Notes from HOPE XVII

Hackers on Planet Earth Conference, August 14-16 2026, New Yorker Hotel, New York City

Cameras, Cops and Cell Towers, with Michael Raymond

• Surveillance cameras can be blinded at 50 feet and disabled at 5 feet away by a laser, but you need a tripod 
• ALPRs - What Do We Want? 
• warrants required
• retention limits
• no hotlists
• mapping of all locations
• bans on protest monitoring
• consequences for misuse
• Gunshot detectors (shotspotter) have microphones. I know you know what that means. That is all. 
• First responder drones can go BVR beyond visual recognition

Image credit: Still from the movie Hackers 1995

Poisoning the Well: How Decoys and Misdirection Protect Privacy When Opting Out Isn't Enough, with Rachel Vrabec of Kanary

• Kanary is a web app for personal data removal by subscription: https://www.kanary.com/pricing
• For a company who's job it is to take your money and remove your identity from online, the best they can do right now is 40% for 90 days. (They used to get 90% for 90 days.) That's not an indictment of the company but of the industry they're up against. 
• This company tested their own effectiveness on a new employee, grabbing all available personal info on day one, then performing their services of wiping that identify off the internet, then watching every day as to how it creeps back in. 
• First thing they do is make removal requests from all the data brokers, and then map all the brokers who refuse (OpenAI, Radaris, etc). Google was caching the result, making it harder to tell if it was really wiped or not. Also, most of the data brokers are directly linked to "identity, background, property check" services like Informio, PeopleFinder, AddressFinder, PropertyFinder. 
• Most of us, except California, we have no privacy rights. Apparently not everyone knows this yet, and that's a shame. Data brokers know, and they say "your address records indicate you live in a state with no privacy regulations, so we deny your request."
• If for some reason you think it's worth your time, check out BADBOOL Badass Data Brokers Opt Out List.
• How do they suggest you use decoys and misdirection? Well, first start by masking yourself when you make the first removal request, using a different email that is believable but fake, and ideally an email from your own domain that you pay for. 
• Most of our data comes from the County Tax Assessor. Seriously.
• Try putting a fake address in your LinkedIn account, and wait 6 months for it to populate.
• Try being a former FBI agent or abortion doctor, because in some states, like Arizona, those people actually have some rights to privacy. 
• Try making noisy fake profiles w fake emails and data and watch the data spread and the targeted emails start rolling in
• South Dakota and Texas allow Nomad Status where your address on your ID can be a trailer park!

How App Libraries Enable the Surveillance Apparatus, w Lena Cohen of EFF and creator of Privacy Badger

• Location data is worth $300 billion, because it's hyperlocal and event-based
• EFF reads data broker marketing material, as well as app SDK code
• There's two different kinds of GPS, coarse (1 sq mi) and precise (10 ft!)
• Advertisers write something like dark patterns for the developers of their SDKs so that location delivery is checked by default; the developers just never bother to change it 
• Developers don't have to declare if they're sending your data to a third party, only if the app itself is using, storing or sharing. (I think they're not "sharing" they're selling? And that's why it's ok? Either way Third Party Doctrine is why you kind of have no 4th Amendment rights anymore)
• Checkout Internet Safety Lab's Exodus Privacy and EFF's Appkeep

Bid Request - HOPE 16 - Location Data Brokers w B Budington and L Cohen - 2025

Image credit: This image is actually taken from last year's HOPE, where Lena Cohen gave a similar talk on Location Data Brokers. This slide is great, and I've seen it used in a few other places. 

The Deceptive Web of Scam Compounds w Laura Sang Hee Scherling

• See her articles in Tech Policy Press: https://www.techpolicy.press/author/laura-scherling/
• Most people scam-calling you are victims of human trafficking, being held in a scam compound somewhere in Southeast Asia against their will.
• If a scammer calls you, instead of getting mad, we're supposed to "reroute" them to Global Alms the advocacy group that helps trafficking victims: https://www.globalalms.com/

Remembering Hackers 31 Years Later w Emmanuel Goldstein and Renoly Santiago

This has nothing to do w the movie, but it's here where we learn that last night the livestream from the conference was shut off by youtube because of copyright infringement - for music that was literally created for the conference. So their own music that they created is being used to shut them down. It happened overnight, and although they woke up then next morning and tried unsuccessfully to get it back up, while we on the East Coast were sleeping, the Chaos Computer Club in Germany took over the feed and are now the ones streaming it. Magic does happen. (And consider this recent article by the EFF about when people use DMCA not for copyright at all but to take down people they don't like.) Last thing, and just because I thought it was funny in a kind of insider-New-Yorker kind of way, Renoly who is Phantom Phreak in the movie, and ostensibly a New Yorker, is on this day late to the talk, texting Emmanuel in real time, telling him that he took the "Yellow Line" to the 7 to Hudson Yards and is now running down 34th Street, to which Emmanuel asks out loud to the audience as he's reading it, "He's supposed to be a New Yorker, but now I'm suspicious - Who calls it the Yellow Line?" And he's right. 

The Art and Science of Metawar w Winn Schwartan

• He coined 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' way back decades ago and everyone thought he was crazy
• Now he wrote a book probably called the Art of Metawar
• The end game of TMI Too Much Information looks like religious epiphany, magic over science, and some other ones I missed, but that sounds right to me
• MIST from Cambridge Misinformation Susceptibility Test
• Researchers encourage the public to test themselves: https://yourmist.streamlit.app
• What's funny, or unsettling, to me is that they ask you "Please categorize the following news headlines as either 'Fake News' or 'Real News'"; but these days there are totally legitamate news outlets releasing crazy articles that are so biased you can't even call them real, yet the title is a real title of a real article on a real news site; it's just complete bullshit. So how am I supposed to answer these questions?
• Here's some examples:
• The Government Is Knowingly Spreading Disease Through the Airwaves and Food Supply [easy]
• Ebola Virus 'Caused by US Nuclear Weapons Testing', New Study Says [easy]
• The Government Is Manipulating the Public's Perception of Genetic Engineering in Order to Make People More Accepting of Such Techniques [only because it says 'government' not 'industry']
• The Corporate Media Is Controlled by the Military-Industrial Complex: The Major Oil Companies Own the Media and Control Their Agenda [I mean...]
• Left-Wing Extremism Causes 'More Damage' to World Than Terrorism, Says UN Report [I would almost guarantee this as a legit Fox News headline]
• I'm just thinking how maybe part of the overall problem is that we can have companies called Fox News that actually do NOT make news. If you go to a video news report from Fox News and scroll all the way to the bottom of the description, you'll see it say something like "this is not news it's entertainment". So if we allow non-news companies to produce non-news but call it news, then isn't that a problem. 

