This is a delightful article about a physicist who collects interesting phenomena. It reminded me a little of the story of Richard Feynman getting back into physics after playing around with wobbling plates. Read the article here

This is a shocking story about the normalisation of low level police corruption. I guess I’m linking to it because I found it so surprising. Link to the story

Wolfram now have a library of prompt templates that you can invoke from inside the Wolfram ecosystem. I think this is a nice way to lower the overhead of getting prompts to work well for you, or an org, but it still keeps a bit of the uncertainty in play. Learn more here

My colleague pointed me to this overview of media trends. A general pessimism in media circles around their future (I think this has to be the long term trends as patterns of attention continue to be dominated by tech companies. I was interested to see how media orgs are struggling to grapple with emerging social media platforms. I found their self congratulatory comment that they predicted that Elon Musk would step down as Twitter/X CEO a little hollow. He has stepped down in name only. Check out the overview here

If you want to build AI apps that have some level of governance behind them, then this looks like it might be a good option to look at. Explore this option here

This is an astonishing find through AI that could reduce global use of Lithium in batteries. My calculation is that the global lithium market in mobile phone batteries is worth about 1/2 Billion dollars per year, using back of the envelope calculations, so this advance is useful, but not transformative of the global economy.
 Read the findings here

I once held the dream of working at Google, and once toyed with the idea of moving to SF to work for Meta. Our naive era of lionising these companies is past now, and Tim Bray captures this well. Tim Bray’s thoughts here