But their work has not

My photos on Flickr (here and here) have had more than 20 million views. The photo with the most views is this one (above) with 83,000+ so far. It was shot with a camcorder to accompany a conversation I was having with somebody about gold crowns and inlays, of which I have many, all installed more than fifty years ago by students at the University of North Carolina Dental School, for $25 apiece. One student was John Berry, who practices (or practiced) in Durham. The other was Steve Herring, who practices (or practiced) in Fayetteville. Both studied primarily under Dr. Clifford Sturdivant, who passed in 2008. John and Steve were both younger than me, but not by much, so I’m guessing they’ve both retired.

Preach!

Luke Kornet is not a saint. Not yet. But he was my favorite Knick before becoming my favorite Celtic, and he is now my favorite Spur. He is also my favorite blogging pro player in any sport. Here’s his blog.

Luke hardly mentions that his claim to fame in college was shooting more threes than any player seven feet or taller (I think he’s 7’3″, though he’s listed two inches shy of that) something he rarely does in the pros, because his main role is blocking shots, which he does a lot. (One game-winning example.)

Last week, Luke stretched his blogging game by throwing a block against the Atlanta Hawks. Dig:

This week, the Atlanta Hawks “announced a special one-night collaboration to celebrate the city’s iconic cultural institution Magic City” during the team’s home game against Orlando on Monday, March 16. In its press release, the Hawks failed to acknowledge that this place is, as the business itself boasts, “Atlanta’s premier strip club.” Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask that the Atlanta Hawks cancel this promotional night with Magic City.

His reason:

The NBA should desire to protect and esteem women, many of whom work diligently every day to make this the best basketball league in the world. We should promote an atmosphere that is protective and respectful of the daughters, wives, sisters, mothers, and partners that we know and love.

Here is Luke’s first post, which lays out his mission, so to speak. Like my wife and I, Luke seeks out interesting Catholic churches as he travels about with his team. There are, as Luke and we both know, a huge variety of those. It’s a big old church. Lots of choices.

Here is a graphic Luke added to this blog post. Says a lot about him.

Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism.

Starbucks knows that they can’t get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one.

The Wedding-Industrial complex is built on the simple idea that your wedding should cost the same as your best friend’s wedding did (plus a little more).

The status ratchet is real, and it’s easy to be seduced by it. “Compared to what” is a fundamental component of marketing.

One reason this works is that a little progress gets you positive feedback, which makes you eager to find a little more, a cycle that doesn’t end. Infinity, all the way up.

And, for those seeking social change, the opposite is worth noting:

When asking for penance, self-control and good behavior, infinity is not a useful tool. When someone shows up and tries to do better, “that’s not good enough,” is not a particularly useful motivator.

The useful process begins by earning enrollment in the journey toward better, but it’s not amplified by our criticism of each action being imperfect.

Go-up infinity is about ‘more.’ But too often, social-good infinity is about ‘pure’. And pure is difficult to embrace, because anything less than pure feels like failure.

Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types - Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) - to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can reduce conflict, collaborate better, and recognise that “idiots” are usually just people different from you.

This model comes from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, where he mapped four behaviour patterns (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, Compliance) that later became DISC. Subsequent practitioners, such as TTI Success Insights, has since operationalised it into assessment tools and corporate profiling systems. However, Erikson also makes the case for the universality of the patterns with comparisons with Hippocrates’s four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the Aztecs fourfold categorising via the elements fire, air, earth, water, mapping them to leader‑types, easygoing “air” people, community‑minded “earth” people, and quiet, powerful “water” people.

Although I appreciated the way in which this book captures the way that we are all different, I am left wondering if there is a danger of prioritising nature over nurture, as if our own identity and difference is static. Although it is fine to say that I am a ‘Red’, I wonder if this is something that can be worked on? To become a little more ‘Blue’ say? Alternatively, I wonder if we are different colours in different situations, with little evidence to help differentiate between what is the ‘true’ and ‘false’ self. This is something that Erikson touches on:

Consciously or subconsciously, surrounding factors cause me to choose a particular course of action.
And this is how we act. Look at this formula:

BEHAVIOR = f (P × Sf)
Behavior is a function of Personality and Surrounding factors.
Behavior is that which we can observe.
Personality is what we try to figure out.
Surrounding factors are things that we have an influence on.

Conclusion: We continually affect one another in some form or other. The trick is to try to figure out what’s there, under the surface. And this book is all about behavior.

Source: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

With this discussion of difference I am left thinking about Todd Rose’s discussion of the end of average.

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Source: End of Average by Todd Rose

For Rose, people vary across multiple dimensions, aggregating to a single score or type distorts that reality. Used lightly, colour models therefore can serve like a transport map, good enough to navigate some conversations. However, taken too literally, they risk flattening the very individuality Rose is arguing to preserve.

I was left challenged about an organisation expectations and how they balance with people and their colours. If we are to follow Erikson guide, is there actually any point expecting people to create clear documentation or collect the appropriate information relating to an incident if they are not that way inclined? Or should we accept such perceived incompetence? Here I am reminded of Adam Fraser’s discussion of misalignment between behaviour and values. I guess one approach maybe to treat the various labels as a hypothesis about behaviour, not a justification why we can not do something.

If there is any action to come from Erikson’s book it might be to complete some sort of DISC assessment to get a better appreciation of my own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder if this would be useful in conjunction with some sort of coaching program with a focus on growth.

The real issue at hand is that often when people overlook DISC, it’s because they use it to set a firm expectation of understanding people and their behavior rather than using it as a guideline towards growth.

Source: Here’s What’s Wrong With The DISC Personality Assessment by Chad Brown

The post REVIEW: Surrounded by Idiots (Thomas Erikson) appeared first on Read Write Respond.

[Sounding smart is now suspicious.]

Over at Techdirt, Mike Masnick writes about how the existence of A.I. detection tools is turning students into worse writers. The particular concern here is not students using A.I. to avoid writing things themselves. Instead, the problem is talented writers being forced to dumb down their writing as a defensive act. Masnick opens with this awful example:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Revising writing to avoid false positives from A.I. detectors is just an outrageously poor use of time.

Link: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-robots-and-its-pushing-them-to-use-more-ai/

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten:

It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh-and-blood worker in the engine room of the data industry. What he has to say is explosive.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” [...]

