The next installment of The Story of Us by the blogger and illustrator Tim Urban of Wait But Why! A single cell is itself a giant—a magical living giant made up of trillions of non-living atoms—and an animal is a higher-level giant made up of trillions of cells. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining […]
Fanfiction is fan-written fiction about existing characters and worlds created by other writers, usually from popular media such as TV, movies, or bestselling books. When did people start writing fanfiction? Why do people write it? What needs does fanfiction fill that aren't met by writing about characters you make up from scratch? This week's speaker […]
There are doctors whose daily job, their 9-5, is making the blind to see. There are people whose everyday job at the factory is constructing tiny devices that are implanted in people's ears, making the deaf to hear. There are athletes who are double amputees who cannot be allowed to run races against people who […]
The next installment of The Story of Us by the blogger and illustrator Tim Urban of Wait But Why! Building giants was a necessity for ancient humans. A human tribe was more than the sum of its parts, in physical power, in productivity, and in knowledge. Given the powers of emergence, large human giants would […]
The more we work with LLMs (Large Language Models, like ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude), and the more we struggle with the stupid mistakes that they make, the more we see how very *human* their errors are. They struggle to please. They over-estimate their own ability. They fail to cite their sources. They misremember things. […]
To be overwhelmed by the greatness of something isn't necessarily pleasant. When we talk about Awe as atheists do we really mean the overwhelmed part? Are we focused on powerfully wonderful experiences that we might describe as AWEsome, or on powerfully negative experiences we might describe as AW(E)ful? How about a nice mild sense of […]
Bayes' Theorem is a formula for calculating probability based on evidence available. It is demonstrably correct (that's what makes it a theorem), and many modern institutions now rely on it: its logic underlies gambling odds, insurance calculations, and robot navigation. But it's results often contradict human intuitions, because human intuitions are really bad with probabilities. […]
The next installment of The Story of Us by the blogger and illustrator Tim Urban of Wait But Why! In the late 1700s, the forefathers of what became the United States were Enlightenment Kids. During the Enlightenment, Higher Minds in parts of Europe started cautiously talking about a new story. The new story talked about […]
Let's plan what we'll be doing for the next quarter! Is there a topic you'd like to give a talk about? Come have a voice in what we do next quarter! Even if you don’t want to volunteer to give a talk, your voice is valuable so that we know which talks to schedule! You […]
Kaizen is the Japanese word for improvement. The word has come to be applied to a specific approach to improvement, originally in industrial and business processes, later expanded to self-improvement. In kaizen, you make small changes while keeping everything else going, rather than stopping what you're doing and starting over. This approach is consistent with […]