes
- How Communism is Outcompeting Capitalism: this article asks some very important questions