The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake, and people watching porn while wearing the glasses. Clips that could trigger “enormous scandals” if they were leaked.

“There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses — someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.

Delightful. And what a brand move for Ray-Ban and Oakley.

Here’s not looking at you, kid

Three and a half weeks after cataract surgery on my left eye, vision improvement seems to have plateaued. I’d say it’s 20/80. The new lens is fine, but the corneal edema persists, so it feels like it’s smeared with vaseline. My right eye, which had its cataract replaced with a new lens fifteen years ago, is 20/10, so I rely on it entirely, even though my left has always been the dominant eye and wants to take over, layering a blur over everything. It also has a lot of floating debris that looks like pepper grinds or small insects in the air. I’m going back to see the surgeon this afternoon, because there are other symptoms (irritation, headaches), and I’m leaving for two weeks on Wednesday (California, Hawaii). Anyway, that’s why a lot is going undone and unwritten.

A market of one, speaking

The new M5 MacBook Pros look appealing. I might buy one if Apple offered storage in excess of 8TB. I have that in this 3-year-old M2-based MacBook Pro. Why have they gone through three generations of CPUs without raising the maximum storage, when we’re generating more data all the time?

James Vornov, MD PhD Neurologist, drug developer and philosopher exploring the neuroscience of decision-making and personal identity.

If things in the world are real, then so are their properties We see agency in the world, but what does it want?

Back to purpose in the world

Let’s recap the last few posts. We want to say that there are real “things” in the world simply by virtue of their stability over time. It’s not just quarks or the wave function of the universe. Rocks, dogs, and people are things. And some things, complex dynamical systems, clearly have agency. They do things. So we want to say like an apple is red, a rock is hard, these complex systems from E. coli to man have agency as one of their properties.

Now we’re in a position to look for purpose. I ask the question: Why does the dog bark, why does E. coli endlessly tumble and run and tumble and run in its search for food? Why do I write Substack posts? I think asking why about agency changes everything because we start to understand purpose.

Things persist. That’s purpose.

It’s hard to see any “why”. Things are things. And things are things because they persist over time. The only goal of a system, the only thing that makes it a system or a thing is its stability over time. The hurricane has no goal to be a hurricane, the purpose of all its parts and physical interaction is simply what it does to continue on. It pulls in warm, moist air — not to destroy, but because that’s how it maintains its structure. The second conditions change and it moves over the cold Atlantic, it’s gone, done with it.

Living organisms behave more explicitly, revealing their drive to exist. E. coli tumbles then runs in its dance up the nutrient gradient to continue as a stable system. The behavior reveals purpose, which is to get to food and live another day and divide in another mitotic cycle.

The dog barks at the mailman and the mailman goes away. Why? That’s what dogs do. They alert the pack, guard the food source. We see things in the world and we ask why. The things all reply to us, “So we can continue to be the thing. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be asking.”

It’s a very simple materialist answer to what purpose there is to all this. It’s not random or accidental. Of course not, that’s not how it appears in any case. All these things in the world look and often act with purpose. The world is real, observer-independent, and needs no designer, no primary mover.

But, I hear you say, it’s not just about survival, is it? It’s not just some sort of Darwinism and survival of the fittest, is it? What about play and joy and love? Why should things feel good and bad and hurtful and right and wrong? Surely there’s purpose beyond simply being.

And true, persistence for us as complex social animals isn’t about selfish genes. I always hated that formulation because it discounts the part of persistence that includes thriving, being a better version beyond reproducing. Watch puppies wrestle — play builds skills, tests social bonds, establishes hierarchy. Watch humans make art, tell stories, seek companionship. These aren’t luxuries bolted onto survival. They are what persistence looks like when you’re not an E. coli. Purpose seen as continuing to be doesn’t have to squeeze out joy and meaning; it makes the spice intrinsic to the stew. The dog that keeps interrupting my typing right now isn’t simply surviving. She’s persisting in the fullest sense. It’s her purpose.

Bateson: don’t project your why onto theirs.

Gregory Bateson saw this asking “Why?” as a trap. In “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” and in his lectures, he identified a fundamental error he called “Conscious Purpose“. We humans think in straight lines attributing cause and effect to the world. Things have reasons expressed as goals, plans, action, result. We even attribute bad intent to innocent hurricanes. Conscious purpose follows the shortest causal path to cause and effect. But systems don’t work that way, whether hurricane, E. coli, or dog. Complex, dynamical systems are circular, persistent feedback loops.

The key is that our conscious purpose mistakenly projects our simple-minded view of cause and effect on to things in the world to see singular purpose in them. Worse, we mistake our purpose for theirs. You look at the dog and say “she wants to please me.” No — that’s your purpose for the dog mapped onto the dog. She’s persisting as a dog-in-an-ecology-that-includes-you. Sure she persists here because she gets fed and played with, but that’s merely my purpose meeting her purpose in the bigger purpose of man’s best friend.

Bateson argued this isn’t just a philosophical mistake. It’s dangerous and the cause of much misery. Conscious purpose is the mind’s filter, selecting only the information relevant to the human goal and ignoring everything else. Imposing control on complex systems doesn’t fix them — it makes them dumb, stripping away what he called their “accumulated wisdom”. An ecology has persisted for millennia by being suited to survive down to the smallest detail. The bayou system around New Orleans knew how to handle water. Seasonal flooding was the feedback mechanism: water spread across wetlands, sediment rebuilt the land, the system absorbed the surge. We came along and imposed a single conscious purpose: stop the damage caused by seasonal flooding. So we built levees, channels, drainage. And we got what we wanted, we stopped recurring floods and built a city. But we destroyed the buffer. The wetlands shrank, the land sank, the system lost its ability to absorb the catastrophic event that we saw as rare but the bayou, in its wisdom, had adapted to over a very long time. The catastrophic damage of Hurricane Katrina was just a little event in a long history of that ecosystem. He implored us to look at the system and its purpose, not impose our linear cause and effect to control it. Whether it’s ecology, society, or family structure, these dynamical systems have their purpose, continuing for good or bad.

This is systemic wisdom. See yourself as participant in a larger whole, not the agent imposing goals on it. This is why he valued art, religion, dreams, natural history — practices that engage the whole mind rather than just the conscious, linear filter. These are how we access the circular, relational understanding that conscious purpose blocks. The idea is to look for pattern, for the interactions and be part of the system working to sustain, not merely in the sense of persistence, but with joy and meaning. Thriving, not surviving.

