Snail drinking a dew drop from an acorn head. And a comparison of bee sizes.

NYT Opinion from an Australian — Dear America, Why Did You Let Us Down? And what the hell, Australia?

Good Judgement Project update — I have now submitted my initial predictions for the 9 available questions in The World In 2017 challenge. You should all get started now, especially while there is still a huge error in the current forecast of whether Leung Chun-ying will win re-election as Chief Executive of…

Behavioural finance 1, efficient markets 0

Computer security is super hard. You may have heard about heartbleed, a bug found in 2014 in an open source SSL library which affected…

Good Judgement challenge — make predictions about the world in 2017. I feel like it would be fun to try, and if anyone is interested we could have an informal competition of our own.

Why is turkey cheaper when demand is higher?

SlateStarCodex challenges whether Trump is racist. Ross Douthat responds on Twitter.

An anti-aging startup gets $116 million in funding from Jeff Bezos. And the blood of human teens rejuvenates old mice.

Magic Leap may not be so revolutionary after all.

Vox on gerrymandering. And Vox on using state’s rights defensively against Trump.

What Eli Dourado will be working on (aviation policy and regulation). And a scathing article on the FAA and modernization.

Long interview with Julia Galef, who hosts one of my favourite podcasts, Rationally Speaking.

Farm in South Australia grows tomatoes in the desert with nothing but sun and seawater.

A study about violence in mammals. Too many of the articles behind that link bury…

Elon Musk gave a presentation last week about SpaceX’s plans to start a self-sustaining colony on Mars. Here is a short video, and the full presentation, and also an article with what seem like some sensible improvements to the plan.

Long, interesting profile of Robin Hanson. His book is Age of Em (which is great), he blogs at Overcoming Bias, an interesting blog post of his is This is The Dreamtime.

Best chase scene ever, via Planet Earth 2.

Researchers at Google have created the first scalable quantum simulation of a molecule using a variational quantum eigensolver, which is a quantum analog…