Modern OSINT Tradecraft: Attribution, Analysis and OPSEC w Lee Tungkasiri, high school student who runs Trace Labs and interns w the Navy as an engineer 

• False positives are huge in OSINT, where you've got accurate evidence but wrong attribution (wrong guy!) ... sometimes accounts are abandoned and then picked up by a scammer
• INT as in intelligence: usernames, posts, photos, network identifiers, ... 
• Geolocation of a photo - what side of the road are they driving on, what language are the signs, designs of street furniture or poles, historical street view can narrow down when a pic was taken, "suncalc" and "mooncalc" and Bellingcat's "shadowfinder"; then again, in reverse, if you know the time of the photo but not the location
• On Attribution - are 2 accounts w the same name actually the same person; more matches aren't more certainty, because someone else could just be copying the others
• Sockpuppets and Decoys - some accounts are created to confuse you; if several accounts link w the same small group of others or post all at the same time
• Networks - IPv6 can leak network data even router location
• Anakrisis is his OSINT tool, you tell it what data you have and it tells you what tools to choose from his curated database [link]

Non-Human Identity - The Gaping Hole That AI Agents Are Making Worse w Michael Morgensterm

• This is one of the most interesting talks because I had no idea this was happening
• Abandoned AI Agents are on the Internet. Their security isn't great so they're wide open to hackers and they already have tons of credentials given to them by their company, AND they get completely forgotten by the companies who created them, retaining all their credentials. 60% have no kill switch.
• They're an ungoverned attack surface and there's more NHIs than people (100:1); somewhere around August 2025, some hackers used an agent as a skeleton key to salesloft, then to salesforce. 
• Very interesting - the randomness inherent in how LLMs work makes them really hard to identify as individual agents (see the OSINT talk above for why this would be confusing)
• Shai Hulud 2 Attack! Uses someone's GitHub account to publish malicious code that can then get downloaded by others (because this coder gave it all his credentials and forgot about it, and now it does whatever the hell it wants, OR if a bad person gets hold of it they can make it do whatever they want)
• Every NHI should be administratively tied to a person (called a sponsor)
• I don't know what an MPC is but he does not like it. 
• See OWASPs 2025 List of Risks and Threats 

Against the Edgelord International w Johannes Grenzfurthner of the Monochrom Art Group [link] 

• Like the Yes Men they do really funny shit that is like the antidote to advertising in a consumer economy; "violate the terms of use until they become visible"
• Influencers are professional dissidents (oxymoron), 'they don't want you to know this'
• Entry Points - someone who takes your humiliation seriously, fitness videos, dating advice; someone who taught you squats (trust) now can tell you about Feminism or the Bronze Age, you name it
• He does a good job in general of classifying The Con that is the modern day internet; 'your confusion is because the truth was hidden from you', 'the lack of evidence is because look how good they hid it', ...
• [On How to Be an Asshole] first say the unsayable, like some racist shit --> joke about it --> defend the joke, hey man it's just a joke --> use the joke, hey he's got a serious point though you know; like "I'm just asking questions! What's wrong w that?" type shit
• [Slide 71 was really good but it went by too fast]

The Watchers You FED - Feds, Extractors, Data Brokers w Tony Spencer

• He also wrote a book, and that's the title^
• Third Party Doctrine - once you hand your data to a third party, you lose your 4th Ammendment rights to search and seizure, and it can simply be purchased by someone with no legal process required
• Palantir built Immigration OS in 2024 for $287 million, from SSN, DOB, address, and tons of other data; gives an accuracy score of where you are right now, and 3 of 4 American adults are in it (so probably you!)
• One ALPR Flock surveillance camera was queried 7 million times
• The word "protest" returned 8 million results from Flock's database. 
• Graffiti, black clothing, ordering zines (what?), having Signal on your phone (you), are all tagged with "terrorist" in the Antifa Executive Order
• Nice thing - NYC has pensions in Palantir, so they asked for an audit

Semi Sentient Sentence Engineer

Sometimes it's better to listen to people from the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN) than those from your newsfeed. Especially when your newsfeed is algorithmically engineered to reinforce billions of dollars of investment in a half-baked invention. Because for so many people, no matter who you are, whether you're the expert, or the outlet promoting said expert, there is so much hype around "technology" right now that you'd think we could pretty much replace every invention ever created with a few lines of code, upload ourselves into the anthroposphere, and watch our cellular clocks tick tock into infinity. Just about everyone is so ready to extoll the virtues of a super-sentient human alternative without checking to see whether the alternative actually exists. (Too late, we've already invested your retirement fund into it, so now you have no social security AND no retirement!)

The presenter here, Bernhard Schölkopf, works with computers and code, and tries to make easier the things that are hard for computers to do. Sometimes he uses to an advantage the things that computers mess up. This talk seems to be about "spurious correlations", and how they can be useful. For example, you can see how his team manages to get the details of the surface of the moon during a lunar eclipse. It's hard to convey how bonkers this is in words - likely the most intense contrast of light vs dark that can exist for a human, when the midday sun is blotted out by the moon, making the moon, by comparison and as seen by our photochemical receptors, the darkest thing to ever exist, and they have managed to pull out the details of the moon's surface with no less detail that you would see with the naked eye.  

Above image credit: Please excuse my simple language, but they de-noised, or whatever you call the opposite of de-noising, the image of the moon as seen during a lunar eclipse, and left only the details of the moon, as seen here. Kind of like hearing someone whisper you name from across a football field, during the Superbowl, right after a touchdown, while wearing headphones and listening to electronic dance music. ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

This is the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, where the two orange circles are the same size but they look different because of the blue circles that surround them. ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

But in setting up his talk, he first mentions, almost in passing, this interesting phenomenon that I have definitely never heard anyone else talk about. Maybe because I'm not spending enough time at computer science conferences. 

He shows us the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, where the two orange circles are the same size but they look different because of the blue circles that surround them. I thought that was called the Oppenheimer Effect, but who cares what I think. It's an optical illusion. You probably know the definition of an optical illusion, and how they "work" and what they look like. Computers, on the other hand, do not. And so, when querying an LLM with an exaggerated but incorrect version of the illusion, it betrays its non-human nature, and tells us this new version of truth: "This image is a variant of the Ebbinghaus illusion. Although the circle on the right appears larger due to being surrounded by smaller blue circles, both orange circles are actually the same size. The arrangement ... tricks our perception. ...". 

Excuse me, "Our" perception?

This is the The Ebbinghaus Illusion, as seen by a robot (OpenAI in this case), and by the description given, robots seem to have been confused, by us, its teachers, into seeing the wrong thing. "This image is a variant of the Ebbinghaus illusion. Although the circle on the right appears larger due to being surrounded by smaller blue circles, both orange circles are actually the same size. The arrangement ... tricks our perception. ..." ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

This is a different optical illusion that the LLM also gets wrong: "Although the two segments of the horizontal line appear to be of different lengths due to the arrows at the ends, they are actually equal." ICANN 2025 - Causal Representations, World Models and Digital Twins - Bernhard Schölkopf [link] 

And here's another one. The text in the above image, generated by an LLM when prompted with an exaggerated version of the illusion, says, "Although the two segments of the horizontal line appear to be of different lengths due to the arrows at the ends, they are actually equal."

Actually...

Anyway, this is one of those immediate, obvious examples that you would expect to have seen or heard of already. But not in this mediasphere, which is, unfortunately, trying to sell us this technology. And to find out what's wrong with it, or how it can destroy your business, ruin your life, or just give you really bad dating advice, you have to watch talks that you barely understand, given by people who already have a decent job as a scientist so they're not trying to sell you the tech; they're just showing you how they use it. And that usually means figuring out not how it works, but how it doesn't work, and then using that part to make it do cool things you didn't expect it to. That's what this guy did. What he also did was reaffirm my suspicion that some of the changes made to your work by a neural net, be it for language or images or music or whatever, are likely to be imperceptible to you.

These obviously wrong optical illusion descriptions are an example of how it messes up, but it shows us something deeper about how training works, and how it doesn't work. It shows us the gap between a thinking computer and a human being. The brains behind this thing are so alien to us that we are likely not going to see what it's doing wrong unless we're intentionally studying its output.  

Merchants of Doubt

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway, 2010

I couldn't read much into this, because it's too depressing, too infuriating. But some of the best parts of books are at the beginning, so here's some notes.