If you want a why, look outside.

So persistence is really the same as purpose in our materialist view of dynamical systems. Yet where’s the joy and meaning in that? To me it seems thin. Where’s the why? Seems to turn me into just a more complex version of E. coli, navigating the nutrient gradient day after day until the task is taken up by my kids and grandchildren.

Wider purpose then? A why? “To be the best version of myself” — but best by whose standard? “To live well” — but well how? The moment you ask “why persist?” I think this discussion points to a clear answer. You’re asking for something the system can’t generate from inside itself. The question points outside by its very nature.

Let’s go back to me and puppy. I have a use for my dog — companionship, play, emotional regulation. She has a use for me — food, shelter, pack. The cow exists in its current numbers because it feeds us. Otherwise there would be many fewer cows in the world. Complex systems in a bigger mutual relationship that’s given each of us purpose for the other. Not this conscious cause and effect purpose, but real mutual persistence that can provide me meaning and the dog and the cow meaning. The dog doesn’t need to understand my purpose for her any more than I need to understand mine for the cow I never met.

Same structure scales all the way up: if there is a God, we don’t need to understand that purpose for us. And notice — it’s not one-way there either. We might use God too: meaning, framework, community, the experience of something larger than the self.

There’s the tight logic we’ve built from the start here. There are things in the world that are stable, persistent. If there’s a “why” beyond bare persistence, it requires something outside them to provide some larger purpose, just a larger system to be part of. Any external controlling agency is going to limit the wisdom of the system. Whether we pose that as God, the superior beings simulating our existence, Gaia, or even just community or family, these are the bigger system. Their purpose includes you as your purpose includes them. God by definition is supernatural, that is to say literally super-natural — beyond or outside materialist nature.

Yet, more broadly this is where all meaning besides mere survival comes from, from the outside of you as an individual system. This is far from nihilism that arises from materialism, to say that there is no purpose, and that life is meaningless. It’s also not existentialism, where we decide to create our own meaning. I’m suggesting that’s impossible to do on your own, from inside as an individual. I’m saying this: purpose is real, it’s to continue, but beyond that, to any “why” requires relationship to something outside yourself. Now you choose what system you are a part of to create that why.

Prefer to follow via Substack? You can read this and future posts (and leave comments) by subscribing to On Deciding… Better on Substack: Brain, Self, and Mind

© 2026 James Vornov MD, PhD. This content is freely shareable with attribution. Please link to this page if quoting.

The post How do we find the “why”? appeared first on On Deciding . . . Better 3.0.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Featuring bubble-style lines with colorful gradients, the wallpapers come in Mac Purple, Mac Blue, Mac Pink, and Mac Yellow. The design and the colors spell out the word “Mac.”

They got me. I’m upgrading to Tahoe now.

Over the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve often used the term speed bump to describe a certain type of hardware update: a new version of an existing product where the new stuff is mostly faster components, especially the CPU and GPU, but where a lot of the product, including the enclosure, remains unchanged. I’ve been thinking about it all week, as I tested the iPhone 17e, because the 17e is the epitome of a good speed bump. But it’s a funny term, because in real life, a speed bump — on the road — is something that slows you down. But in computer hardware it’s about going faster, or doing more, even if only slightly.

The other thing I find mildly amusing about the word “bump” and the iPhone 17e is that it’s the one and only iPhone in Apple’s lineup that doesn’t have a camera plateau — a.k.a. bump. The lens itself does jut out, slightly, but it’s just a lens, not a plateau, harking back to iPhones of yesteryear, like the iPhone XR from 2018.

Speed bump hardware updates never update every component. That’s not a speed bump. Only some components get updated. In a good speed bump update, the parts that get upgraded are the parts from the old model that were most lacking. My review last year of the iPhone 16e was fairly effusive, but I noted one primary omission: MagSafe. There were, of course, other compromises made for the 16e compared to higher-priced models in the lineup, but MagSafe was the one feature missing from the 16e that really bothered me. I’m not sure there was a single review of the 16e that didn’t list the omission of MagSafe as the 16e’s biggest shortcoming.

Apple’s explanation, a year ago, for omitting MagSafe was that the customers they were targeting with the 16e were people upgrading from 4-, 5-, or even 6-year-old iPhones, so they were accustomed to charging their phones by plugging in a cable. I can see that. People who bought an iPhone 16e in the last year didn’t miss MagSafe because they never had a phone with it. But, for those of us who have been using iPhones with MagSafe, the lack of MagSafe on the 16e was the primary reason to steer friends and family away from getting one. It’s not just about charging, either. I use MagSafe in a bunch of places, in a bunch of ways. I have a dock next to my bed and another next to my keyboard at my desk. I have a MagSafe mount on the dashboard of my car (which is so old it long predates CarPlay). I have a handful of MagSafe accessories like this snap-on stand from Moft that I recommended last summer, and portable MagSafe battery packs like this one from Anker (battery packs like these make for great travel items — they double as bedside chargers in hotels). I don’t carry a MagSafe card wallet or use PopSocket-style attachments, but a lot of people do. MagSafe is just great, and the lack of it on the 16e was the biggest reason not to recommend it. Just because the target audience wouldn’t miss it — because their old phone didn’t have it — doesn’t mean they wouldn’t miss out by not having it on their new one.

Well, that’s over. The 17e has MagSafe, and supports inductive charging at speeds up to 15W. (The iPhone Air supports charging up to 20W, and the 17 and 17 Pro models up to 25W.) Apple could have stopped there — with the addition of MagSafe alone — and the 17e would’ve been a successful year-over-year update.

But that would’ve been only a ... err ... mag bump, not a speed bump. Apple also bumped the SoC from the A18 to the A19, the current-generation chip from the regular iPhone 17. This is not a huge deal, year-over-year, but faster is faster and newer is better. (The $599 iPhone 17e, with the A19, benchmarks faster in single-core CPU performance than the $599 MacBook Neo, with the year-old A18 Pro.)

