Hasnain says:

“Kathy Kacher, a consultant who advises corporate executives on their return-to-office plans, is surprised the percentage isn’t higher.

“Many organizations that attempted to force a return to the office have had to retract or change their plans because of employee pushback, and now, they don’t look strong,” says Kacher, the president of Career/Life Alliance Services. “A lot of executives have egg on their faces and they’re sad about that.””

Hasnain says:

“Of course, I’m not saying complexity is bad. It’s necessary. Some day we’ll reach a fundamental limit of our database architecture, and before that day arrives, we’ll need to make a jump in complexity.

But until then, because we squeezed first, we get to keep working with the most boring system possible. This is by far the cheaper and more practical option.”

Hasnain says:

Exciting! Funnily timed too since the sci-fi book I’m reading also goes into new physics found at Fermilab.

“If confirmed, this would represent arguably one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs for a hundred years, since Einstein's theories of relativity. That is because a fifth force and any particles associated with it are not part of the Standard Model of particle physics.”

Hasnain says:

““I always find it fascinating when new mathematics is born out of just purely looking at data,” Fuchs said. “Without it, it’s really hard to imagine that [they] would have stumbled upon this.”

Stange added that none of this would have happened without the low-stakes summer project. “Serendipity and an attitude of playful exploration both have such a huge role in discovery,” she said.

“It was pure coincidence,” Haag said. “If I didn’t go big enough, we wouldn’t have noticed it.” The work bodes well for the future of number theory. “You can glean understanding of mathematics through your intuition, through proofs,” Stange said. “And you trust that a lot because you spent a lot of time thinking about it. But you can’t argue with the data.””

Hasnain says:

“Shu Nagata, a graduate student and co-author on the paper, added that they saw evidence that the reaction was taking place as a three-body interaction more often than as a two-body interaction. That is, three atoms would collide; two would form a molecule, and the third remained single. But the third played some role in the reaction.”

Hasnain says:

One thing that always stuck me about the US (both in the media and in the public) is how trusting people are - you hear someone say something and assume it’s the truth and don’t question it, unless they have a bad reputation. It was quite jarring as it’s the opposite in Pakistan where you assume everyone has an agenda and is out to screw you. Both extremes are bad for their own reasons, but I wish the US generally had more distrust and skepticism. Especially in the media.

“Before Musk, the person setting the day’s news agenda on Twitter was Donald Trump. As it became clear during his first campaign that Trump mostly did not tell the truth, the press corps gradually brought more scrutiny to the candidate’s statements. In some cases, cable networks stopped carrying his public appearances live, since they could not be fact-checked effectively in real time.

Musk’s broken promises have yet to reach anything near the volume of lies that Trump told as president. But given his recent track record, it’s well past time for the press to grant him an equal measure of skepticism.”

Hasnain says:

Great human interest story. And I learned a lot about this thing that I never had before.

“The ball had grown to mean so much to him. It wasn't the signatures, or that he thought the ball might be worth something like $20,000 ... The ball became a family heirloom over the next three decades. But not in the way you'd expect. Calhoun never locked it up in a vault or even put it in a protective case in the house. He left it in the basement of his house, and Clarence and Calhoun's other three kids would dribble it and throw it around. He wanted his kids to be able to touch and feel something that had altered the trajectory of their family.”

Hasnain says:

Refreshingly different concept from the usual sci-fi short stories I’ve read in a while.

“Ransisc's nose twitched in disagreement. "I asked one of their savants the same question. He gave me back a poem by a human named Hail or Snow or something of that sort. It was about someone who stood at a fork in the road and ended up taking the less-used track. That's what the humans did.”

Hasnain says:

This is scary - and also really cool that it’s possible to find a causal link like this.

“In more recent work, they take this analysis a step further, calculating the amount of cooling associated with the tracks’ brightening effect and the way the pollution extended the lifetime of the clouds. IMO rules have warmed the planet by 0.1 watts per square meter—double the warming caused by changes to clouds by airplanes, they conclude in a paper under review. The impact is magnified in regions of heavy shipping, like the north Atlantic, where the disappearing clouds are “shock to the system,” Yuan says. The increase in light, which was worsened by a lack of reflective Saharan dust over the ocean this year, “can account for most of the warming observed” in the Atlantic this summer, he says.”

Hasnain says:

“None of this should be news to investors: More than journalists or many of the startups’ own employees, venture capitalists had the best access to the financial conditions of these startups. The writing was on the wall.”