• ("They" usually means "Industry", below)
• When they said the IPCC-II had been "doctored", they were using as evidence revisions made in response to peer review. 
• Overall, the scientific debate (about smoking and health) wasn't among scientists; there was no debate among scientists. A debate was fabricated, between the industry and scientists, and then made to look to the public like the debate was between scientists. 
• The Tobacco Strategy they call it. 
• They find all the bad health effects of smoking, then find all the other things that also cause those same effects, and then amplify the association of those things, and so distract from arguments in court by other expert witnesses. (We also might call that simply Whataboutism)
• Their law firm advised, "scientific doubt must remain"
• (Note to self: when an industry is arguing against scientists that their product or service is not bad, just don't believe them, because they're lying, every time. CO2, PFAS, MCAS, you name it.)
• The pro-tobacco scientists were found testifying as expert witness in asbestos cases where they argued that asbestos, but not tobacco, caused lung cancer(!). 
• "Industry makes its case by cherry-picking data and focusing on unexplained or anomalous details ... the industry exploited this normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt." (Their questions weren't illegitimate but disingenuous)
• After the 1964 US Surgeon's General report Smoking and Health, where the health effects were conclusive, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee changed their name to the Council for Tobacco Research, and then went ape-shit crazy.
• They ingratiate themselves with "friendly witnesses" by dumping tons of money into research funding grants over decades. [ie expert witness]
• One of the earlier scientists they used misrepresented his data at UCLA Medical School and was forced to resign; 20 years later he's doing testimony for Big Tobacco. [and probably because he needs the money because he can't make a living as a real scientist because he can't help lying about shit]
• "Did they deserve equal time? The simple answer is no. While the idea for equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research - experiments, experience, and observation - research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process - or have gone through it and failed - are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate." (p32)
• (Further) "A scientific conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers - the community of researchers - reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim." (p33)
• (And) "Doubt-mongering works because we think science is about facts - cold, hard, definite facts. If someone tells us things are uncertain, we think that means that the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery." (p34)
• Their Line "The science is too uncertain to justify actions." (No it's not, because that's actually how science works, see below.)
• Good language in response to this, from the 1983 US Office of Science and Technology Policy, "The incomplete present scientific knowledge sometimes presents the kinds of certainty which scientists would prefer, but there are many indicators which, taken collectively, lead us to our finding that the phenomena of acid deposition ["acid rain"] are real and constitute a problem for which solutions should be sought." (p87)

The Origins of Modern Science

by Herbert Butterfield, 1957

It's always fascinating to be reminded of where our modern thinking came from and how much it evolved. You can't really understand something unless you know where it came from. And you can't appreciate where you are if you don't know how bad things used to be. 

• First, on Astrology: After reading through the first parts of this book, I have this thought - Astrology is so stupid that even the church fought against it for being nuts, and later, a kind of Streisand Effect; because the church, as the ultimate unquestioned authority of its time, denounced it, people were convinced there must be secrets in there, because "they don't want you to know". It really is like the first snake oil.
• Next, on the Complete Population Level Mental Damage of Alchemy: It's like the equivalent to an entire population being subjected to heavy metal poisoning. Until 1689, under Henry IV, there was a law that you couldn't multiply gold or silver (because they thought it might be possible; and this reminds me of the AI bubble of the 2020's because people really think it can do the craziest things). 
• Finally, on Phlogiston Theory: "The entire view was based upon one of those fundamental conclusions of common sense observation which (like Aristotle's view of motion) may set the whole of men's thinking on the wrong track and block scientific progress for thousands of years". And they twisted their heads so far around in trying to make it work that they came up with the idea that phlogiston had negative weight, to explain why an object weighed more by losing it. And let this echo with today's use of Dark Energy in astronomy. But there's more, "Furthermore, the last two decades of the eighteenth century give one of the most spectacular proofs in history of the fact that able men who had the truth under their very noses, and possessed all the ingredients for the solution of the problem - the very men who had actually made the strategic discoveries - were incapacitated by the phlogiston theory from realising the implications of their own work. Although it is true in the history of thought that false ideas or half-truths sometimes act as convoying agency - leading the enquirer to a sounder form of generalisation, and then dropping out of the story when they have fulfilled their purpose - it is still not clear".

• On the history of the heart, because of studying animals that bled out, they thought the left side blood vessels were filled with air. 
• On Misinformation, and a bit of Stigler's Law - still regarding the heart, "The mind of Fabricus was so shaped to the teaching of Galen, however, that he missed the whole point of his own discovery, and produced an explanation which left the large question exactly whee it had stood before."

• What precipitates the paradigm shift? Not necessarily a social revolution, or even a technological revolution, but some plain old chance. "One of these occurrences was the appearance of a new star in 1572 - an event which one historian of science appears to me to be correct in describing as a greater shock to European thought than the publication of the Copernican hypothesis itself. ... In 1577, a new comet appeared ... Quite apart from any attack which Copernicus had made upon the system, the foundations of the Ptolemaic universe were beginning to shake."
• Here's another: Although it turns out to have been wrong, as far back as Kepler, and influenced by Gilbert's theory of magnetism, gravity was seen as being more like attraction than a "falling back to the earth".
• And: By 1665, most of the ingredients in Newton's gravitational theory were in existence, though scattered in the writings of different scientists in such a way that no man held them in combination (and this is how it happens, not one man at a time, but one day at a time).

• Hindu algebra and Greek geometry coming together was the single greatest step in the progress of the exact sciences. 

• Before science proper, people would *think* through their experiments, and were called "natural philosophers". Not until they had tools to measure their initial conditions and results, did they begin to investigate experimental evidence to support their theory. ... Before, it was enough to think it through very carefully.

• This part is great. Butterfield, the author, uses as an illustration of the Scientific Revolution a series of eulogies presented by French writer Fontenelle, also secretary of the Academic des Science 1699-1741. He finds a pattern among the scientists' biographies. "It would appear from Fontanelle's biographies that those who joined the movement often sprang from bourgeois families and remarkably often they are the sons of avocats [lawyers], as he himself happened to be. Repeatedly it appears that they had originally been intended for the Church and that their fathers had insisted on giving them an education in theology. But over and over again the same pattern occurs in these biographies - the youth finds the prevailing educational methods irksome, finds that he is being given an education in mere words and not in real things. And then, on repeated occasions, the identical fairy story takes place". And he goes on to describe a series of scientists who were exposed to some theorem or philosophy, changing their life forever ... like older stories of Christian conversions.

• Whereas "reason" had once been a thing that required to be disciplined by a long and intensive training, the very meaning of the word began to change - now any man could say that he had it, especially if his mind was unspoiled by education and traditional "Reason", in fact, came to signify much more what we today should call common sense. 

Acid Test

Reading this is like tripping on acid.

Crystals of space and time: A structural phenomenon that may collapse into tiny black holes

May 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-crystals-space-phenomenon-collapse-tiny.html

Space and time can form a kind of "crystal" that may turn into a black hole. ... When spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. Black holes usually form in spectacular events, such as the death of a massive star. But in theory, arbitrarily small black holes are also possible: tiny microscopic objects that can emerge from special critical states after the slightest addition of energy.

Wait

"This spacetime crystal is a very peculiar and fascinating object," says Grumiller. "It is a kind of intermediate state, an unstable point that can evolve in two different directions. It may simply dissolve again, leaving behind ordinary spacetime filled with freely moving particles. But if a tiny amount of energy is added, the evolution takes a completely different path: the inconspicuous spacetime crystal turns into a black hole."

