The last week was a period of a little more than some introspection. The selection of articles below doesn't reflect the mood I've been in but I do hope you enjoy them.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

What is the real cost of betting on weather catastrophes? — An engrossing and disturbing dive into the long history of so-called catastrophe markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, and just how morally reprehensible they (and the people who use them to bet) are.

From the article:

Neat categorical distinctions between gambling and speculation often look messy up close. Such distinctions are typically class-based efforts to legitimise elite financial practices by discrediting allegedly irrational economic behaviour of non-elites.

Hollow Body — University professor Peter Wayne Moe explores how learning to play classical guitar helped him personally and professionally after being demoralized by the advent of ChatGPT and its widespread embrace.

From the article:

I still want to believe that education can fundamentally change you. Even as so much of higher ed is transactional—check this box, get that degree, and then land your job—I’m not yet ready to give up on the idea of education as transformation. This is why Socrates warned to be careful who your teacher is: That teacher will shape you into a particular kind of person.

The Lost Story of Alan Turing’s Secret “Delilah” Project — A history of a portable (at least for the time) voice-encryption system that the legendary mathematician and computer scientist cobbled together, a system that shows just how ahead of his time Turing and his ideas were.

From the article:

Applying a similar principle, Delilah added the obscuring key to spoken words. In Delilah’s case, the key was a stream of pseudorandom numbers—that is, random-seeming numbers that were not truly random. Delilah’s key generator contained five rotating wheels and some fancy electronics concocted by Turing.

The Surprising History of Spell Checkers—and What It Means for AI-Anxious Editors — Like them or hate then, spelling checkers have been around for quite a while. Sometimes, it's difficult to believe that just about software didn't have a spelling checker baked into it. Or at all.

From the article:

By 2006, spell checking had escaped the bounds of word processors entirely. Firefox 2.0 brought spell checking to web browsers, extending this technology to email, forums, and anywhere else people wrote online. Spell checking had become part of the invisible infrastructure of digital writing—so ubiquitous we barely noticed it anymore.