The upgrade to the A19 enables a better image-processing pipeline for the camera, which allows the 17e to offer Apple’s “next-generation portraits”, which are an obvious improvement over the previous portrait mode offered by the 16e. But the camera hardware itself — lenses and sensors, both front and back — is unchanged year-over-year. The technical specs for the camera, as reported by Halide’s nifty Technical Readout feature, are identical to the 16e. It’s a fine camera, but not a great camera. Just like last year with the 16e, the camera’s limitations are most noticeable in low-light situations. Still, both of these things are true:

• The 17e camera is by far the weakest iPhone camera Apple currently offers. (It does not come close to the quality of the also-single-lens iPhone Air camera.)
• For the people considering the 17e, it’s probably the best camera of any kind they’ve ever owned, and a big improvement over their current, probably years-old, phone.

The 17e camera system remains limited to Apple’s original Photographic Styles; all the other iPhones in the new A19 generation — the 17, 17 Pro, and Air — offer the much improved “latest-generation” Photographic Styles. In practice, this means the system Camera app on the 17e only offers these styles: Standard, Rich Contrast, Vibrant, Warm, and Cool. The second-generation Photographic Styles, which debuted last year on the iPhone 16 models, offer a much wider variety of styles and more fine-grained control, all of which processing is non-destructive. To name one obvious scenario, the new generation of Photographic Styles offers several black-and-white styles. When you shoot with these B&W styles, you can subsequently change your mind and apply one of the color styles in the Photos app, because the styles aren’t baked-in. But with the original-generation Photographic Styles — the one the 17e is limited to — the styles you shoot with are baked into the HEIC (or JPEG) files. You can apply non-destructive filters in post, including black-and-white filters, but those filters are simplistic compared to the new-generation Photographic Styles — and unlike the new Photographic Styles, you can’t preview the old filters live in the Camera app viewfinder. If you care about any of this, you should spend the extra $200 to get the regular iPhone 17, or perhaps, the still-for-sale iPhone 16, both of which offer both better camera hardware and software than the 17e. If you don’t care about any of this, the 17e might be the iPhone for you.

Here’s a link to Apple’s ever-excellent Compare page, with a comparison of the 16e vs. 17e vs. 17. (For posterity, here’s that Compare page archived as a PDF.) Other than the addition of MagSafe, the next biggest change from last year’s 16e to the new 17e is that base storage has increased from 128 to 256 GB (while the starting price has remained unchanged at $600). Nice. Also, there’s a third color option, “soft pink”, in addition to white and black. Lastly, the 17e gains the Ceramic Shield 2 front glass, which Apple claims offers 3× better scratch resistance. That’s nice too.

That’s about it for what’s improved in the 17e compared to the 16e. But that’s enough. With the old iPhone SE models, Apple only updated the hardware every 3–5 years. The new e models are seemingly on the same annual upgrade cycle as the other generation-numbered models.¹ Adding MagSafe, going from the A18 to A19, increasing base storage, and adding a new colorway is a solid speed bump.

The next way to consider the 17e is by comparing it to the base iPhone 17. What do you miss if you go with the 17e — or, what do you gain by paying an extra $200 for the 17?

• The base 17 has a ProMotion display with dynamic refresh rates up to 120 Hz and an always-on display. It’s also a brighter display (1000 vs. 800 nits SDR, 1600 vs. 1200 nits HDR). The iPhone 17 is the first base model iPhone with ProMotion, and it also sports a slightly bigger display (6.3″ vs. 6.1″) despite the fact that the 17 is only 2mm taller and exactly the same width as the 17e — the increased screen size is mostly from having smaller bezels surrounding the display.

• The iPhone 17 comes with Apple’s second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for precision Find My support. If you track, say, an AirTag using the Find My app, the iPhone 17 supports the cool feature that guides you right to the device, with distances down to fractions of a foot. The iPhone 17e doesn’t support that — it just lets you do the old Find My stuff, like having the lost device play a sound, and showing its location on a map.

• Camera Control: On my personal iPhone 17 Pro, I only use the Camera Control button for launching the Camera app, and as a shutter within Camera (and other camera apps, like !Camera, Analogue,² and Halide). I don’t use it for adjusting controls, because it’s just too finicky. But I love it as a dedicated launcher and shutter button. I keep trying to invoke it on the 17e to launch the Camera app, even now, a few days into daily driving it.

• The iPhone 17 has the clever Dynamic Island; the 17e has a dumb notch. The Dynamic Island is nice to have, but despite having one on my personal phone for 3.5 years (it debuted with the 14 Pro in 2022), I can’t say I’ve particularly missed it during the better part of a week that I’ve been using the 17e as my primary phone. I actually had to double check that the 17e doesn’t have it while first writing this paragraph, because, over my first few days of testing, I just hadn’t noticed. But then I went out and ran an errand requiring an Uber ride, while listening to a podcast, and I noticed the lack of a Dynamic Island — no live status update for the hailed Uber, and no quick-tap button for jumping back into Overcast.

• And last, but far from least, the iPhone 17 has significantly better camera hardware: the 1× main camera is better; it offers a 0.5× ultra wide lens that the 17e completely lacks; and the all-new front-facing camera is vastly superior.

That’s a fair amount of better stuff for $200. But none of those things jumps out to me as a reason not to recommend the 17e for someone who considers price their highest priority. With 256 GB of storage, even the base model 17e is recommendable without hesitation. The omission of MagSafe on last year’s 16e was low-hanging fruit for Apple to add this year, as was the meager base storage of 128 GB. I don’t think there’s anything on par with MagSafe for next year’s iPhone 18e. (My first choice would be the second-generation Ultra Wideband chip — I’d like to see precision location make it into everything Apple sells sooner rather than later.)

Across several days of testing, 5G cellular reception was strong, and battery life was long. I ran Speedtest a few times, at different locations in Center City Philadelphia, and each time got download speeds above 500 Mbps and upload speeds around 40–50 Mbps. Apple’s in-house C1X modem is simply great.

Here’s a table with pricing for the iPhone models Apple currently sells:

This is a very compelling lineup, and the 17e shores up the lowest price point with aplomb:

• Good: iPhone 17e
• Better: iPhone 17
• Best: iPhone 17 Pro or iPhone Air, depending on how you define “best”.