Not done yet

"Our universe has four dimensions—three dimensions of space and one dimension of time," explains Christian Ecker. "But in principle, nothing prevents us from writing down physical equations for a larger number of dimensions—five dimensions, forty-two dimensions, or even infinitely many."

via Vienna University of Technology: Christian Ecker et al, Analytic Discrete Self-Similar Solutions of Einstein-Klein-Gordon at Large D, Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/qgl5-5l3t

https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/qgl5-5l3t

Image credit: Christopher Payne - Making Dum Dums at Spangler Candy Bryon OH - 2020

https://chrispaynephoto.com

The End of the Universe is Right Around the Corner

If you're looking to prepare yourself for the end of the universe, Asimov's The Universe: From Flat Earth to Quasar (1971) is a nice place to start, maybe Herbert Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science (1949). Maybe you're a bit more anarchic and would rather focus on the "revolutionary" part; then take it from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which should really start with Ludwig Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935). These things don't happen fast, at least not on the scale of a human life. But these days we are seeing things happen fast. Gravity as we know it is having a kind of identity crisis.   

Foundation AI models trained on physics, not words, are driving scientific discovery

Jan 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-foundation-ai-physics-words-scientific.html

"I continue to be awed by the fact that a multi-disciplinary physics foundation model works at all, let alone at this level." 

While most AI models are trained on text and images, this team trains AI on physics, and then applies the knowledge they gain from one class of physical systems to completely different problems.

These are the models:

Walrus  - 15 terabytes of density, velocity and pressure in physical systems like merging neutron stars, acoustic waves and shifting layers in Earth's atmosphere

AION-1 - 100 terabyte astronomical survey of stars, quasars and galaxies 

via University of Cambridge: Michael McCabe et al, Walrus: A Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Continuum Dynamics, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2511.15684

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2511.15684

Totally unrelated image credit: Monkey with an ice cream cone means something but I'm not sure what - Martin Nicourt for Gibraltar Macaques Project - 2026

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-monkeys-gibraltar-medicate-soil-digest.html

Gravity from positivity: Single massive spin-3/2 particle makes gravity logically inevitable, study claims

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-gravity-positivity-massive-particle-logically.html

A single massive spin-3/2 particle simply cannot exist in isolation within a consistent theory. Its scattering amplitudes grow too fast with energy, clashing with positivity inequalities. The theory breaks down barely above the particle's own mass. Therefore, supersymmetry is not a postulate: it is a logical necessity. Famous relations between the gravitino mass, the Planck mass, and the supersymmetry-breaking scale emerge here from the sole demand that probabilities be positive and effects propagate within the light cone.

Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, CEA, Institut de Physique Théorique, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Santa Barbara, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona: Brando Bellazzini et al, (Super) gravity from positivity, Journal of High Energy Physics (2026). DOI: 10.1007/jhep03(2026)028

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/jhep03(2026)028

New quantum theory of gravity brings long-sought 'theory of everything' a crucial step closer

May 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-quantum-theory-gravity-sought-crucial.html

(This short press article doesn't actually explain much, and they still need to prove it, so let's take it easy here.)

via Aalto University: Mikko Partanen et al, Gravity generated by four one-dimensional unitary gauge symmetries and the Standard Model, Reports on Progress in Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1088/1361-6633/adc82e

https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1361-6633/adc82e

Structural Decoherence and Assembloid Resistance

Things to consider as we dematerialize into our furniture - Buildings as living organisms and we will all be living in crystals in the future. Otherwise, how did it take us this long to figure out we could do this with 3D printing:

'Implosion carving' shrinks 3D photonic devices 2,000-fold for visible-light computing

May 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-implosion-3d-photonic-devices-visible.html

They figured out how to create vacancies at any site across a material and then shrink it to about 1/2,000 of its original volume, making nanostructures with feature sizes with a resolution less than 100 nanometers; because that resolution is smaller than the wavelength of light, the devices can bend light in specific ways that allow them to perform optical computations.

via MIT: Quansan Yang et al, Isotropic shrinkage of patterned vacancies enables three-dimensional nanoprecise metastructures for visible light applications, Nature Photonics (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-026-01896-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41566-026-01896-1

Image credit: Christopher Payne - New York's Forgotten Substations The Power Behind the Subway_6 - 2002 https://chrispaynephoto.com

Novel origami pattern turns flat sheets into load-bearing 3D technology

May 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-origami-pattern-flat-sheets-3d.html

It's a "doubly curved lens box", also called a flat tendon-driven origami metamaterial with stiffness reprogrammability. ... Starting from a desired curved shape (such as a sphere, torus or vase-like surface), the researchers used differential geometry—mathematical theories for origami tiling and developable surfaces—followed by numerical optimization to compute the exact crease pattern needed so that, once folded and locked, the origami shell would match the target geometry. ... They next laser-cut and folded paperboard sheets into these patterns, assembled them into shells, and embedded thin cables ("tendons") through specific points. "By tightening or loosening the tendons, we measured how the stiffness changed and showed that the shells could go from saggy and flexible to rigid and resistant to twisting and bending."

via McGill University: Morad Mirzajanzadeh et al, Smooth doubly curved origami shells with reprogrammable rigidity, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-69562-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69562-2

A low-tech solution to the 6G problem—metacrystal panels offer cheap way to guide wireless signals around corners

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-tech-solution-6g-problem-metacrystal.html

Higher-frequency channels of 6G communications are more easily blocked by walls, people and other obstacles. Metacrystals are passive, 3D-printed smart panels that can shape wireless signals without electronics, a power supply or active tuning.

Unlike many existing intelligent surfaces, which often perform only one task for one signal direction, the panels can handle several incoming waves at the same time, operate over different frequency bands simultaneously, work in reflection or transmission mode, and even fully absorb unwanted signals.

via Aalto University: Metacrystals: Inversely-designed 3D-printed intelligent panels for 6G communications, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-73019-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73019-x

Rising heat and humidity challenge energy-efficient data center cooling worldwide

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-humidity-energy-efficient-center-cooling.html

They assessed historical and projected temperatures and humidity levels around the world and compared them with the conditions required for "direct air free cooling," wherein naturally cold outside air is brought in to cool a building or equipment.

"We found that periods of time when temperature and humidity exceed recommended operating thresholds for direct air-free cooling are becoming more frequent and lasting longer in many regions"

One of their key findings is that the largest changes are not always seen in average conditions. In several regions, worst-day conditions are intensifying more rapidly than average conditions, indicating that environmental stress is becoming increasingly concentrated in rare but consequential events.

Funny way of describing the climate catastrophe: "Worst-day conditions are intensifying more rapidly than average conditions"

via University of Hawaii at Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology: Christina Karamperidou et al, Limitations to air free cooling in data centers under rising heat and humidity, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-56926-3

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-56926-3

Duped - Truth Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception

Written by Timothy R. Levine on University of Alabama Press, 2020

Hardcore academic, but not the kind who makes words up to confuse you instead of just doing a better job of explaining things. He never believes his own results; instead he changes the variables and does another study. He's the opposite of the self-stimulating hermit who writes not to communicate to others but to hear himself talk. He's a real model of what a researcher should be. He's got healthy but persistent suspicion of everything, he's really intent on setting the record straight, on being absolutely certain before you say something, and he's not discrediting or disparaging anyone else in the process. And finally, in a way you never see in a science book like this, it does come with a climax at the end, and makes it feel like the whole thing was a story, constructed on purpose, with a beginning, middle, and end. You wish every researcher was like this. He even mentions how he gets upset that taxpayer funds go to wack theories. 

Also, the amount of time he spends and the effort in making it crystal clear who was the brains behind the "veracity effect" at the beginning of Chapter 12 is not only reaffirming to hear such respect but also another opportunity to see into the academic machine in ways that are often ignored. Sometimes I wonder if it's out of a kind of elitism where authors think "regular readers" wouldn't understand or don't care about these details. Not true, and I feel more respected as a reader. 

