daniel messinger

A law of human proxemics? Children align side to side at closer distances and face-to-face when distances are greater than .65 m. #PreschoolPhysics science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

I would not have predicted this and I think Microsoft deserves serious praise here. Bravo.

New AI in Context video, on the New York Times Bestseller If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and imo it's a banger. Featuring @deanwball , @RepBillFoster and @dwarkesh_sp

It appears that a Polymarket account called "Magamyman" made $515,000 in a single day betting on last night's U.S. strike on Iran, with the first trade placed 71 minutes before the news broke publicly. When this person bought in, the market had this at a 17% probability. They turned roughly $87,000 into over half a million dollars overnight. Reminder that Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket's advisory board and his firm invested double-digit millions into the platform last year. The DOJ and CFTC both had active investigations into Polymarket that were dropped after Trump took office. Prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action. We need answers, transparency, and oversight.

while looking through cognates for an unrelated project, i stumbled on *m{a,e}gh-, which interestingly reframes the famous clarke quote

This was a very dangerous photo! I was 15 and just became the #1 woman player in the world, the youngest ever at that time. I was also the #1 15 year old in the world, boy or girl. I decided to make a public statement and started to wear the Star of David, and be photographed with it! I was never a political person. I just wanted to honor more than 300 members of my extended family who were killed during the Holocaust. It was an extremely dangerous thing to do in Hungary back at that time. I wrote about it extensively in my memoir Rebel Queen. #RebelQueen amazon.com/Rebel-Queen-Mi…

These 9 people were killed by ICE in the month of January: Alex Pretti Renee Good Keith Porter Parady La Heber Sanchaz Domínguez Victor Manuel Diaz Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres and Geraldo Lunas Campos.

Today, masked Israeli settlers armed with clubs attacked Palestinian farmers while they were working their land near the villages of Kafr Qaddum and Beit Lid in the West Bank. Palestinians urgently need international protection.

@turbo_xo_ @paulg Immigrants commit crimes at lower rate than citizens. Data (American Economic Association): aeaweb.org/research/chart… Data (House of Representatives): docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU… Study (PNAS): pnas.org/doi/full/10.10…

Today, Israel murdered three of my journalist colleagues in a single airstrike. The world discusses the Gaza "Board Of Peace" while our children freeze to death and airstrikes wipe out families. The ceasefire is a lie. Israel continues to ethnically cleanse us.

You could probably literally double the amount of food a group goes through by cutting a piece of each pastry or doughnut or removing a slice from each pizza ahead of time

@daemon404 I run a video production team at a nonprofit making videos about AI risk (youtu.be/5KVDDfAkRgc?si…) I’d love to be connected with talented people in any aspect of video production especially anyone who lives near the bay!

Take a moment to look at the inhumanity captured in this extraordinary photo running on the front page of tonight's Minneapolis @StarTribune. It shows federal immigration agents immobilizing a protester on the ground and spraying chemical irritant directly into his face. The scene reminds me of the brutality used against civil rights protesters in the 1960s. We look back at those old photos and wonder how the authorities could have behaved so savagely; many years from now, young Americans will look at these photos from 2026 and wonder how anyone could have justified shooting a woman in the head as she tried to drive away, arresting 5-year-old schoolchildren on the street, or holding a man down and spaying chemicals into his face. Thanks to the Star Tribune reporters and photographers for documenting this work; they create accountability, they make democracy work, and they make all of us in journalism proud.

Fun fact: The 1998 paper that introduced Google and PageRank to the world ends with this acknowledgment: "Supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding also provided by DARPA and NASA." Sergey Brin was on an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Larry Page was a PhD student on the grant. Google—now worth $2 trillion—exists because American taxpayers funded "the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project." Not a startup garage myth. A government grant. Every time someone says public research funding "picks winners and losers" or "crowds out private innovation," remember: the most dominant technology company of the 21st century was incubated entirely with public money, inside a public university, by researchers on federal fellowships and grants. The private sector didn't see it coming. VCs passed. The government funded it anyway—not because it would become Google, but because fundamental research into information retrieval seemed worth understanding. That's the point. You can't predict which grants will change the world. You fund the science and let researchers explore. The internet (DARPA). GPS (DoD). Touchscreens (CIA/NSF). mRNA vaccines (NIH). Google (NSF/DARPA/NASA). Public investment in basic research isn't wasteful spending. It's the seed corn of the entire modern economy.

Genuinely I thought this policy was something he would work at and make progress to over the course of his whole term. I had so little faith in the state to fund it. Day 14 he got it done in its entirety. I’m actually speechless.

MIssissippi's largest synagogue destroyed in an arson attack on the Sabbath. The fact this isn't the biggest story of the morning, or the day so far, should tell you just how normalized anti-Semitic action is becoming. mississippitoday.org/2026/01/10/fir…

As someone who covered Tiananmen in 1989, it pains me to feel the need to retweet this about the US.

This is Tehran. Let that sink in. You are watching a revolution unfold live while the world’s media stays dead silent. Legacy media has become nothing more than a propaganda machine, because what news could possibly be bigger than this? @FoxNews @CNN x.com/Negaarsh/statu…

How do children’s surroundings impact their mental health? We found that youth living in more disadvantaged neighborhoods had more severe anxiety and depression and longer delays to care, emphasizing the need to reduce barriers to youth mental health care. link.springer.com/article/10.100…