In New York last week at Apple’s hands-on “experience” for the media, which was primarily about the MacBook Neo, I got the chance to talk about the 17e, too. Apple’s product marketing people tend to compare the 17e against the iPhone 11 and 12. Those are the iPhones most would-be 17e buyers are upgrading from. Things they’ll notice if they do upgrade to a 17e:

• Much better battery life. Not just compared to an iPhone 11 or 12 that’s been in use for 4–5 years, but against a factory fresh battery in those older iPhones. Apple’s “streaming video” benchmark goes from 11 hours to 21 hours comparing the 17e to the 12. And if they are upgrading from a phone with a 4- or 5-year-old battery that’s been through hundreds of charge cycles, they’re going to notice it even more.
• A noticeably brighter screen (800 vs 625 nits).
• A much improved camera. Even if they’re not serious about photography, the 17e camera is noticeably better than the cameras from half a decade ago.
• Everything will feel faster.

Frankly, I’m not sure who the year-old iPhone 16 is for today, especially considering that Apple is now only offering it with 128 GB of storage. People on a tight budget but who really want an ultra wide 0.5× second camera lens? The potential appeal of the still-available 16 Plus is more obvious: if you want a big-screen iPhone, it’s much less expensive than a 17 Pro Max. And, unlike the regular iPhone 16, the 16 Plus is available with 256 GB. But at that point, I’d encourage whoever is considering the $900 iPhone 16 Plus with 256 GB storage to pay an extra $100 and get the iPhone Air instead. The overall lineup would have more coherence and clarity if Apple just eliminated the two 16 models. I suspect Apple is on the cusp of completely moving away from the strategy of selling two- and three-year-old iPhones at lower prices, and updating their entire lineup with annual speed bumps.

Your whole day on one screen. Finalist is an iOS/macOS day planner that pulls in your calendars, reminders, and health data so nothing falls through the cracks.

The latest version launches now and adds subtasks, calendar bookmarks, HealthKit in your journal, and a spoken daily briefing you can trigger from your Lock Screen.

Run it alongside what you already use. It quietly picks up what your current setup doesn’t. Free trial on the App Store, Lifetime license available.

A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It’s easy to think not much has changed.

But book publishing isn’t about printing, and it’s a useful metaphor for the systems changes we’re seeing all around us.

The book publishing system was based on scarcity.

A successful bookstore was perfect. It had exactly the right number of books — more wouldn’t fit, and fewer wouldn’t pay the rent. The only way for a book publisher to get a new book into the stores was to get the bookseller to take an old book out.

As a result of this chokepoint, distribution became the focus. Publishers came to see bookstores, not readers, as their customers—which is why there are few ads for books, or toll-free numbers to call. There were plenty of authors, so publishers selected which ones got a distribution investment. And their timing and launch strategies all revolved around the bookstores.

Bookstores have to make smart choices. Months in advance, they choose which new books to take on (and which to leave behind.) If they were wrong, if a new book they don’t carry has an audience, then they lose sales because readers go elsewhere.

The small change? Get rid of the scarcity of shelf space. Amazon never removes a book to make room for a new book. They have all the books.

The publishers’ existing strategies make little sense when the scarcity of shelf space goes away.

One industry term is the “lay down” which describes how many books a major publisher needs to print and distribute to get good nationwide coverage at launch. For books that hope to be bestsellers, that number was 25,000 copies or so… a book from a well-known author would have that many copies in the world before a single copy was sold.

Today, for many books like this, the laydown is 250. 1% of what it used to be.

This is why the industry is shifting so much attention to pre-orders. The online world not only eradicated space (you can buy things from anywhere, so shelves don’t matter), it also shifted time. You can indicate interest by buying things long before they’re distributed.

Bookstores don’t stock a new book unless they see it’s already been selling online.

Another example: Pop music.

Through a happy accident, the typical record store was exactly big enough to hold all the music that the typical listener might ever hear on the radio. The radio as a sampling medium was about the same size as the physical distribution medium of the store. You didn’t hear hula music on the radio and you couldn’t buy it at Tower Records.

First, we blew up the store. The internet meant that any song you wanted, you could download for free if you cared enough, or listen to it on YouTube (if you only cared a little.)

Then, we blew up the radio station. The internet meant that the sampling medium went from DJ-curated to streaming-on-demand. And we demanded.

Change the distribution, change the medium.

There are still hits, but they’re not driven by A&R teams, record-store distribution deals or payola. The sampling medium and the revenue medium have become the same.

And one more shift, one that’s changed both industries:

The cost of making a book or a song has plummeted. Thanks to AI, autotune and other tools, combined with the roll-your-own distribution of ebooks and social media, anyone can create and self-publish. So, anyone will.

Scarcity of creation and scarcity of distribution have been replaced by a surplus of both.

What doesn’t scale? Trust, attention and belonging.

AI is making relatively small changes to very big systems, everywhere we look. But if those systems are built on the desires of humans, we will need to earn trust, attention and belonging more than ever before.

[Available for a not nearly limited enough time]

It’s apparently National Ranch Day, a celebration of one of America’s lesser culinary contributions. Should you find yourself at a Great Wolf Lodge today, you can plunk down just $3.10 to partake of this:

[Photo credit: Great Wolf Lodge]

What you’re looking at is a “milkshake” containing some combination of vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and ranch dressing. As far as I can determine, news of this abomination was first revealed near the end of a mid-February press release, which described it thusly:

Ranch Milkshake: A sweet-and-tangy vanilla ranch shake topped with fried chicken, carrots and celery, and finished with a sweet-and-salty lime rim and whipped cream.

They just tossed that in a list of four limited-time food and drink offerings alongside a burger and a brownie, as if a ranch milkshake is the most normal thing in the world.

It’s available through April 26 (for a regular price of $7.99). I’ve found that there’s a Great Wolf Lodge about an hour west of Boston, but I do not intend to visit. If you do, please let me know how it is.

Previously in Ridiculous Foods Made Primarily to Go Viral: Everything Is Dumb, So Let’s Get Drunk on Roast Beef Vodka

Verily

What's happening today is today. All day.

Also, it's absurd that Indiana is mostly in the Eastern time zone. This time of year, the sun rises at four hours before noon and sets eight hours after noon. 

And fast moving storms from southwest to northeast tend to produce tornadoes.

There's a long arc of thunderweather moving lengthwise to the northeast from Texas and across Chicago right now. ORD is all delays. Good view of the action on Windy. Good view of the delays on FlightAware's MiseryMap.

Apparently, yes

Ted Gioia: Is Spotify Enabling Massive Impersonation of Famous Jazz Musicians?