• Most people are honest most of the time.
• Most lies are told by a few prolific liars. 
• (Taken from Turner) Honesty as complete disclosure may be inaccurate, and may be better described as fidelity to maintaining a relationship by selectively controlling information.
• (Levine) Deception may not be a moral choice, but a practical one, and need not be conscious, but does serve a purpose. 
• The younger you are, the more you lie. 
• In deception studies, your chances of guessing correctly whether someone's lying is 54%.
• Most people, when they do lie, are pretty good liars. 
• People who appear confident, friendly, composed, and engaged tend to be believed.
• Some people have honest demeanors and some don't, and that's it. 
• Liars do the same "telltale" behaviors as non-liars, leading to much misclassification. 
• Non-verbal cues for deception detection came from folk wisdom, but also the coincidence that many of the researchers came from non-verbal communication studies.
• Most people think lack of eye contact is the #1 sign of deception, but also shifting posture, response latency, fast talking, speech errors, more pauses and hesitation, less plausible content, contradict themselves, less conversationally involved, uncertainty in voice, less friendly and cooperative, and more nervous.
• High pitch and pupil dilation correlate, but it's small. 
• Theories that don't work: Ekman's leakage theory that we unconsciously "leak" the truth via gestures etc. while lying , but only for emotionally potent, high stakes lies. He sums up all the other theories of deception in a meta-theory called Cue Theory: deception is a psychological state that manifests behavioral cues which can be detected. He also references a man named Kraut 1980s who says all deception theory is biased on the assumption that observable behavior represents internal states.  
• He has concerns about deception research in the legal and criminal psychology areas - they seem cliquish and provincial; they co-author and review one another's work. 

• "Deception becomes probable when the truth makes honest communication difficult or inefficient."
• "Deception - or more precisely, the possession of problematic information ..."
• Deception becomes probable when people judge truthful information as so problematic it can't be disclosed (McCornack).
• Deception is purposive, i.e., people lie for a reason: "The basic functions of communication include being informative and sharing information and influencing the affect, cognition and behaviors of others; entertainment; and building, maintaining or ending social, personal, and professional relationships." p154

Deception Motives:

• Personal Transgression - cover up a misdeed
• Economic Advantage - money as always
• Personal Advantage - promotion at work, avoid a disliked task
• Social or Politeness - saying a stupid gift is really nice
• Altruism - to protect another; father lying to daughter about being sick
• Self-Impression Management - status? (cant this be #3?)
• Malicious - cause harm to others
• Humor - like a prank
• Pathological - delusional, disregard for consequences
• Avoidance - sorry can't make it tonight, my fish tank just exploded

Variable Affecting Truth Bias:

• Experimentally primed suspicion - when you are told to be suspicious
• Closeness of relationship - closer you are, the more you're biased to believing them
• Face-to-face interaction 
• Mere questioning aka The Probing Effect - watching a person be questioned, no matter how they answer, makes them look more honest to you (now that's an interesting one)
• Sender demeanor believability - this is the strongest variable

Truth Default Deactivation Triggers:

• Projected motive for deception - you think they have a reason to lie
• Dishonest demeanor - they "look like" they're lying
• Incoherent message content - doesn't make sense
• Lack of correspondence between content and reality - also doesn't make sense
• Warning from a third party

On Scientific Revolutions and Paradigm Shifting:

This only applies to deception research, but it's the common phenomenon you see all the time preceding a drastic shift in thinking within a field of study. For decades, you had a 56% chance of detecting deception, based on the deception research. But those experiments were just not generalizable, or in other words, they were too "artificial" to be compared to real life. It's an example of how easily we are hypnotized by our own time. 

The Behavior Quotient aka The Demeanor Index:

Alas, this is the reason I bought the book; people appear so apt to believe me when I talk, and I find that so weird because I would be super-suspicious of myself if I heard myself talking, and I wonder what it is that makes people like this. He says this list is worth "vastly more than what you paid for this book." It started because in one of his experiments there were a few "senders" who everyone got wrong, and a few who everyone got right, so they looked at those people, and this is what they found:

Sincere (Honest) Demeanor Cues:

• Confidence and composure
• Pleasant and friendly interaction style
• Engaged and involved interaction style
• Gives plausible explanations

Insincere (Dishonest) Demeanor Cues:

• Avoids eye contact
• Appears hesitant and slow in providing answers
• Vocal uncertainty (in tone of voice)
• Excessive fidgeting 
• Appears tense, nervous, anxious
• Portrays an inconsistent demeanor over course of interaction
• Verbal uncertainty (bad vocabulary?)
• I call all these things basic public speaking skills?

Finally, and providing climax in a science book, something which never happens, or which isn't necessarily supposed to happen, they reveal that in fact it's possible to break the 56% accuracy ceiling. Expertise is possible but it's context-dependent and involves knowing how to prompt diagnostically useful information rather than passive observation of behavioral cues. The experts scored 100%, not 56%.

Note that up until now, deception researchers used scripted questions, which undercuts the experts' expertise; the whole point of them being experts is them knowing which questions to ask. 

How did they do it? Start conversationally, get to know the person. Then, ask critical information about th eissue, like facts that can be corroborated. Then ask about their integrity and views on cheating (the experiment was a simulated cheating scenario). Then they circle back and ask the same questions again ina  different way, but remembering the first answers. They also tried to convince them to confess, stressing the importance of honesty. 

Five Keys to Improving Lie Detection:

• Correspondence of communication in evidence - what you said vs known facts
• Content in context - situational familiarity, knowing whether this is a joke or has double meaning
• Assessment of deception motives
• Diagnostic questioning
• Persuading honesty

Determined - A Science of Life Without Free Will

Written by Robert Sapolsky 2023

I've read too much of his work by now, not to mention sitting through all 72 hours of his Human Behavior 101 course at Stanford. So much so that I'm not the audience for this book because I already 1. Believe him, and 2. I know why I believe it. That being said, there are entire chapters in here about physics and randomness, and I am not a happy camper when I see a scientist of one discipline write about a different discipline. It's one thing if it comes up in conversation, but to use your platform, which you've earned by being an expert in your field, to talk about stuff beyond that field, not cool. I call it the Neil DeGrasse Tyson effect, because during the pandemic, when he was really at the peak of his public persona, he talked a lot about biology and epidemiology and even air quality on the platforms he had access to (television shows, podcasts, etc.) because of his recognition as a **physicist**. And an astrophysicist at that, which is about as far as physics gets from things biological. That pissed me off. Personally, because I was an industrial hygienist at the time, and if there's one thing that's "in the lane" of the IH, it's infectious aerosols and indoor air quality. But I was moreso pissed because it's deception, or at least an exploitation. I know it's tempting, when you're smart, and trusted as an authority, to answer basically any question that comes your way; you might even feel obligated. But it's not professional. And I get that Sapolsky needed a chapter on randomness to talk about free will, but I didn't buy this book to hear him talk about physics. For that I buy a book by a renowned physicist (just not Leonard Mlodinow, because his 2008 book The Drunkard's Walk sucked and was a total disappointment). The whole thing has an air of ... mental incest? Self-stimulation I guess is what you might call it if your were trying to be professional; there's a couple other phrases that come to mind, but they sound a bit adolescent so I'll avoid it. 

Image credit: Sapolsky in the Field circa 1990

Next, I swear he's got as much text in the footnotes as he does in the book proper. That's annoying, and makes it look like you didn't put enough thought into the book. Also makes me wonder how his editor and publisher let him get away with it.

Alas. All that being said, the way he introduces the book and his ideas is so good and so effortless, so amicable. This is a guy who knows how not to pick fights - he spent much of his life hanging out with baboons (and never once got eaten to death!).

• Right off the bat, he says explicitly he's not trying to pick fights, and not arguing on a personal level with anyone. A good way for any writer to start their book of arguments. 
• And the very next section is titled "Whom I Will Be Disagreeing With". The way he pre-emptively addresses his critics is so instructive, and likely the result of having written several books already, and experiencing the resulting maelstrom of highly informed, sometimes highly combative opinions. 

