Derek Lowe tells the story of “carbyne”, a potential further allotrope of carbon, comprising linear chains of carbon atoms, C-C≡C-C≡C-C. Whether such a molecule can exist on its own has long been the the topic of speculation. Now a report has appeared of a “pseudocarbyne”, stabilised by gold atoms.

Matt Boyd with Dr Simon Blouin On 26 February 2025 Islands for the Future of Humanity will host a Webinar and international panel discussion on Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Electricity Failure in New Zealand. Ahead of this event Matt Boyd talks with Dr Simon Blouin about his research on catastrophic electricity loss, supply chain, and food security.

Srinivasan Keshav posted a link to this excellent deepdive by Prasad Raje of Udemy into the advances that DeepSeek R1 has made from a perspective of the core technology.

Affordable digitisation of insect collections using photogrammetry This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is currently being worked on by Beatrice Spence, Arissa-Elena Rotunjanu and Anna Yiu. It is co-supervised with Tiffany Ki and Edgar Turner.

Using computational SSDs for vector databases This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a Cambridge Computer Science Part III or MPhil project, and is available for being worked on. It may be co-supervised with Sadiq Jaffer. Large pre-trained models can be used to embed media/documents into concise vector representations with the property that vectors that are "close" to each other are semantically related.

Here I was, super happy with my return to blogging in 2024. I wasn't crazy prolific or anything, but I did manage to post something every month except for April. What happened in April? Kind of a lot. But nothing compared with January. Someday I hope to have the time and space necessary to write about at least part of it, but that day is not today.

In this essay, I take a deep dive into the history of American plutocracy and its conspicuously Republican roots.

The post Partisan Politics and the Road to Plutocracy appeared first on Economics from the Top Down.

In the 1960s and 70s, US TV networks were broadcasting a plethora of situation comedies, many of which featured families in a variety of shapes and sizes [1]. Child actors were integral to these programs, and part of their job was to perform the genre’s comedic conventions, make the audience laugh, and help sitcoms appeal to a family audience.

Science fiction and comedy are often used for social commentary and animated sf/fantasy sitcom Futurama (Fox 1999-2003, Comedy Central 2008-2013, Netflix 2023-) is no exception.  For those unfamiliar with the series, it is an animated workplace sitcom with science fiction elements (cf Geraghty, 2009).

It wasn’t the machines that terrified me—it was the mirrors. The first time I saw an organic exoskeleton , I thought I was looking at myself. Same face, same build, even the faint scar above my left eyebrow from when I fell off my bike as a kid. But it wasn’t me. It couldn’t be. I touched my forehead instinctively. The clone mimicked the motion, its expression blank, its eyes devoid of the humanity I thought I recognized.

Much has been said about how expensive academic journals are. Large companies like Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley publish most of the major journals, and their shareholders pocket much of the “rent” they receive thanks to academics’ labor. There are alternatives. One of them is based on Wikipedia, whose process for vetting information is more transparent than that of most journals.