Also, AI Actress Tilly Norwood Drops a Video—and It's Cringe on Steroids "At least Skynet was honest about trying to erase humanity…"

Bzzz

Marginal Revolution: A Fly Has Been Uploaded. It begins, "n 2024, the entire neuronal diagram of the fruit-fly brain–some 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections–was mapped. Later research showed that the map could be used to predict behavior. Now, Eon Systems a firm with some of the scientists involved in the fruit-fly research and with the goal of uploading a human brain has announced that they uploaded the fruit fly brain to a digital environment. The digital fly appears to behave in the digital environment in reasonably fly like ways–this is not a simulation, the fly’s “sensors” are being activated by the digital environment and the neurons are responding.

dreamwieber’s video on Hypercard is one of the best things I’ve seen on the topic:

via Kottke

Just over a decade ago, reviewing the then-new iPhones 6S, I could tell which way the silicon wind was blowing. Year-over-year, the A9 CPU in the iPhone 6S was 1.6× faster than the A8 in the iPhone 6. Impressive. But what really struck me was comparing the 6S’s GeekBench scores to MacBooks. The A9, in 2015, benchmarked comparably to a two-year-old MacBook Air from 2013. More impressively, it outperformed the then-new no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in single-core performance (by a factor of roughly 1.1×) and was only 3 percent slower in multi-core. That was a comparison to the base $1,300 model MacBook with a 1.1 GHz dual-core Intel Core M processor, not the $1,600 model with a 1.2 GHz Core M. But, still — the iPhone 6S outperformed a brand-new $1,300 MacBook, and drew even with a $1,600 model. I called that “astounding”. The writing was clearly on the wall: the future of the Mac seemed destined to move from Intel’s x86 chips to Apple’s own ARM-based chips.

Here we are today, over five years after the debut of Apple’s M-series chips, and we now have the MacBook Neo: a $600 laptop that uses the A18 Pro, literally the same SoC as 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro models. It was clear right from the start of the Apple Silicon transition that Apple’s M-series chips were vastly superior to x86 — better performance-per-watt, better performance period, the innovative (and still unmatched, five years later) unified memory architecture — but the MacBook Neo proves that Apple’s A-series chips are powerful enough for an excellent consumer MacBook.

I think the truth is that Apple’s A-series chips have been capable of credibly powering Macs for a long time. The Apple Silicon developer transition kits, from the summer of 2020, were Mac Mini enclosures running A12Z chips that were originally designed for iPad Pros.¹ But I think Apple could have started using A-series chips in Macs even before that. It would have been credible, but with compromises. By waiting until now, the advantages are simply overwhelming. You cannot buy an x86 PC laptop in the $600–700 price range that competes with the MacBook Neo on any metric — performance, display quality, audio quality, or build quality. And certainly not software quality.

The original iPhone in 2007 was the most amazing device I’ve ever used. It may well wind up being the most amazing device I ever will use. It was ahead of its time in so many ways. But a desktop-class computer, performance-wise, it was not. Two decades is a long time in the computer industry, and nothing proves that more than Apple’s “phone chips” overtaking Intel’s x86 platform in every measurable metric — they’re faster, cooler, smaller, and perhaps even cost less. And they certainly don’t cost more.

I’ve been testing a citrus-colored $700 MacBook Neo² — the model with Touch ID and 512 GB storage — since last week. I set it up new, rather than restoring my primary MacOS work setup from an existing Mac, and have used as much built-in software, with as many default settings, as I could bear. I’ve only added third-party software, or changed settings, as I’ve needed to. And I’ve been using it for as much of my work as possible. I expected this to go well, but in fact, the experience has vastly exceeded my expectations. Christ almighty I don’t even have as many complaints about running MacOS 26 Tahoe (which the Neo requires) as I thought I would.

It’s never been a good idea to evaluate the performance of Apple’s computers by tech specs alone. That’s exemplified by the experience of using a Neo. 8 GB of RAM is not a lot. And I love me my RAM — my personal workstation remains a 2021 M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM (the most available at the time). But just using the Neo, without any consideration that it’s memory limited, I haven’t noticed a single hitch. I’m not quitting apps I otherwise wouldn’t quit, or closing Safari tabs I wouldn’t otherwise close. I’m just working — with an even dozen apps open as I type this sentence — and everything feels snappy.

Now, could I run up a few hundred open Safari tabs on this machine, like I do on my MacBook Pro, without feeling the effects? No, probably not. But that’s abnormal. In typical productivity use, the Neo isn’t merely fine — it’s good.

The display is bright and crisp. At 500 maximum nits, the specs say it’s as bright as a MacBook Air. In practice, that feels true. (500 nits also matches the maximum SDR brightness of my personal M1 MacBook Pro.) Sound from the side-firing speakers is very good — loud and clear. I’d say the sound seems too good to be true for a $600 laptop. Battery life is long (and I’ve done almost all my testing while the Neo is unplugged from power). The keyboard feels exactly the same as what I’m used to, except that because the key caps are brand new, it feels even better than the keyboard on my own now-four-years-old MacBook Pro, the most-used key caps on which are now a little slick.

And the trackpad. Let me sing the praises of the MacBook Neo’s trackpad. The Neo’s trackpad exemplifies the Neo as a whole. Rather than sell old components at a lower price — as Apple had been doing, allowing third-party resellers like Walmart to sell the 8 GB M1 MacBook Air from 2020 at sub-$700 prices starting two years ago — the Neo is designed from the ground up to be a low-cost MacBook.

A decade ago, Apple began switching from trackpads with mechanical clicking mechanisms to Magic Trackpads, where clicks are simulated via haptic feedback (in Apple’s parlance, the Taptic Engine). And, with Magic Trackpads, you can use Force Touch — a hard press — to perform special actions. By default, if “Force Touch and haptic feedback” is enabled on a Mac with a Magic Trackpad, a hard Force Touch press will perform a Look Up — e.g., do it on a word in Safari and you’ll get a popover with the Dictionary app’s definition for that word. It’s a shortcut to the “Look Up in Dictionary” command in the contextual menu, which is also available via the keyboard shortcut Control-Command-D to look up whatever text is currently selected, or that the mouse pointer is currently hovering over — standard features that work in all proper Mac apps.