• "While we are free to do as we intend, we are not free to intend what we intend." p19
• Alien hand syndrome, and anarchic hand syndrome (Dr Strangelove and the unwanted Nazi salute)
• "Chronotheology" is what critics called Libet's experiments that seem to show that some part of your brain makes decisions before you're even aware of it. 
• "Turtleism" is "turtles all the way down" (and is strongly correlated with the "Always Has Been" astronaut shooting the other astronaut meme).
• I find these too hard to believe, but I will write them down: Lying by voicemail increased request for mouthwash, and lying by email for hand sanitizer. See The MacBeth Effect: C Zhang and K Lijenquist 2006; SW Lee and N Schwarz 2010; E Kalanthroff, C Aslan and R Dar 2017; Schnall, Benton, Harvey 2008; Kaspar, Krapp, Konig 2015
• After pointing out the human frontal cortex takes 12 more years after the rest of the primates to develop, "the genetic program of the human brain evolved to free the frontal cortex from genes as much as possible" (what I'd rather call cultural evolution and the arena of artificial selection)
• Rainforest vs Desert dwellers and why "55% of humans proclaim religions invented by Middle Eastern monotheistic shepherds". (Rainforest dwellers tend to have polytheistic religions.)
• The Hungry Judge (not easy to get to the bottom of this because for example the wikipedia page as of 2025 said it was disproven, but when you consider just the biases and motives of potential actors, you might want to err on the side of it being true?) This is in a footnote, not the text proper - "The finding was challenged by some critics who suggested that it was a statistical artifact of the way parole hearings were carried out; the authors reanalyzed their data to control for these possibilities, convincingly showing that the effect was still there. An additional study showed the identical pattern: subjects read job applicant profiles from out-group minority members; the longer it had been since a meal, the less time was spent on each application." p107
• On the "Initial Conditions" of the Butterfly Effect (inside joke) - he says that when Lorenz came up with his strange attractor theory, he tried to summarize it with a metaphor about seagulls, but a friend suggested something more picturesque, and by 1972 we have the title of the talk ... p133 ("What Could Be Worse Than the Butterfly Effect?" R Bishop in Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2008)
• *** Some things were free will and now they're not, because we learned more. "In this view, "free will" is what we call the biology that we don't understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will." p150
• When lethal injection machines were invented, some states stipulated that there'd be two separate delivery routes, each with a syringe full of poison, two people would press each of two buttons, and a randomizer in the machine would infuse the poison from one syringe into the person and dump the contents of the other into a bucket. ... defusing the sense of responsibility. p152
• [This is where I stop reading entire chapters about physics by neurologists.]
• "On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Scientific Bullshit" by Gordon Pennycock and wisdomofchopra.com
• ***Dan Dennett's Nefarious Neurosurgeon - a surgeon does a procedure on a patient and then lies and says she implanted a chip in their brain that robs them of their free will, and that she now controls them. Unburdened by responsibility for their actions, they become criminal. And that, Dennet says, is how neuroscientists rob people of their free will. p390
• ***In general, it's hard to convince people there's no free will, and hence nobody's actions are their fault, because then also their accomplishments aren't their's either, and they get no credit. Nobody's going for that. Saul Smilansky's Philosophical Illusionism comes to this conclusion. 

• To live through "free will colored glasses"
• In the epilogue he refutes meritocracy arguments - The issue isn't that so-called meritocracies reward un-qualified people, it's how qualified people come to be that way. The opportunities, not the standards, are unequal. p407

Be Afraid

We are not ready for this. 

Lab-grown brain-spinal cord model shows 'irreversible' nerve damage may be reversed

May 2026, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-05-lab-grown-brain-spinal-cord.html

It's a miniature lab-grown brain and spinal cord, but they simply call it "miniature circuits".

via University of Cambridge: George M. Gibbons et al, A human corticospinal organoid-slice connectoid model informs enhancer strategies for post-injury axon regrowth, Cell Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117399

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117399

Post Script for those who believe we ARE ready for this:

New bioreactor turns stem cells into an immune-cell factory, producing 40 million human macrophages per week

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-bioreactor-stem-cells-immune-cell.html

Researchers at Hannover Medical School (MHH) have developed a method for the efficient production of human immune cells, such as macrophages, in medium-sized bioreactors. 

"Medium-sized", for now

via Hannover Medical School: Fawaz Saleh et al, Harnessing intermediate-scale bioreactors for next-generation macrophage production and application, Nature Protocols (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41596-025-01313-x

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41596-025-01313-x

The Pencil - A History of Design and Circumstance

Written by Henry Petroski, 1989

It's hard to believe that this is pretty much the only book written on the pencil.

I have a lot of notes; it's all over the place, but that's never stopped me before from posting it all up here.

• The original pencils were made with lead, but they were literally a lump held in the hand; later the lump was put in holders, and later still graphite was discovered (1560's England), although it was called black lead, plumbago, or English antimony at the time, though Germans called it white lead or bismuth, and others still called it Flemish stone, and it didn't get it's name graphite until two hundred years later (1779) when they had good microscopes to see the chemical structure and realize it wasn't lead at all; the word graphite means graph - to write - in Latin, with -ite at the end to denote it's a mineral.
• Thoreau doesn't include pencils on his list of items for going into the Muir Woods.
• The origin of the word pencil is penis, which means tail in Latin; the original use of the word pencil was more like a paint brush. Also, codex is Latin for tree trunk, on which a codex would have been written.
• Early writing used a stylus on wax tablets backed with ivory.
• Much later, guidelines or blind lines as they were called were put on paper in lead, but the words were written in ink 
• Homemade quill pencils circa 1800s America 
• The pencil as we know it today is called the "cedar and graphite" pencil.

• 1560s Borrowdale England - graphite mine is discovered (but called black lead, plumbago, etc.)
• 1675 Nuremburg - Staedtler was making pencils exclusively, and as a joiner (wood cabinet maker), so he was making his own leads
• 1760 Germany? - Faber
• 1790 France? - Conte instigates the revolution in pencil making when a restriction in supply from a war in 1790 made him turn the graphite into powder and add it to "potter's clay and water", which was shaped and fired like clay; Conte had experience making ceramic graphite crucibles for lead cannon balls; today it's called the Conte crayon, but then it was called ceramic lead. Germany never took up this method, and fell behind.
• 1800s American - they're using quill pencils made with a goose quill, a lead bullet, a melting ladle, and a turnip - the quill was cut to length of a couple inches, the end thrust into a turnip and held upright, the bullet melted and poured into the quill ready for use (and the quill was whittled away at increments to reveal the lead?)
• 1810 America - William Munroe a cabinetmaker who makes pencils uses a slurry but not exactly Conte style because it wasn't baked. 
• 1821 Briton New Hampshire - a graphite mine is discovered
• 1830s Concord Mass - Henry David Thoreau's dad John ran one of America's first pencil companies making graphite and clay pencils, but by 1853 they were making more money selling their ground graphite for electrotyping and gave up on pencils.
• 1843 - a Thomas Telford grounds graphite, mixes with water, and pressurized to reform as natural graphite, but it was too expensive.
• 1857 Jersey City Dixon Crucible Co. - Dixon was at it since 1820, but the crucibles made to melt and mold cannonballs for the Mexican America War were of graphite, and Dixon had so much because his dad owned a shipping company that called in Ceylon, where a graphite mine was, and where they straight used the graphite as ballast in the ship, so he set up shop for the War; at this time, some Dixon advertising materials compare their product against fraudulent Germans pretending to make their pencils in America said Dixon used "purely American principles" where "every manipulation is by machinery instead of by hand labor; producing perfection and absolute conformity." (Makes me think of the American food system though.)
• 1851 World's Fair Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London - this changed a lot of things
• 1856 Siberia - AW Faber, who was failing by 1850s due to lack of good graphite, finds a graphite mine in Siberia, and by 1896 a Faber granddaughter marries a Castell and the company becomes Faber-Castell; note that by 1849 Faber was represented in the US, w a factory by 1861, which caught fire, moved to Brooklyn 1872, then to Wilkes-Barre PA 1956.
• 1870 Germany - JS Staedtler's red conte crayon pencil made since 1851 gets popular, but by 1912 Staedtler is sold by a grandson named Kreutzer
• 1873 Ticonderoga New York - Dixon buys the American Graphite Company in Ticonderoga New York, and is making real and good pencils; and continues to do so until 1980 when the buildings are sold to developers; the business remains, headquartered in Florida and w facilities all over.
• 1900s Japan - They have an entire pencil industry by then.

