The painting invites the viewer to wonder what has just happened, why it happened, and why the participants are dressed in such costumes. It encourages the viewer to reconstruct the preceding events through imagination.
— Read on apaintingstory.com/en/posts/the-duel-after-the-masquerade/
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No one told me the Vatican is a storage closet. Beautiful beyond imagination, yet overflowing with statues and paintings, like they ran out of room for the collections. People told me I would be “angry” at the Vatican for “stealing treasures.” I did not feel that way. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. The Vatican saved the history of their people from being looted and forgotten. Now it’s remembered.
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A recent executive order issued by the White House directs NASA to establish the initial elements of a permanent moon base by 2030.
— Read on singularityhub.com/2026/03/12/nasa-is-planning-to-build-a-permanent-moon-base-by-2030-heres-what-it-will-take/ -
Historically, population decline has been driven by external and involuntary shocks like famine, disease, or war. Notable examples include:
The Black Death in the 14th century
The collapse of the Roman Empire
China’s Great Famine.Unlike past population declines, today’s is voluntary and structural.
— Read on chamath.substack.com/p/population-collapseWe’re long past the point where this can be dismissed by anyone with a working brain. Seriously – wtf is going on?
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— REVISED DEFINITIONS OF THE VERB “TO GOOGLE” – “To receive results as ten-second videos that present a sponsored product as the only possible answer to your question.”
— Become “the World’s Worst Cleric” in a medieval game inspired by Disco Elysium.
— A new website seeking to define the term “liberal”. It’s common media literacy by now to doublecheck the funding mechanism of any large organization. A quick Perplexity search claims this project is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.
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Based on the 2024 presidential election, 54% of Illinois voters are Democrats, yet Democrats hold 82% of Illinois’ U.S. House seats.
With one fewer seat to work with, Illinois Democrats would have a difficult time drawing maps that would eliminate another Republican district. Keeping their current 14 seats would give Democrats over 87% of Illinois’ U.S. House delegation.
— Read on www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-population-loss-could-make-congressional-gerrymandering-harder-in-2030/ -
Europeans get lower salaries than Americans, but they receive better benefits.
So who makes more? The average American pay is still one of the highest. But not by an enormous amount.
I asked AI to help me understand the explanation. From Perplexity:
the speaker argues you should use median, equivalized, disposable, PPP‑adjusted income from sources like OECD and World Bank, because those numbers reflect what people can actually spend after taxes and transfers and are better aligned with household living standards.
Here’s the data.
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Broadcast during just 23 weeks of 1982, and reaching no more than WCIU’s Chicagoland perimeter, The Chicago Party conformed only to those codes that suited it….treating Chicago audiences to dynamic performances by unjustly local artists trafficking in sweet soul, disco, and emerging electronic R&B, the pop forms then wrestling for urban chart dominance
— Read on numerogroup.com/blogs/stories/ultra-high-frequencies-the-chicago-party -
Curation – such as record collecting – has a beginning and an end. Curation does not continue infinitely; a record stops when it reaches its end. Curation is a choice among infinite options. A record costs money and takes up space, defining its limit. Your limited choices have meaning and therefore define you. Curation creates consequences. Choose a record and you choose the permanent soundtrack of your life.
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Somewhere in the bowels of X, Sam Altman suggested asking an AI to provide the hardest question it could reasonably answer.
Perplexity provides 1/ difficult questions it can answer reasonably well (given the availability of public information), and 2/ questions that are hard to answer.
These are the questions it can reasonably answer based on available data. They are the 20’s version of a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
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Somewhere I recall reading that for elite athletes, the winning combination was genetic talent, the will to succeed, and the presence of a father or close family member with the capability and drive to act as a secondary coach. I thought about that when reading this interview with Rudy Kraft, one of the earliest writers on Chaosium. He talks about his early experiences with his dad:
I first got involved in gaming as a hobby because of my father. I was the oldest of five children—although we started gaming before the fifth child was born. We had family games of Clue and Monopoly—mostly Clue. At some point, my father bought me a Christmas present of the old Avalon Hill game Afrika Korps. He and I played that a lot often leaving it set up on the desk in my parents’ bedroom. Because I liked this game, he bought additional Avalon Hill Games at least once a year until I went away to college in 1974.
When it comes to standing out in his career, all the ingredients are there: His interest, his disposition, and a dad who recognized his interest and supported his hobby. I doubt there were any hangups or second guessing in his career, because thanks to his dad, his work was family approved and associated with positive memories.
As a dad and to all the dads out there, what are we helping support in our children? What strong framework are we helping them build for their future success?
At any rate, I love stories and interviews where people share their passions and their interests and why they geek out on things. This is a fun one. You can read the full interview here.
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The Fermi Paradox is essentially this: If the odds for intelligent life are so good, then why haven’t we met any aliens? The Paradox lists theories why. Personally, I think either they’re here and we don’t know about it, or we don’t know how to look. Casey Handmer has a new theory – we can’t observe approaching aliens fast enough:
when we look out into the universe we are observing only our past light cone….So even though aliens might be quite close, we wouldn’t see them until just before they arrived……if the aliens we see are traveling at high speed toward us, the intermediate state (seen but not met) is unlikely to be longer than a handful of weeks.
— Read on caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2026/03/03/notes-on-the-fermi-paradox/Sure, why not? For a while the Fermi paradox was my favorite Wikipedia article. There’s a lot to digest in it. Speaking of which, the comments on Casey Handmer’s post are interesting.
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We got, not transhumanism (as deliberate, informed, rational decision to self-consciously go beyond natural human capacity), but surreptitious transhuman behaviour, without the weird philosophy or the new aesthetics….Playing god – but using these new, unfathomable powers to… become more normal. So call it transnormalism.
— Read on www.gleech.org/enhance -
What’s actually important to me is that you really understand that this is a real possibility, for you, in your life. If you practice with honest diligence, with tenderness and patience and determination, one day you will understand that you were completely wrong about everything. And you will be so, so happy about that.
More here.
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I love how art-world denizens dress when they come to Los Angeles. The collector class interprets “dressing for/with/about fine art in LA” differently than I’ve ever seen elsewhere in the world, applying vast economic resources to fashion interpretations that I can only describe as “downstream from 1960s CIA experiments.”
— Read on freakpalace.substack.com/p/the-freakiest-outfits-we-saw-at-frieze -
Today, we’re introducing Spectre I, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings.
We live in a world of always-on listening devices.
Smart devices and AI dominate our world in business and private conversations.
With Deveillance, you will
@be_inaudible
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— Read on x.com/aidaxbaradari/status/2028864606568067491 -
Can AI be used to analyze Powerball data? With the right dataset, it sure can.
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A more straightforward tactic: talk to your children often about the kind of working lives I’m outlining here, and the age of AI more broadly. Make them understand that the kind of single-track careers they see on TV or hear about in school — the kind that many of us have had — aren’t really going to exist in the future they’re heading into
— Read on x.com/dmattin/status/2015405818586279993
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