The Neo’s trackpad is mechanical. It actually clicks, even when the machine is powered off.³ Obviously this is a cost-saving measure. But the Neo’s trackpad doesn’t feel cheap in any way. You can click it anywhere you want — top, bottom, middle, corner — and the click feels right. Multi-finger gestures (most commonly, two-finger swipes for scrolling) — just work. Does it feel as nice as a Magic Trackpad? No, probably not. But I keep forgetting there’s anything at all different or special about this trackpad. It just feels normal. That’s unbelievable. The “Force Touch and haptic feedback” option is missing in the Trackpad panel in System Settings, so you might miss that feature if you’re used to it. But for anyone who isn’t used to that Magic Trackpad feature — which includes anyone who’s never used a MacBook before (perhaps the primary audience for the Neo), along with most casual longtime Mac users (which is probably the secondary audience) — it’s hard to say there’s anything they’d even notice that’s different about this trackpad than the one in the MacBook Air, other than the fact that it’s a little bit smaller. But it’s only smaller in a way that feels proportional to the Neo’s slightly smaller footprint compared to the Air. It’s a cheaper trackpad that doesn’t feel at all cheap. Bravo!

So What’s the Catch?

You can use this Compare page at Apple’s website (archived, for posterity, as a PDF here) to see the full list of what’s missing or different on the Neo, compared to the current M5 MacBook Air (which now starts at $1,100) and the 5-year-old M1 MacBook Air (so old it still sports the Intel-era wedge shape) that Walmart had been selling for $600–650. Things I’ve noticed, that bothered me, personally:

• The Neo lacks an ambient light sensor. It still offers an option in System Settings → Display to “Automatically adjust brightness”, which setting is on by default, but I have no idea how it works without an ambient light sensor. However it works, it doesn’t work well. As the lighting conditions in my house have changed — from day to night, overcast to sunny — I’ve found myself adjusting the display brightness manually. I only realized when I started adjusting the brightness on the Neo manually that I more or less haven’t adjusted the brightness manually on a MacBook in years. Maybe a decade. I’m not saying I never adjust the brightness on a MacBook Air or Pro, but I do it so seldomly that I had no muscle memory at all for which F-keys control brightness. After a few days using the Neo, I know exactly where they are: F1 and F2.

And, uh, that’s it. That’s the one catch that’s annoyed me over the six days I’ve been using the Neo as my primary computer for work and for reading. Once or twice a day I need to manually bump the display brightness up or down. 
That’s a crazily short list. One item, and it’s only a mild annoyance.

There are other things missing that I’ve noticed, but that I haven’t minded. The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on other MacBook models, and the on-screen (e.g. in the Dynamic Island) indicator on iPhones and iPads, cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no third-party software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software. Not a big deal, but worth being aware of. [Update: In a brief note added to Apple’s Platform Security Guide, Apple claims that the green indicator dot in the corner of the Neo’s display is guaranteed to be visible if the camera is in use.]

The Neo’s webcam doesn’t offer Center Stage or Desk View. But personally, I never take advantage of Center Stage or Desk View, so I don’t miss their absence. Your mileage may vary. But the camera is 1080p and to my eyes looks pretty good. And I’d say it looks damn good for a $600 laptop.

The Neo has no notch. Instead, it has a larger black bezel surrounding the entire display than do the MacBook Airs and Pros. I consider this an advantage for the Neo, not a disadvantage. The MacBook notch has not grown on me, and the Neo’s display bezel doesn’t bother me at all.

And there’s the whole thing with the second USB-C port only supporting USB 2 speeds. That stinks. But if Apple could sell a one-port MacBook a decade ago, they can sell one with a shitty second port today. I’ll bet this is one of the things that will be improved in the second generation Neo, but it’s not something that would keep me from recommending this one — or even buying one myself — today. If you know you need multiple higher-speed USB ports (or Thunderbolt), you need a MacBook Air or Pro.

The Neo ships with a measly 20-watt charger in the box — the same rinky-dink charger that comes with iPad Airs. I wish it were 30 watts (which is what came with the M1 MacBook Air), but maybe we’re lucky it comes with a charger at all. The Neo charges faster if you plug it into a more powerful power adapter, in either USB-C port.⁴ The USB-C cable in the box is white, not color-matched to the Neo, and it’s only 1.5 meters long. MacBook Airs and Pros ship with 2-meter MagSafe cables. Again, though: $600!

The Weighty Issue on My Mind

The Neo is not a svelte ultralight. It weights 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg) — exactly the same as the 13-inch M5 MacBook Air. The Neo, with a 13.0-inch display, has a smaller footprint than the 13.6-inch Air, but the Air is thinner. I don’t know if this is a catch though. It’s just the normal weight for a smaller-display Mac laptop. The decade-ago MacBook “One”, on the other hand, was a design statement. It weighed just a hair over 2 pounds (0.92 kg), and tapered from 1.35 cm to just 0.35 cm in thickness. The Neo is 1.27 cm thick, and the M5 Air is 1.13 cm. In fact, the extraordinary thinness of the 2015 MacBook might have necessitated the invention of the haptics-only Magic Trackpad. The Magic Trackpad first appeared on that MacBook and the early 2015 MacBook Pros — it was nice-to-have for the MacBook Pros, but might have been the only trackpad that would fit in the front of the MacBook One’s tapered case.

If I had my druthers, Apple would make a new svelte ultralight MacBook. Not instead of the Neo, but in addition to the Neo. Apple’s inconsistent use of the name “Air” makes this complicated, but the MacBook Neo is obviously akin to the iPhone 17e; the MacBook Air is akin to the iPhone 17 (the default model for most people); the MacBook Pros are akin to the iPhone 17 Pros. I wish Apple would make a MacBook that’s akin to the iPhone Air — crazy thin and surprisingly performant.