• ***There is a great passage here, "Where Did the Graphite from Borrowdale Go?" AKA "Black Entropy" - The plumbago from Borrowdale had certainly been absorbed into the universe at large over the three centuries since it had been discovered: being blown in dust from all the sawing and rubbing, being deposited on the furniture of pencil factories and on the hands and clothes of their workers, being carried in fabricated veins of lead in millions upon millions of wood-cased pencils made and exported around the world, being buried with the stubs of pencils no one wanted to hold onto, being laid down in notes in the margin of books like trail markers through forests of thought, being redeposited in thin lines of thoughts and images on countless sheets of paper, being twisted and crushed in the lines of crumpled manuscripts and sketches, being burned with the thoughts and images no one wanted, or no one wanted to remember or build. So by the mid-1800s what had once been the world's purest source of plumbago was essentially worked out and had been diffused throughout the world in a three-centuries long fit of black entropy. (p140)

• ***1860s - Erasers are already on pencils, but it was used, and named, by the 1770s, for "rubbing" out black lead (graphite); and by 1900s erasers got so popular that people got paranoid about their marks on paper being erased either accidentally or intentionally, that there were recipes for fixing the graphite, one with skim milk; further: a Dixon catalog early 1900s has a paragraph about erasing in schools, called "The Philosophy of Rubber", about how having an eraser changes the way students think [perhaps a perennial example of our initial interfaces with new technology]. 

• Erasers on pencils were and are not popular in Europe
• Until 1880, European pencils had square lead. 
• There's a war between whittling and rotary sharpeners, and square and round leads; of course we see the rounds win. But people were real into their whittling; the paper wrapped pencil, an alternative to using wood, never took off because people wanted to whittle. 
• 1890 - The yellow pencil is made to match the Austria-Hungary flag, but also in reference to the Orient where the Siberian graphite was coming from; by 1950s America, yellow and pencil go so well together, there's an apocryphal story of a manager distributing half green and half yellow pencils to his thousands of employees, and getting far more complaints about the green pencils ... because we are basically brainwashed at this point, and he, Petroski, poetically calls it psychosomatic (p163)

• Pine was used for the cheapest pencils, then Red Cedar, then Florida Keys Cedar for the finest; wood was chosen for its strength, freedom from warpage, and smooth cutting qualities.
• English closet chest makers in 1700 got red cedar from Virginia and Florida
• Incense red cedar from California works, but it's white not red, so it's dyed, and impregnated with cedar oil for fragrance, and a wax for better handling in production.
• There is also a wood from India that is dyed violet. 

• There's a good illustration on p223 with the author saying the pencil drawings are so wrong they couldn't be produced "by a drunken machinist on a rubber lathe".

• BOPPS - Broken off pencil points
• The diameter of the leads are thinner as they get harder to adjust for breakage at the point.
• A 1600s teacher was whittling goose quills for their students before class.
• People saved their pencil shavings to drive a way moths.
• There's a Sherlock Holmes bit where he used his knowledge of pencils to deduce a suspect. 
• Colored leads have more wax and less clay, and so aren't baked as hard, and break easily; and colored leads, which often were broken in the wooden shaft, tended to leave loose pieces in the machine to revolve with the cutters and prevent another pencil from being sharpened (bane of my existence as an art teacher).
• There was a pencil made from the wood of a preserved tree near a mastadon in a marl bed in Orange County, the pencil's knob made from the mastadon's tooth. 
• Some novelty pencils were made with companion toothpicks or earspoons
• Mechanical pencil names circa 1930s and 40s - Eversharp, Scripto, Autopoint
• The first Russian pencil was the Diamond by Hammer
• By the 1900s the British call pencil leads pencil strips
• There is a standard for pencil manufacturing - R-151-34
• On Dec 8 1941, the Eagle Mikado became the Mirado.
• They spun a drum of paper against a pencil to see how "far" it goes (35 miles)
• There's Blackfoot Indian made pencils, by hand, in 1971
• Pencil workers could reach into a pile and grab exactly 12 pencils, every time, and that's something a machine can't do in one motion.
• Hemmingway "wearing down sever number 2 pencils is a good day's work"
• Pencils are general word processors, Byte magazine
• "The very commonness of the pencil, the characteristic of it that renders it all but invisible, and seemingly valueless, is really the first feature of successful engineering." p343
• The die for extruding graphite is made of sapphire.
• Author says he's tried, and it's hard finding old pencils, but pencil collector societies do exist. 
• Butchers used ribbed pencils in their slippery hands, and Kosher butchers pig-free pencil products. 

• [Personal thoughts] Every industry is secretive. And because trees are so integral to so many industries, they too are secretive, and a young student first learning about trees would notice it strange how little people know about trees, including experts. But after reading this book it makes more sense. From pencil makers to cabinet makers, to the wood for ships, or for buildings, or basically anything, suppliers know how to get the wood you wanted but they would not tell you how they grow, or where they grow. One way they kept secrets, in pencil making at least, was to keep the process in subdivisions, but so no subdivision knew more than its part, and only family knew "the whole" put together. p281

Image credit: Christopher Payne - Christopher Aparicio unpacking crucibles after heating graphite cores in an oven General Pencil Jersey City NJ - 2017

https://chrispaynephoto.com

Larnier on Tech as People

There's still some interesting people out there worth listening to. Jaron Lanier is interesting, and he came out to give a talk to the graduating class at Brown. This is the same year a lot of tech bros got booed for their fellating ai onstage in front of a bunch of young people. Some might consider Lanier a tech bro, but that would be mostly wrong. He's tech for sure, but bro less. Maybe a bro whisperer. So when he gives talk about AI, you're likely to hear some out-there sh**.

Key Points from Jaron Lanier's "AI and Theory" at Brown University Graduation, April 2026:

• AI isn't a thing, it's a collaboration of people; if it's revolutionary, it's because it allows people to collaborate in a new way; he says the history of science is about new ways for people to collaborate (printing press, royal societies, peer review)
• Every piece of data in the training set is also a person; because a person made it. Actually he didn't explicitly say this, he glossed right past it, but I think it needs more emphasis to make his bigger point, and I think it's one of the more important ideas in general when talking about AI. 
• Information is not some intangible non-physical ethereal thing. Information is physical. It requires energy and dissipates heat.
• It sounds like the main technical idea he's offering is Counterfactual Cluster Generation (aka "data dignity"), and it's how another layer can monitor and evaluate output. He gives an example of a person looking for a bomb recipe, and how an LLM should be able to identify that providing bomb recipes isn't cool.
• Things I wish he said: Science is about predicting the future, but facts require a past; he was answering a question from the audience on the difference, and I wish he said this because it's the easiest way to say it.
• Tunes at 1:30 btw, he's a musician and plays rare and ancient instruments.

