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Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Daniel W. Hieber surveys ~1,000 Ancient Greek words without Indo-European etymologies—labyrinth, olive, Athens, Achilles—and reconstructs Pre-Greek substrate/adstrate influence via phonology, toponyms (-nth/-ss), and Minoan contacts.
3 min · 618 words
How the Railways Killed a Medieval LawDeodands put a price on objects that caused death—until the train age made the doctrine untenable
JSTOR Daily recounts the medieval English doctrine of the deodand—forfeiting the value of objects that caused death—and how industrial railways and crowded accidents finally forced Parliament to abolish it in the nineteenth century.
5 min · 1,197 words
A personal essay on hedging vs boosters in scientific writing after generative AI: relative use of words like could fell even as raw counts rose with more published text.
4 min · 817 words
Noah Smith on what it means when AI becomes better at mathematics than any human—how “hero” mathematicians shaped culture, and how post-heroic math and science might look when machines own the frontier.
14 min · 3,242 words
The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skinWhy sunburn risk and how hot the sun feels on your skin diverge—backed by numbers.
A clear, numbers-first essay explaining why the warmth of sunlight is a poor proxy for UV-B sunburn risk: cloudy cool days can still burn, and scorching morning heat may not, once you separate infrared heating from the UV index.
3 min · 727 words
Reflections on 1,000 Days of Math
I finally hit 1,000 days of doing math daily! Early on in my journey I was a lot more aggressive with my XP targets, but settled into a low-volume rhythm as my goals evolved. I worked from MF1 (Math Foundations 1, lowest level) into MF3, then about halfway through MF3 I started M4ML (Mathematics for Machine Learning). ### Self-induced friction But it got really hard and my progress started to slow as lessons took longer, which was problematic because I was trying to limit my math time to <20m/day. That may have worked fine, but I really screwed myself by relying on…
5 min · 1,105 words
A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
Linguist Danny Bate traces how W emerged after Rome's fall—from foederati names and medieval spelling experiments to the oddest letter in the modern alphabet and what its history reveals about language change.
11 min · 2,473 words
Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
Janet Davis highlights four CHI 2026 papers she wishes she had written, reflecting on research themes and why each piece of HCI scholarship stood out.
13 min · 3,021 words
Jens Egholm Pedersen argues modern science is synonymous with open-source software: why reproducible code matters as much as papers, and what researchers should do next.
7 min · 1,517 words
lcamtuf argues that electronically controlled working memory—not Babbage—was the real bottleneck unlocked on the path to modern computers, tracing early registers, delay lines, and RAM.
8 min · 1,775 words