culture

An extremely deep dive into the three-second chord that opens A Hard Day's Night. You can hear it in your mind; here is the best guess yet as to how it was constructed. “For the honour of all mathematicians, I would like to put the record straight — or at least straighter. The tale of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Chord is a tale of 18th century mathematicians, the study of heat, Karaoke tricks and a measure of luck

The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Chord – Kevin Houston (2014)

science

Adventures in computation lexicology. A physicist uses mathematical analysis and modeling to decide whether “expresso” is a legitimate variant spelling of “espresso” in English, and finds that it is. While “expresso” is used much less frequently than “espresso”, its usage has held up well over time; so it is not going to go away, and, given a piush, it might some day overtake “espresso” in popularity. Wonk alert: Quite a lot of mathiness, especially around the middle

Finding X in Espresso: Adventures in Computational Lexicology

What does this do?

Could anyone let me know what these two does?

![](https://m.stacker.news/119670)

econ

The Import of Exports (2015)

Politics_And_Law

How to Write About Sudan

When is better to think without words?

Philosophical critique of Anthropic’s decision to give its chatbot the ability to end conversations which cause it “apparent distress”, the first product decision ostensibly driven by AI welfare. If each LLM instance only exists through and in a conversation, this policy is “uninformed self-termination” and leads to even tougher ethical questions — “are we as users killing something every time we end a chat?”

Claude’s Right to Die? The Moral Error in Anthropic’s End-Chat Policy

Block_thought

What if the job market was a true market, where jobs could be bought by the highest bidder? An intriguing thought experiment. Applicants would seek financing and apply to purchase an entry-level job, say, from someone ready to trade upwards in their career — similar to how the housing market works now. Recruiters become brokers. A great system for job-holding incumbents, terrible for everybody else 

The big idea: A job you can buy and sell

Exiled on Saint Helena, Napoleon had only the occasional English newspaper for information. Not knowing English, he set about learning it, taught by his biographer, Emmanuel de Las Cases. He wrote letters for Las Cases to correct: “Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged”

Napoleon’s “Englich” Lessons

Debates about Large AI Models revolve around their intelligence or its lack. It would be more useful to see them as a new cultural and social technology that allows us to harness unmanageably complex human-made information — à la markets and democracies. A product’s price or an election result are incomplete, selective but useful measures of large amounts of individual knowledge and actions

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Essay about the arrival of infinite scroll on the web, presented in a clever circular design that the reader can scroll through forever. "The scrollbar solved the web’s first scaling problem: how to situate yourself within content that stretched beyond the visible screen. Somewhere along the way, the usage changed and became a fuel for motion. A motion I can’t really control and a motion I can’t really resist"

Navigation queues | Navigation cues

Everything we understand about the cosmos can be traced back to angels. Medieval debates about bodiless celestial beings that were nonetheless located in time and space forced an update to Aristotelian notions of physics. In the thinking of Duns Scotus, Isaac Newton and others, an invisible force such as God's will could act on such a body. This laid the framework for modern physics

Legacy of the Angels

Unlike traditional elites who can pass down land, family businesses, or social networks, this class’s only transferable asset is earning potential, which their children must re-earn through education and training. Education has become more expensive; professional training is lasting longer — “a wage cut by other means”. “The result is a class that, despite its high incomes and social prestige, is unsustainable”

Managerial Class Has No Future

Many writers have pursued the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, to no end. This one doesn't find the answer either, but at least does it in a way that explains why a definitive result is now vanishingly unlikely. The trail went cold long ago, and crypto has become enmeshed in the investment landscape. "There is no paternity test for Bitcoin"

In Pursuit Of The Bitcoin God

A group of friends build a scale model of time on a dry lakebed in the Mojave to visualise the entire span of human civilisation against 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution. The effect is appropriately humbling.

To Scale: Time | Video | 10m 20s

AskSN

What's the best financial advice you ever got?

Aardvark

Dont take financial advice from anyone. Do your own research. Asses your risk to reward ratio and never get too greedy

Suppose a pedestrian gets hit by a bus, but cannot recall the colour of the bus responsible. The pedestrian sues the Blue Bus Company, as they own 75% of the buses in town, and the odds are high it was one of their buses. Should the pedestrian win? “If we were to let baseline probabilities dictate verdicts, we’d risk punishing the likely without evidence — instead of proving who was guilty”

The Blue Bus paradox

The “melancholy image” of the commuter, as quoted in Benjamin’s Arcades

Memes

Meme Monday - Best Bitcoin Meme Gets 5,000 CCs

There is no gold at Fort Knox

![](https://m.stacker.news/82599)

Despite the title, a defence of the humanities. They furnish a cultured class within society. “Writing a commentary on Virgil is just as useless now as it was in the 450. The humanities have always been about courtoisie, a constellation of interests, tastes, and prejudices which marks one as a member of a particular class. What humanists want most of all is to initiate their students into that class”