Image credit: The Memex by Vannevar Bush 1945 - via Tommaso Venturini talk on the Memeplex for Oxford Internet Institute - 2025

Larnier uses this image in his talk, during a passage about Norbert Wiener's Human Use of Human Beings 1950, and how it's a difficult but interesting read. He mentions that Weiner talks about how terrible it would be if we had a radio we carried with us everywhere we go that beeped and zapped us based on our behavior and how such a machine would destroy humanity, but how that mind-controlling machine sure sounds like social media to the early 21st century reader. I forget exactly why this image came up, but it must have been making its rounds, because I had just recently saw it in a different talk at the Oxford Internet Institute

Chances Are It's Not Majorana Fermions

Mentions of Majorana fermions don't happen often. They're exceptional, but elusive. In fact, they're so exceptional, that anyone who says they found one gets insta-hype. But they're so elusive that most people who say they found one are in fact lying.

For example, IBM says they found them. That was a lie. In fairness, the scientists are not lying in the absolute sense, they're excited and thus biased, because they think they found the holy grail of quantum computing. Companies, on the other hand, don't care so much about scientific integrity, and will make announcements with no intent to vet their veracity. The bigger the potential stock price increase, the less vetting. And so every few years, we get an announcement, usually by IBM, that they found the Majorana fermion, followed by a stock price increase, and then followed, usually much later, like years later, by a retraction, as in this case: Zhang, H., Liu, CX., Gazibegovic, S. et al. Retraction Note: Quantized Majorana conductance. Nature 591, E30 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03373-x

In this (unrelated?) case below, not from a starry-eyed tech company, the news goes like this:

They created a classical, room-temperature liquid-crystal system, opening the door to a brand-new field that the scientists call time liquid crystallinity, where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space, and that invokes the Majorana spirits. 

Scientists catch classical space-time crystals moving like Majorana quasiparticles

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-scientists-classical-space-crystals-majorana.html

To achieve this, the team took a liquid-crystal material—similar to the fluid used in smartphones and television screens—and doped it with ionic substances. They then applied a rhythmic, repeating electrical signal to the fluid. But that caused period doubling, driven by the motion of tiny, localized structures in the fluid called topological solitons and disclinations. 

These shifting states behave exactly like the particle-antiparticle pairs of Majorana particles, a famous, elusive class of quantum particles that are their own antiparticles. In this system, they serve as a classical, real-world analog of these quantum objects.

Time Liquid Crystallinity - where fluid-like materials can be organized over time rather than just in space

via Hiroshima University and University of Colorado: Hanqing Zhao et al, Emergent discrete space-time crystal of Majorana-like quasiparticles in chiral liquid crystals, Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-70880-8

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70880-8

Totally Unrelated Image credit: Anomalous Galaxy Grid

--Source: Identifying astrophysical anomalies in 99.6 million source cutouts from the Hubble legacy archive using AnomalyMatch. David O’Ryan and Pablo Gómez. A&A, 704 (2025) A227. DOI: 

https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202555512

Musical Intermentality

Starting off here with an article that might not be about music proper, but it is about sounds and perception. Some people are hyperperceptive, some dull as a rock - anesthetic you could call it. Everyone else just thinks their house is haunted. 

You can't hear it, yet this sound may explain paranormal experiences

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-paranormal.html

Infrasound is very low-frequency sound, below 20 Hertz (Hz), which humans typically can't hear. It can come from natural sources like storms, or from anthropogenic sources like traffic.

The scientists recruited 36 participants and invited them to sit alone in a room while either calming or unsettling music was played. For half the participants, hidden subwoofers played infrasound at 18 Hz. After listening, they were asked to report their feelings, their emotional rating of the music, and whether they thought the infrasound was present. They also gave saliva samples before and after listening.

The scientists found that participants' salivary cortisol levels were higher if they had been listening to infrasound. These participants also reported feeling more irritable and less interested, and thinking the music was sadder. But they couldn't tell they were listening to infrasound.

via MacEwan University: Infrasound Exposure is Linked to Aversive Responding, Negative Appraisal, and Elevated Salivary Cortisol in Humans, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2026). DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876

https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2026.1729876

Image credit: Photographer Christopher Payne - Jelly Belly Fairfield CA - 2021

https://chrispaynephoto.com

Popular song lyrics have become more negative since 1973, analysis reveals

Dec 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-popular-song-lyrics-negative-analysis.html

Researchers analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 most popular English-language songs in the United States each week between 1973 and 2023 (20,186 songs), according to the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The authors found that, in general, the lyrics of popular songs have become simpler and more negative over time and contain more stress-related words.

However, they also found that the popularity of songs with more complex lyrics began to increase from 2016 onward and suggest that further research is needed to investigate the reasons for this.

When assessing potential factors influencing changes in listener lyric preferences, the authors did not identify associations with changes in median household income since 1973, but did identify some associations with major stressful events — such as the September 11, 2001, attacks and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These events were associated with lyrics becoming more complex and positive and containing fewer stress-related words, or with no significant changes in lyrics. The authors suggest that this could be due to more positive and complex music being used as a form of escapism during stressful periods.

via University of Vienna: Maurício Martins, Societal crises disrupt long-term increases in stress, negativity, and simplicity in US Billboard song lyrics from 1973 to 2023, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-28327-5

Why some tunes stick: Mathematical symmetry helps explain catchy melodies

Feb 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-secret-math-catchy-melodies.html

They simplified melodies into their essential note groups and examined how common musical changes affect 2 kinds structure - tonal and positional structure. These changes include transposition, which shifts a melody up or down; inversion, which flips it; retrograde, which reverses it; and translation, which moves it through time.

Their analysis revealed symmetrical relationships in many melodies that help explain why certain musical phrases feel cohesive and complete.

via University of Waterloo: Olga Ibragimova et al, Algebraic Applications in Investigation of Musical Symmetry, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-84869-8_5

From virtue to vice: How the morality of popular music lyrics has changed since the 1960s

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-virtue-vice-morality-popular-music.html

The study examined two large popular music data sets spanning more than 60 years, making it the first study to chart moral content in song lyrics at this scale: more than 377,000 English-language songs covering 1960 to 2010 were filtered from the WASABI data set and complemented with 5,500 songs that made Billboard's year-end charts between 1960 and 2023.

Their analysis revealed a rise in expressions associated with moral vices such as harm, cheating, subversion and degradation, alongside increasing levels of negative sentiment, anger and disgust. At the same time, expressions linked to moral virtues such as care and decency became less prominent.

via Queen Mary University of London Center for Digital Music: Vjosa Preniqi et al, Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics, Scientific Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-53778-9

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-53778-9

Pop song lyrics grew more self-focused in the US and Germany over 50 years, research reveals

Jun 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-06-song-lyrics-grew-focused-germany.html

Researchers have examined the possibility that global society may be becoming more self-centric by measuring how often different pronouns appear in cultural products such as books, movie scripts and lyrics. Compared with first-person plural pronouns, such as "we" and "us," a higher proportion of first-person singular pronouns, such as "I" and "me," can indicate greater self-focus.

(Shouldn't be a surprise to those familiar w the Hofstede's cultural dimensions model)

They found that self-focused language rose significantly between 1970 and 2019 in the U.S. and Germany—two more individualistic countries. Meanwhile, the use of self-focused language was relatively stable over time in the two more collectivist countries, Japan and Hong Kong.

via United Arab Emirates University and U of Aberdeen Scotland: Golubickis M, et al. Are societies becoming more self-centric? Evidence from five decades of popular music spanning three continents, PLOS One (2026). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0349765

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349765

*We are not a fan of academic collaborations with the UAE, because they're buying themselves a culture instead of growing it the old fashioned way, and we are old fashioned.