the 400 ton lynchpin of American electric power

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/17/magazine/transformers-power-electric-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7FA.Fjad.cHKm1xl5jKxn&smid=url-share

To understand how this laborious process unfolds, the photographer Christopher Payne visited Delta Star, a transformer manufacturer based in Lynchburg, Va.

The contagion of fear

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/13/the-contagion-of-fear/

What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear. We cannot expect the public to understand the inner workings of all technology (that was the fallacy of my 18-year-old self!): technology is too broad, too deep, and too core to all of our lives to expect everyone to understand everything; we must — at some level — trust domain experts. When those domain experts sow fear, it is the fear that takes root, propagating much more readily than any evidence that may follow it. (As Jonathan Swift famously quipped over three centuries ago, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".) In this regard, Coxon is more vector than index case: it is indisputable that the fears of extinction risk are widespread and Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else. Unfortunately, as the fear takes hold, the sheer number of frightened experts becomes its own kind of evidence, with contrary voices drowned out by the din of an apparent consensus.

The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

https://www.researchagenda.news/articles/the-waymo-effect.html

The research on research should give us pause here. We know from the team-science literature that small teams tend to disrupt while large teams develop, and that it is the unexpected combinations of collaborators – the atypical pairings across fields and institutions – that disproportionately produce the most novel work. Meanwhile, the early evidence on generative AI points in a direction that should sound familiar: individual productivity rises while the diversity of ideas narrows, everyone moving faster along increasingly similar paths. We are, in effect, running an uncontrolled global experiment in trading serendipity for throughput – and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus.

 

Fighting to Live as the Towers Died

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/nyregion/fighting-to-live-as-the-towers-died.html?unlocked_article_code=1._lA.U04p.8XSZivhybfBs&smid=url-share

They began as calls for help, information, guidance. They quickly turned into soundings of desperation, and anger, and love. Now they are the remembered voices of the men and women who were trapped on the high floors of the twin towers.

From their last words, a haunting chronicle of the final 102 minutes at the World Trade Center has emerged, built on scores of phone conversations and e-mail and voice messages. These accounts, along with the testimony of the handful of people who escaped, provide the first sweeping views from the floors directly hit by the airplanes and above.

Collected by reporters for The New York Times, these last words give human form to an all but invisible strand of this stark, public catastrophe: the advancing destruction across the top 19 floors of the north tower and the top 33 of the south, where loss of life was most severe on Sept. 11. Of the 2,823 believed dead in the attack on New York, at least 1,946, or 69 percent, were killed on those upper floors, an analysis by The Times has found.

216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

Hugh Howey's Routine

https://hughhowey.com/my-routine/

The next mental framework to adopt is to leave behind any notion of three meals a day. You don’t burn the same amount of calories every day, so why are you eating the same amount? Listen to your body. Get hungry before every meal. If you aren’t hungry, don’t eat. Skipping meals is the easiest thing you can do to change your body, and you can start right now. I went to bed last night without eating dinner, because I never got hungry. I woke up hungry, so I had breakfast immediately. Most mornings I wake up without any hunger. I’ll have a protein shake with my workout (more on this later), and if I’m not hungry after that, my first meal will be at lunch. Only eating when you’re hungry will simplify your life, save you money, keep you fit, and reduce the amount of calories you need to burn to hit your target weight. All this, just by thinking differently.

WORSE ON PURPOSE

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what's still worth buying.

Jazz Band Covers Nirvana On The Spot (Ft. Ulysses Owens Jr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0