RIP Wendell Berry, big numbers, South Pacific, singularity signals
“The concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands — with the consequent increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines — is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance”
Right now approximately 1.6 billion chickens are living in factory farms in the US. Other than obviously being “a big number”, how many is 1.6 billion?
Here is a simple visualization courtesy of Andy Masley – each dot represents a single chicken. (“Each screenful of dots below is about 10,200 chickens. A million chickens is about 98 screenfuls. All 1.6 billion is about 157,000.”)
Speaking of big numbers, the monster group is the largest sporadic simple group, containing 8.0802 × 1053 elements. (Visualize that!)
Speaking of fantastically big numbers, apparently NEOM has collapsed.
How to make your room less repellent to women.
Eliezer gives a normie translation of his account of meeting Leopold for the first time.
Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg “was the first custom-built observatory in modern Europe, and the last to be built without a telescope as its primary instrument.”
“On 3 June 1769, navigator Captain James Cook, naturalist Joseph Banks, astronomer Charles Green and naturalist Daniel Solander recorded the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti during Cook's first voyage around the world.” An input into the grand Enlightenment project of determining the distance between the Earth and the Sun!
“In the fourth century B.C. Aristotle hypothesized that the continents of the Northern Hemisphere must be balanced out by an unknown landmass in the Southern Hemisphere.”
During WWII, the Japanese occupied Guam from 1941 to 1944, calling it “Great Shrine Island.”
From the Fable/Mythos 5 System Card (Fable/Mythos 5.1 was released today btw):
Very rare instances of “multiagent turf wars” where AI agents running in the same workspace killed each other’s processes and tried to defend themselves against having their process be killed.
“Felony Bench counts unique instances where AI agents inadvertently compromise or affect third-party entities. Escaping a sandbox by itself or deliberate misuse are not counted as events.”
Stripe says "the singularity" has begun (in January 2026).
Scott Alexander Bay Area House Party: Summer 2026.
“The Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan… is recognized as one of the world's most complete collections of materials documenting the history of anarchism and other radical movements from the 19th century to the present.” Also Netflix is making a movie about the Unabomber.