Culture

Keep the crap going

VM

06 Dec 2024 — 2 min read

pexels-photo-5473956

Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini?

In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushes to meet her just as the doors are about to close, and submits her proposal in the form of a thick dossier. The boss asks her for a 500-word summary to consume during her minute-long elevator ride. The employee turns to Google Gemini, which digests the report and spits out the gist, and which the employee regurgitates to the boss’s approval. The end.

Everyone who knows me knows that my intellectual coordinates are defined by scientific ideas, even when they’re about sociology or the humanities. This is why I found a new book, Decolonial Keywords: South Asian Thoughts and Attitudes, edited by anthropologists Renny Thomas and Sasanka Perera, so compelling. The book

3D rendering of a superconducting quantum chip laid out as a 16-qubit lattice. Twelve qubits in the middle are shown as small

Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?

A quantum battery is a system that stores energy and whose working parts are quantum systems, such as atoms, ions, spins, superconducting circuits or quantum dots, so the processes of storing and extracting energy are governed by quantum mechanics. Imagine you have a row of toy boxes. Each box can

Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing

The science writer Philip Ball has described “nerd tunnel vision” as the rationalisation scientists who maintained ties with Jeffrey Epstein after his 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex offered, hinting at something more calculated than just oversight. “Nerd tunnel vision is a defining feature of much of the Edge discourse,

A laser worthy of a nuclear clock

The nucleus of the thorium-229 isotope has a special property: it has an excited state that's incredibly close in energy to its ground state. The existence of such an isomer is remarkable because when nuclei normally get excited, they need enormous amounts of energy — hundreds of thousands or

Keep the crap going

VM

Read more

Review: ‘Decolonial Keywords’ (2026)

Would a quantum battery charge faster than a classical one?

Epstein or otherwise, Silicon Valley’s techno-elite know what they’re doing

A laser worthy of a nuclear clock