The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips. Those chips were small enough and low-power enough to fit in the MacBook’s thin and fan-less enclosure, but they were slow as balls. It was a huge compromise for a laptop that carried a somewhat premium price. Today, performance, performance-per-watt, and physical chip size are all solved problems with Apple Silicon. I’d consider paying double the price of the Neo for a MacBook with similar specs (but more RAM and better I/O) that weighed 2.0 pounds or less. I’d buy such a MacBook not to replace my 14-inch MacBook Pro, but to replace my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro as my “carry around the house” secondary computer.⁵

As it stands, I might buy a Neo for that same purpose, 2.7-pound weight be damned. iPad Pros, encased in Magic Keyboards, are expensive and heavy. So are iPad Airs. My 2018 iPad Pro, in its Magic Keyboard case, weighs 2.36 pounds (1.07 kg). That’s the 11-inch model, with a cramped less-than-standard-size keyboard. I’m much happier with this MacBook Neo than I am doing anything on that iPad. Yes, my iPad is old at this point. But replacing it with a new iPad Pro would require a new Magic Keyboard too. For an iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard, that combination starts at $1,300 for 11-inch, $1,650 for 13-inch. If I switched to iPad Air, the cost would be $870 for 11-inch, $1,120 for 13-inch. The 13-inch iPads, when attached to Magic Keyboards, weigh slightly more than a 2.7-pound 13-inch MacBook Neo. The 11-inch iPads, with keyboards, weigh about 2.3 pounds. Why bother when I find MacOS way more enjoyable and productive? My three-device lifestyle for the last decade has been a MacBook Pro (anchored to a Studio Display at my desk at home, and in my briefcase when travelling); my iPhone; and an iPad Pro with a Magic Keyboard for use around the rest of the house. This last week testing the MacBook Neo, I haven’t touched my iPad once, and I haven’t once wished this Neo were an iPad. And there were many times when I was very happy that it was a Mac.

And I can buy one, just like this one, for $700. That’s $170 less than an 11-inch iPad Air and Magic Keyboard. And the Neo comes with a full-size keyboard and runs MacOS, not a version of iOS with a limited imitation of MacOS’s windowing UI. I am in no way arguing that the MacBook Neo is an iPad killer, but it’s a splendid iPad alternative for people like me, who don’t draw with a Pencil, do type with a keyboard, and just want a small, simple, highly portable and highly capable computer to use around the house. The MacBook Neo is going to be a great first Macintosh for a lot of people switching from PCs. But it’s also going to be a great secondary Mac for a lot of longtime Mac users with expensive desktop setups for their main workstations — like me.

The Neo crystallizes the post-Jony Ive Apple. The MacBook “One” was a design statement, and a much-beloved semi-premium product for a relatively small audience. The Neo is a mass-market device that was conceived of, designed, and engineered to expand the Mac user base to a larger audience. It’s a design statement too, but of a different sort — emphasizing practicality above all else. It’s just a goddamn lovely tool, and fun too.

I’ll just say it: I think I’m done with iPads. Why bother when Apple is now making a crackerjack Mac laptop that starts at just $600? May the MacBook Neo live so long that its name becomes inapt.

The Knot, Problems Can Be Solved, will be available in September.

And this week, I’m launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here.

We’re surrounded by problems. Problems create the arc of our days, and solving them creates value for ourselves and for others. There are big problems, the ones that are on a grand stage, and local problems, related to our career, our peers or our projects. If it’s a problem, it can be solved.

The best reason for me to publish a book is to help inspire conversations and the momentum that leads to change. Books give us an excuse to engage, and they create a portable bundle of ideas that are easy to share.

Several hundred people have already read and listened to the book, and the conversations it’s creating (and the stuck that’s disappearing) are thrilling to see.

In talking with folks over the last year and a half, the same theme returns–the frustration of being stuck. We see our world changing and feel the tension, but it’s easy to lose sight of what we can do and how we can show up to make an impact.

Without a doubt, there are situations everywhere. Situations are uncomfortable and unhappy, but they have no solution. We can’t do anything about a situation, so our best course of action is to acknowledge it and get back to work on the problems we can solve instead. Gravity is a situation, getting to the moon and back is a problem.

My approach to bringing this book to the world is to give booksellers the confidence they need to support it by enrolling as many pre-orders as I can. By creating digital interactions and courses, I’m giving readers a chance to engage with the ideas now, and then receive the book/audiobook when it ships in September.

I appreciate your trust, and I hope you find the book and the course useful.

[I’m so tired of winning.]

Last year, I covered the 2025 edition of the Ig Nobel prizes. Since 1991, a ceremony has been held annually in the Boston area, and I was lucky enough to attend in 2011. Sadly, it’s unlikely I’ll be able to repeat that in 2026, as the Ig Nobel ceremony is moving out of America.

The shift from the US to Europe is due to concerns about the political situation and attendees getting visas, organisers said on Monday.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country [US],” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview.

“We cannot, in good conscience, ask the new laureates, or the international journalists covering the event, to travel to the United States this year,” said Abrahams.

Who can blame them?

Link: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/research-frontiers/ig-nobels-to-move-awards-to-switzerland-due-to-concern-over-us-travel-visas/91073250

Yesterday, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board (MDEQ) unanimously granted xAI a permit for an expanded power plant in Southaven, Mississippi. The plant will be powered by 41 natural gas turbines.

Some of those turbines are already in place, with questions surrounding their legality now finalized.

The way in which MDEQ went about this process has left many local — and national — critics of xAI unhappy, as Kailynn Johnson writes for The Memphis Flyer:

The board’s decision to hold the meeting on Election Day, and five days after the hearing was announced, has been condemned by local and national groups.

The Mississippi State Conference of the NAACP and the national NAACP sent an open letter to MDEQ to immediately reschedule the public hearing for the following week, and requested a response by Monday.

The organization criticized MDEQ’s decision to issue their responses to public comments on Saturday, March 7, as well as for holding the hearing “nearly three driving hours from the site of the facility.”

Lora Kolodny, CNBC:

The MDEQ denied the request on Monday, writing in a response to the NAACP that its permit board “regularly meets on the second Tuesday of each month, which has been the standard practice for decades,” and that the regulator, “considers matters on a statewide basis.” A copy of the letter was shared with CNBC.

[…]
Following the MDEQ’s response on Monday, the NAACP said in a statement that by having the hearing the morning of Election Day, three hours away from the community, “their actions speak volumes.”

“They’re trying to sneak xAI’s data center into the community’s backyard and they don’t care about the people living there,” the letter said.

Despite the MDEQ’s insistence about the meeting itself, the results of that meeting are what really impact people living in south Memphis and north Mississippi.

Samuel Hardiman, The Daily Memphian:

The approval of xAI’s long-term plans for a power plant means a substantial amount of smog-causing chemicals could be added to the Memphis metropolitan area’s air.

According to the draft permit, xAI could emit 423 tons of nitrogen oxides, a smog-causing chemical, each year. That’s about the same as the two area Tennessee Valley Authority natural gas plants — Allen Combined Cycle and Southaven — combined.